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Ode To Sunset,
A Year In The Life Of American Genius
a fiction by Pat Nolan
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Ode To Sunset, A Year In The Life Of American Genius by Pat Nolan
October 2025 $35 paper 500 pages ISBN 978-0-9840310-9-2
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Ode To Sunset,
A Year In The Life Of American Genius
a fiction by Pat Nolan
“. . .it is characteristic of American genius that the casual eye does not easily distinguish it from charlatanry. Purity of intention lies at the center of American achievement. Modern American writing is about honesty. The American tradition is to offer discovery, not virtuoso performances.”
— Hugh Kenner
“A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity.”
— Flann O’Brien
“For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.”
—Laurence Sterne
Ode To Sunset, A Year In The Life of American Genius is a story told in the American pulp fiction vernacular just as Dante’s Divine Comedy was written in the vernacular of its day. Unfortunately, the resemblance ends there. The novel is not autobiographical nor is it a roman á clef. Written as a retro-pulp, the composition reflects the methods of Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO group as well as those of the mysterious Raymond Roussel, with a nod to Flann O’Brien and Laurence Sterne. No actual poets were named in the writing of this fiction with the exception of dead poets who serve as historical or literary markers as is often required of dead poets.
“Anything from Pat Nolan, holed up somewhere on the Russian River, is worth the price of a ticket. This dive, ten years in the making, into poetic detective noir, has the reader swimming laps, trying to catch up to all the theatrical asides, puns, ghosts, banter, thinly veiled characters, that haunt Ode to Sunset, A Year in the Life of American Genius. Lots of fun. Enjoy the swim.”
—Donald Guravich, writer and illustrator, author of A Brief History of Flying, and Blue Chips.
Ode To Sunset is a work of imagination steeped in literary allusion as the narration of a year in the life of a postmodern fictional poet with a resolute commitment to his art and personal independence.
“Ode to Sunset is like a kaleidoscope, each turn of the page offers a further satiric, picaresque array of poets, poetry, and poetry scenes, but as its sunset deepens and its hero comes to matter as an I as well as an eye, we discover we are in the kaleidoscope and the pages turn us. Don’t read this book for answers. Read it for the questions it will make you ask. But do read this book”.
—Tim Hunt, author of The Tao of Twang and The Textuality Of Soulwork, Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose
Carl Wendt, last of the hardscrabble hardboiled poets, has the look of a well-worn Alex Trebek with the pit bull demeanor of a Mickey Rourke. As a poet, he is not quite Charles Baudelaire and not quite Charles Bukowski living in a city not quite Frisco. In this role, he serves as an exemplification of Hugh Kenner’s contention that the difficulty in distinguishing American genius from charlatanry is that the American tradition is not about virtuosity but purity of intent.
“Wendt is an American original, Dean Moriarty driving off the road of commonplace cultural criticism, stopping only for the occasional hitchhiker, like Charles Bukowski and Guy Davenport, the gruffy and the elegant, who provide gasoline for the conversation. Occasionally, Don Quixote and The Good Soldier Švejk wrest the wheel from Wendt, the poet, but never Captain Ahab who rages in the trunk. If that seems obscure, think of Ode To Sunset as an enchanted mystery unfolding in a musical prose that would make Jack Kerouac proud.”
—Andrei Codrescu, man of letters. Author of How to Live Under Fascism: New Poems & Photos
Carl Wendt, the street-wise poet, has his complacency shattered by the death of an ex-girlfriend, and the prospect of becoming homeless. News that friends and acquaintances of his generation have died or are dying greet him at every turn. His steady side hustle, a culture column in a weekly newspaper, is in jeopardy, and not to put too fine a point on his panic, there’s a serial killer of poets on the loose in the city.
“Pick your picaresque heroes; I’ve always been fond of an elegant slacker named Sebastian Dangerfield, and for wit, there are few rivals to Phillip Marlowe; but Pat Nolan’s Carl Wendt stakes his claim half a century later on the streets and in the clubs, libraries and bedrooms of SF. Ode to Sunset is many things, not least of which a hilarious send-up of Bay Area poetry’s poseurs. Wendt knows the scene well. Let him be your guide; but guard your butts and your booze.”
—Dan Coshnear, author of Occupy, and Jobs, And Other Preoccupations
Ode To Sunset follows Carl Wendt in an allegorical yearlong picaresque meander from the sacred to the profane and back through a landscape of allusion, observation, critique, appropriation, commentary, satire, and sarcasm in an irreverent no-holds barred look at the literary bedrock of American poetry through the eyes of the last of his kind, Poetasaurus rex. As an eight second David Mamet pitch, think of Ode To Sunset, A Year in the Life of American Genius as “A Confederacy of Dunces meets The Savage Detectives with voiceover by George Steiner.”
“Ode to Sunset is impossible to stop reading. On my second go-through, I find myself more amazed by the detail of character portraits than the peregrination. It’s a grand guignol of San Francisco as a shrewd veteran poet sees it. The other dimension that is more noticeable on re-reading is the wit and authenticity of the dialog. All these distinct and original apparitions engage our hero in badinage that rings true and different for each. That is a real art, easy to overlook. The whole book is a great achievement with lineage from Rabelais to Kerouac.”
—Eric Johnson, author of Journeyman’s Dues and Buffalo Rome
“For a taste of today’s finest pulp – a delicious blend of the West Coast-immediacy of Raymond Chandler, the irreverence of Groucho Marx, the gonzo of Hunter S. Thompson, the imagination of Philip K. Dick, the profound wit of Mark Twain and the verbal brilliance of the poet that he is – dive into the delicious autofiction of Ode To Sunset, A Year In The Life Of American Genius. Only the likes of Pat Nolan could manage to take nearly a decade to serialize a single year in the life of his fictionalized protagonist, the durable Carl Wendt, who will prevail as an immortal literary character for decades to come. Think geriatric, psychedelicized Tristram Shandy.”
—Steven Lavoie, author of Salvage and co-founder of The Black Bart Poetry Society
“Pat Nolan’s Ode to Sunset is the book you need to read if you’re a poet & wondering how your life is going to turn out. If you’re not a poet, you can read it with a sense of relief & delight, knowing that your life is probably not going to turn out that way. & riding the rails between stations is a mystery story, “Who’s been killing the poets of San Francisco?” that may or may not get solved. I found Ode to Sunset to be a place where polemic, satire, exposé, cautionary tale, flaneur / cicerone commentary, snake oil salesperson’s manual, autobiography, & stream of consciousness overlap when considered as a Venn diagram. Pat Nolan must have had a ball writing this book, & so will the reader, poet or not. But — spoiler alert — it does have a very sad ending.”
—Mark Young, author of The Magritte Poems
Pat Nolan is the author of four novels as well as numerous poetry selections. His writing has been published in The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, Exquisite Corpse, Brooklyn Rail, Posit, and the Hurricane Review. His work has also appeared in various anthologies, including Up Late, American Poetry Since 1970, Poems for the Millenium, and Saints Of Hysteria. He has also curated a number of blogs featuring his poetry, prose, and criticism, most recently Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine, and Parole, blog of The New Black Bart Poetry Society. He lives in the redwood wilds along the Russian River in Northern California.
odetosunset.com 