Cymru Roberts' Listening to Bethlehem

Reviewed by Kiran Bhat

(Landfill Editions, 2019)

Rumbling, rambling sentences drive the reader across the panorama of thought and imagination that is present in Listening To Bethlehem. It is no accident that the title calls to mind the essay collection by Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, as the author Cymru Roberts himself overtly references Didion and her style at various points in the novel. However, while Didion aspired to portray the grime and grimness of a Counterculture California, Roberts aspires to create an almost drug-infused euphoria out of the dark lanes and alleyways of his Las Vegas. Much like Sin City, Roberts’ imagination is running in a cinematic gray, or a cartoon’s black-and-white, and it is in these delirious saunters that Roberts and his characters encounter not truth, not fulfillment, but the darkness calling out to them, encouraging them to err once more.
 
Roberts’ novel is rooted in the sojourns of four characters. The character who gets the most space to speak in the novel is Robertstein. We are introduced to him playing golf with a stranger who becomes a friend. He later visits his girlfriend Farah, and befriends her brother Farhad. He makes friends with a backgammon player a little later on in a Starbucks. Then, guilt, attraction, and self-loathing pull him back towards Farah. Robertstein seems constantly lonely and needy for human affection. He pulls himself into anyone who will give him time, he lives to make relationships out of anyone. Whether the people he meets are simply shades of a moment or result in real bonds is harder to glean. Such is the point. Robertstein’s roundabouts are rooted in an existential picaresque, which constantly circles back to him being unfulfilled, misunderstood, and alone.
 
If the reader discovers empathy in Robertstein, they discover aversion and disgust in meandering hitman CK. CK tends to spout racist nonsense, go into long, self-indulgent rants, and kill innocent strangers. A perfectly hate-able gentleman, indeed. Once again, whether CK is meant to be a stand-in for any particular tendency or simply a manic creation of the moment is hard to tell. However, while CK kills, Robertstein self-destructs, the Russia-stuck Travis hallucinates in a closed environment in fragmented, surrealist prose, and the Eight Teens take to fighting good, evil, and themselves in eight different countries of the world. One thing is clear: each and every character represents a little bit of the fantasy that Roberts builds out of his ever-morphing Las Vegas, and the seeds of discontent or disarray that spring from his native city.
 
From a craft standpoint, Listening To Bethlehem impresses on various levels. Certain images like the following

the layered peaks burned in hues of melting gold and all of the crisscrossing jetstreams in the city were momentarily changed into a flamboyance of flamingo legs that stalked confidently across the desert sky ...

stayed with me for many days after reading the book. Roberts’ ratio of scene construction and character development is also on point. Roberts inspires pity in the most random of people, such as a random rich person CK is about to kill: 

a mush of eggs is visible in his mouth as he talks and dabs of mayo and saliva cling to the corners of his mouth ...

The reference to the egg around his mouth comes back fairly often in the passage, and sometimes in the most surprising of ways.
 
At the same time, Listening to Bethlehem glitters not only with fascinating sentences, but with images, drawings, and stencils littered throughout the pages, which cause the reader to reflect to the writing differently than if the novel had been merely textual. The mix of image and words stood out on one page in particular; Robertstein golfs with an acquired friend and looks out into the vastness around him:

The dark peak against the Egyptian blue background that formed the eastern boundary of civilization seemed but a stone’s throw away from where the two lounged.

On the other side of these sentences is a depiction of Horus, drawn as an owl rather than a humanoid, golf balls all around him, with three eyes over his face blotted as if they were gouged out. Linguistically, Roberts’ reference to cultures outside of Las Vegas already starts to create the sense that the novel plans to travel a bit further than a golf course. But then, when the reader sees the abjectness of Horus’ depiction, the black stenciled lines around it, the three dotted eyes, one feels a shiver down the spine. It’s as if something is watching, and something nasty is soon to come out.
 
Roberts ear for dialogue is both convincing and irritating. Characters shout lines like, 

"Dog, yo soy CO-LOM-BI-AAAAA-NOOOOO!"

or

“Are you, an Ep-is-co-pal-ian?”

“I don’t know what that is.”
​
“It’s like a reptile, but also human …”

​and tend to act like jerks while doing so:

The Japanese boy is looking at me bashfully when I roll down the window.

“You want I suck you off?”

His window is only cracked, but it’s quiet outside. I know he heard me because he mouths, “What the fffff.”
​
“Sucky sucky?!"

This sort of immature and self-indulgent babble grates on the ears, and sounds exaggerated, but captures a very real way that a lot of Americans speak. And because Roberts is trying to write inside of these very masculine, self-absorbed, and unempathetic voices, the dialogue does more than show that Roberts has an ear for capturing how people talk; it brings out the despicable mindsets of his characters before their actions speak for themselves.
 
Listening to Bethlehem is a daydream of novel that is as much hysteria as it is delirium. In creating a trip of the imagination and the subconscious that spans all of the liminalities of the human mind, Roberts has built a space to cage in the darker side of the human condition and force people to stare at it. This need for violence, its yearning for recognition; people who appreciate the manic stylings of David Foster Wallace as well as the audiovisual taste of Quentin Tarantino will find a lot to look forward to in Roberts’ prose. His curtness of image and courage to delve into the taboos of human experience should further provoke an aversion that even his mentors never dared to evoke.

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Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world ... (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne. You can find him on @Weltgeist Kiran.