00332925.2025.2567816

The Current Fantasy (2024): By Charlie Haas. Beck & Branch

Miles Beller

In an essay some years back, Tom Stoppard, the crafty British playwright, wrote about American novelist Ernest Hemingway. Stoppard focused on a particular paragraph from Hemingway’s (2016) The Sun Also Rises, on how this writing packed so much into such a tight economical space, and on how Hemingway finely and decisively conveyed a welter of fact and feeling so completely and effortlessly that he established a truth impossible to refute. Here was writing so keenly observed, rendered with such clarity of purpose, that Stoppard summed it up by saying it was “one of the greatest paragraphs ever written in English” (Stoppard, 2005, para. 23).

I was reminded of Stoppard and his Ernest accounting while reading Charlie Haas’s latest novel, The Current Fantasy. For, as was true of Hemingway, Haas here delivers writing that is compressed and lean, propelled by a taut, muscular intimacy and immediacy. Nothing is extraneous or redundant; each word serves a purpose, performing a role. It is minimalism that is maximalism, an exacting zeroing in on detail and moment, resulting in The Current Fantasy rendering a venerable generational accounting of idealism T-boned by realism, character formed in the U-turns and sudden stops; unforeseen, unknown, unimaginable.

Indeed, as Hemingway (2002) remarked about the writer’s art, it is the author’s job to delineate matters as if depicting the tip of an iceberg, revealing it so truly and accurately that the reader would feel the far greater weight hidden and submerged below the waterline (p. 144). It was as if the writer were informing the reader of vast, hidden subconscious associations and concealed motives by not belaboring matters but rather conveying all that was necessary by deft portrayal of the most germane and specific characteristics and qualities of what can be seen and known. For in doing this, the whole would be revealed. And this is what Charlie Haas accomplishes in The Current Fantasy. Through direct sentences bearing faceted observations, complex truths appear, the visible tips of lives in limbo strikingly etched and revealing the greater mass below.

The following excerpt from the novel, a section concerning one of several characters sailing from a life in Europe to an unknown American future, finely underscores this:

They go out on the Third Class deck. People are crowding the sunny spots, sitting by nationality, a caravansary of black dresses, balloon pants, headscarves, skullcaps, and vests with bits of mirror on them. They’re busy with gossip, knitting, smoking, books, letters, chess and parcheesi, but here are Gerhard’s tense nervous glances of people traveling from one catastrophe to what they hope won’t be another. (p. 48)

Another passage provides another character brokering an incisive meditation on enduring art as compared to what befalls its all-too-often hapless practitioners.

“We think such nice things about art, but up close it’s trouble,” Richard says. “The blind poet finishes his epic and falls over in a heap. Everyone makes a living off his epic for the next thousand years and no one even stops to sweep him up.” (p. 199)

In terms of the novel’s narrative, Haas’s subject has its roots in history and nonfiction, tapping into an actual collective of outsider German creatives, as social media dwellers might today call them, who quit their country as WWI loomed—this to escape the gathering storm as well as further disconnect from the stuff Marshall McLuhan would later warn us of, such performers of the hyper-charged modern electric circus as the clattering telegraph and the clanging telephone.

And so, seeking to Luddite the right thing, Haas’s collection of free-for-all spirits casts the U.S.A. as the most apt star for the promised land, America the suitable, the new Elysium where these expat Germans settle in on a patch of turf called Sunland, where doing-your-own-thingism, such as sporting no clothes or avoiding haircuts, is a welcomed option.

(If this description suggests that these transplanted iconoclasts helped sow the rebellious youth movement springing up in the 1960s, there are those, in fact, who definitely do connect what they see as related counterculture dots.)

And so, with these restive émigrés resettled in place, Haas tracks and traces their struggles in trying to erect Eden on Yankee turf; this juxtaposed with their own personal snares and snafus, heartaches and heartbreaks. But the story does not stop here, rather extending beyond the iconoclastic social experiment into the years and consequences ahead, personal and geopolitical vectors intersecting, altering trajectories in significant ways.

Accordingly, a clutch of characters is shadowed and pursued, some in a dynamic family, others in utopianism entombed, yet all for a decisive moment inhabiting the dream of a paradisiacal commune whose fate is already doomed. However, while collective idealism here collapses of its own contradictions and inconsistencies, Haas shows us by the novel’s end that individual choices faced honestly and truly received and acknowledged can lead to moral outcomes, and that a life informed by awareness and understanding can be a meaningful agent of change. As Jung (1955) observed, “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses” (p. 234).

In his previous novel, The Enthusiast, Charlie Haas (2009) established his ability to brightly entertain, at moments interpolating the quotidian with the quixotic, showcasing his kicky knack to suddenly flip what was placidly expected into that which is smartly invective. A splendid, rewarding read, The Enthusiast at times wrapped itself in the comic cloak of irony while swaddled in the surety of improbability.

In addition to book fiction, Haas has written for The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, and Esquire. As a screenwriter, his credits cover an eclectic mix of films, ranging from kinetic comedy and irresistible kitschy pop to stark storytelling, movies that include Matinee (Dante, 1993), Tex (Hunter, 1982), Over the Edge (Kaplan, 1979), and Gremlins 2 (Dante, 1990).

With The Current Fantasy, Haas abstains from send-up and exaggeration, instead devoting his considerable skills to furnishing fiction that, by directness, dexterity, and a steady confidence in the evolving story, renders a life study of nuance and intention, an accounting animated by discovery and dimension. No oblique prose, no suddenly revealed trapdoor plot to upend the reader. Rather, The Current Fantasy discloses itself by the rhythms and heartbeats of life as it is lived. Through restraint and resolve emerges a simplicity that engenders complexity, as Charlie Haas’s The Current Fantasy—animated by writing that illuminates from within those necessary illusions and personal compacts tendered daily—evokes human folly and fulfillment with urgency, sympathy, and grace.

Notes on contributor

Miles Beller has been happily associated with the C. G. Jung Institute as an editorial board member of Psychological Perspectives for forty-plus years and is the journal’s fiction editor. He was selected as the Joan Nordell Fellow at Harvard’s Houghton Library and served as Writer in Residence at Cabot House. He is currently completing his second novel, True to Life, a fiction exploring transition and causation. His play about Marshall McLuhan was recently made into a short film.

Psychological Perspectives’ review of The Current Fantasy PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 2025, Vol. 68, No. 3–4, 489–491 Routledge / Taylor & Francis Group https://doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2025.2567816

Psychological Perspectives’ review of The Current Fantasy

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
2025, Vol. 68, No. 3–4, 489–491
Routledge / Taylor & Francis Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2025.2567816