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Rose Alley
Fiction. When violence erupts on the streets of Paris in May 1968, a hapless international film crew finds itself stranded during the shooting of a preposterous low-budget blue movie about notorious 18th century erotic poet John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. A deadpan and digressive behind-the-scenes catalog of the actors, filmmakers, bystanders, and subjects involved in this movie, ROSE ALLEY is also a fantastical and venomous love letter to French film and literature, obsessive collectors, pornography, language, revolution, misanthropy, the joys of cross-cultural misunderstanding, and other peculiar objects of affection. As Harry Mathews writes, "you have no excuse not to read this book."
- GenresFiction
178 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2009
76 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 21, 2017
Cinematic history is littered with screenplays that never took off, films halted midstream because of exorbitant production costs, and projects derailed by Machiavellian producers and directors or megalomaniacal actors. Many of these ill-fated films were simply stored away to anonymously languish in a vault—some released years later to satisfy researchers, aficionados, and completists. Rose Alley, Jeremy M. Davies’s comic debut, is the story of a crazed and ultimately failed attempt to film a biopic based on the life of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, also a renowned satirist and bawdy bard. The titillating titular film (“It would be a documentary fiction. A dialectical fiction. With fucking. (Simulated.)”) is shot in Paris under “the specter of the calamitous riots,” that is, during the May 1968 general strike of 11 million workers. But while the confusion stirred by the disquiet suffuses the narrative, direct commentary on the strikes is not Davies’s project. Instead, much of his focus is on the labyrinthine twists of the film’s botched production as well as the outré frivolities of its colorful cast and crew.
Seemingly mimicking the film’s breakdown and, at least metaphorically, the dissolution of French society, Rose Alley is divided into chapters centering on individual characters, often shifting back and forth in the story’s string of events, resembling a film whose scenes were shot out of sequence with the intention of later splicing them together to run chronologically, but which were finally left to run in a digressive, fragmentary form. At times, we’re offered meditations on the art of editing, and what could be a glimpse into Davies’s own predilections:
Thus, it is in the slow accretion of details where the big picture of his novel comes together.
Rose Alley is what Northrop Frye would call an “anatomy”: a work characterized by its fluid structure and nested stories; and, as Frye, referring to Tristram Shandy, wrote, its: “digressing narrative, the catalogues, the stylizing of character along ‘humor’ lines…the symposium discussions, and the constant ridicule of philosophers and pedantic critics.” Davies, however, reserves his ridicule for sundry historical personages: Debussy is a “troglodyte”; Sir Lawrence Olivier is a “fucker”; John Dryden is “a talent, certainly, but his poems are a graveyard for academics”; John Wilmot is “contemporary as a dirty limerick”; and Roman Polanski is rather outrageously described as performing an
Davies’s confident, luxurious, indelible, and seemingly effortless style approaches the baroque qualities of John Barth and John Hawkes, brimming with an effusive comicality and wide panoramic sweep resembling Salman Rushdie at his early excessive best; and, with its knowing digressions, also falls somewhere between Alexander Theroux and William Gass. Seemingly responding to one of his characters’ distrust of maps, which inevitably show “states stiff and static as jigsaw pieces rather than as arcs and orbits and educated guesses,” Davies skillfully maps the internecine terrain of the film’s cast and crew, while largely dispensing with an easy narratological cartography—that is, he replaces “stiff and static” plot devices with his characters’ ever-shifting emotional “arcs,” their duplicitous and conniving “orbits”; and, rather than giving cheap answers, he offers a novel where no one resolution is conclusively drawn, allowing readers to make their own “educated guesses” about what really happened.
