Channelling Henry
“So this novel you want to write, what’s the plot?”
“The plot is simple. A young artist moves to New York from somewhere else. The artist develops rapidly, stimulated by the charged atmosphere. The artist is too clever. The city and its denizens seem surreal … but it’s real. That’s what makes it so cruel. Even the fakes are real. She’s in deeper than she knows. She’s in trouble. Big trouble … ”
When Cassie Goldin takes up her scholarship at the Empire State University, the last thing she expects to encounter is a professor who seems to be writing a novel about her life. Then there’s her Australian friend Jeremy, also struggling with the permeable boundary between fiction and reality. Not to mention Hank, the street vendor with a dark past and a penchant for painting young girls.
And isn’t that Henry Miller himself, sitting in the corner spouting incomprehensible sound bites? In the tradition of literary noir, with a dash of New Age metaphysics and more action than a ticker tape parade, Channelling Henry is a millennium novel with a difference.
Author’s Note
I began writing this book in Brooklyn, September 1999. Since then, terrorists have killed a lot of people and destroyed the World Trade Centre. Why persist with fiction under these circumstances?
My Manhattan is an overcrowded third world island off the east coast of North America. It’s a place some people dreamed up a long while ago, and then it got out of hand.
The events depicted here are examples of what happens when the imagination is overheated. Henry Miller knew that better than anyone. I kept the following quote (from Tropic of Cancer) in front of me while I reworked what began in my imagination during that millennium-year sabbatical with my family.
‘If now and then we encounter pages that explode, that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know they come from a man with his back up, a man with nothing left but his words.’
Bruce L. Russell
Fremantle, August 2003.