Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City

I recommend HOGG.

There's nothing else like it.

Starting with Section 7 "the Plague Journal" on page 723 the single narrative splits into multiple streams on the same page, there are gaps in all of the streams, and finally on pages 831-32 there is this

"My life here more and more resembles a book whose opening chapters, whose title even, suggest mysteries to be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, or more upsetting, have so changed by the book's end that the answers to initial questions will have become trivial."

It continues in this multi-stream format until page 869 and then ends ten pages later on 879 with sentence fragment "Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills I have come to" At which point you remember it began with a sentence fragment "to wound the autumnal city." and realize that the book has wrapped on itself and will not reach a conclusion.

I am used to academic texts with footnotes and some how-to books with sidebars that provide details and examples from the primary flow, but this becomes a scrapbook that juxtaposes incongruous blocks of text. Sometimes I could tease out the connection but not always.

If your argument is that Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake are more complex then I agree. But I found Dhalgren much harder to follow or understand than the French existentialist novels (e.g. "The Flanders Road", "The Marquise went out at 5" or "Jealousy") that were stream of consciousness but maintained a consistent perspective

This is discussed in the article and while not a position I support, I think leaving out this detail does him a major disservice: "Yet he has refused to retract the comments—in part because of his own sexual experiences with men as an underage boy, which he refuses to characterize as abusive."

I find that overall hard to fully condemn the person for, vs to separate out those views from his work, as I've never seen anything about him personally acting that way himself with any boys. (Though you say there's more to be found,so... what is it?) I'm no doctor, but the "standard" media-presented look at a situation like that would probably be something like manifestations of trauma from those encounters at young ages combined with the other traumas of growing up gay in America at the time, which I largely file in the "bad but understandable and not actively harming others" bucket.

I tried one, maybe 20 years ago. I barely remembered it existed. I know I gave it a decent go, at least 100 pages, but it didn't stick. But I've had 20 more years to consume formulaic books, and then more that did quite a bit to subvert those overlapping genres in interest ways. Maybe I'll appreciate what might have been subtleties more nuanced than I had an eye for the first time around, and come at it with a more experienced set of eyes a second time. I'll go dig up something online to go through the beginning, and see if Dhalgren's found me now and buy a copy.

Totally. I discovered it on a shelf labeled "The Unfuckwithables" in a little indie bookstore years ago, next to Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and William Vollmann.

Since I loved the other three, I pretty much had to give it a shot. I still think about it regularly even though I can't really recall any particular storyline or plot. I've always thought it would make for a great procedurally generated game world for some reason.