By D. W. White.

 

Kevin Maloney, The Red Headed Pilgrim (Two Dollar Radio, 2023)

Autofiction, despite reports of its demise, is very much alive. Slippery terminology — metafiction, new narrative, autobiographical fiction — notwithstanding, the unfiltered and unrestrained first person narrator, employing liberal use of the direct address and possessed, to some extent or another, of the carbon copied ghost of his creator, continues to haunt modern fiction. The term, like most good controversies, is French, originally describing a type of book that sheds novelistic convention to simply get down to the business of storytelling. If the appellation is something of a bête noire in current literary circles, Kevin Maloney certainly doesn’t care. In his endlessly humorous, starkly honest, and rapidly paced novel The Red Headed Pilgrim, Maloney offers perhaps the most literal interpretation of autofiction this side of Struggles and Recherches, questioning not only the rules of fiction but the rules of life.

Halfway between the ranting of a beloved, inebriated uncle at the family holiday and the working diary of an emerging standup comic, The Red Headed Pilgrim is the story of Kevin Maloney, an outcast in a world of outcasts, telling us of his adventures from existentially-unnerved teenager to neurotic father. From the very beginning, starting with the book’s charming and effective prologue, Maloney plays with the novel form, not so much breaking the fourth wall as challenging its very existence.

This is the story of a pilgrim named Kevin Maloney. He leaves his home and everything he knows and goes looking for God. I’ll tell you right now — he doesn’t find Him. Either that or he finds Him everywhere. I’m still not sure.
I’m sitting in a field of Queen Anne’s lace in a business park in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. August 16, 2019. The trees rise from the monotony, reaching brilliant green fingers to heaven. One day I’ll be dead and there won’t be anything.

The reader could be forgiven for struggling to locate the prologue’s relationship to the novel itself — at first, one wonders if we’ve found a latter-day Henry James, introducing his own work to ever-patient posterity. But the opening, like the rest of the book, is written by Kevin Maloney the protagonist, the novelistic creature born of the introspective rib of Kevin Maloney the author. This is true autofiction, so auto as to question the fiction, and it is the element of the novel Maloney (artificer) is most comfortable with as he jokes and stumbles his way through the life of Kevin (creation), as brutally honest and self-deprecating a literary hero as one can expect, or wish, to find.

Semantics aside, the rewards to the author of writing fiction that blurs the lines between their own life and that of their character is the tonal flexibility, the ability to dissect and interrogate their subject with a degree of penetration and precision afforded only to self-analysis. Maloney tears into Kevin in a manner that, were it not for the relationship established early on, would be so harsh as to distract from his book’s narrative progression. As it is, however, the method allows Maloney to frame the entire novel as answering the question of how in the hell he ended up where he is ‘now’, in a fictive present loosely corresponding to when this book was sold in real life. After learning, in that erudite and thoughtful prologue, that our protagonist eventually becomes a successful author, husband, and father — that Kevin eventually becomes Maloney — we first meet our teenaged narrator as a low-level misanthrope, the type Kurt Cobain would charge harshly with inauthenticity. From there, through a series of positively insane adventures, the book’s central question is asked and answered in a manner that continually defies logic. This in turn creates the work’s central tension: the friction between Maloney’s odyssey, the ending of which we know from the outset, and Kevin’s markedly un-Odyssean qualities. One ends up cheering for our narrator solely, if nothing else, due to the sheer improbability of his story.

The novel benefits from this approach on the more immediate levels of sentence and paragraph, as well. Kevin’s honesty and the self-abasement — quite literally on display throughout — make for an accessible, forthright style that will appeal to readers seeking, like our hero, a humorous, earnest escape from the rigors of the world. Maloney holds little back in describing his former and fictive self’s missteps, be them with women, employment, friendships, or the meaning of life itself. Such a method is inherently relatable and sympathetic, something surely not lost on author or narrator. While Kevin is far from the most conventionally likable of characters, most readers will find themselves firmly in his corner, battling both the grand and the mundane crises of life.

While he is doubtless a funny writer, Maloney is at his best relying on description; watching the wind through the trees is the richest gift bestowed to both character and writer. While the humor is strong, the prose comes to life when Maloney gives in a bit to his arch-nemesis, sobriety, and allow a deeper reflection:

When she finally spoke, instead of saying hurtful things about my personality, she told me that she loved me. I didn’t understand. The sun was setting behind our neighbor’s bamboo fence. Half of Wendy’s face was orange. Her freckles glowed like campfire embers. She told me what a good man I was, how kind and decent and thoughtful. How happy she was that we’d had a child together. No matter what else happened, she said, we’d always have that.

Much like the prologue, poignant moments such as this one, when Kevin allows his narrative to slow down and take in a scene, are regularly effective. They are also, perhaps, a touch too few and far between, as Maloney appears to have committed so intensely to his approach that the novel suffers some from monotony.

Indeed, where The Red Headed Pilgrim runs into trouble is when this repetitive, one-note style results in a lack of depth. The one-liners and bolts of quick-witted dry humor, always it seems set up with too-clear intention, are at times nearly continuous, overwhelming narrative situation and reader alike:

What can I say about Burlington, Vermont — that quaint New England city where I spent the majority of my 20s, in whose apartment buildings I nearly lost my virginity, then actually lost my virginity? Walking around that first day, I had the sensation that I’d stumbled into the fever dream of a nostalgic suburban housewife. Everywhere I looked, there were brick buildings and church spires and Baby Boomers taking photographs of brick buildings and church spires. They’d come from places like University Park, Texas; New Albany, Ohio; and Los Altos Hills, California, to indulge masturbatory fantasies of "simpler times" that never existed in reality, whereas I’d come to ride out a non-apocalypse, hoping to convince my non-girlfriend that I had the survival skills necessary to have sex with me.

These sections become frustrating in large part because, when he chooses to, Maloney can change speeds, and when he does he is successful. In his quest to be so hyper-aware of Kevin’s youthful ignorance, he relies somewhat too much on the self-deprecation. While it surely reflects what it must have been like to know our protagonist in his early days, the style is perhaps overdrawn by half, undercutting the novel’s narrative goals by downplaying the importance of its central question. It can be challenging, at a certain point, to remain invested in the journey to self-discovery of a character who so endlessly dislikes himself and everything around him.

But Maloney is certainly in on the joke, even if Kevin is not. There is gravitas and pathos here, forays into the bathetic notwithstanding. The Red Headed Pilgrim is a Künstlerroman of the strangest order, the poet who sees himself as anything but, a portrait of the artist as failed office drone. Within that formulation is a novel of immense honesty — about life, ourselves, what it means to want and to fail. There is, too, an accessible, readable, enjoyable book, one that will strike a chord with many of its readers and elicit a laugh from all of them. To thine own self be true, Polonious says — or, as Kevin Maloney might have it, for thine own self keep searching, because eventually, in the pages of a book or a field of lace, you just might find something like it.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. A graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University’s BookEnds Fellowship, he serves as Founding Editor for L’Esprit Literary Review and Fiction Editor for West Trade Review. His writing appears in Florida Review, The Rupture, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among several other publications. A Chicago expat, he now lives in Long Beach, California, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block.