Providence
Wolff, Geoffrey
which fog up in time of strenuous exertion and fall off in time of danger; as when Mrs. Thomas N. Tucker assaulted him while wielding a chintz pillow with "surprising force." The violence occurred...
...This tells you something about the difference between Yale and Brown in those days...
...When I was a student there, a friend of mine, a native Rhode Islander, told me that there was a grand total of one straight auto-body shop in the state...
...Consternation reigns—distraction, anyway...
...We're talking about time...
...Best cigars I have had since returning from overseas," wrote H. E. O., of Columbia, SC MY OFFER TO CIGAR LOVERS I'll send you postpaid a selection of 42 factory-fresh cigars—a special selection of Honduras handmades, vintage-leaf long-filler and cut-filler smokes...
...Boston...
...In The House of Intellect Jacques Barzun, writing in the late 1950s, warned of the dangers that modern education posed to the mind...
...I'll send them to you from Tampa, the fine cigar capital of the world...
...He attempted all the wimp gimmicks of the New Age Progressive, and he was rendered absurd and futile...
...The Backer presidency was not a success...
...A corruption...
...Her husband died and died...
...Geoffrey Wolff knows all of this, and much more besides, and he's no doubt known it for a long time, and he's probably one of the best writers in America...
...I can tell you that each of the few times I put this book down I looked at the jacket photograph of the author and wished, with distressing envy, that I could write about a third as well...
...Why the young man kneed him in-advertently I cannot fathom...
...Baby got his face blown away with a nail gun...
...Herbert Wadlough is the kind of precious boob whose eminence would never take him beyond jerkwater in any age but our own gorgeous era, an era when mass education puffs up mil-lions, educating them beyond their means and booting them up with a software of high-flown patois to conceal their essential oafishness...
...She never shoulda slept with Tom, though...
...Ours wasn't for a Panther, it was for Raymond Patriarca, the Mr...
...These superb smokes are made with expertly blended Cuban-seed-leaf tobaccos grown and cured the old Cuban way in Honduras from seed smuggled out of Cuba...
...there might be overheard fragments of a babble-collage, winding threads of conversational critique, rendering collective verdict on Gerald's Party: "—certain rich wildness, untamed, Flaubertian abandonment to excess" '—knockoff of The Erasers, handled with ["—Feedback loop"] much less elan . . ." —in my (Elliott...
...We'll be listening to Tom Waits side A when we leave Providence, and side B will still be playing when we get home...
...Date name street —"I am very impressed with the mildness and freshness I pt,, state :^p I of the sampler you sent," said J. J. M., of Lincoln, IL L OFFER GOOD IN U.S...
...This was indeed a low point, but there are so many others, my favorite being when, to mollify a world-wide outcry against President Backer's use of harmless sleep-inducing gas against Bermudian revolutionaries, Wadlough is gassed on the "Today Show" to demonstrate Yale University alumni between 34 and 38 will remember the spring of 1970 for the trial of Bobby Seale in downtown New Haven...
...Outstanding...
...But he's also got a heart (truth is, O'Hara hated a lot of his characters), and this is, finally, a novel to break the heart: "For Clara, there was no end...
...Seizing the moment, Tucker's PR experts turn the fall into a feat of Backerian heroism and announce that it was Backer who saved Wad-lough...
...About the Providence we Brownies went into a couple of times a year...
...We had our strike, of course, but we had a trial, too...
...And if it's a stage . . . if it's there in its entirety, the script all written, so to speak, a kind of cyclodrama which seems to move only because we, like these [wristwatch] hands here, move through it, then it should be possible, if we could just overcome our perceptual limitations, to visit any part of it, including the no-longer and the not yet...
...Uncertainty...
...jostle of tweedy shoulders and the graceful swoop of peasant skirts (Arlene...
...So far as I can tell, the unfortunate victims are, in order of dispatch: 1) Ros, actress/floozy—Icepick 2) Roger, jealous husband—Croquet mallet 3)Tania, painter/Earth mother—Bathtub drowning 4)Vic, narrator's best friend—Gunshot wounds I say "so far as I can tell," because it's pretty much impossible to keep track of all the malaise, madness, vapors, and violence that afflict the revelers—much less to distinguish the real mayhem from the unreal, or the surreal from either...
...After they saw Babylon Pink together, Skippy wanted them to try out some of the positions, "but Lisa was too wasted to figure out where to put her ankles...
...They're mild, flavorful and extremely satisfying to the cigar smoker who's looking for something new, something better, something exceptionally tasty...
...This was Brown before JFK, Jr...
...Geoffrey Wolff is best known for his biographies of the wacked-out poet Harry Crosby (Black Sun) and his own philandering dad (The Duke of Deception), but from PROVIDENCE Geoffrey Wolff/Viking-Elisabeth Sifton Books/$16.95 Thomas Mallon 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 now on he's going to be as important to Providence history as Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci (indicted, okay, but popular), or—sit down—S...
...Big of the whole New England Mafia, a guy to whom Skull and Bones meant skulls and bones, not some club...
...Before, that is, they blew off the rest of the semester: Cambodia, Kent State—the Strike...
