REVIEW: By Night In America?
Barry N. Malzberg’s "The Last Transaction" is terrifying reading in 2025
The deathbed confession as novel is a hard trick to pull off, but when it works, it works incredibly well. Case in point: the final sentence of Chris Andrews’s translation of Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile remains etched into my brain, the culmination of a haunting narrative in which an authoritarian looks back over his life’s work and attempts to convince the reader — and himself — that it was all worth it. Richard Eder’s review in the New York Times aptly referred to the book as “part confession, part justification, part delirium.”
Its conclusion is a brutal rebuttal to all that we’ve read up until that point. Bolaño’s fiction rarely chronicled a world in which the moral and noble won in the end, but the finale of this particular work demonstrates that evil acts are also rarely rewarded, and that the way of all flesh can undo one’s hopes for a dignified exit.
By Night in Chile was first published in 2000, with its English translation arriving three years later. Twenty-three years earlier, Barry N. Malzberg’s short novel The Last Transaction was published, and it follows a similar approach, as a once-powerful man recounts his life and its triumphs and regrets. At the time that it was published, Malzberg’s novel was set in the near future; its narrator, one William Eric Springer, is a former president of the United States, elected in 1980 and defeated in his re-election bid four years later.
There are speculative elements to The Last Transaction, but reading the novel from a point in time after its events took place gives it a subtly different feel, as though it now reads like a secret history of the recent past. And its sense of a president clinging to his fading reputation even as his mind begins to disintegrate has certain parallels with various moments in late-20th and early 21st-century politics.
Stark House’s new edition of The Last Transaction pairs it with another short novel by Malzberg: Scop, about an increasingly unhinged time traveler’s efforts to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The fact that Scop’s desperate protagonist engages in rape and assault while ostensibly trying to make the world a better place is the first clue that there’s more going on than meets the eye — but while Scop is a heady and unnerving work of fiction, it’s The Last Transaction that ultimately packs the bigger punch. Sadly, the omnibus of these two novels was published shortly after Malzberg’s death in December of 2024. (It was through tributes to him by the likes of Scott Edelman and Jeet Heer that Malzberg went from a writer I’d heard of to one I urgently wanted to read.) It’s worth pointing out here that both Stark House and Anti-Oedipus Press have done excellent work in keeping Malzberg’s fiction in print. This is high-concept work that’s also elegantly written; a rare combination.
A short prologue fills readers in on the specifics of William Eric Springer’s time in office, including his political rise and his two marriages. There’s a sharp dissonance between the literally encyclopedic text that opens the book and the first words that we see from Springer himself, which combine the act of writing with another essential function. “Don’t think I can get a thing out today,” Springer begins.
Not a thing, not a thing. Sensation of dim blockage not only of the mind but of the bowels; it is, then — and let me try to get this right — as if all of this rhetoric were choked within coils of possibility: too weak, distracted, dispirited even for simple recitation of the facts.
In the conflating of the literary and the physical, there’s a bit of Krapp’s Last Tape in here, but with a wild disparity in power between Malzberg’s novel and Beckett’s play. (Malzberg makes this comparison literal about halfway through by having Springer reference the play in question.) Immediately, Springer recalls an official visit to Peoria which anticipates the subsequent breakdown of his cognition. “But although I saw, I did not know where I was, literally could not place the segment for an instant: who was I? where was this? what was going on? And the panic began.”
This is the first of many signs that our narrator is not a reliable one, and that the gulf between his dwindling mental acuity and the sheer power he held as Commander in Chief will be a running theme in Malzberg’s novel. There’s also a sense that, memory issues aside, Springer is also increasingly strung out on medication.
Steroids sang in my blood, bobbed up and down, bathed and laved one another, the effect of coming back into focus after having been out was almost orgasmic — not that anything down there is working at all; do not think that I have a dirty mind, doctor.
That doctor is the aptly named Goodenough, who becomes Springer’s chief adversary in an ethical debate. Springer wants to finish his memoirs — “the true and final recollections of my administration” — while Goodenough worries that the former head of state is in no condition to work on a project like that. “My obligation is to keep my patient alive,” the doctor tells Springer. “It is not to see how far I can go to kill a patient.”
The portrait of Springer that emerges from his recollections is of a turgid failure,
both personal and political. His narration describes the adultery that ended his first marriage and the death of his son Arthur from leukemia in his 20s. But even when Springer recalls this understandably traumatic incident for him, after pages of discourse on the death of his child, its impact on his first wife, and who each of them blamed for it, Malzberg shifts gears and shows Springer ruminating on something in a way that would fit neatly on X circa now.
The Hope Diamond, curse and all, has been the property of the United States of America, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, since sometime in the late 1950s. I wonder if anybody has over considered this.
Gradually, Springer reaches the apex of his confession, the point at which his failings as a person are arguably eclipsed by his failings as a political leader. He speaks around a national crisis a few times before eventually giving more specific details: a hostage situation involving the potential of tens of thousands of Americans dying.
As a reminder, The Last Transaction was published in 1977. Its portrait of a former president succumbing to dementia feels unnervingly prescient in 2025. Consider the controversy surrounding whether or not Ronald Reagan was showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease when he was still in office or the ongoing debates about the cognitive health of several subsequent occupants of the Oval Office.
There’s a moment at the end of the film Barry Lyndon in which a title card says of its long-deceased characters, “They are all equal now.” There’s something similar afoot in the way both Bolaño and Malzberg treat their narrators, once-powerful men who are now at the liberties of their failing bodies. There’s an aspect of confession in By Night in Chile, with its very Catholic narrator making something that reads a lot like a confession. In the case of The Last Transaction, Springer claims to be trying to understand his own life and legacy better — but there are other moments when his fervor diminishes:
Who am I kidding? Sanctimonious to the end. How much of this has been the truth and how much the same old lies I will never know, impossible to separate, but I have tried — goddamnit, I have tried.
Is it enough to have tried? In the case of Malzberg’s ailing former president, I suspect most readers will answer in the negative. In very different contexts, and with a distance of more than twenty years, Bolaño and Malzberg both understood very well the appeal of considering yourself the hero of your own story, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. In chronicling the frenetic dishonesty that can accompany such revisionist history, both writers have made narrators for the ages — and have held up a mirror to a certain strain of political vanity that’s impossible to shake.