James Chapman (author)
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James Chapman (born 1955) is an American novelist and publisher. He was raised in Bakersfield, California, has lived in New York City since 1978, and is the author of six novels to date:
- Our Plague (A Film from New York) [1993]
- The Walls Collide as You Expand, Dwarf Maple [1993]
- Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand) [1994]
- In Candyland It's Cool to Feed on Your Friends [1998]
- Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream! [2000]
- Stet [2006]
His novels combine experimental technique with a direct emotionality, often dealing with the anguish inherent in human communication. Excerpted in many print and online magazines, his work has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize.
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[edit] Themes
Several of his novels have had as an ongoing theme the place of the artist in the world.
[edit] Earlier work (to 1995)
In his first novel, Our Plague (A Film from New York), the protagonist is an underground filmmaker alienated from his own body, disgusted by his own careerism, and awash in apocalyptic visions. Not a lucid book, certainly a difficult one.
The story in The Walls Collide as You Expand, Dwarf Maple seems almost desiccated: a young woman grows up, meets a man on a train, and lives with him in a city. Nothing happens.
Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand), a "Television-War Novel" about the Gulf War, blurs reality into its electronic media equivalent, to suggest a new, amoral, surrealistically detached technological level to the old horrors of war.
[edit] Later work
In Candyland It's Cool to Feed on Your Friends, a strangely knotted and personal work, deals with an indigent photographer who loses his closest friends for the crime of having exploited them in his photographs. The frame provided for the narrative strongly implies that something like this took place in Chapman's own life.
Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream!'s visionary, messianic heroine flings herself into all manner of self-expression, but willfully loses faith in each attempt at meaning, and each time ends up more broken, more solitary.
Stet, Chapman's most ambitious book to date, takes the form of a bitter "Russian novel" about a visionary and weirdly serene Soviet filmmaker and painter, who ends up in prison camp as punishment for his (fatally) private and antisocial tendencies.
[edit] Future prospects and forthcoming work
It seems evident from the pessimism at the close of both Candyland and Daughter, as well as the advancement of Buddhistic emotional detachment as a "solution" for the embattled artist in Stet, that Chapman's relationship to his own career and audience is an increasingly troubled one. The novels, as ambitious as they are, remain almost unknown despite some critical praise, and this could be a source of the strange alienation in the work (which seems to increase as one reads the books in chronological order). On the other hand, the enlightened character of Stet could be seen as Chapman's having found a way to come to terms with whatever pressures he seems to feel.
Published excerpts of his forthcoming novella-as-libretto, rather ominously titled How is This Going to Continue?, seem to carry the artist-figure, a composer this time, still further into private grief and alienation. The subject of this "libretto" is the death of the composer's wife, followed by the composer's own death. The style is also unprecedented in his work, now consisting entirely of quotations from other sources (some of which are, however, invented).
And in a work-in-progress called Degenerescence, he appears to have finally turned away from the last of his own recognizable mannerisms, in favor of a pseudo-ancient repetitive incantation about the destruction of the world: what might be called home-made Sumerian myth.
[edit] As Publisher
Chapman also operates Fugue State Press, a publisher of "advanced and experimental fiction" which has published a peculiar assortment of work by Andre Malraux, W. B. Keckler, Randie Lipkin, Prakash Kona, Noah Cicero, Eckhard Gerdes, Tim Miller, Joshua Cohen, and others. Chapman has referred to the press as "an orphanage for the unpublishable," indicating that the work is not commercially viable in the current publishing marketplace.
