Oscar Wilde maintained that ”There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written. That is all.” If that were so, it would be impossible to play with the reader’s moral sensibilities, as this novella does.
Kaganof is apparently a persona of South African filmmaker Ian Kerkhof, and Hectic! has already been published in Dutch. It was turned down by a South African publisher because of its outrageousness. It is the story of Red Kowalski, a self-hating Jew on a joyride of intoxication and destruction in what seems to be contemporary Cape Town.
The self-hating Jew part has something in common with the recent movie The Believer, which fictionalised the true story of a young Jew who joined a neo-Nazi gang. This is as far as it goes in providing Red with some psychology; otherwise, he is something of a cipher. That doesn’t matter in and of itself, but when the reader is confronted with rape and violence, without much explanatory psychology and without a fully realised social context in which to place these events, the shock seems to take place in a vacuum. Realist tradition asks us to read such horror stories as portraits of either individual or social pathology, but Hectic! doesn’t quite allow that. It may be deliberately anti-realist text, but then it feels like a game without real resonance.
One is left wondering what to make of it all: are we to discover a different kind of moral schema from the conventional one, as, say, Last Exit to Brooklyn forces one to do? I think Kaganof is pushing his protagonist in this direction, but I can’t be sure; there’s not enough to go on. He may be working out personal obsessions, as Dennis Cooper so unsettlingly does, but Hectic! seems too jaunty, too jokey, for that. Kaganof may just be trying to outrage us for the sake of outraging us. But then I read Samuel R Delany’s Hogg round the same time, and by comparison with that deeply revolting/titillating text, Hectic! is anodyne and straightforward.
Apart from such confusion, whether it be moral or aesthetic (and perhaps such confusion is salutary), it must be said that Hectic! is written with verve: the narrative is swiftly episodic, and it is often very funny. The slangy language has considerable energy. It’s a pity that this apparently self-published book didn’t find a professional publisher here, though: it could have done with a certain amount of editing, and the amateur typography is some way short of inviting.