Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould

I finished Up in the Old Hotel, the collection of Joseph Mitchell's works, last night. The final piece in the book is "Joe Gould's Secret," which qualifies in my mind for the category of nonfiction novel and is a kind of depressing, but Borgesian, masterpiece. Joe Gould and his vast work-in-progress, the Oral History, both are and aren't (because the guy, and his secret, were real) stand-ins for the reader's and Joseph Mitchell's own highest aspirations. Mitchell doesn't simplify the moral dilemmas he finds himself in at any point, and there's a sense in which the reader becomes implicated as well, in his relationship with a mentally imbalanced, self-promoting homeless person who's capable of flashes of wit as well as delusions of grandeur. Where most of us would "do the right thing" in terms of what seems to be asked of us today and pull away (we've been taught by a kind of weakened, and evil, but comfortable, version of Alcoholics Anonymous theology that we are actually being most moral when we do nothing to support or interact with an alcoholic or person of similar disorder), Mitchell is unable to do so, and conveys a palpable sense of being besmirched by his choices with regard to Gould, no matter what they are. It's a marvelous, and still morally relevant work that Dostoevsky would be proud to have written, I think.