Rainer Hanshe, the founder and senior editor of the New York literary magazine Hyperion, has published

The Acolytes, a brave first novel that resists gentrification at every turn. Winding off Off-Broadway from a small theater company, across the Brooklyn Bridge to the "small Victorian mansion" of an unsung iconoclastic octogenarian novelist and playwright, The Acolytes traverses a cityscape seemingly uncontaminated by politics or history. The events of 9-11 are touched on but once, obliquely, "the cataclysm that occurred in New York." The reader is occasionally reminded of the darker sides of life in an often prohibitively expensive city, "excessive as Sodom, consumptive as Saturn, and profligate as Baal," but is for the most part spared much detailing of the crasser realities confronted by characters such as Terence Dalbergio, an aspiring writer, and his actor friend, Gabriel Mogador, the son of a gravestone carver from rural Pennsylvania. True, one banker has a minor role in one of the intersecting tragic narratives, but this hideous man is notably denied a speaking part. Indeed, for all of their tragic flaws, none of the primary characters in The Acolytes can be charged with materialism, or even worldliness. The "lost, wandering souls" who devote themselves to the octogenarian "outlaw of American fiction," Amos Latimer, and Amos' chief acolyte, the theater director, Ivan the terrible, believe that "art" with true "value" is neither concerned with "so-called political or social significance," nor with the judgments of the "base philistines." Denizens of more rarified realms, Amos, Ivan, Terence and Gabriel will suffer the oblivion of non-recognition, endure incidentals -- yet another meaningless job at a nameless "chic bar" -- but they will not suffer the indignity of being greenwashed at Whole Foods nor find themselves aggrieved by the flocks of steroid-enhanced stockbrokers who descended on the Village before the Great Recession, when the skinny-jean folk finished their migration to Williamsburg.

Hanshe's eschewal of overt social and political themes is neither incidental to his literary purposes nor implies that The Acolytes fails to resurrect several true historicities. Rather, the indistinct Gotham scenery corresponds with Hanshes devotion to character development and his ambition to delineate representative stories of the artist. Formally speaking, in each of four intertwined, tragically-inflected parables, a protagonist's character is disclosed within the novel's meticulous investigation of the multifaceted phenomena of hierarchically-stratified acolyte relations, the encouragement and exploitation of mentors, the devotion and resistance of underlings. And to be sure, The Acolytes captures actual, historical truth in this borough, for if the devil doesnt always wear Prada downtown, the pernicious dynamics of hierarchical power relations are rife in the ethereal netherworlds of the avant-garde subcultures, manifest among unsung artists, present even in failed theaters never accessed by any bridge or tunnel. Hanshe's depiction of the relations among the actors, writers and artists orbiting the aged iconoclast (each of whom is at one time or another a more or less official "assistant") has a poignancy particularly befitting American provinciality and religiosity, but likewise stakes a real claim for universal validity, "something more archetypical." The stories of the artist Hanshe constructs indeed illuminate acolyte phenomena in other, seemingly heterogeneous settings; the relations among Amos, Ivan, Gabriel and Terence easily call to mind the divergent paths of the Socratics, Plato and Aristotle, Jesus and his disciples, Wagner and Nietzsche, Elijah Mohammed and Malcom X, etc. What is most courageous, and thought-provoking, in Hanshe's account of acolyte phenomena is his concern with erotic motivations, both wholesome and predatory. Gabriel, cursed with both "masculine pulchritude" and a surplus of naive ambition, destined to be manipulated by the "cunning ogre" Ivan and transformed into a "rabid and thoughtless believer," represents the acolyte as ingnue. In this respect we can say that Hanshe's novel not only does

