Back in the early ‘70s, Jonathan Baumbach started a non-profit publishing house with a focus on experimental metafiction called the Fiction Collective (now FC2) alongside writers Steve Katz, Peter Spielberg, Ronald Sukenick and the miserable (or so I hear) B.H. Friedman at the Brooklyn College to be run entirely by likeminded writers, editing and publishing one another’s stories—it’s the only publishing house I know that gives the author complete—and I mean C O M P L E T E—control over their stories—using pocket $$$ from the writer and grants from the B.C. to pay for each book’s initial publication until enough copies are sold that the writer can be paid back, and to be honest I have no idea how that works, as Reruns was originally published in 1974—one of the first three FC publications: Friedman’s Museum & Spielberg’s Twiddledum, Twadledum—and my copy, a third printing released in 2003, is still a first edition, and undeservedly so. I’m the third user to add this book. Un—believ—able.

In under 170 pages, Baumbach successfully builds and maintains a sort of hypersurreality, mixing together dream and film, meditating on the art of storywriting for both the printed page and the camera. His handling of things dreamlike and filmic has a very Lynchian vibe to it: any random section’s goings-on would be right at home in any D. Lynch film, esp. Eraserhead.

I went in on the run. The sensation of impact—the sudden shock of cold—hanging on like a bad memory. Someone came in after me. I was swimming under the water toward what looked like an American flag at the bottom of the pool when a pair of hands attached themselves to my ankles. Whoever it was—I assumed Anna—followed like an appendage. Under the American flag was the corpse of a large animal—a cow, I thought, though it’s difficult to tell under water. When touched it made a mooing sound. I started to surface.

There’s also a lot that goes on in this short novel, so much so that it’s almost impossible to keep up with, particularly if you’re trying to read more than 30 pgs in one sitting. It’s overwhelming, and if you can consider that a detractor, it’s surely this novel’s largest. It’s helped a lot by the 33 short chapters (‘Nights’/reruns) making up the narrator’s past, and briefly a child’s escape from a family of vampires straight out of old, xenophobic Hollywood.

Beyond this, I don’t really know how to comment on Baumbach’s wicked cool book, or how to even describe what’s going on in it. Baumbach’s is a world where loved ones will be intimate friends one second and strangers the next, where secretaries type with the nipples of their breasts, where friends literally disappear into thin air when attention is being paid elsewhere, where amateur snipers take up residence in your apartment, spending weeks picking off any unlucky walker, where actors (e.g., Gregory Peck) insert themselves into minor roles, and enemies are suddenly close friends, where disconnected phones are always ringing, where real life-or-death situations are averted because the camera recording them ran out of film, &c. It all makes up an often hilarious, always nightmarish pop culture mash-up, blending dreams with books and TV, and asking how these clichés and archetypes have an effect upon our lives.

Go. Now. Order Reruns. It’s only $6.

80%
[2]

”You’re harder to live with when you’re not here. I have no patience with your absence.”
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Fun fact: Jonathan Baumbach is the father of the famed indie dir. Noah Baumbach, mastermind behind such films as Kicking & Screaming (1995 v.) and The Squid & the Whale. ( )