Some thoughts on Robert Louis Henry's
God loves rich kids and we smoke off the same cigarette

by J. de Salvo
(editor of The Bicycle Review)

Robert Louis Henry isn’t even writing, or doesn’t want you to know he is; that is, when he isn’t writing what’s easily identifiable as some very well-crafted contemporary poetry, it’s hard to find a name for what exactly it is he’s doing, apart from the obvious “prose”. All of which sounds like there are a hundred different ways in which it couldn’t possibly “work”, just like any other great and “impossible” idea.

Rather than dancing around the verities…you know: the existence of God, ethics and morality, the “meaning of life”, that we as a “post-modern” (repetition of ironic quotes is intentional ala Foster Wallace) generation of writers are supposed to be “over” or “beyond”, he immerses himself in them without ever getting bogged down or archaic. The result is a collection which makes you think, (even causes you pain if you’re half way sensitive) without forgetting, somehow, to be fun to read.

I’m going to ignore Henry’s poetry, which is really too good to dissect anyhow, and focus on this “stuff”, here; especially as he doesn’t take the easy way out and start with his more accessible stuff, but hits you right at the beginning with this, this, this “prose”. As Louis Henry hints at in his introduction, “…many times you’ll wonder if I’m ever actually going to get to a point, or tell a story.” Which would be awful if, as is so often the case with so-called “experimental” writing these days, that were the overt and self-conscious point of what he was doing; “in his hands” it comes off wonderfully in that same way that Richard Brautigan or Douglas Copeland could always make you enjoy reading without having to pay so much attention to who, what, where, when, and why exactly, you were reading in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong…I love densely plotted, Dostoevskian/Dickensian type stuff as much as the next novelist, but Henry is doing something with his prose which would only suffer from too much filling in. Delightfully, he realizes this, and allows the form he has chosen to take over; going, in the process, to places he might never have made it to had he started from somewhere else.

If the truth has to be anything, it has to be effortless.

If there is anything the truth cannot be, it is pretentious.

The prose in God loves rich kids… feels …not to say is, because there’s always a distinction between the craft of writing and the impression the writer creates…anyways FEELS effortless, and never pretentious. Louis Henry tells the truth in perhaps the only possible way: by being honest. As in “Souls in the post,” for example, where he writes:

“My mother once asked me, if I had a gun against my head, what would I say if I was asked if I believed in god?” (Robert Louis Henry distinguishes between God and “god”, and do be prepared for the idea of a deity to come up again and again in different contexts and through different perspectives throughout this collection.)

“My response was:
‘Whichever answer I thought would stop the bullet.’"

If you haven’t guessed, I recommend this book.

-J. de Salvo

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