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Any novella built on a single dialogue will, at the very least, earn itself default comparisons to Samuel Beckett. And while this isn’t unreasonable in the case of Aaron Petrovich’s slim new asylum noir, The Session, perhaps a better literary forebear is anti-totalitarian Arthur Koestler, who himself had one foot perpetually in the madhouse.
Ostensibly a mystery about the murder of a mathematician, Petrovich doesn’t worry too much about precision plotting or tying up loose ends; indeed, he doesn’t seem all that interested in creating loose ends. Much like Beckett, Petrovich aims at the accretion of atmosphere through the attrition of coherence and convention, as his two protagonists divagate through discussions of fact and process, using word games and puns to evoke a sensibility of dark, poetic unmeaning. Unlike Beckett, however, Petrovich’s prose gets a stylistic boost from a series of shadowy monotypes by Vilem Benes. As the first title from Akashic’s Hotel St. George imprint, which aims to match art with fiction, The Session fulfills the mandate admirably. Though like its impressive literary forebears, it might not be for everyone.
Ostensibly a mystery about the murder of a mathematician, Petrovich doesn’t worry too much about precision plotting or tying up loose ends; indeed, he doesn’t seem all that interested in creating loose ends. Much like Beckett, Petrovich aims at the accretion of atmosphere through the attrition of coherence and convention, as his two protagonists divagate through discussions of fact and process, using word games and puns to evoke a sensibility of dark, poetic unmeaning. Unlike Beckett, however, Petrovich’s prose gets a stylistic boost from a series of shadowy monotypes by Vilem Benes. As the first title from Akashic’s Hotel St. George imprint, which aims to match art with fiction, The Session fulfills the mandate admirably. Though like its impressive literary forebears, it might not be for everyone.
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