“Glyph” by Percival Everett- review

 “Glyph” by Percival Everett:

This is a book by Percival Everett which I hadn’t so much fun with as with his other books. It is a satire on poststructuralism that features a sarcastic infant genius, a baby born with an IQ of 475. The baby’s name is Ralph and he is hyper-intelligent, linguistically competent, and has, mostly firmly founded, opinions on almost everything. He reads books of philosophy, science and mathematics. He wisely does not speak but communicates with scribbled, often sarcastic, very insightful notes. He is the son of Eve, a failed painter and Douglas, a failed academic. Ralph introduces his parents with the line "My father was a poststructuralist and my mother hated his guts". 

Glyph could have been a mischievous and very funny satire on poststructuralist thought and literary theory - if there wouldn’t be those endless, tiring theoretical excursions into just this poststructuralism. So the book is only partly funny and I resigned myself to the enjoyment of the plot and story. 

The plot gains velocity when Ralph is abducted by a mad psychologist, after a series of psychological tests have revealed that he is in possession of an incredibly exceptional IQ. From his abductor he is further abducted by the FBI and then furthermore abducted by a well-meaning Mexican guard and his wife. He finally escapes the grabbing pedophilic hands of a catholic priest and makes it back into his mother’s arms. 

In the end the satire appears to develop too many targets and sidelines and sort of eats itself. For example is Ralph not just the narrator of his adventures but also a novelist, who offers up his own "Theory of Fictive Space", a sort of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for novels, which contains a huge list of ideas about the novel (or fiction in general) and fictitious dialogues between historical figures like Socrates, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Zeno, Thales or Wittgenstein, to name a few. It is all very theoretical and thus, while quite interesting and philosophical, even comical, it also becomes tedious. It is a stew of metafictional reflection and enjoyable comedy, which makes it finally a matter of taste, some like it, some don’t. I did partly. 

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