The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Cardboard Castles by Mark Axelrod
Gordon McAlpine

Mark Axelrod. Cardboard Castles. Pacific Writers, 1996. 233 pp. Paper: $16.95

Axelrod’s novel is a moving and at times hilarious adventure through one writer’s life of the imagination, the intellect, and the libido. The novel introduces Brazilian-American novelist Duncan Katz, whose story—told by Katz himself with a self-consciousness that at once acknowledges, expands upon, and satirizes the playful seriousness (serious playfulness?) of much postmodern fiction—moves from the narrator’s first encounters with books, wherein as a child he literally “consumes” their pulpy pages, through his frustrations as a burgeoning author, his lawsuit against God for the deity’s irresponsible creation of Minnesota winters, and his flight to foreign lands.
The novel is driven by Katz’s contradictions. His voice is one that has acquired a contemporary dose of irony and resignation; nonetheless, the narrative betrays the depth of Katz’s seemingly indestructible idealism. He is a man defeated not only by American publishing but also by God Himself (in the courtroom encounter); yet he is moved to reveries on love, hunger and responsibility that can spring only from a still vital well of hope that even Katz’s most bitter defeats have not dried up. In this he is a hero for our times, ever-aware and willing to push on regardless of the frustrations that inevitably accompany such cursed/blessed awareness. Here lies the triumph of Axelrod’s compelling protagonist—that engagement with a world that is in countless ways coercing us to disengage is in itself a rich enough “means” that arriving at one or another particular “end” is finally unimportant.
Cardboard Castles is an important novel and—as it is the first in a trilogy featuring Katz—a promising one as well. [Gordon McAlpine]