A few loose thoughts on John Pistelli Major Arcana, which I liked a lot. I might try to write something more detailed, but I typed out my immediate reaction so why not share and help John sell his book? 

-It has something of the collage character of hysterical realism, combining different realms of knowledge and observation and describing them in different registers. I don’t think the parts fit together perfectly, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the book benefits from scale.

-My old friend Julianne Werlin says that the aesthetic horizon of the work is modernist (fragments shorn against ruins) and that the main ideological framework is Catholic. I think the aesthetic horizon is Romantic (although for Pistelli Joyce is also Romantic). He understands the Romanticism he wants to continue to be a sort of self-overcoming of Protestantism, and that is why (stretching credulity a bit but why not?) he makes Simon Magnus an old-timey New Englander. In addition to various 80s comic book artists, Simon Magnus is quite explicitly inspired by Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn (we’re told twice that Ellen Chandler is reading Doktor Faustus while Simon Magnus and Marco Cohen collaborate on their masterpiece). Simon Magnus is meant to embody American art and literature starting with the Pilgrims or Hawthorn, just as Leverkühn embodies the German Spirit starting with Dürer.

-In a sense the book is about: what happens in a world where the literary tradition Pistelli teaches and tries to continue is fading away? He thinks that the western / anglophone literary tradition as digested by the Romantics (Blake and the Melville generation above all) conveys the essence of human freedom. To cease to be inspired by it (or at least by what it is about) would be to cease to be free, to stop “transitioning.”

-Pistelli interprets various popular efforts at self-orientation as continuations of this Romantic tradition, with the central examples being the creation of comic-book mythologies and manifestation coaching. (He cheats a little by giving Simon Magnus and Ash del Greco better, more Invisible College adjacent literary tastes than is perhaps plausible. But again, why not?) Romantic self-creation needs to be checked by an ethical impulse that Pistelli associates with traditional religion. Marco Cohen is needed for the Overman comics to work. The sacrificial gesture of the Christ-like Jacob Morrow leads Ash de Greco see that true freedom is manifested not in arbitrary gestures (the Kirillov-style suicide she was planning) but in love and friendship. (This thought is partly inspired by Gnocchic Apocryphon’s review.)

-The philosopher Marcel Gauchet says that religion is a way of making sense of our “debt of meaning” towards the universe; once we realize that religions are something we created we’re tempted to think the debt of meaning is something that can also be explained away. In fact philosophical or artistic reflection on freedom winds up being a reflection on / transformation of our religious heritage. This is what Coetzee is up to in the Jesus books and what Pistelli is trying to do in Major Arcana. (I guess this is also what annoyed Henry James about Baudelaire and even to a lesser extent Hawthorn - isn’t there something fake about referring to a religion you don’t believe in to make moral sense of the present?)

-(Spoilers?) both this novel and Gasda’s Sleepers are about a canceled professor (the iconic literary type of our age?), a suicide and a baby. Something in the water?