Late in John C. Hampsey’s novel SODA LAKE, the narrator is offered a bagel at a French hotel that, he’s later informed, is made of plastic. It’s a surreal little moment that serves as a tidy metaphor for the novel itself: presenting something outwardly familiar that is revealed to be an artificial construction. A philosophical novel disguised as a mystery, SODA LAKE uses its premise as a launching pad for questions about the nature of memory, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about both.
It all begins with the unnamed narrator en route to a friend’s wedding when he sees a man run from his car and vanish into the vast salt flats of the California desert. Haunted by this disquieting sight, the narrator embarks on a quest to locate the man, an Irishman named McCuade. What begins as a Hitchcockian tale of obsession shifts to a series of vignettes, each following a character grappling with an identity crisis: a man spends his Fridays impersonating a Jesuit priest and making rounds to visit parishioners (“Father Fenton”); a former nun is driven to psychological and spiritual collapse by a stalker (“Helena”); an aristocrat forced to turn his castle into a museum and live as a permanent exhibit rebels against his imprisonment through bizarre performance art (“The Lord”). These seemingly disconnected narratives serve as thematic reflections of the narrator’s disintegrating self as he searches for McCuade, who may not even be a person so much as a kind of mystical force that dissolves the identities of those it touches.
Hampsey’s atmospheric, dreamlike prose captures this dissolution of selfhood with visceral immediacy: “Artery-pulsing rootflesh with no need to worry about moving or to think—I am he, and I am He.” Physical landscapes, too, are rendered with surreal poetry: “The white light from the western sun, piercing through the overhead leaves, seemed fixed in the sky. The only change—the width of the water narrowing as I headed downstream.” But the novel’s extended digressions into abstruse metaphysical monologues too often slow its narrative momentum, written in an opaque style that can defy readability (“shblankton in holberloo, en plankosh ferbotkin”).
Those expecting the straightforward plot and tidy resolution of a conventional mystery may find this novel more baffling than mind-expanding; this is anything but a relaxing beach read. But for readers willing to surrender to its strange currents, SODA LAKE offers a challenging and genuinely original voyage through the nature of consciousness and identity—with all its weird detours and dead ends.
John C. Hampsey’s SODA LAKE begins like a mystery—a man vanishes into a desert salt flat—but quickly becomes a challenging and dreamlike voyage into the nature of identity that offers readers an original and haunting exploration of the self.
~ By Edward Sung for IndieReader