Their characteristics are cataloged with the care of a naturalist: the “unrelenting crispness and dryness” of the scholastici poets, say, or the “morbid ethical neurosis” of a poet-programmer. Riviere lovingly presents a range of subcultures in “Dead Souls.” There are poets, of course, but also recitation artists, booksellers, engineers with literary pretensions and esoteric cliques. Wiese’s claim to innocence is in some sense predicated on our collective guilt. In “Dead Souls,” the precondition to make or experience art is the desire to be someone else. Whether it’s the “simulated fandom” of a media entity-cum-poetry influencer or the studied sophistication of an alienated rural class, Riviere leaves a trail of fraudulence throughout the novel. The novel pans out from Wiese’s “crimes against originality” to suggest plagiarism’s unspoken prevalence within the culture - and, more broadly, within modern life itself. The reading is both manic and thrillingly musical. (He is not alone in his poaching Bernhard haunts contemporary fiction.) Wiese’s obsessions are captured in spiraling sentences that unfurl with the comma-spliced cadence of consciousness.

His long sentences, use of repetition and italicized emphases are swiped from the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard.

Like his protagonist, Riviere is not above a stylistic lift when the need arises. The story of Wiese’s rise and fall is episodic, presented in a series of misadventures with poets, lovers, techno-activists, lunatics and ex-servicemen whose names are listed at the front of the book like a table of contents or Baroque song cycle. Sebald, the narrator, an editor of “a mid-circulation literary magazine,” is largely transparent, a screen on which to project the complex mental states of an enigmatic interlocutor. Somewhere between confession and deranged apologia, the novel reimagines excommunication as an epic of self-invention.Īs in the works of W. But when the unnamed narrator encounters Wiese at the tail end of a cultural festival, the pariah poet delivers a boozy, all-night monologue that complicates the accepted version of events. Wiese’s cancellation seems to establish a precarious equilibrium.

Who else might be bound for the so-called gray list?

Sophisticated detection software created at the behest of publishers - the quantitative analysis and comparative system, or QACS - has confirmed that the poet Solomon Wiese, a rising star, is a plagiarist. (“There were rich poets,” we read incredulously.) But the capital’s ascendant literary scene is embroiled in scandal. Sam Riviere’s debut novel, “Dead Souls,” depicts a fantastical, alternate-world version of London in which poetry has become the city’s major cultural product.

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere