Cardinal Numbers

The nineteen audacious fictions that comprise Cardinal Numbers are evidence of the gorgeously disruptive mind of Hob Broun. They arrived to us posthumously, not only out of the pressure of an exceptional and subversive intelligence but also out of a kind of tension quite special to those whose lives must be lived in the face of calamitously punishing circumstances—in the case of Hob Broun, quadriplegia complicated by the horrendous physical decline immobility necessarily brings on. Such conditions of existence produced in Hob Broun a living instance of the Beckettian principle I cannot go on; I must go on, and accordingly made of his fiction a kind of literary embodiment of these opposing statements. To be sure, it is this very irony that suffuses the stories in this book, and that imparts to them the heart-aching air of hope struggling between moments of its being successively suffocated and set aflame. Take, for example, the beleaguered figure of old Schenck at the close of "Ice Water"—on the one hand, moving "slowly, like someone his age, planting both feet on a step before the next move down," but by virtually the next sentence believing, on the other hand, that everything is expressible, achievable, possible. It is in just these terms that each of these entries—even the more wildly madcap of them, whose playfulness and raucous revision of the short-story form are, at bottom, more a kind of whistling in the dark than a demonic urge to overturn convention—should be read: as a map of the will of their author to keep on keeping on, keep trucking, keep marching, no matter what. Taken in these terms, Hob Broun's story and Hob Broun's stories apply to us all, right down to the very last period, even if the torment in our lives has not been written so grievously large.

First published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf (the above was adapted from the original book jacket).

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"Broun is a ‘writer’s (writer’s) writer’ only in that he isn’t well-known—his work isn’t at all opaque or aloof. He published three books in his lifetime, the novels Odditorium (1983) and Inner Tube (1985), and the superb short story collection Cardinal Numbers (1988). While writing Inner Tube, Broun underwent emergency surgery to remove a spinal tumour. He was left paralysed from the neck down. Remarkably, he finished the novel—and wrote the stories in Cardinal Numbers—using a kind of writing-machine: an oral catheter (or ‘sip-and-puff device’) connected to a customised word processor, triggered by his breath whenever a letter flashed on the screen. This aspect of Broun’s life lends itself to mythologization: what better image of writerly dedication? At the same time, it risks obscuring what really matters: the work itself."—David Winters, Bibliokept

"Given the effort required of Broun to accomplish any kind of writing, it would have seemed logical had he traded his sentence-level virtuosity for an attention to plot instead, or narrative structure, or any other element of craft, and delivered stories in workman-like prose. But all it takes is a cursory reading of either book to reach the conclusion that he was almost incapable of writing a boring sentence."—Aaron Jacobs, Tin House

"Each story here is a crazy, audacious experiment in style and truth-telling and takes the reader over some edge. Read these stories for the truth. And weep."—Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times

"Playfulness is Broun's mode; chaos and despair are his barely hidden secrets. A cardinal number, as opposed to an ordinal number, is used to indicate quantity but not order."—Jonathan Baumbach, The New York Times

"These stories play with form and genre while also delivering us to deeply felt and often devastating places. Broun wrote with real wit and heart. [...] Every word was hard-won."—Sam Lipsyte, The Millions