Late Arcade

by Nathaniel Mackey

Overview

A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel 

Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal.

Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”—oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays— which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention.

Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum). 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811226608
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/28/2017
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida in 1947. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and has received many awards for his work, including the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, and the Bollingen Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University, and edits the literary journal Hambone.

Editorial Reviews

"Our greatest living epic poet, (...) Mackey’s poetry and criticism (...) have reinvented modernism for our time."

Literary Hub

"Mackey has now written close to one thousand pages of fiction about music that does not exist....What is so revolutionary about it, still, is the way Mackey makes the pain of this absence into the occasion for renewing a love of language, of redirecting our ears toward the page...[His] handling of history is subtle and immaculate."

BOMB Magazine

"Singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel."

Big Other - John Madera

"A literary adventure of the highest order, a feat of prose and imagination that takes the fiction genre into new territory. Once of the most memorable meetings of prose and jazz in English literature."

All About Jazz - Florence Wetzel

"Exquisite rhythmic lyricism"

Bookforum

"Through the treatment of avant-garde jazz as sonically improvised sentences, Nathaniel Mackey’s, Late Arcade, exhibits a boundless and complicated metamorphosis in which musicality becomes the very language which attempts to describe it. An eight month series of letters written by N. to a peculiar confidant known as, “The Angel of Dust,” relays the appearance of mystical, if not erotically charged, balloons, whose ability to share the subjective experiences of N.’s bandmates results in both performances and identities gaining a greater sense of cosmic locality. Instead of accepting the casual clichés which plague musical writing, Mackey adapts a set of stylistics which are uniquely his own: much like those breaths which are prodigiously pushed out of a tenor, a trumpet, or an oboe, the words read as chaotic, harmonious, suspensions of the spirit which one must hear before they may fully inhabit."

Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI - Bennet S. Johnson

"Mackey isn’t simply playing the part of a poet recounting jazz, he’s fully engaged in the creation of its written iteration, his script a study of rhythm, flow, freedom and, yes, discipline, his words as expressive and imaginative as Coltrane’s or Coleman’s most deviously-conceived notes."

Jazzwise - Spencer Grady

"Nathaniel Mackey is a poet of ongoingness involved in a kind of spiritualist or cosmic pursuit."

The Washington Post - Edward Hirsch

"A major work of experimental and philosophical fiction....an ongoing meditation on black cultural production writ large."

Chicago Review

2016-11-06
An avant-garde jazz sextet hones its craft, hits the road, and tries to make sense of some unusual onstage goings-on.N., the narrator of the fifth in this series of jazz-themed novels by Mackey (Bass Cathedral, 2008, etc.), is writing letters to the "Angel of Dust" in 1983 and 1984 about his group, the Molimo m'Atet. It's an experimental group inspired by (to pick a few of the many names dropped) Yusef Lateef, Sun Ra, and Milton Nascimento, relying heavily on intuition and improvisation. The novel's language is similarly off-the-cuff, deploying abstracted wordplay that foregrounds sound and rhythm as much as sense. ("Rickety buildup grew possessed of growl and grumble, an aroused rattle and would-be rafter shake amassing senses of emergence or at least emergency….") Lines like those give the book a poetic lift, but Mackey is relentless in peppering the pages with such prose, recalling the line (often attributed to Thelonious Monk) that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. The skeletal plot turns involve N.'s flirtation with the group's percussionist; an approving but intellectually-wanting concert review that prompts a group emergency meeting and press release; and, most surrealistically, the appearance of comic-book-style word balloons during performances, usually delivering semierotic messages. What to make of that? Art, of course: the band responds by giving the audience at a concert blow-up balloons to do with what they will, popping and rubbing in support of N.'s theories about air, sound, and the nature of music. The m'Atet's performances in Detroit and their home base in Southern California uniformly receive wild applause, but this novel is a little harder to get behind: for all of its wild, free-wheeling spirit, overall it feels like an extended solo that keeps going after it's run through all of its themes. An appealingly brash if overworked experimental lark.

Kirkus Reviews