Daybook at Sheep Meadow: The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson
Daybook from Sheep Meadow finds Peter Dimock returning to the breakdown of America’s imperialist history that he started exploring in his groundbreaking previous novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. In Daybook, Dimock expands on what it means to refute the narrative of American greatness – and what happens once one starts on that path. Historian Tallis Martinson has grappled for years with the atrocities of the American condition through meditative notebook entries, wherein he has attempted to create a “historical method” that guide’s an individual ‘s personal thought outside the language of empire. However, when words fail him completely, he commits himself to a psychiatric facility, mute and unable to write. Daybook presents Tallis’ notebook entries, annotated by his brother and editor Christopher Rentho Martinson. Christopher initially follows the entries’ complex guided meditations in hopes of being able to reach Tallis during his visits to the psychiatric facility. Instead, he finds himself immersed in his own family’s implication in the normalized atrocities of his country’s past and present. An experiment in the capacity of literature to re-lay the trajectory of America’s future, Daybook stages a space wherein the reader can register – and, potentially, remedy – the criminal catastrophe of the American political arena.
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I don't typically write reviews here, but my God did this book frustrate me. I see what the author is going for thematically, and it could be really beautiful! The concepts of language and culture being so deeply intertwined–and what it means to lose one, and subsequently both, of those–is so multilayered and complicated. But the complicated nature of that idea does not constitute the overly wordy, deeply pretentious, and at the end of the day, utterly exhausting nature of this book. It feels like Dimock is putting words together just to make himself sound more intelligent, even though the words don't make sense together. I mean honestly, what the hell does “exclusive means of combining intervals of duration with ethically coherent continuities of expression” even mean? I have read and reread that line in the hopes of piecing something together, and yet I remain lost! And that's not even talking about how often Dimock quotes from entirely different texts (which is obnoxiously often).
But at least he's critiquing American imperialism for what little of the book is actually his own writing! Take that USA! Fuck the system or whatever.
In short, there are about a million other books that tackle those themes and ideas in different, and significantly better, ways. Go read those ones instead
Adding another little update now that I'm writing a paper about this god forsaken book: “An unsurvivable impunity of respectability” makes VERY little sense. It has taken me a solid 5 minutes to parse through the full sentence this phrase is a part of, which is frankly absurd given that it isn't even a very long sentence! All this man does in this novel is write intentionally wordy–and grammatically frustrating–sentences for no other reason than to confuse the reader and make himself sound that much smarter. Frankly, I would rather try to make sense of a Colleen Hoover novel put through several rounds of Google Translate than have to read this shit show of a novel ever again.
