In this palimpsest of Moby Dick, Em Lockaby turns the 1980’s arcade scene into a madcap quest for meaning seen through the eyes of our smelly and picaresque narrator, Nick. The style recalls Pynchon in the absolute bonkers-ness of it, but also in its vast reach--the American landscape, the Cold War tension that eeks out even onto a game cabinet, and, above all, those games themselves become grounds for Nick’s unrelenting search for the metaphor that will finally unlock his subject. The novel is

In this palimpsest of Moby Dick, Em Lockaby turns the 1980’s arcade scene into a madcap quest for meaning seen through the eyes of our smelly and picaresque narrator, Nick. The style recalls Pynchon in the absolute bonkers-ness of it, but also in its vast reach--the American landscape, the Cold War tension that eeks out even onto a game cabinet, and, above all, those games themselves become grounds for Nick’s unrelenting search for the metaphor that will finally unlock his subject. The novel is profound in that search, delving to such depths that it seems almost uninterested in its wonderful images, such as that of an evergreen forest illuminated solely by headlights, of a rainy wasteland through New Mexico. Lockaby is a master at unlocking the deepest import of video games and why we play them; here that brilliance gets a full and percipient treatment.

