Chimera

Abstract

Chimera is a novel-in-progress about America, money and murder, and it represents the experience of a young American born of immigrant parents, coming of age during the Great Recession of 2008. The novel consists of equal parts fiction, truth, biography, autobiography, philosophy, meditations on multi-racial identities, ecopoetics, and various indictments of cultural identity, collective economic practices, conceptions of criminality and justice, colonialism, mutually-shared delusions, and the linguistic implications of policymaking. Told in the present perfect tense, the novel takes place over the span of one day in the year 2027, and in that one day, the narrator, Hank, recollects events from 2008 to 2017. The text itself is an experiment on form, time and reflection, and it utilizes the devices of memory and disjunction as a means to travel back in time to the recollected events. Those events take place during the end of marijuana prohibition, culminating in a homicide outside of a bar in a small town in Humboldt County, California in 2017.