Nathaniel Mackey

Group dynamics

Reviews of Bass Cathedral—the fourth installment in Nathaniel Mackey’s apparently endless series of epistolary novels of the avant-garde jazz world—will surely compare the 2006 National Book Award-winning author’s writing to the free-form musical genre that’s its subject.

This would be tiresome if it weren’t so clearly Mackey’s intent.

With bursts of alliteration, clusters of compound nouns, dangling prepositions, and the personification-by-apostrophization of a host of abstract concepts, Mackey succeeds in doing with language what his narrator N.’s favorite musicians—Coltrane, Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman—do with sound.

With jazz positioned as a kind of ur-text (the foundation for all other forms of expression), Mackey uses the recent adventures of his fictional sextet, Molimo m’Atet, to describe a world where “wholeness finds fault with itself” and “a part is more than a part.”