A Review of James Reich’s The Moth for The Star
By John Mirkovic
In The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, the urban sub-chaos softly closes with the image of the Arthurian Fisher King, sitting upon the shore, waiting for his chosen successor, wondering “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” In his slim yet cinematically plot-driven novel, The Moth for the Star, James Reich sits atop a similarly bereft world, and when he sets about destroying his lands, you will feel it viscerally, and not see the masterful ending coming.
From The Waste Land to Reich’s first page, in the way he tells us that Charles Varnas is “quite simply, a dark-haired man in a pale suit who had been on a long voyage,” we sit with the protagonist on a sand dune in Egypt in 1925 with the gentleness of Antoine de St. Exupery’s Le Petit Prince. But we are not to linger in this peaceful imagery for long, for on the same first page, the mood on the North African sand swings sharply from The Little Prince to the darkness of Camus’s L’Étranger. We are now with a man who has just murdered someone, still in the panting breaths of super-oxygenated clarity. Or perhaps we are witnessing his incomplete memory of the encounter. It’s hard to tell.
The Moth for the Star is a murder mystery noir set in New York City shortly after the stock market crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression, at times jumping in time and place from America to Egypt. Varnas and his lover Campbell do exactly what many of us did when faced with societal crisis: walk the streets aimlessly, drink liquor in copious doses, and hide in monochrome designer disguise from the real world. They waste her dwindling inheritance, addicted to alcohol and to each other, whispering about immortality like vampires in a Jim Jarmusch film, saved by the hand-copied poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but destroyed as human beings. They flee the memory of the sickening crime they committed, the memory of Campbell’s dead father and his demonic agenda, and the people they have become due to childhood abuse.
Campbell is Varnas’s private religion. Together they are a seance candle burning at both ends, lost in the vastness of space. At times that vastness seems clarified in Campbell’s clairvoyance and amplified in Reich’s many references to the newly-discovered Planet X and its effect on the collective psyche. Sometimes the vastness is a hurtling asteroid, but it all seems to be an exploration of the Freudian death drive and the weight of looming annihilation.
As a character, Charles Varnas emits the upper-class elitism of T. S. Eliot; it is more than fifty pages into the book before our characters finally acknowledge the shantytowns and Hoovervilles that are beginning to encroach on their New York lifestyle. “The wasteland has found the city. It always does,” Varnas says of the unhoused, before quickly adding, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to be bleak.” They glide past the sleeping wretches with the impeccable sleekness of house cats set against the cardboard and shame of the middle-class fallen.
This book is certainly a psychological thriller, and because Reich studied psychology, we find the influence of the twentieth-century pioneers Freud and Jung in the story. Though Freud’s themes are everywhere in this book, the story is subtly tinged with the crisis that Carl Jung went through while writing his Red Book, which Reich quotes before the story even begins: “Every attentive person knows their Hell, but not all know their devil,” Jung wrote in his magnum opus, enchanted by his own sense of dread at all the changes he saw coming in the early twentieth century. Reich’s work comes at a time of similar shared dread, a sense of some looming something on everyone’s mind, and it feels rewarding to read it in this time.
I knew nothing of James Reich before this book. If you read a bit about him in published interviews, you will learn that he focuses not on metaphysical allusions, but rather on “the intensity of the symbolism, the metaphor . . . Images and the consequences of images; the inherent danger of archetypes, of the sublime, the risk.” In his intense writing style, not derived from long winding sentences and info-dumping monologues, but rather from carefully crafted prose and a masterful structure, Reich builds his story on top of layers and layers of historical backdrops, like silent movie sets wheeled in and out as he needs them—so many backdrops that they pile at the windows like velvet curtains. “My research is always pattern recognition . . . the material history must become the psychological history in the novel. That is my technique,” he explained in an interview with The National Book Review.
Reich does not withhold any of the ingredients we need for a gripping modern noir. The dark, rain-soaked streets, snappy cab drivers, and the dogged detective are all there. But the genre never becomes a crutch or a mimicry thanks to the finely crafted structure of this story, the pacing, the dosage, and the usage of time as a narrative device. The careful unspooling is sometimes punctuated with moments of extreme brutality, with sentences like: “The analyst fell back, the cords of his life severed, choking on his blood, his fingers testing the long and pulsing gill that the Egyptian had opened in his dirty skin. . .”—sentences you read twice, sentences that make this book seem bigger than its physical form.
The Moth for the Star shows us what is possible when you commit to writing a psychological novel that does not moralize or attempt to promote an ethics or worldview, but rather allows the reader’s own desire for knowledge to be turned against them. By focusing on the story and amazing the reader with his brilliant ending, Reich takes the kinds of risks that make us scared to finish a book, scared that the author will fail to pull it off. I assure you he does.
A warning from the first-century AD gnostic Valentinus seems applicable to Reich’s characters and could serve as a roadmap for any aspiring Fisher King or Queen who finds themselves atop a literary kingdom of the kind Reich has created: “From the beginning you have been immortal, and you are the children of eternal life. And you wanted death to be allocated to yourselves so that you might spend it and use it up, and that death might die in you and through you. For when you nullify the world and are not yourselves annihilated, you are lord over creation and all corruption.”