Synopsis

A man mysteriously disappears in a lighthouse, as if dissolved by light, leaving behind a notebook filled with bizarre claims of a curse and a series of drawings entitled ‘The Death of the Jubilant Child.’ The investigation into the disappearance unearths hidden connections between the disappeared man, Helene and the strange figure of the Man With The Forks In His Fingers. Fifteen years later, the discovery of the detective’s copy of the notebook by Helene’s daughter seems to set in motion a repetition of the events of the past.

Circuitously structured and intensely lyrical, The Autodidacts explores the mythos of friendship, the necessity of failure, the duty of imagination, and the dreams of working class lives demanding to be beautiful. It is a prayer in denial of its heresy, a metafictional-roman-a-clef trying to maintain its concealment, and an attempt to love that shows its workings out in the margins of its construction.

Thomas Kendall’s THE AUTODIDACTS is a brilliant novel — inviting like a secret passage, infallible in its somehow orderly but whirligig construction, spine-tingling to unpack, and as haunted as any fiction in recent memory. – Dennis Cooper

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Excerpt

James ‘Jim’ Burke arrives at the hospital ten minutes after Lawrence leaves. This despite appearances is in no way premeditated, appearances being less than convincing on closer inspection. Jim is unshaven and wearing a suit slicked with patches of scuff and wear, a vinyl stickiness to the fabric akin to the wet scraped skin he used to find around his knees during the long lost and barely specifiable summers of his youth.

Here he is then, unshaven, unlaundered, his pupils an enlarging spot of black in the spoiled fruit of his eyes, thought patterns gone AWOL, defected in deference to a ragged swarm of digitised colour blown around like confetti by the jigsaw winds of his perception. There’s a bunch of flowers that he stole from an elderly woman’s garden in his hand, the dirt still nattily dreading the stems and forming an organic webbed candelabra under the base of his fist.

He is full of stories or anti-stories that knit and chain together, tangled in images that no mouth could shape nor ear disentangle. How to explain to Helene what happened to him today on the way to see their child or what looped Road to Damascus revelation lurked behind their sequence. Jim walks through the car park rehearsing all the things that he’ll shed, in an instant, on seeing Helene’s heart-shaped face.

He wants to tell her about the old lady on the bus with her wrists crossed stoically above her shopping cart. How she pointedly ignored what must have sounded to her like obscene chatter from the teenagers behind her but which Jim knew held all the necessary, ugly fecundity of youth. He wants to tell Helene about the old lady’s hands, how they were ridged with veins the way great rivers are rendered on a map. How he knew in this moment that he too was some celestial body, a planet amid planets coursing through exploded space, full of lifeforms and possessing only the burning consciousness of a star nudged from its path.

Jim steps forward and the doors of the hospital slide cleanly open, an airless hum sucking the sound from his ears. A cold regulatory blast of air conditioning straps around his body, his skin coming to attention now in a Mobius strip of goosebumps.

Jim feels a sudden rush of exhaustion that’s warm and vaguely sensual at first but which is followed by a quick disavowal of that pleasure. His cells grind. Jim feels the muscles of his body stretching like a long strand of spit. The flowers begin to weigh in his hand. He looks at them. They have wilted on the bus ride here and point downwards now as if peeled from the air.

They were supposed to prove something else entirely.

Jim ducks inside the gift shop. He picks up a bunch of expensive roses and begins to weave the stolen daffodils into their array. The bouquet has become clownish, smeared with a carnival yellow behind which the serious red of the roses break through in little patches of suggested depth.

– Another self-portrait Jim?

He imagines Helene laughing as she says this. Sees her touching his hand and leaving a white half-moon of shooed blood where her finger rests. He pictures their child being transferred to his arms, a weight his body has missed all these years and in which each of them swirl and gambol and mutate, the child a new being to go beyond each of them, bound for the stars or somewhere else at least.

The excitement is making Jim’s fantasies childish. All his hopes have this quality of having been arrested in youth by sadness. He has been sad for a long time. The sadness seemed to reproduce itself in all his wayward strategies to cope with it, a disease that proceeded to colonise all the settlements of his self.

The girl behind the counter of the flower shop is trying to flirt with him. He barely notices. She lays her fingers on the counter and rotates her hips towards the register. There are large rings on each of her fingers. She takes the flowers and scans them while lightly bouncing her hip against the drawer.

What are you here for?

I’m a dad… I think. I think I’m a dad.

The girl turns to him now, leans over the counter.

– You think?

– It’s complicated.

The girl presses the change into his palm.

– Best of luck with that.

About the Author

Thomas Kendall is the author of The Autodidacts released May 2022. Dennis Cooper called The Autodidacts ‘a brilliant novel — inviting like a secret passage, infallible in its somehow orderly but whirligig construction, spine-tingling to unpack, and as haunted as any fiction in recent memory.’ His work has appeared in the anthologies Abyss (Orchards Lantern) and Userlands (Akashic Books) and online at Entropy.

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