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Alarm is a story that illustrates that much of our life happens at the periphery of the chase for our dreams. Mick O’Grady is a man who’s stalled out and slowed down in that chase. His life has overtaken and surrounded him, and the daily minutia of working (or not working), eating, and mating has moved to the forefront. And it’s not pretty. By all accounts his life is broken. Broken like a bad gear shifter on a used car. It might rock and wheeze and push you forward, but the ground you’re gaining is directly out of proportion of the effort you’re exerting. It’s not until O’Grady sets his sights on a move to Portland that he starts to gain momentum and make sense of what’s happening around him.

All of this is set against the fallout of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. This serves to ground the novel in a specific period of time, but goes further to show that even with the enormity of such events, it is often the crises that are closest to our day to day lives that receive the most of our attention. For O’Grady, being seen in any state of undress by his girlfriend is cause for alarm, while 9-11 is just the inconvenience of not drinking tap water. This is shown in a great scene in which O’Grady is talking with a man at the bar who is expounding on the cultural history of American disasters and their implications for future generations, all the while O’Grady can barely muster responses that form complete sentences, and eventually steers the conversation to his own problems. This is a very accurate way of portraying the impact of the attacks. I can’t say whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But it’s refreshing (if not a little scary) to see these events written about in this light.

Alarm employs the help of an alternate narrator, AKA alter-narrator, to provide an underhanded counterpoint to O’Grady’s meanderings. Set in brackets along the right-hand side of the page, the alter-narrator is invisible and inaudible to O’Grady. By expressing to the reader that O’Grady’s path of reasoning is defective, or that his thoughts are repetitive, the alter-narrator disarms the notion that this is just another slacker story from the west coast, allowing the reader to view the story in its own light.

There is a certain sense throughout the book that the author, Mike Daily, knows O’Grady a bit too well. The humorous, surreal details of O’Grady’s job search and the realness of his co-workers and friends smacks of Daily’s having been there and done that. In saying this, I’d rather not speculate on any psuedo-autobiographic nature inherent in the book, but rather talk about Daily’s process of performing as O’Grady’s character and its impact on the work. Alarm comes with 2 CDs, one a live performance of excerpts from the book, the other a studio version. Daily has memorized large portions of (if not the entire) book and performs them with his experimental, free jazz group O’Grady. This cycle of writing, memorizing, and performing has served as an ongoing revision process, and it must be this process that lends certain chapters and passages a lyrical, poetic air. “God is My Friend” is one of the best examples of this. One can also speculate that the repeated performances as O’Grady by Daily create an identity crisis of sorts, and that the man on stage is at varying moments the creator and the character, or perhaps both at once. Whether this is limited to the audience, or if it is occurring within Daily as well is impossible to tell, but nonetheless exciting.

Just so no one gets confused I’m going to explicitly point out that the book’s protagonist and Daily’s band share the same name. This name-sharing is a fundamental part of understanding this format of the Alarm experience. The band is, in some ways, a more real and emotional interpretation of the character. Capitalizing on musical aspects such as rhythm, harmony and dischord, Daily takes control of the experience and brings the listener directly into the head of O’Grady. Hearing the internal monologue of Mick O’Grady broadcast across the room to an audience full of people creates an emotional relationship between the protagonist and the listener that is very different than can be accomplished on the page.

This also raises the question of which work is the “real” work? the book, the recording, or the performance. I hesitate to pose this question, as I feel that it in some way panders to those who wish to compartmentalize the arts into easily manageable categories. This is not my intention, and I’m sure it is not Daily’s. But nevertheless I bring it up to point out that this work is an attempt to challenge that way of thinking. Alarm reminds me of “One and Three Chairs” by Joseph Kosuth. It exists as a direct challenge to the viewer/reader/listener as to the accepted language of each of its representations. It points out not only the limitations of each medium but also the possibilities created when we use them together, or think about them differently.

There is a certain amount of redundancy between the formats that I have trouble understanding. I think this comes from the fact that all formats of the work are packaged together, giving the impression that they are all pieces of the same whole, and somehow need to be enjoyed together. When in fact they are each separate representations of the story, each capable of standing on their own. Personally I prefer the studio versions, for their enhanced production value. Although I’ve only heard recordings of the live performances and seen them on video, never in person.

Alarm should make you uncomfortable. Uncomfortable in relating to the story. Uncomfortable in reading it. Uncomfortable in listening to it. Uncomfortable in trying to understand exactly how to approach it. But with the discomfort comes an excitement that tells you that you are uncomfortable for all the right reasons. Alarm exists as a story that has put more heart and soul into exploring the many territories of storytelling than anything I’ve seen before.