Dorothy L'Amour: A Novel
by Lynn Crosbie
Doubleday, 1999
Caesarea: A Novel
by Tony Burgess
ECW Press, 1999
More Die of Heartbreak: A Novel
by Saul Bellow
Viking, 1987
Review by Michael Bryson
About a third of the way into More Die of Heartbreak Saul Bellow
writes:
There aren't any words for what happens to the soul in the free world.
Never mind "rising entitlements", never mind the luxury "life-style."
... Full wakefulness would make us face up to the new death,
the peculiar ordeal on our side of the world. The opening of
a true consciousness to what is actually occurring would be a
purgatory.
The "our side of the world" Bellow speaks about is "the
West," the democratic states opposed the Eastern Communist tyranny.
Though the Cold War victory came quickly in 1989, Bellow's exploration
of the West's "peculiar ordeal" remains poignant. If it's true
that "there aren't any words for what happens to the soul in the
free world," Bellow begins to tell us where we might find them. Over
a decade later, Tony Burgess and Lynn Crosbie are continuing that process.
For a type of "purgatory" is exactly what readers will find
in Burgess's Caesarea and Crosbie's Dorothy L'Amour. Burgess's
novel is the third and final installment of the Bewdley Trilogy, a cycle
of novels which includes The Hellmouths of Bewdley and Pontypool
Changes Everything. Each of these novels is stuffed with weird happenings
of the most horrific kind, putting Burgess in league with the likes of
William S. Burroughs and other writers whose surrealism is lifted to metaphor
for the strangeness of our age.
Burgess's Bewdley Trilogy takes place in small town Ontario. The trilogy
features flesh eating zombies, evil doctors, language-based viruses and
internet terrorists. The plots largely defy summary and interpretation.
Burgess presents a world devoid of stable meaning. His novels are experimental
in the best sense of the term. His writing undermines the often unquestioned
assumptions of our culture. To return to Bellows: "The opening of
a true consciousness to what is actually occurring would be a purgatory."
It must be said, however, that Caesarea is the weakest link
of the trilogy. The weirdness is all pervasive, a technique which gives
it little leverage as metaphor, since the reader too quickly loses any
sense of the relationship between the world of the novel and the world
outside the window. It is as if Alice began her story already down the
rabbit hole. The connection between the above and the below is lost.
In Dorothy L'Amour, the connection between the real world and
the world of artiface is also blurred - in this case because Crosbie has
written a novelization of the life of murdered Playboy Playmate of the
Year, Dorothy Stratten (1960-1980).
The primary problem with Crosbie's writing - the brilliant poetry,
her audacious first novel, Paul's Case - continues here. Namely,
she constructs her narratives out of cultural icons and places too much
weight on what those icons signify. Crosbie is not the country's greatest
storyteller, nor is she a great creator of character - however, she is
hugely daring and intelligent and funny (in an odd way, perhaps, but still
funny). In short, Crosbie's writing is an essential antidote to the bland
lyricism which has swept Canada's literary awards year after year.
Crosbie's Stratten says of her life "it's like driving a Jaguar,
all the time." The trouble is, Crosbie's prose does not whirl like
a tornado - or zip page to page like a Jaguar. The prose instead illustrates
Stratten from the outside, or provides interpretive glimpses of Stratten's
world-eye-view (the Jaguar metaphor, for example). Readers will be left
to simply trust Crosbie's judgment. Did Stratten speed through life? Most
of Crosbie's prose suggests otherwise.
For example, here Crosbie's Stratten remembers advice from a high
school English teacher:
Understand this: confession is codified like anything else. One confesses
to sins that are narrowly circumscribed by convention and custom. To
contravene these ethical laws is simply to inscribe oneself as other
within a fixed system.
Does that sound like a narrator who's speeding through life? (Why
would she remember that?). Surely she sounds more like a narrator
full of the knowledge of her own tragic demise. The reader enters the
novel with this knowledge also, and Stratten's violent death is never
deep beneath the surface.
Crosbie should be applauded for resisting any temptation to simplify
Stratten, as Stratten's last boyfriend (Peter Bogdanovich) did in his
book The Killing of the Unicorn. In fact, Crosbie's narrative -
like Burgess's - resists closure and interpretation. In this sense, Crosbie's
purpose here is a literary rescue job - saving Stratten from the confines
of her icon status. Crosbie has humanized the Playmate, complicated her
- and by using often archaic language, shown Stratten perhaps to be unknowable.
And what about Bellow? What does it mean, "more die of heartbreak"?
One character in the novel, a botanist, tells a reporter more people die
from heartbreak than from radiation poisoning. The botanist is thought
to be insensitive to those suffering from radiation poisoning, but Bellow's
point is clearly that the conflicts of the heart are poorly understood
and even more poorly included in the great media circus that passes for
contemporary civic discourse.
More Die of Heartbreak isn't one of Bellow's great novels. The plot
is thin, and it serves largely as a frame for Bellow to hang his intellectual
musings. Like Dorothy L'Amour, Bellow's novel invites readers to
return to original sources, making the novel itself little more than a
catalogue of previously disseminated ideas. Its prime value is like that
of the tent evangelist preaching the old time religion. It is a challenge
to the present to engage in a dialogue with the past. Every generation
that tries to remake the world fails. Once we admit our own failure the
past can offer solace and wisdom, not simply a terror we try hard to ignore.
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