“It is a basic assumption of scholarship that certain units of information vibrate in harmony,” the narrator notes toward the end of Rose Alley. And Davies’s descriptive passages prove that the same may happen in fiction. There are the “powdery Pierrots” who “wept calligraphically.” There’s the dead body: “Limbs like cracked broomsticks, hair like straw, the fingers dried and tight as belt-leather, and toes hard as ten thimbles; her skin all over like airmail paper: a macabre little manikin.” And, thinking of Ephraim Bueno, Eugenia Sleck (Davies has Pynchon’s panache for naming characters) “longed to see the ember of comprehension that fear would light in his cow-dull eyes as she throttled him.” Davies repeatedly demonstrates a knowing command of the acoustical properties of sentences:
Though Rose Alley comes in a brilliant pink, for all of its ribaldry and salacious interludes, it might as well have come in blue (William Gass would certainly be proud). In it are countless bawdy asides like Ephraim Bueno’s painting of “pornographic dummies”; Gilbert Beltham’s “violating from behind a schoolgirl bound hand and foot with thorny creepers”; and Raoul Foche is a fount of them: “Fucking Millicent was something like climbing a marble pillar long as the world: much fortitude was required, and you left frivolity behind with your clothes.” While Rose Alley is certainly erotically charged, some of the characters have a kind of horror of the flesh. There’s Evelyn Nevers for whom pornography
And there’s Gilbert Beltham, whose “body was a machine for making disease,” and his almost grotesque reveries on his own impotence, his surprise at somehow being aroused in spite of all of his repugnance. There are long passages in the Beltham chapter worth quoting in full, and reveling in, as they showcase a digressive style informed as much by a winking erudition as it is by its ever roaming eye and ear for detail, and a sense of humor, oscillating from the utterly base to high comedy.
The chapter on Myrna Krause is one of the funniest chapters in what is a very funny book. We learn, in a wonderfully absurd turn, that Krause’s parents, both chronic stutterers, “learned to communicate with one another by whistling the choruses of popular tunes,” and that their “infrequent efforts at intelligible speech were so gruesome and heartbreaking to behold—with tongues like purple geese molting spittle and phlegm—that simple questions from one or both had at times occasioned debilitating traumas in those who received them.”
Jeremy M. Davies’s Rose Alley is a film buff’s, no, cosmopolitan’s, no, epicurean’s, no, literary aesthete’s guide to late ’60s Paris; and it’s a kind of loving homage to unfinished films, their reverberations of nostalgia, memory, and obsession; but it’s also a novel where dizzying erudition is set in counterpoint with comic set-pieces, where robust language, mediated by a penetrating understanding of character, takes over every page (there are even expansive extrapolations on etymologies). There’s a buoyancy to the style here and an easy abandonment of straightforward storytelling, resulting in a beautiful prose object, that is, a story told “in the best possible way.”
[This review originally appeared in The Brooklyn Rail: http://brooklynrail.org/2011/02/books...]
Seemingly mimicking the film’s breakdown and, at least metaphorically, the dissolution of French society, Rose Alley is divided into chapters centering on individual characters, often shifting back and forth in the story’s string of events, resembling a film whose scenes were shot out of sequence with the intention of later splicing them together to run chronologically, but which were finally left to run in a digressive, fragmentary form. At times, we’re offered meditations on the art of editing, and what could be a glimpse into Davies’s own predilections:
Male or female, it is difficult to detect a consistent style in the cumulative work of any editor, for, after all, the most he or she can possibly do is rearrange existing material and tell a story in the best possible way.
Thus, it is in the slow accretion of details where the big picture of his novel comes together.
Rose Alley is what Northrop Frye would call an “anatomy”: a work characterized by its fluid structure and nested stories; and, as Frye, referring to Tristram Shandy, wrote, its: “digressing narrative, the catalogues, the stylizing of character along ‘humor’ lines…the symposium discussions, and the constant ridicule of philosophers and pedantic critics.” Davies, however, reserves his ridicule for sundry historical personages: Debussy is a “troglodyte”; Sir Lawrence Olivier is a “fucker”; John Dryden is “a talent, certainly, but his poems are a graveyard for academics”; John Wilmot is “contemporary as a dirty limerick”; and Roman Polanski is rather outrageously described as performing an
obscene Polish belly dance before the newsreel cameras, gyrating right off the podium and into the air, a whirligig of satanic energy, before disappearing through the roof like a ghost, vibrating so quickly now that his atoms and those of the ceiling passed each other like soap bubbles in a bathing beauty phantasmagoria.
