Something Is Crook in Middlebrook

Something Is Crook in Middlebrook is the novel Derek Pell named "Best Experimental Novel of 2012," and it is the book that opened Hugunin's late-career fiction run at JEF. Arthur Strewth Middlebrook, a former art instructor and critic turned museum guard, suffers a brain event that leaves him with shotgun-mike hearing in one ear and a blood spill across the scan that looks, the protagonist notes, like a sinking ship. The pan-audicon hearing becomes the novel's instrument: he uses it to suck the sound waves out of Chicago.

Hugunin had been one of America's most prolific photography critics for decades before this debut, with criticism in Afterimage and Artweek, the L.A. art journal The Dumb Ox (founded 1976) and U-Turn (founded 1982) to his name, and 33 years teaching the History of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He calls his fiction practice ludicakadroman, "playful autotheory" — the memory of lived experience treated as one material among artworks, theory, and other texts. Middlebrook is where that practice begins.