But without them, we’d only have books that make sense. And who wants to live in a world that makes sense? J. S. Latham is a critic and recovering literary journalist. He owns a first edition of “The Atrocity Exhibition” and is currently 400 pages into a self-published novel about time-traveling bees.
Of course, there is a dark side. Not every nut job is a Burroughs or a Pound. Many are just bigots with word processors. The line between “outsider visionary” and “hateful crank” is thin and bloody. The manifesto of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski ( Industrial Society and Its Future ), is a perfectly logical, brilliantly argued, utterly insane text. It is also a blueprint for murder. The literary world has a hard time with this. We want our crazies to be lovable, like crying about the Dharma Bums. We don’t want them building bombs. nut jobs author
Because the Nut Jobs Author offers something that the well-adjusted novelist cannot: certainty in the face of chaos . The sane novelist asks questions. The nut job provides answers. Ugly, beautiful, terrifying, stupid answers. When the world feels random—when politics is a farce and the news is a horror show—there is a perverse comfort in diving into a fully realized alternate reality, even a psychotic one. But without them, we’d only have books that make sense
Literature needs its nut jobs. They are the prospectors who dig in the dangerous, collapsed mineshafts where the sane novelist fears to tread. Nine times out of ten, they find only fool’s gold—a 900-page screed about the gender of angels. But that tenth time? That tenth time, they bring back a piece of ore that glows with a strange, new light. They expand what a sentence can do, what a story can contain, what a mind can believe. Of course, there is a dark side