Felicia's Nose (Paperback or Softback)

Annotator's Note
by Tom Bradley

At the end of her life, Carol Novack was doing what must eventually be done by everyone who's strong enough: she was squarely facing certain aspects of herself, her family, and her heritage that were not precisely excruciating, but, as she said, were interesting and worthy of painstaking examination.

Even before the cancer diagnosis, she was tallying up her life's debits and credits, in particular the wheels and deals with Muter. The penultimate chapter of Felicia s Nose is a confrontation between the eponymous heroine and her female parent, ending with something like a Pandora's box being stashed under a bed. It's unopened, and bursting with what we all know is inside.

Being a writer, Carol's method of self-excavation was literary, and she recruited my help, two shovels being better than one. She liked the way I'd glossed Kane X. Faucher's sextuply schizoid impersonations in Epigonesia (BlazeVOX, 2010). That giant book fascinated Carol as the rarity of rarities: a new genre, something like a superficially nonfictional Pale Fire, taking place in real time as the primary text alternately rides roughshod over, and is sapped and subverted by, the critical apparatus.

She wanted me to do to her what I did to Kane X. Faucher in Epigonesia: to dig under her characters and situations, to dissect her names, numbers, references, to turn her allusions, both deliberate and unconscious, inside out. Carol wanted a running commentary that furtively pursued she cringed at the word psychoanalytical strategies. She envisaged an infestation of ten-point type skittering along the bottom of her novel like army ants underfoot.

"We need a literal subtext!" she cried.

The relationship of a novelist with her annotator is a bizarre admixture of banter and intimacy. As we worked, certain passages of her novel began to emit unexpected, sometimes appalling reverberations. But Carol never failed, with surprising courage, to reassure me that we were on track or at least we were groping along an alley in a not-excessively dark and horrendous inner city.

Carol died before we could finish Felicia's Nose. In what neither of us knew would be her last chapter, she comes forward and speaks in her own voice for the first time. She shouts encouragement directly down to me, where I toil in cackling paranoia at the bottom of the final page. Carol's thinking about all the strange and possibly happy directions our book will follow next, and she says, "I can't wait to see..."

She didn't wait. I'll never know what she saw.

CAROL NOVACK (1948 - 2011) founded Mad Hatters’ Review in 2005, was the former recipient of a writer’s award from the Australian government, the author of a poetry chapbook, and an erstwhile criminal defense and constitutional lawyer in New York City. In 2010, she moved from a Greenwich Village co-op to a mountain residence (a future “retreat” for individuals and collaborators) in Western North Carolina, importing her KGB Bar reading series, “Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes” to The Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, and founding the non-profit arts organization, MadHat, Inc.

Carol’s collection of fictions, fusions, monologues and poems, Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack, was published in 2010 by Spuyten Duyvil Press. The book is beautifully illustrated, mainly by artists who’ve graced the pages of Mad Hatters’ Review. The late poet Hugh Fox called the collection: “The most seductive, original, impacting work I have seen for years... Magnifique!”

TOM BRADLEY’s latest books are Family Romance (Jaded Ibis Press, illustrated by Nick Patterson), A Pleasure Jaunt With One of the Sex Workers Who Don’t Exist in the People’s Republic of China (Neopoiesis Press), Even the Dog Won’t Touch Me (Ahadada Press), Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (Dog Horn Publishing) and Put It Down in a Book (Drill Press, 3:AM Magazine’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2009). His next novel, with secret title and hidden nature, illustrated by the alchemical artist David Aronson, is coming next year from the occult publisher, Mandrake of Oxford. Further curiosity can be indulged at tombradley.org.

NICK PATTERSON is a visual artist whose love of twisting minds and turning heads has led him to explore all the darkness the human experience can muster, through high contrast ink drawings. With no official training in the visual medium, Patterson’s art is loosely tethered to reality, although it is very detailed. His inspiration is drawn from an amalgam of cartoons, comics, and movies. Carrying a sketchbook with him everywhere, he lets no flicker of imagination escape. Nick Patterson’s art has been published in several small magazines and novels. He currently lives in a city full of flowers on the western edge of Canada.