On July 17, 2023, Sagging Meniscus published Chaotic Good.
Available via Asterism or Bookshop or Powell’s or B&N or Amazon.
Like Neutral Evil ))), a short novel published in 2020 about seeing Sunn O))) in Philadelphia on March 18, 2017, Chaotic Good presents another polythematic core sample, this time about taking the train to NYC to see a band—as far removed from Sunn O))) as possible—at “the world’s most famous arena” on December 28, 2019 after walking too far in Brooklyn with an old troubled friend, intermittently concerned about an imminent storm of excrement, all capped by the nightly procession of nearly invisible satellites. It’s an associative cascade about a foundational synesthesiac experience after an unforeseen change of plans, a cylindrical hotel deserving demolition, the renovated men’s bathroom in New York Penn Station, untangling headphone cords, cleaning house before moving out, logging the past versus planning the future, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s, preferring the documentary to the drama, waiting too long in car for spouse to return from hellacious megastore, wielding plunger on dented bumper, walking with young daughter around where you grew up, the composed part followed by the improvised part, intentionally losing now to win later, remembering once in a while that the trick is to surrender to the flow.
Open Letters Review (Eric Bies) says: “The novel’s narrative is episodic, given to all manner of digressions and leaps of associative discovery, with little concern for the contour of conventional plotting. Of course, such a bill of materials has often accounted for literary disaster at the hands of lesser writers. But Chaotic Good turns these ingredients to wonderful effect, constantly entertaining with its stream of refreshingly unique observations and reflections.”
“Indulgent, “mundane,” “self-important,” says Publishers’ Weekly. The anonymous reviewer also says “explores the complexities of middle age with candor and longing” and “readers with the patience for Phish might be into this.”
And the first phan to review it had this to say:
Matt Bucher, author of The Belan Deck, co-host of the Concavity Show podcast (which kindly included Chaotic Good on its “best of 2023” episode 1 h, 7 m, 37 s into it) and the admin of wallace-l, the DFW email listserv, says: “I really loved this book. The voice is witty and insightful and even though I know nothing about attending a Phish concert, it’s the quality of the writing itself that carries the book. I’d compare it to an American, suburban Knausgaard. Klein packs in a ton of detail and uses the materials of his life to construct literary art. His philosophical ruminations reflect reality and delve into postmodernity. If, like me, you value documentary over drama, you will dig this one.”
Quick readers may make their way through Chaotic Good in less than one hour and forty-seven minutes, the length of an interview with me available via the most excellent Melbourne-based podcast Beyond the Zero, posted July 13. Available at Apple, Spotify, and whenever else you get podcasts. Also, because 107 minutes of audio is probably insufficient, here are 8K+ words of textual supplementation related to books mentioned.
“Mostly just found myself highlighting and typing ha or lol or the little plus sign which of course means I dig this. Affable narration. Highly readable. Entertaining. Funny. Bejeweled with alluring idiosyncrasies. Unspools with characteristic effortlessness. I felt at home.”
—Matthew Vollmer, author of All of Us Together in the End
Chaotic Good, emblazoned with a stupendous “love and light” sticker, made it to the floor of the July 30 show at MSG:
“Just as Chaotic Good is ‘ostensibly fiction,’ it is also ‘ostensibly about a man’s solo journey into the sensuous depths of a communal music-listening experience.’ Of course it is much more. It is, scene by scene and paragraph by paragraph, a tree of singing rings—spooling, puddling, and oscillating in refracting flashes of innocence and experience, calmly paid out like vibrant candied rainbow rope, like the sliding scale of a human brain shot through and butterflied by blasts of radio wave on a magnetic field—each frame a static opportunity for digressive associative rumination—often, age-old tensions to ponder, reality as it is vs. as it was or could be: the thin man inside the fat man; the young inside the old; the bachelor inside the family unit; the mind within the mind; and, to cut things off somewhere, the individual within the concert within the city within the country.”
—Eric Bies, Goodreads, Books for Eric Booktube
And finally there’s this crown jewel of a Chaotic Good blurb/review, a screenshot of a text message a reader friend received from a dad/phan friend:
Will add to this when there’s something more to add . . .
For now, if so moved, please acquire via: