Gary Oldman is a building you must walk through

by Forrest Roth

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ISBN 978-0996227667

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Unemployed, aimless, stuck in a mundane relationship with a burned-out social worker, an anonymous writer (of some sort) awaits the phone call that he believes will change their fortunes: his being hired to script a television commercial featuring renowned actor Gary Oldman. In preparation for the momentous day, his various obsessions connected to Oldman’s cinematic career hold forth, including the return of his girlfriend’s marginally “famous” sister from a Los Angeles psychiatric ward and her ensuing disappearance, as well as his questionable attraction to them both. But once the quasi-narrative of assorted characters he creates for her consolation over the lost sister begins, the only story to prevail may be an inescapable echo chamber of Oldman’s dialogic influence into which everything and everyone must fall.

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“Gary Oldman Is a Building You Must Walk Through is a gloriously entrancing ‘elaboration,’ an obsession in prose. One wonders at Gary Oldman, containing multitudes: Wittgenstein’s Nephew comes to mind, though so do Notable American Women, The Making of Americans, I Looked Alive. ‘This is something which the I hasn’t been trained for,’ we’re told. Indeed.”
—Gabriel Blackwell, author of Madeleine E.

“A tessellation of spinning faces—some legendary, some just neurotic—Forrest Roth’s Gary Oldman Is a Building You Must Walk Through is a playful pattern, masterfully tailored, as though for a famous actress, a red carpet star. Perhaps without blushing, perhaps she signs her autograph.”
—Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary

“Like an exploded villanelle, or Oulipo with invisible constraints, this darkly playful Beckettian monologue maps a syntactically circuitous route to the meaning of fame, violence, interiority, and language itself. It’s smart, it’s mysterious, and it’s damn funny.”
—Shya Scanlon, author of The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Gary Oldman Is a Building You Must Walk Through is an insanely original, hyperreal romp through the simulacra of celebrity and culture and celebrity culture. In this sprawling monologue of a book, Roth proves that a novel can be just that: novel. There are no precedents.”
​—Ryan Ridge, author of American Homes

"The point of the novel is for the reader to experience an unmooring of their own individuality or sovereignty and to question whether or not the author and the reader, or the viewer and Gary Oldman, have a much more complicated relationship than most people think when they sit down to read a book or watch a movie."
—Travis McDonald in The Rupture (full review here)

"About its own architecture—in the sense of both visible pieces and invisible demands, engineering for necessity as well as aesthetics, with certain pillars and shifting panels recurring in formulation after formulation, like a sketch for a Futurist painting or a draft of a typed letter or a maquette of carefully folded paper that will serve as the model of a Frank Gehry building—this is a book that swiftly lures you into a labyrinthine experiment in narrative, in writing."
—Spencer Dew, in decomP (full review here)

"Forrest Roth’s debut novel is as much a prose poem as it is a work of fiction: a narrative swaddled in sestina and synecdoche, which emerges fitfully, slyly, but not accidentally from layers upon layers of self-referential language and repeated scenes, like the Cheshire Cat arriving on the scene grin-first."
—Jeff Gilliland in Atticus Review (full review here)