Sergio de la Pava: A Naked Singularity
A couple of months ago I got a random email saying (paraphrased) “Love your Infinite Jest notes, love your blog, can I send you a free copy of this novel that appeals to a lot of the people who like Infinite Jest?” I looked it up and saw that it was self-published, which is not a great sign, but a few pages on the net did praise it effusively, and I figured that there was no downside, so I said sure. I wasn’t planning to read it any time soon, but a few weeks ago I picked it up and read a few pages, and then read a few more, and then I read the whole book, and damned if it wasn’t really good.
The novel is A Naked Singularity, and it is a big mess, but luckily for de la Pava, I love big messes. Infinite Jest itself, Gravity’s Rainbow, Sandinista!, Zen Arcade—if it’s some gigantic work that overflows its banks and doesn’t know when to stop, chances are good that I’ll love it. It’s a 700 page book, but we’re at about page 300 before the plot even really gets started; most of the beginning of the book is filled with a depiction of what it’s like to be a public defender, as the narrator is, in between a bunch of entertainingly digressive dialogues dealing with subjects ranging from abstruse philosophy to pop culture.
Actually, once the plot really gets started and the book gets more focused, it gets a little less interesting and more conventional, but it never stops being entertaining. Most readers would likely disagree, but I almost wish that the novel was even more of a big mess. It’s already 700 pages; why not add a couple hundred more and keep the second half of the book as crazy as the first?
Back to the good points about the book. As I said, the writing style itself is super entertaining. For example, even though about 5% of the the book is taken up by the narrator going on about the professional boxing scene of the 1980s, I didn’t mind. And learning about the life of a public defender was very educational, and naturally enraging as well. There were a bunch of interesting stylistic experiments (there’s one great chapter in particular that keeps jump-cutting back and forth between different scenes during one day) which I would have been happy to see de la Pava take even farther.
A Naked Singularity is self-published but it’s not that easy to tell; the physical book and its layout are very professional, and the only thing giving it away to me was a larger-than-usual incidence of typos. I’ve seen other reviewers wish that it had been edited down some, but as I said earlier, I kind of wish it had been edited even less. I don’t know how hard de la Pava looked for a publisher—it seems hard to believe that no one would have taken a chance on this being the breakout hit of the year. Hopefully his next book will find a wider audience. I’ll certainly read it.
P.S. I am required by the FTC to disclose (as I already did, but here it is again, explicitly) that I received this book for free.