The Whole World Itself is Just a Long Poem: Noah Kumin’s Stop All the Clocks – Manuel Marrero
May 19, 2025
Something is happening to people in our city.
A woman materialized in my apartment building. I’m Asian, she said. Before I could respond she said some numbers at me. Pardon? Numbers…Ah, you must want the combination for the laundry room in the basement. I tried to remember. Oh, you don’t use it?
I was stepping out to welcome a guest who had texted to say he was arriving and could I meet him outside? The Asian woman seemed flustered. She must have recently moved in upstairs.
No, I don’t use it. It’s bad down there. The machines are too small. They break and eat your money and there’s rats. Excuse me a minute I need to get through and let my guest in.
She ran out the door and down the street.
It must have been one of her first days in New York City. It’s been raining, giving everything a slick, neonoir translucency. A Babel of Satanic skyscrapers. Perhaps she happened by our local subway stop, which boasts fent walkers. These are special twenty-first century addicts who walk crouched like the amputee creatures in Silent Hill. They are fully conscious but so high they can’t stand up straight. They’re harmless if a little unsettling, not much strength or coordination to articulate. Now if you could just place some bills in my mouth, I’ll go intensely relax over there and you know, get something to eat at some point. I can be trusted.
There are no Fentanyl-Americans in Stop All the Clocks, but perhaps the first draft was finished predating their arrival. Instead there are sometimes these stilted, ornamental descriptions of city life like Midtown, brimming with human drama at midday, began at this hour to drain of its coherence: the managerial class shuffled home, shouting the day’s last items of jargon into their devices, trapezoidal shadows stretched across soulless pedestrian plazas, and the lights of emptying towers clicked on. There’s probably about a dozen or so of these uh-huh filler sentences woodenly intoning about bustling, shuffling New Yorkers malaise-struck and gait-hobbled thinking what a brave new world. A contagion of higher education perhaps. I have no idea what this is supposed to do. Too busy showing to say anything. Beigist shoegaze. I’d rather be told this kind of thing in one sentence. Here it is: It’s after the year 2000. There are contrivances like a romanticism of QR codes that functions as plot device, forcing you to buy in.
A whizz-bang ginned up joint like this belongs to the beach, as in you need to bury your head in sand to see the world like the author does. I could take it to task. It is riveting and stimulating frequently enough in a page turner way, but its ending is anticlimactic. It’s like paying ten grand for autistic pussy just to be came in fluffer on the Sankey diagram.
Enough ribbing. It’s supposed to be a bad year but I’m having a great time. After a brutal winter of suicides, we deserve a proper book of summer. For Alcoholic-Americans. The sense of Kumin having this upstairs and the catharsis of getting it on the page and patiently waiting his turn while active in other projects, the mechanics of the elevator pitch are like a visible green screen. He knows what he’s doing and not doing. He does all the voices. There’s derealization, thriller velocity, frailty, paranoia, seriousness and urgency, but either stand out or blend in. Don’t tell me how to be a pulp novelist, and definitely don’t show me.
I don’t know how long AI will take to capture writing, but this isn’t an aptitude or discipline that can be quantified as success numerically. One reader blows me away. Every one of them blows my mind. Each a little explosion of connection. DFW compared his audience to that of contemporary classical music. Two hundred thousand. Two million maybe. Fewer.
A long game, it’s really about when a book sells one copy a year forever.
Paper goods used to arrive on one ship. In a sense, the seventeenth century was a post-truth information war like today. People were reading newspapers and novels interchangeably, current events and tall tales. Indian captivity narratives were some of America’s first bestsellers and arguably the first literary form dominated by the experiences of women. A potboiler is seminal. This one leads with gravitas and runs out of momentum. Writers want to be meteoric successes but there are subtle arcs to adventure stories.
I’d be remiss to omit that I finished the book almost two months ago, giving both the benefit of reflection and harsh light of distance. It’s styled as a mystery, and about halfway, I was pretty hooked. Time dilated. The layered expositions were elegantly nested in the action. I was impressed and trusted the author to take these cloak and dagger characters where they needed to go.
In the time it takes to complete a novel, you are no longer the same person who began it. Longevity becomes literature. And like the poetics of the LLM at the center of this, the variables and heuristics are a gray box of ancient and vaporous provenance.
Kumin knows plots are eternal, and Stop All the Clocks is only disappointing because it flirts convincingly with greatness. The best parts go right through you like a Brian De Palma movie. Insufficiently or inadequately haunted though. Its ideas don’t feel fully developed. They seem to involute monstrously into basically Cronenberg reductio ad absurdum. If plots always obsolesce first, it seems no accident the LLM Hildegard’s métier is poetry, and the namesake of the prosaic novel a W.H. Auden poem. Kumin knows poetry is an inexhaustibly generative conjuring where inscrutability is not a cul-de-sac but an internal hermeneutical highway.
I think people should generally write about their immediate surroundings. Most good books are full of interesting thoughts and abstract ideas. Stop All the Clocks has both. It’s a novel of ideas that doesn’t feel personal.
I read it very quickly and eagerly. I think Noah Kumin has more to say. He clearly loves poetry. I want to read about LEV(Longevity Escape Velocity). I believe in an immortal soul. Death, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice are cosmic victories where prolonged life increases suffering. The extinct are glorious. You will never die. You are bound to inhabit other vessels beyond this body. The book feels derivative. There’s a part about chess I keep thinking about. Stop All the Clocks draws blood, but it washes off too easily. The crescendo is dizzying only to land safely. In the end, I find the future it envisages to lack imagination. But damn are the good parts good. Man does the plot twist. The screws turn. The wheels spin.