Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany’s maddening combination of, to name just three, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, South American magical realism and an American poetic rendition of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
One of the strangest, most bizarre, weirdest novels ever to rise to
cult classic status - a kind of x-rated fairy tale covered in soot. Yet
there something epic, even mythic running through its nine hundred pages
that makes this work truly compelling.
Delany penned five
published novels prior to his twenty-third birthday and shortly
thereafter was hospitalized having suffered a nervous breakdown. Lying
in his mental health ward bed for days, his imagination molded and
shaped vast charred sections of a hidden city. Reading Dhalgren,
my sense is the novel’s post-apocalyptic Bellona was that city. And the
author continued revisiting its smoldering precincts in the ensuing
years as he wrote his massive work published in 1975 when age
thirty-three.
Not a conventional storyline so much as a series
of images and events swirling up from the author's inner vision, a novel
spun from the fantasies and daydreams of youth as if expressing the
repressed desires of legions of stoned college sophomores combined with
the steamrolling fury of angry 1960s counterculture, all heaped up into a
colossal explosion scorching prim, prissy middle class, consumerist
America into oblivion. No wonder Delany's radical, eccentric novel
amassed a cult following both then and now. 
Our
main character is Kid, age twenty-seven, and we follow his odyssey from
the day of arrival roaming around burned out, isolated, cutoff, mostly
deserted Bellona, a city located on a map at the epicenter of this
futuristic, surreal America, far out and spaced out on the plains of a
state that might be Kansas. Kid and author Samuel Delany share much in
common: 1) mixed racial identity: Kid is half-white, half American
Indian, 2) fluid, gender hopping sexuality - Kid has oodles of sex with
both men and women, and 3) a past bout of mental illness resulting in
hospitalization.
Kid is also a drifter who suffers from partial
amnesia – he can’t recall his own or his parent’s name although he
remembers his mother was an American Indian. All-in-all, irrespective of
a reader’s racial background, sexual orientation, intellectual acumen
or mental stability, nearly anyone can identify with Kid both to their
heart’s content and heartache's content.
Similar to others gang
members in Bellona, Kid wears an “orchid,” that is, seven curved blades,
each about ten inches long held in place over hand and fingers by an
adjustable metal wristband. Yet kid is a poet. The combination of hard
and soft, violence and sensitivity is reminiscent of the sixties rock
group Iron Butterfly - hard like iron, delicate like a butterfly.
And the kid walks with one bare foot and a sandal on his other foot.
Along with the widespread importation of yoga, meditation, chanting
mantras and other Eastern practices, wearing sandals and going barefoot
were very much part of sixties youth culture.
Bellona is complete freedom – the ideas from Jerry Rubin’s Do IT!
are taken to heart. Why not? This is a city without babies or toddlers
or snot nosed kids, without spouses or parents or police, a city where
nobody has to work for money since food can be stolen from abandoned
houses and one can always sleep free in the park and have access to an
unlimited supply of dope. Although somewhat forgivable since spawned
from the imagination of author as young man, I myself found all the many
sexual scenes both puerile and ungracious. Delany’s Bellona forms a
fantasy world of perpetually healthy, sexually charged twentysomethings,
where there is never any need for doctors, dentists or pharmacists,
where women never have periods or get pregnant and sex is nothing more
than the sheer pleasure and intensity of the act itself. 
Three
of my favorite parts: 1) discussions on the nature of poetry, art and
literature with Ernest Newboy, aged poet and Bellona’s version of
Obi-Wan Kenobi; 2) the magical mystery tour aspect of the scorpions,
those colorful, vivid, holographic images enveloping certain gang
members; 3) the postmodern twists in the long concluding chapter
undercutting, questioning and challenging any sense of normality in our
perceiving the world and reading Dhalgren, the very novel we hold in our hands.
I
agree with a number of other reviewers - there isn’t that much middle
ground; this is one novel you will either love or hate. Philip K. Dick
complained it was trash and threw it away. Perhaps he was thrown off by
the foul language and explicit sex scenes. Yet I can see how for many
readers disgruntled with all the nasty, tawdry, overly judgmental,
superficial crap thrown in their faces, reading Dhalgren is
always a satisfying, joyful hit. Lastly, my advice: don’t give up on the
novel too soon as it does get better the further you read. And if you
get bogged down, play some good old sixties music like Kenny Rogers
singing Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In or Santana’s Soul Sacrifice or, as a last resort, the long version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. 
Michelle
Phillips has that unmistakable Dhalgren hippie look. If the young
ladies were all as beautiful as Michelle and I was twenty-seven and
single, I'd take my chances and make a beeline to Bellona.
Samuel R. Delany in his New York City apartment in 1983
“Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses." - Dhalgren
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