The Brooklyn Rail

Crow, the titular character in Lyle Rexer’s warm, witty, and intensely thought provoking The Book of Crow, is a slinger of slang and a raconteur, a gourmand specializing in the varied cuisines we might refer to as “slightly used food,” and a true citizen of the world. A walking (though usually flying), talking (though mostly cawing) gentleman thief (gentle-bird at the very least) he is above all, a crow. Or is he?

Though Crow lives the life of a bird—summers where it’s warm, winters where it’s… warm—one might easily see him as a man, a proxy for an author named Lyle Rexer imagining the life of a fictional, and highly fictive, crow. Or perhaps (obviously, in fact) Crow is a narrative creation born of Rexer’s mind and set down on these very pages, his identity partly implied to reader by author and partly born in the reader’s mind as a product of the reader’s knowledge, mood, and experience, independent of Crow, Rexer, and the work itself.

This variable nature of narrative is at the heart of Crow’s story, as it is in critical works such as Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction—part of the idea being that there are multiple selves engaging with any one work. Set on a continuum, they run from the physical author of a book to the physical reader of a book. Between these points lie various way stations. There is a reader the author imagines, but that is not the reader he encounters—just as there is an author the reader imagines, one that will never match who that author truly is. The fact that we seek to explicitly know each other through literature, or to even know literature as a thing static, open to a sole interpretation, is delusional to put it uncharitably, suspect at the very least:

Crow referred to his nest as the Bat Cave and rarely let anyone inside. With good reason. They couldn’t handle it. They would be like Marco Polo at Khan’s court, refusing to believe that such a place could exist outside their very limited belief systems and financial arrangements. They would be dazed by the bottle caps, shards of glass, tarnished necklaces, tinfoil, quahog shells burnished like pearl… The wealth would be incomprehensible to them, the sight of it sure to blind them or drive them crazy with envy. He didn’t want their blindness on his conscience. (In secret, they laughed at him. “Have you been to Crow’s crib? Utter trash, man. The dude has absolutely no taste. And he needs a clutter consultant.”)

Not that delusion is wrong in this sense. Crow may be right: He may have taste so fly (heh) an emir would be envious. Then, again, Crow may just be a crow, collecting dirty, albeit shiny, little nuggets in his life’s journey as no more than a matter of instinct. Except, it’s not instinct, as Rexer with his obvious breadth of ornithological knowledge is no doubt aware.

Crows do not show attraction for or collect shiny objects. This itself is a myth, a piece of our shared illusion, as is any myth. And there is a panoply of myths at play in The Book of Crow, a hoard of these shiny, shared delusions concerning crows, ravens, and magpies, tales of the foundation of the world, of the color black and sun and sky. Central to The Book of Crow, though, is the question of the perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs that constitute our individually constructed realities.

A recurring motif in the book is Crow’s one-time drunken bender in LA, a parched, ill-fated attempt at quenching his thirst in a puddle in the parking lot of Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant, only to find the puddle was tequila at the liquid end of a shiny, shattered bottle come from a nearby liquor store. This points to the way our perceptions serve as an attempt to interpret our physical world favorably, a requirement of life, the hope necessary to keep going; a hope that will sooner or later fail in the face of our singular existence. We eat, we fuck, we fight, we flee, we age, we die; and so, the Earth abides until, well, eventually the Earth won’t make it either.

The Book of Crow is a spry, refreshing read, bright with language, humor, and intellect. In spite of his narrative’s overtly constructed nature, Rexer does nothing to diminish his main character. The reader feels for Crow as his story nears its end, wondering with a sense of alarm whether Crow’s life will end before their eyes. And maybe it will, but having come this far with Crow and Rexer, the reader trusts the end will be worth it. For this reader at least might even have finished the book and found himself saying, “That Crow, he’s the man.”