some real philological work by elaborating the sensuous connotations conventionally associated with the acolyte's feminine counterpart, it offers a morality tale that many a parent might wish their beautiful children to consider before they seek fame and fortune in the big city. In the stories of the artist Hanshe presents, questions of process and method do not appear as sterile abstractions, but dilemmas of the greatest existential import. As each plot unfolds in moments of reversal and recognition, the reader considers what the actors themselves cannot, alternate paths that will either facilitate self-awareness, and mastery "as a craftsman, or the oblivion entailed when the hope of a higher destiny encourages submission to a charismatic authority and the claim that one must renounce one's own perceptive faculties and ordinary common sense. The tragedy of Amos Latimer is sure to be of interest to aficionados of the literary underground; more than a few are sure to surmise an actual historical personage inspiring the depiction of the outlaw of American fiction in the last years of his life, a ghost in his own countrythough hailed as a genius by many of the most circumspect and discerning artists of his age. More than a few will recall news reports of recent years in the anticipatory post-mortem of Amos offered early in The Acolytes: he would soon die and what came of his acolytes no one knew, though some made a career out of whatever detritus he left behind, safeguarding it as some kind of hallowed treasure that glowed with the life of the dead master; others tore up even the floorboards of his apartment and removed the windows from the walls, collecting every last fragment he may have touched. Some lived off his remnants, became 'experts' and authorities, guardians 'protecting' his oeuvre as if no one but those who were closest to him were capable of interpreting it. And just weeks after he died, his assistant, who it was discovered had been emptying his bank account of large sums of money throughout his life, auctioned his collection of Carl Van Vechten photographs on a common website. The truths captured in Hanshes often acute narration of acolyte phenomena stand independently of any specific historical reference, though the pathos which seems to be driving his text does suggest deeply personal roots. Of all the characters in The Acolytes Amos is the most

convincingly individuated. His speeches, which typically read as near verbatim recollections of a sages mini-lectures, are those that most memorably pierce the text. If it is fair to say, metaphorically speaking, that The Acolytes is a first novel that resists gentrification, this is in large measure because the idiosyncratic world-view and paradoxical theories of creativity articulated by Amos connote a philosophy of cultural resistance with epochally transformative ambitions. Hanshe emulates Amos self-professed brand of heightened, or "symbolic," realism" in the poetic license he takes, turning his tragic plots far closer to the improbable than Aristotle would allow, striving for poetical transmutation rather than the prosaic descriptions of facts, which are but a pale fragment of reality. Yet however much The Acolytes itself appears to be a devotional performance, in no sense do we find a work of uncritical slavitude. Not only is the illfated Amos presented without autonomy or self-knowledge, but the only acolyte with whom he enjoys a wholesome relationship, the young writer Terence, finds his own voice as an artist when he breaks free from the covenant and is confident in a mode of creativity significantly different from the occultist approach to artistic production often professed by Amos and further developed in the sadistic psychological experiments purported to be theatrical exercises by Ivan the terrible. Ultimately, however one evaluates Amos and Ivans divergent claims concerning the necessity of accessing the embodied immediacy of the unconscious, there is no doubt that Hanshe keeps some faith with (his interpretation of) the wisdom of Amos muse yet mediates on the mysteries of creativity with critical distance. Still at times Hanshes narration wobbles, and this perhaps reflects an awkward fidelity with heightened or poetic realism, an artistic choice that comes at the cost of an ear for dialogue. If the reader is pained by seemingly overextended verbiage she might keep in mind that such straining for transmutation likely reflects the acolyte phenomena Hanshe is concerned with itself. Thus, if one is distracted discovering that the young

acolytes go perambulating rather than walk, sojourn rather than travel, one would do well to recall that characters such as Hanshes wild naifs not only exist, but very likely inhabit a rather Gothic Gotham. Their New York is likely as much the Paris of Rimbaud or the London of Chatterton as the sterile city of Guiliani and Bloomberg, and this "magic" is likely reflected in their diction. Blissfully innocent of the ironic detachment that so often curses the privileged scions of the literati, they perambulate rather than merely walk because they experience themselves as sublimely transmuted in wonder and awe at the novel world blossoming before them. To kids such as the characters we meet at the outset of The Acolytes, Central Park is an ersazt Garden of Eden. A single brush with greatness, the seeming good fortune of making the personal acquaintance of an assistant to an unsung iconoclast of American letters, is able to appear as destiny: "they no longer felt like mere dreamers who fantasized about greatness, but characters in time who would make an imprint on history. Through Ivan, they were brought into almost direct contact with an artistic lineage they only read ofsuddenly, they were alive in time." Sociologically speaking, the capacity for faith in a higher calling that Terence and Gabriel share at least at first reflects that fact that it is the first and second generation immigrants, the peasants, farm boys and ingnues who give dynamism and vitality to the urban neighborhoods that have not yet been sacrificed to the speculative pressures of luxury zoning. Thus, whatever one finally concludes regarding Amos (or Hanshes) brand of poetic realism, there can be little doubt that New York would not be New York if there were not acolytes ready to sacrifice their lives (and often sell their souls) to a city they believe has promised them a higher destiny. Since time immemorial, those with true mastery of the word are just as likely, if not more likely, to be untutored immigrants, scatters, rappers, and other marginals striving to

capture their wonder at transcendence as those properly conditioned by syntactical circumscription and verbal economy.