Davies’s confident, luxurious, indelible, and seemingly effortless style approaches the baroque qualities of John Barth and John Hawkes, brimming with an effusive comicality and wide panoramic sweep resembling Salman Rushdie at his early excessive best; and, with its knowing digressions, also falls somewhere between Alexander Theroux and William Gass. Seemingly responding to one of his characters’ distrust of maps, which inevitably show “states stiff and static as jigsaw pieces rather than as arcs and orbits and educated guesses,” Davies skillfully maps the internecine terrain of the film’s cast and crew, while largely dispensing with an easy narratological cartography—that is, he replaces “stiff and static” plot devices with his characters’ ever-shifting emotional “arcs,” their duplicitous and conniving “orbits”; and, rather than giving cheap answers, he offers a novel where no one resolution is conclusively drawn, allowing readers to make their own “educated guesses” about what really happened.
“It is a basic assumption of scholarship that certain units of information vibrate in harmony,” the narrator notes toward the end of Rose Alley. And Davies’s descriptive passages prove that the same may happen in fiction. There are the “powdery Pierrots” who “wept calligraphically.” There’s the dead body: “Limbs like cracked broomsticks, hair like straw, the fingers dried and tight as belt-leather, and toes hard as ten thimbles; her skin all over like airmail paper: a macabre little manikin.” And, thinking of Ephraim Bueno, Eugenia Sleck (Davies has Pynchon’s panache for naming characters) “longed to see the ember of comprehension that fear would light in his cow-dull eyes as she throttled him.” Davies repeatedly demonstrates a knowing command of the acoustical properties of sentences:
Sforza’s stomach was flat and hairless but soft to touch, with the feel of fatness. His was an adolescent’s slenderness, retained to middle age, threatening to swell if not well tended. He ate a lot, but not often, and then only meat: proud of his figure, eager to show it, and already three-quarters beef and mutton—or so Evelyn calculated privately.
Though Rose Alley comes in a brilliant pink, for all of its ribaldry and salacious interludes, it might as well have come in blue (William Gass would certainly be proud). In it are countless bawdy asides like Ephraim Bueno’s painting of “pornographic dummies”; Gilbert Beltham’s “violating from behind a schoolgirl bound hand and foot with thorny creepers”; and Raoul Foche is a fount of them: “Fucking Millicent was something like climbing a marble pillar long as the world: much fortitude was required, and you left frivolity behind with your clothes.” While Rose Alley is certainly erotically charged, some of the characters have a kind of horror of the flesh. There’s Evelyn Nevers for whom pornography
made her think of vulval insect bites in tropical climes, the various cancers and polyps like tusks or withered and innovative new appendages seen to have emanated from the skin around the scrotum or labia, as though the body were seeking an alternate means to acquit itself of a burdensome responsibility.
And there’s Gilbert Beltham, whose “body was a machine for making disease,” and his almost grotesque reveries on his own impotence, his surprise at somehow being aroused in spite of all of his repugnance. There are long passages in the Beltham chapter worth quoting in full, and reveling in, as they showcase a digressive style informed as much by a winking erudition as it is by its ever roaming eye and ear for detail, and a sense of humor, oscillating from the utterly base to high comedy.
The chapter on Myrna Krause is one of the funniest chapters in what is a very funny book. We learn, in a wonderfully absurd turn, that Krause’s parents, both chronic stutterers, “learned to communicate with one another by whistling the choruses of popular tunes,” and that their “infrequent efforts at intelligible speech were so gruesome and heartbreaking to behold—with tongues like purple geese molting spittle and phlegm—that simple questions from one or both had at times occasioned debilitating traumas in those who received them.”
Jeremy M. Davies’s Rose Alley is a film buff’s, no, cosmopolitan’s, no, epicurean’s, no, literary aesthete’s guide to late ’60s Paris; and it’s a kind of loving homage to unfinished films, their reverberations of nostalgia, memory, and obsession; but it’s also a novel where dizzying erudition is set in counterpoint with comic set-pieces, where robust language, mediated by a penetrating understanding of character, takes over every page (there are even expansive extrapolations on etymologies). There’s a buoyancy to the style here and an easy abandonment of straightforward storytelling, resulting in a beautiful prose object, that is, a story told “in the best possible way.”
[This review originally appeared in The Brooklyn Rail: http://brooklynrail.org/2011/02/books...]
