Chaotic Good
By Lee Klein
Sagging Meniscus Press 2023

Lee Klein’s last novel, 2019’s Neutral Evil ))), made for strangely addictive reading: slim and splendidly written, yes, but difficult to say how it hummed the way it did. To this day it upholds a rare distinction among those much-praised, much-beleaguered books known as “autofiction”—rare because it tends to inspire in its readers a sincere wish to meet its author, the book’s apparent protagonist, rather than to run in the opposite direction. Memorably, it was an autofiction that managed to embrace the tentacular complexity of our ponderous Information Age without succumbing to it—the kind of novel that’s capable of talking about Twitter without sounding like Twitter.

Klein’s new novel, Chaotic Good, rings all the same bells, and then some. Its unnamed narrator (again, presumably Klein), a self-described “writer of uneventful autobiographical essayistic stories,” is the same middle-aged, Pennsylvania-based everyman readers of Neutral Evil ))) came to know and love. His quest, not explicitly stated but easy enough to describe, is the definition of quotidian: to find balance among competing obligations to work, family, health, and art. This is a novel, on the one hand, of classic age-old tensions, pitting man against himself, his art, his wife, his child, his parents, his childhood, his society, etc. But this is also a novel about resolutions, a storehouse of all the small daily sacrifices, frustrations, and accomplishments that make up a life worth writing about.

The novel’s narrative is episodic, given to all manner of digressions and leaps of associative discovery, with little concern for the contour of conventional plotting. Of course, such a bill of materials has often accounted for literary disaster at the hands of lesser writers. But Chaotic Good turns these ingredients to wonderful effect, constantly entertaining with its stream of refreshingly unique observations and reflections.

It helps that Klein’s extremely readable style has all the appearance of easiness. But cleverly concealed behind that appearance is a careful and intuitive prose patterning that seems to capture the ebb and flow of our very own thought processes. See how, plunging into the weeds of his job as an editor for a medical publisher, Klein can be zen-like, self-assured, almost algorithmic:

Once I organized the random files inherited from the previous manager of the projects I worked on, I never had to reorganize. The system of shortcuts on my desktop, the sloping pyramidal shape with the prioritized projects toward the top, made it so I wasted no extraneous thought or experienced agitation or annoyance as I clicked through levels of the server and instead zapped to exactly what I needed. Over time this system limited agitation and annoyance, every day, multiple times per day, an accretion of efficiency that let me enter a flow state and make progress as the hours passed.

One way of understanding the novel’s aim, far from telling one coherent story, as scene follows scene, is to enter just such a flow state while reading it. The scenes themselves range from the piquant to the pedestrian, and though the domestic ends up outweighing the exotic to a considerable degree, the novel’s interest doesn’t suffer one jot for that. On the contrary, much of the pleasure in reading Chaotic Good derives precisely from the ongoing sense of recognition that accompanies one relatable moment after another. In one such scene Klein sits, marooned in a mall parking lot with his wife and child, waiting for a roadside assistance technician to arrive and resuscitate the family car’s dead battery, which naturally leads to reflections upon the “grapefruit-sized dimple on the right rear bumper”:

On the list of everything we need to take care of sooner or later, the dent is more of a symbolic parallel for this time in our lives than it is a priority. It won’t always be this way. It will get better, we say to ourselves. Whenever I say this I envision the teenage version of our hyperactive, curious, willful child smiling at our naivety. In ten years, we’ll be even more worn down, unable to follow an adolescent jettisoned at warp speed into inevitable independence.

The substance of Chaotic Good is largely moments like these, overtly the stuff of the narrator’s mind and its unpretentious involutions, what he calls, elsewhere in the book, “static opportunities for digressive associative rumination.”

At the center of the novel is an odyssey that takes Klein through his old haunts in Brooklyn to Madison Square Garden and back. This journey to go watch the improvisational “jam” band” Phish in concert makes for another strong formal parallel with the last book, Neutral Evil ))), which also centers on Klein’s attendance at a concert. In both cases, however, the live music experience is not substantially more than a frame story. Lights and sights and sounds galore—what better occasion for letting the mind run free than the sensory onslaught of high-energy live music?

By the end of the novel, having strayed as far from Madison Square Garden as one could hope, walking alongside his daughter through the neighborhood of his youth, Klein catches sight of a small prop plane overhead:

I extract my phone and upload live video of the plane circling but when I look at the videos immediately after uploading them I delete them because they don’t capture the effect of the sun, the rare sight of a blue plane turning scavenger circles in a clear sky, the radiance of it, what it must be like from the pilot’s perspective, the view, the layout, the predominance of trees, the carefree exuberance of circling like this, covering the same tract of aerial space, around and around to the point that I expect to see crop circles above, ribbons of exhaust and vapor forming a ring above us, like skywriting delivering a cryptic statement on behalf of celestial sponsors.

Chaotic Good is a boon against lonely days, tired times, and weary consciousnesses. Of course it ends with a hopeful vision, one last stab of gratitude to cut through all the truth of which it treats, all the ambivalence and confusion of daily living: the plane lands in the street in front of Klein’s childhood home; its pilot delivers a gift to Klein’s daughter; and then the plane flies away.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.