The Epiphany Machine by David Burr Gerrard

The epiphany machine is a device that looks like an antique sewing machine or the jawbone of an extinct animal that tattoos the arms of users with a phrase that reveals their quintessential nature, or is it their most serious failing – or are they the same thing? It’s a divine or diabolical creation, or perhaps just the prop of a clever charlatan, with conflicting origin myths. The device is a brilliant concept for a novel, but that’s just the starting point. This is an extraordinary novel that will make you laugh out loud and then somberly reflect on a world that always seems to be changing for the worse. It is drenched in irony and has wonderful plot twists, characters who come alive and terrific writing. Most of all it’s a book with something to say, which leaves the reader with a lot to think about.

This novel is so entertaining and so much fun that the craft underlying it can go unnoticed. The first sentence is: “The epiphany machine will not discover anything about you that you do not, in some way, already know.” We have no idea, at this point, of what the epiphany machine is – – but it’s such a clear, simple and concise way of expressing what an epiphany is, whether triggered by a psychotropic drug, a religious experience or the eponymous machine of the novel. Gerrard has a knack for converting complex ideas into simple sentences. Then there’s the narrative structure. Narrated by the main character, Venter Lowood, the story is interspersed with extracts from various pieces of writing and testimonials transcribed by Venter, that present many different voices and viewpoints. The nested stories presented in this way not only create great narrative opportunities but introduce characters who re-emerge as in a Dickens novel, to play important roles in the chronicle. The dialogues are terrific, often hilarious, and they aren’t simply for show but build characters that become very real and believable. This is a wonderfully wrought piece of writing.

Here’s an example of how Gerrard integrates testimonials into the narrative and blends humor with more profound thought. “If anyone else had gotten the epiphany tattoo that I got,” begins one testimonial, “it would have ruined Adam Lyons [the machine’s curator]. Maybe the fact that it went to me . . . was a stroke of luck for him. Or maybe I got it because it was actually meant for me.” That last sentence, simple as it is, frames a basic question – are the tattoos as random as the message in a fortune cookie, as meaningless as a newspaper horoscope or do they tell an essential truth about a person?. The problem that brings him to Adam Lyons is his imminent marriage to a non-Jewish woman, which upsets his Jewish mother. The quandary makes him sick enough to consult a physician who diagnoses him with either a parasite or wedding jitters and opines, “’Of course, a wife sometimes is a parasite,’” before rolling up his sleeve and showing his tattoo, which says CAN TOLERATE WIFE and explaining how that tattoo saved his own marriage. “’When she yells at me,’” he says, “’. . . for putting forks tines-up in the drying rack rather than tines-down the way she likes, I think: I can tolerate this. So I do.’” Once again Gerrard manages in a light an amusing way, to pose a significant question about the tattoos – do they state what is true or do they cause something to become true? Before administering the tattoo, Lyons gives the man this advice: “’You’ve already given God your foreskin, you don’t owe him the rest of your dick,’” and the man laughs and says that it wasn’t God he was concerned about but his mother. “’So,’” Lyons asks, “’you owe your mother the rest of your dick?’” The tattoo that the man eventually receives, to Lyon’s apparent chagrin, is DIRTY JEW. Rather than being upset, however, the man is pleased and provides his own interpretation: “’A neutral observer would probably have thought I had been the victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime. But you have to remember that the only person who can really understand an epiphany tattoo is the person who gets it. The machine was telling me that I dirtied my Jewish heritage and that I needed to clean up.’” Here again Gerrard presents crucial information about the interpretation of tattoos in a hilariously ironic way,

The epiphany inscribed on Venter Lowood’s arm, DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, which deeply offends the would-be author, might actually characterize what’s necessary for living responsibly within a community of other human beings. Not caring about how others perceive you marks a person as an outlaw, literally someone outside of the bounds of the law. We’re all attracted to the independence of living free from restrictions from the outside, but such personal freedom is at odds with civilization and Venter’s journey is one of coming to terms with that conflict, as well as accepting the very imperfect human being he is.

Some things that generally annoy me in a novel, such as the insertion of real people in a story of fiction and writing about writers, Gerrard manages to accomplish in a way that is both clever and integral to the tale. In this novel, there isn’t just one author or would-be-author, but a slew of them. Pretty much every major character is, in some way a writer. And the real characters, the most prominent of which is John Lennon, are not there because the author is too lazy to create his own characters but to provide a connection between the fictional world of the epiphany machine and the actual world we live in. The result is that what seems a far-fetched fiction feels, by then end of the book, quite realistic, if not the world in which we are now actually living.

I came to this novel never having heard of it before or of its author, but I’ve ordered a copy of his first novel to see whether this novel is a fluke or the product of a truly gifted writer. I just loved this book.