June 24, 2017
This book was Not Great. There was a lot of interesting and fun turns of phrase, but anything resembling a story was densely hidden and inaccessible. Maybe I'm just Not Smart. But basically it was a book about a historical event that I knew very little about and the author told me even less, told via even more apparent historical references that I also knew nothing about. Everything was very referential. Everything made very little sense. I ended up finishing it just for the sake of finishing it.
June 28, 2009
Jeremy M Davies Rose Alley reconstructs the shooting of the film Rose Alley, filmed in the midst of the Paris student revolutions of 1969, each chapter (but two) telling us the movements and gestures, erotic, literary, personal, of one person connected with the film—starlet-cum-ingenue-cum-nudie-cutie Evelyn Nevers to cinematographer-gone-recluse Selwyn Wexler. These are very funny people, and their antic adventures only underscore the level of almost indescribable verbal play in the novel, which really is a phantasmagoric riot of sound. Here’s a sample sentence, genuinely culled at random, throwing the book open with as much deliberateness as the I ching: “Big Michael Krause took the maestro out of the piano and put his thumbs into the Russian’s Adam’s apple” (39). The whole book is like this, clotted with words you can chew and sounds you’ll want to sing. Leaving aside the erudition of the novel, fill as it is with English Restoration history and that of the French student revolutions, or film making, this novel serves a feast of readerly pleasure.
November 21, 2010
Jeremy's a good friend of mine, but even if he weren't, I wouldn't admire Rose Alley any less. (I probably just wouldn't have heard about it and read it.) This is a brilliant novel. Open it up to any page and start reading—every sentence delights. And the whole construction is winning on every level, from the concept (pairing the Mai 68 riots with John Dryden's ambush), to the style (voyeuristic and yet so charmingly snide), to the conceit (telling the plot "in the background" by dedicating each of the thirteen chapters to a different character that's involved in it). Jeremy has managed to pull off something very tricky: both caring deeply about his characters and realizing that the whole thing's entirely invented and arbitrary, and so the book is simultaneously a trifle and the most serious thing in the world. Which is a characteristic I am always looking for in fiction.
August 7, 2011
Jeremy Davies has written some amazingly concise, beautiful sentences. I enjoyed Rose Alley a great deal, and felt the characters were ephemeral amalgamations of familiar actresses, socialites and infamous personas of the mid-century. He's recreated this history with the right amount of modern inflection. Loved it.
August 8, 2013
Interesting character sketches with some compelling language. Worth a read. Left something to be desired in terms of the craft of the novel, I thought.
November 12, 2012
ROSE ALLEY
Jeremy Davies
Counterpath Press
$15.95
Jeremy Davies’ debut novel Rose Alley is a conundrum of the delicious sort. Rose Alley defies containment, and Davies seems to have deliberately written an unfilmable (and unsummarizable) narrative on the subject of filmmaking. Readers will find themselves caught somewhere between the lyricism of Faulkner and the timeless character studies of Chaucer. And perhaps that’s were one should begin—Rose Alley is effectively a composite of characters studies, lyrical and poignant, with priories set not on a narrative arc, but on capturing the vagrancies of the human condition.
Rose Alley is divided into twelve distinct chapters, with each chapter encapsulating a character. Oftentimes a character mentioned in passing in one chapter is later awarded a chapter of his or her own—sometimes, the reader discovers parallels between narratives, and sometimes the reader will be forced to hurtle gaps of a hundred or so pages before discovering a sense of meaning in a particular character. (Davies was kind enough to include an appendix, which is of great use.) Appendixes aside, this authorial choice forces the most stubborn of readers to cease the search for a linear thread, and embrace the riveting turbidity of Davies’ prose. ‘Filmmaking,’ functions as the narrative conceit—the novel opens and closes and touches throughout on a filming project in France during the riots of the 1960s—and the character studies read like unedited, unorganized candid film snippets. As a result Rose Alley comes across as a finely polished body of prose left intentionally unfinished.
There is of course the question as whether or not the hurdles Davies sets out for his readers will off-putting for all but the most patient. At times Davies awards his reader too much faith, and those readers who seek a narrative structure that will take and guide curious strangers by the hand will doubtlessly become frustrated by Davies’ approach to narrative structure, which keeps a steady distance of 100 (and sometimes, it seems, 1,000) yards ahead.
