My Arizona author for the month is Chris Dietz, not for the first time. He sent a couple of his books up to the Nameless Zine in 2021 and I was happy to take a look at them. I reviewed 'Hinterland' and 'Trilobites!', learning in the process that Dietz has a voice unlike any other writer I've encountered thus far. He doesn't write prose so much as he writes beat poetry in ADHD stream of consciousness style, his love of language shining through in his wordplay. I'm sure many readers will hate his style but even his worst detractor couldn't accuse him of being boring. There's never a dull moment in a Chris Dietz novel.

Well, he's written some more and he's sent them up for review too, so he didn't run screaming for the hills by what I said about his earlier books. I have 'Coltrane, AZ' still to read but here's my take on 'Naco Pink', the slimmer of the two new titles, which is set outside Coltrane, in and around the town of Naco, Sonora. I don't know if they're officially connected to each other or to Dietz's earlier work, or if any or all of them are set in the same universe, but it seems viable because of a shared tone.

All seem to be set in Dietz's immediate surroundings, so far south in Arizona that they can hop the border into Mexico, as indeed this one does. They all seem to be set in the near future, which ought to feel dystopian because civilisation has either collapsed, as it has here, meaning that that border has been rendered meaningless, or is being somewhat ignored down there in the wilds a long way from any big cities. However, while there's definitely some sad fatalism in play, the people we meet tend to be just getting on with their lives the best they can, not particularly worrying about things like the end of the world.

In keeping with that surprising dichotomy of tones, the trigger for this book is the illegal dumping of bismuth into Greenbrush Draw. We know who does it, because they're Hector and Ted. We know that it's bismuth because Hector tells us on page fourteen. We know that their act was witnessed because Mya, our initial narrator, was jogging up to Greenbrush Draw when it happened, so saw the whole thing. And we know that the news spreads quickly, because, by the time Mya gets home, her friend Mona rings up to report that an old lady saw a pink skunk in her yard and another girl's aunt saw a pink roadrunner in hers.

And so, on one hand, we're dealing with the collapse of civilisation and the illegal dumping of toxic chemicals into the environment, but on the other, the local wildlife is painting itself pink and going viral in Naco. Everyone's talking about fluffy pink critters and it's rather charming.

I'd talk about the plot that emerges from this, but I'm not particularly sure if there is one this time out. In both Dietz's earlier novels, it was easy to see what he was setting up and easy to follow the direction he was going, even if we had to rack our imaginations to try to figure out where he would end up. Here, there's not much of that at all. Sure, things happen. We meet an ensemble cast and we spend time with each of them, fleshing out their particular part in the grand scheme of things, but, even when it thinks about turning into an action thriller late on, it never quite decides to truly be about a plot.

What it feels like is a character study, but a very odd one because the entire book is told in the first person singular but different chapters are related by different people. Mya is one of them and the most prominent, I think, but she's far from the only one. What's more, Dietz doesn't seem to have much interest in telling us who's in charge of each chapter, relying on us instead to simply figure it out as we go. Yes, it's confusing. No, it isn't really a problem, because Dietz wants to keep us on the hop and he does exactly that.

The result is kind of like watching 'Pulp Fiction' but with the screen dissolves into a single colour of pink, so we can't actually see anything; we just know things happen and it seems likely that they'll eventually connect. Our job is to figure out how. Certainly there are a host of setpiece scenes that stick impressionistically in our memories, aided of course by Dietz's singular approach to prose. In its way, he's suggesting that, now that civilisation has collapsed, nothing matters any more except what we deem important. So what do we deem important? Clearly anomalous pink animals.

I like what Dietz does, even if part of that is that what he does isn't what anybody else does. I like a book (or a movie or an album) that functions in a completely different way to everything else and I have to say that Dietz's work fits that description to a tee. However, as stream of consciousness as he is, I prefer when he sets up clear puzzles that we have to figure out. That worked in 'Hinterland' and it worked even better in 'Trilobites!', but it doesn't really work for me here, because the entire book is the puzzle and Dietz doesn't want to give us the box.

So to 'Coltrane, AZ', which is twice as thick as this one, so I presume there's a lot more going on within its pages. I won't get to it next month, because I'll move onto a different Arizona author, but I'm still intrigued and I won't let it run too long before I tackle a new Chris Dietz literary puzzle. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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