Jyzeburst - Annal One of the Jyze Age
Jyzeburst Description
For the past five years Glen and Dani have been trying to patch up their shaky mixed-race "zen marriage" (they're not married) in a bizarre backwoods town. Her parents, residing in a far-off state, purchased some property from a friend in the town as an investment and kindly asked their daughter and Glen to look after it in exchange for free rent. What at first seemed to be a cliché idyllic setting -- wetlands, deer, charming rustic folks -- gradually revealed itself to be, in addition, another kind of woodsy cliché: a nest of timber poachers, skinheads, drug dealers, militia plotters, right-wing religious fanatics. At present Dani's staying home to keep up the property and deal with the crazies as best she can, while Glen's commuting long hours, mostly by ferry, to rustle up the bucks to cover their nonrental living expenses; this he does by churning out transcripts as graveyard "nightscoper" for an all-female court reporting firm. And then....
And then, yes, something bad happens. The Digital Revolution up and fires a disruption torpedo straight at Glen and, indirectly, Dani. Scopers are suddenly obsolete -- almost -- and the nightscoper position evaporates. The firm will retain only two scoping jobs, both daytime, and they're put up for grabs among the existing staff. Intrigue and infighting ensue as the deadline for the firm's RIF (Reduction in Force) approaches -- it's a hyped-up modern-day "Bartleby the Scrivener" kind of scene, but this time with women in charge. At home, meanwhile, will the new RIF strains combined with escalating backwoods grotesqueries and a shift in plans by Dani's parents prove fatal for the "zen marriage"? Will the skinheads burn down Glen's writing shed during one of his long absences as he fights to keep his job or come up with a new one?
Big changes are obviously in store for Glen and Dani, separately or together, but what are they? And what's jyze got to do with it? (Non-spoiler answer: everything!)
(For All Annals)
While preparing to write a novel about a torrid love triangle he'd stumbled into in his early twenties, the author G.P. Sandefjord conjures up a bold new prose style for his first-person narrator in the novel -- a younger version of himself. This new style, which the author dubs, half seriously and half not, "jyze," rapidly grows -- or better to say bursts -- into an entirely serious literary form all its own.
Meanwhile a crisis arises concerning the author's day job and he decides to suspend work temporarily on the novel and take jyze out for a kind of shakedown cruise focusing on the job crisis. And...a dozen jyze-obsessed years later the cruise returns to port with the completed draft of an eight-volume, 4,000-page series called Annals of the Jyze Age, of which Jyzeburst is Annal 1.
With the Year 2000 Millennium at their center, all eight annals proceed chronologically and build on their predecessors. But each is also designed to -- and does! -- stand alone as a novel. And all are set in a single U.S. West Coast metro area at the heart of which rises Jyze City.