The real gem to be found here is Davies’ mastery of syntax, and his ability to capture so many different dimensions of humanity within the confines of a single sentence. Readers will delight in hauntingly accurate caricatures of generational gaps: “Eugenia called it rape plain and simple—the reason she’s taken her mother’s maiden name, despite its own distasteful association […]. But Hannelore just shook her head and smiled, as though rape like rock and roll had been invented by a generation of faddish malcontents, beyond Hannelore’s comprehension and—any-way—beneath her notice” (98) and syntaxical plays: “The fevers and insomnia marking 3 A.M. to dawn the optimal time for sleep, the wounded bristled too at the earlier dawn come spring, and asked Wilhelmina to institute a local “darkness-savings time”—to keep the hospital an hour ahead of the surrounding townships, with the soldiers’ bones thus an hour closer to knitting—and to paint the window black” (74) and quaint lyricism: “The dead shall live, the living die. Music shall untune the sky” (167). Questions of patience aside, Davies’ real bravura emerges in his sweeping approach to various syntactical and stylistic techniques, which nonetheless read with impressive fluidity.
Jeremy Davies
Counterpath Press
$15.95
Jeremy Davies’ debut novel Rose Alley is a conundrum of the delicious sort. Rose Alley defies containment, and Davies seems to have deliberately written an unfilmable (and unsummarizable) narrative on the subject of filmmaking. Readers will find themselves caught somewhere between the lyricism of Faulkner and the timeless character studies of Chaucer. And perhaps that’s were one should begin—Rose Alley is effectively a composite of characters studies, lyrical and poignant, with priories set not on a narrative arc, but on capturing the vagrancies of the human condition.
Rose Alley is divided into twelve distinct chapters, with each chapter encapsulating a character. Oftentimes a character mentioned in passing in one chapter is later awarded a chapter of his or her own—sometimes, the reader discovers parallels between narratives, and sometimes the reader will be forced to hurtle gaps of a hundred or so pages before discovering a sense of meaning in a particular character. (Davies was kind enough to include an appendix, which is of great use.) Appendixes aside, this authorial choice forces the most stubborn of readers to cease the search for a linear thread, and embrace the riveting turbidity of Davies’ prose. ‘Filmmaking,’ functions as the narrative conceit—the novel opens and closes and touches throughout on a filming project in France during the riots of the 1960s—and the character studies read like unedited, unorganized candid film snippets. As a result Rose Alley comes across as a finely polished body of prose left intentionally unfinished.
There is of course the question as whether or not the hurdles Davies sets out for his readers will off-putting for all but the most patient. At times Davies awards his reader too much faith, and those readers who seek a narrative structure that will take and guide curious strangers by the hand will doubtlessly become frustrated by Davies’ approach to narrative structure, which keeps a steady distance of 100 (and sometimes, it seems, 1,000) yards ahead.
The real gem to be found here is Davies’ mastery of syntax, and his ability to capture so many different dimensions of humanity within the confines of a single sentence. Readers will delight in hauntingly accurate caricatures of generational gaps: “Eugenia called it rape plain and simple—the reason she’s taken her mother’s maiden name, despite its own distasteful association […]. But Hannelore just shook her head and smiled, as though rape like rock and roll had been invented by a generation of faddish malcontents, beyond Hannelore’s comprehension and—any-way—beneath her notice” (98) and syntaxical plays: “The fevers and insomnia marking 3 A.M. to dawn the optimal time for sleep, the wounded bristled too at the earlier dawn come spring, and asked Wilhelmina to institute a local “darkness-savings time”—to keep the hospital an hour ahead of the surrounding townships, with the soldiers’ bones thus an hour closer to knitting—and to paint the window black” (74) and quaint lyricism: “The dead shall live, the living die. Music shall untune the sky” (167). Questions of patience aside, Davies’ real bravura emerges in his sweeping approach to various syntactical and stylistic techniques, which nonetheless read with impressive fluidity.
December 19, 2011
An absolute corker, funny and full-tilt outrageous, genuinely worthy of that overused adjectivization "Joycean." my favorite debut novel of the past however many years. Read it at once.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews