Reviewed by Mark Seinfelt
Sun Eye Moon Eye
by Vincent Czyz
Spuyten Duyvil
March 2024, Paperback, 588 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1959556831
Logan Blackfeather, the protagonist of Sun Eye Moon Eye, Vincent Czyz’s brilliant new—and not so new—novel, has the ability to view the world (dispensation or curse?) in two radically different ways, which blend and blur in the shadow factory of neural tissue lodged in Skull House like a shrimp in its shell. In this he, like all humans, resembles “a kind of god whose one eye is the Moon and the other, the Sun.”
Logan’s moon eye, however, like Van Gogh’s or a tribal shaman’s, opens wider than most, and this can be mistaken, particularly by those who rely primarily on the sun eye to navigate the world, for madness. So it’s no surprise that Logan eventually becomes a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Like Hamlet, he’s too smart for his own good.
Logan’s sun eye, however, dominates the novel. The world he moves through appears in vivid Technicolor, with refulgent clarity and an absence of shadow, and Logan is able to view it rationally and without undue bias. The coarser moon eye, however, sees in gritty black and white. It is of the dream- and netherworld. “Leave it to the primitive,” Logan thinks (no doubt ironically), “the foolhardy, the poets, the lie-abouts, the mad, to close the sun eye, to lose themselves in fables lying behind a papery-thin lid.”
A talented musician whose debut album was picked up by an indie label, Logan is an ethnic amalgam. He is of Hopi and Anglo descent (though late in the novel we learn that his Anglo mother may be part Asian). He is every bit as bifurcated, every bit a new and unique fusion as, say, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger.
Czyz’s panoramic tour de force opens in the mid-1980s. We meet Logan hitchhiking in the Arizona desert after having visited the mesa villages and Chaco Canyon, one of the sacred places of his father’s people. By this time a mescaline-induced vision he can no longer precisely remember has ended in a mental breakdown and he has stopped making music. The suggestion, as he explores the eerie stone ruins of Chaco Canyon, this destroyed world of doors sans walls that blends with the natural landscape, is that Logan is on a spiritual quest and is intentionally trying to lose himself in myth and fable.
As a boy, he watched traditional Hopi ceremonies and dances with his grandfather, but after his father is killed in a car accident, Logan and his mother move from Arizona to Kansas, where his uncle, in Claudius-like fashion, assumes his father’s place in his mother’s bed. Logan, a young man as the novel opens, now desperately wants to reconnect with his Hopi heritage.
A bag over his shoulder and his thumb out, the frowsy, unshowered Logan is picked up by a coed. Fatefully, the pair stop at roadside bar where Logan encounters a prejudiced truck driver and puts paid to him in a knife fight. This duel, which in sheer narrative brio recalls the many vivid, archetypal knife fights in the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, ends the first section of the novel, called Tokpela after the first of the four worlds of the Hopi (three of the four were destroyed by a natural calamity).
We next encounter Logan in a psychiatric hospital just north of Manhattan. This in the second part of the novel, Tokpa, the resurrected Second World of Hopi mythology. Likewise, Books III and IV are named Kuskurza and Tuwaqachi after the Hopi Third and Fourth Worlds and are set, respectively, in Manhattan and Kansas. Here, Czyz seems to be following a trail blazed by Paul West in his incomparable The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests. West’s masterpiece also features a Hopi protagonist who journeys through very different scenes: the world of the LA porn industry, the Hopi mesas, Vietnam. Its sections, too, are also named after the four Hopi Worlds. Indeed, at one point in Tokpa, Logan’s psychologist gives Logan, a voracious reader, a box of books; the volumes include West’s Rat Man of Paris.
In Book II we learn that Logan turned up in the Big Apple after his acquittal of the trucker’s death. There, in a confused state, he tussles with a cop and winds up being committed. At the state hospital, he encounters a wide array of misfits, becomes less antisocial, probes his traumas and complexes with his psychologist, and shares an erotic interlude with a patient named Linda before hopping a fence one night and fleeing the institution. Linda, we later learn, escapes too—by slitting her wrists.
Logan heads back to Manhattan, where he crashes with friends and begins a turbulent relationship with Shawna, an ad executive, amateur photographer, and art gallery habitué. Landing a job in a West Village piano bar, he encounters an assortment of ’80s types, including punks, yuppies, and skinheads. Although desperately in love with Shawna, Logan again pulls up stakes to return to Kansas, where he stays with his best friend, the Falstaffian Jim Lee, a hard-drinking and coke-snorting Rabelaisian giant of man (another version of whom appears in Czyz’s award-winning short story collection, Adrift in a Vanishing City).
For most of its nearly six hundred pages, Sun Eye Moon Eye reads like a realistic novel, i.e., scenes are viewed through the sun eye. But there are also tantalizing glimpses of the moon eye at work—a terrifying scarecrow hitchhiker, visitations by the ghost of Logan’s father, and dancing katsinas (Native American spirit beings who descend from the stars), to name a few. And as the novel climaxes, the moon eye ascends. In a visionary chapter that calls to mind a scene from a Stanley Kubrick movie, Logan has a mind-blowing experience in the penthouse of a shadowy oligarch who owns, among other things, a record label. Czyz allows himself to go full moon eye, and the reader experiences something akin to the Night Town chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. While there is wonderful word work throughout, Czyz’s prose really sparkles here. Like the “returnal” James Joyce, Czyz leads his readers on a merry chase through myth, literature, and art history. Logan emerges from this surreal escapade hopeful—perhaps he and Shawna climb out of the netherworld to find (or found) a fifth world.
Reading Czyz’s afterword, we learn that this novel has been circulating among publishers since 1991 (hence, my assertion, above, that it’s “not so new”). No doubt he has revised and polished his sentences in the interim, but it remains obscene that that such an ambitious, vital, and sprawling book has taken so long to see print.
About the reviewer: Mark Seinfelt is the author of Final Drafts: suicides of world-famous authors and Baldr and Beatrice.