A Brief Essay On The Genre Of KOCKROACH

As a novel, KOCKROACH fits neatly within the confines of a quite robust genre entitled American Existential Pulp, or AEP.  You won’t find any conferences on AEP or a pack of tweedy English professors debating its virtues in academic journals because, well, because I made the thing up.  Pretty much on the spot.  But I still was trying to write within the confines of my made-up genre when I wrote the novel, and I’m not the first.

The great existential works that made me want to become a writer in the first place were books like THE STRANGER, THE PLAGUE, and THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS by Camus, NAUSEA and NO EXIT by Sartre, THE TRIAL and The Metamorphosis by Kafka, FEAR AND TREMBLING by Kierkegaard, and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Kundera.  These books all deal with the conflict between man’s desire for order and purpose in a universe inherently disorderly and purposeless.  That they often also deal with sex is just a bonus.  (Am I the only one who thinks Meursault’s girlfriend, Marie Cardona, is way hot?)  But as you may notice, all of these works are penned by Europeans, most by Frenchmen.  Sacre bleu.  Maybe it’s something in the foie gras, but the French seem to do existential better than we Americans do.

What Americans do better than anyone is pulp.  We started the magazines that defined it -- magazines like Argosy, Black Mask, and Amazing Stories -- we filled the magazines with murder and mayhem, and we sent those lurid pages all over the world to do their dirty work.  Cowboy stories, boxing stories, adventure stories, detective stories, penned by great writers like Raymond Chandler, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft, stories inhabited with classic characters like Tarzan and Phillip Marlowe.  If you don’t think Camus loved pulp then you haven’t read THE STRANGER lately, a novel loaded with casual cruelty and casual sex and a cold blooded murder at high noon.  And have you noticed the way the author often seems to be pictured in a trench coat with a cigarette in his lips as if he’s channeling Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade?

So as an American, I decided that if I was going to get existential – and I sadly admit that I had a hankering to do just that, since I couldn’t stop looking around at the world and saying, “What the . . .” -- it was probably best to do it in a pulp sort of way, and to do it in stories with American settings and dealing with American issues, like violence and politics and money and sex.  (Yes, yes, I know, violence and politics and money and sex run through the world like the sewers run through Paris, but we do them all our own special way, flavored by an intractable vestige of Puritanism combined with our irritating sense of exceptionality and manifest destiny.)  And thankfully, I had a lot of models.

There was often an inherent existential strain in the old pulp stories.  RED HARVEST by Dashiell Hammett, a classic pulp tale about the efforts of a private eye to clean up a town plagued by crime and violence, seems not so different than a Camus novel about the efforts of the stirring Dr. Reiux to clean up a town plagued by, well, the plague.  In both novels the hero seems motivated only by the need to fight against disorder, whether or not he can actually prevail.  In another great Hammett novel, THE MALTESE FALCON, there is a brilliant bit in Chapter 7 about a man named Flitcraft that, with its insight into the human condition, in three and half pages outdoes the whole of Sartre’s BEING AND NOTHINGNESS.