It’s hard to imagine that Bill Cotter’s 2009 Fever Chart could have content so eccentric as to befit its cover. The cover, after all, is a medley of bright colors and distorted cartoons of urban debris, centering in upon a male figure whose body is animated, kinetic and dripping blood. The cover-art does not mislead the reader; indeed, the story is one depicting life’s brightest colors and most thorough distortions. Yet, Cotter’s literary craft is much subtler than his cover. In his debut novel, published by the independent (read: free-thinking and gutsy) publishing house McSweeney’s, Cotter makes the utterly unpalatable utterly undeniable. What’s worse or perhaps better, he leaves the reader greedy for more of his disturbing images, as he or she is enlightened to the inevitability of the grotesque.
Our narrator, Jerome Coe, is a broken man. He begins his journey in a new apartment degraded by time and the indifference of a landlord. The journey succeeds through multiple hospitals and is sustained mainly on street corners and in cafés that seem all too familiar. Jerome is almost as plagued by his poverty as he is by what he refers to as “bad plumbing,” an incurable incontinence. However, worse than any lower-bodily affliction he may experience is an entirely different type of problem all together—insanity. Jerome encounters person after person (and there is an extensive character cast in this story) who dislodges his sanity or who is sadly dislodged by it. Having seen and partaken of heartbreaking bloodshed, suffering and death, Jerome feels that he is a failure and he feels betrayed by the world that has not yet claimed his life.
Using Jerome’s recollection of the time he was robbed and shot in the head during a psychotic break, Cotter cements a dark view of the human experience (“the little bullet, too puny to take me out of this fucking inhuman farce”). Cotter presents the narrator’s various struggles concurrently to craft a story which is both disgusting and profound after the fashion of Palahnuik, yet with the artistic license and poetic certainty of a talent like Cummings. Moreover, the piece contains a heavy realism that could be attributed either to any of the melancholic writers of times past or instead to the tyrannical pain of the eternal human struggle. As the novel turns upon its final quarter, Jerome is daily the rape victim of a hospital doctor, leading him to pronounce, when told by lecherous nurses to turn over for a suppository, “Okay. I didn’t care anymore. I turned over. Maybe it was sodium cyanide [they were putting in me], or a bomb.”
Despite its numerous entangled subplots, Jerome’s central and final distraction is none other than love, and the women that he loves only seem to protract his pain and struggles—both the real and the imagined. Jerome winds in and out of love and its accompanying envy and indignation so many times in the novel that the reader might begin to doubt his sincerity, were he not ready to put his life on the line for any woman who would keep him warm for a night. Love and hatred, life and death, poverty and self-indulgence are traced as eternally recurring circles throughout the plot of the novel. The fate of his final love, as detailed in the novel, sends the “full circle” spiraling off like a disc into the wind. To read this poignant story is to learn from Bill Cotter’s perspective just how life and love move.
Read it, but don’t expect optimism, because it is a dark and honest tale that begins in dying and ends in death. The dark from which Jerome emerged is the same dark to which he eventually returns; it is the reader’s duty to extract meaning from Cotter’s darkness, but the job is made easier by the screaming vibrancy of his narrative.
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