Blake Nelson's Exile + Two Girls Long Gone

February 18th, 2008 – by Jarett Kobek

For reasons beyond cheapness, I prefer my books used. The transfer of knowledge and experience from owner to owner is a thing unique to the grey market, and makes one believe in an Iain Sinclair/Grant Morrisony idea that books, in their layered pages of information and content, are mystical objects radiating power outwards. (The one downside that I’ve encountered was olfactory. My first edition of Alfred Watkin’s The Old Straight Track reeked like an unembalmed corpse. I kept it outdoors and most of the odor dissipated– it remains a noxious volume, but only when opened.)

I bought Blake Nelson’s Exile in 2004– I had either read, or was about to read, his first novel Girl, which turned out amazing despite the atrocious film adaptation, and I was in the Connecticut Book Barn when I saw Exile’s partially lime green cover. It bore hideous ad copy: A DOWNTOWN BAUDELAIRE FOR THE ’90s.

“Well, self,” sez I, “This surely must be awful. You must give yourself over.”

And so I did. I paid $3.

Exile sat for some time. I read it months later, almost 3 years ago, in March of 2005. This was during the first or second week of a ridiculously painful break-up. It’s a far stronger book than Girl, an unsung masterpiece– a third person, year-long and present tense account of a writer’s life. 85% of it felt like reading my biography through vaseline. Like Girl, it’s a true book. Rare enough to write one, let alone two.

It was heavy enough reading Exile, but as I moved through its pages, I was confronted by the marginalia of its previous owner. Poetry and nonsense at first, but then notes directed at the person to whom she had given the book. It was like a second narrative layered on top of the first, what Arafat Kazi, scourge of the Dhaka Theatre community, would have Knowingly called a palimpsest. The second story took shape as one high school girl’s scribblings and lovenotes to her girlfriend, oozing the innocence of being 16 years old and thinking that her Love would last forever. It was almost too much.

The notes have a terrible fatalism. Someone had sold the book. Either the girl who’d written or the girl to whom she’d been writing. It isn’t hard to imagine their relationship crashing and burning, and the ruination and heartbreak that had followed. The book itself remained, a relic and a time capsule that was cast out into the wider world. It waited to consume an unsuspecting sucker with its implicit drama.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet and Myspace, I located a person that I believed was one of the girls. I thought about writing to her, to ask what had happened, to discover why this thing had been inflicted on me, but even in the low ways of 2005, I had a sense that this idea was awful. So I didn’t. But I’ve thought about those notes almost every day.

All I wanted was a crap book about a downtown Baudelaire for the ’90s.

When I was on the Winter Tour, I re-read my copy of Exile (and Girl too), and I decided that I’d scan the pages with marginalia. I’ve only omitted two: one was redundant, and the other was minor, but allowed a person to identify, in total, one of the girls.

And I ain’t that bad. Not yet.

Page 25, First Strike: “one day I was a princess / wearing a golden dress / (14 carat jewel gown) / don’t worry about me / I’m still a princess / I’m just a little tarnished / just a little rusted”

Page 43, Falling: “falling / i’m not sure / where i’m supposed / to be / except maybe / here? / i think so / i think so / i think so”

Page 61, First Note: “Hi / Katy / you / are / reading /my / book / (+my / writing / in the / margin / s”

Page 127, The Heartbreaker: “Katy… i’m writing you a note so that when you get to page 127, you can read a note from me beautiful me. I’m a rose, I’m a thorn growing off of myself. And everyone is talking about the burning sun. Birds fly south in Summer and my star is shining for you, always. 6/10/98 Gina”