...That hardly a page turns without this boffo, pseudo-philosophical bludgeoning may in fact be the true crime of the evening...
...Federal Hill...
...He's got other things on his mind: his son's birthday and the suspicion he himself s got leukemia...
...Providence opens with the death of The Moron, a hood, definitely small time: "the bad-looking mess leaking stuff on the sidewalk" is his body...
...Through the pages of this splendid tome walk many of the greatest figures of our capital city, a city that is proud to call itself "The Most Important City in the World...
...and throughout everything, Gerry himself mopes portentously about Love, Life, Art, Theater...
...I'll include a generous sampling of Honduras handmades, plus a nice selection of vintage-leaf, long-filler and cut filler cigars, all perfectly blended for mildness and flavor...
...Yet their architecture is so static, so brittle, and at last so bizarrely arbitrary in its contrivances that at various points I began to suspect it of actually having been created by some banal external mechanism: like the secret anagrams Saussure thought he saw in Ovid's poetry, or the queer processes of narrative generation described by Raymond Roussel in Comment j'ai ecrit certains des mes livres...
...passe as a tie-dyed T-shirt—hey, Roxanne, love your tropical fish, baby...
...Thus the central puzzle of Coover's capering conundrum: not so much who is the "author" of the crime—nor even whether, in life as in language and literature, crime admits of being solved—but whether there is not a lacuna between "crime" and "solution," reality and its reconstruction, that renders the subordination of one to the other unstable, ever reversible, and finally, radically beside the point...
...Always a little too bilious to be real fun...
...And he's got a sense of regional history, "before windchill factors," same as O'Hara: YOU DON'T NEED CASTRO'S PERMISSION TO SMOKE CUBAN-SEED HANDMADE CIGARS...
...There's plenty of psychology here, like O'Hara had (both Adam and Clara want to get rid of their golden retriever at different points: it's too healthy for him to look at, and the goddamned dog saw the burglar make advances to her, and she's not going to live with someone who's seen that...
...Strangely effective in its way, but certainly an odious experience...
...residents add 5% sales tax) I ^ Charge $10.90 to my ^ VISA ^ American Express I ^ MasterCard ^ Diners Club Credit card No...
...A few subtle hints from Inspector Pardew, whose name, after all, sounds a good deal like perdu—as in, yes, could be, les Temps perdus...
...HANDMADES FOR THE MAN WHO THOUGHT HE COULDN'T AFFORD THEM...
...investigations and interrogations go forward...
...But there was always something a little creepy about O'Hara...
...Sample the cigars in my new Silver Medallion Sampler and enjoy a wonderful new smoking sensation...
...However: today's paper—March 13, 1986—reports that some Brown coeds have been busted as part of a prostitution ring, which strikes me as the closest amalgamation of town ethos and gown ethos I've ever heard of, considerably more realistic than the schemes of "community involvement" Brown students used to talk about in the early seventies...
...We've got to watch Clara and Adam make up new rules...
...Now, with education reigning over us like an established church, our society is suffused with stupidity and mediocrity unimaginable a few decades ago, even in jerkwater...
...I was a freshman at Brown that year...
...his disparaging mother-inlaw has endless trouble keeping his kid in bed...
...was, Providence is better...
...Wad-lough deserved it...
...They are, while they last, renowned Machiavels, held in awe by the pols and the journalists alike...
...Flight attendants bat-ter him mercilessly...
...a tableau vivant is staged...
...I'm not going to close on a downer like this, though...
...Yet it's hard to know how seriously, if at all, the author intends us to take it, since Gerald's Party veers back and forth from High Chrono-Ontology to parody erotics and mincing bidet jokes with utter capriciousness...
...Natural wrapper...
...Gerry's wife pillages the refrigerator for more hors d'oeuvres...
...It's in a cargo net hanging from a tow-truck's crane...
...Some are indicted...
...Our own Ronald Reagan has employed them, and recently he has suffered on account of their petty shenanigans...
...and Time...
...Not even Lisa shows up, and she and Skip used to be very tight...
...return the unsmoked ones by United Parcel or Parcel Post within 30 days and I'll refund your money...
...Some of them put up Panther sup-porters in their dorm rooms...
...His wife Clara is nice, too...
...Geoffrey Wolff, though, is a different story...
...Do they have the function of another traditional element of crime fiction: the red herring, a spurious datum or event introduced to throw the detective (and the reader) off the scent...
...What happens in Gerald's Party is, sort of and (not that it matters) not in sequence: At a point during a party when the host, Gerry, and his guests are "still on our feet...
...Marcie...
...He's got it, all right—his cells are "banging around like corn in the popper"—and it's a shame...
...What if it's the world that's in-substantial, time the immovable stage for its ghostly oscillations...
...Skippy often works with Baby ("It's a one-tape job...
...Baby is the one Skippy later wishes could be at his trial, for moral support, but that can't be because Baby happens to be the corpse that provokes the particular legal proceedings that so upset Skippy...
...Adam Dwyer detours to avoid it...
...Yes, he's as good...
...I don't know who the narrator is, but he's the last of the all-time greasedchameleons, in and out of every id and larynx in the book...
...There was a big one that went on in the courthouse down the hill...
...Your delivered cost is only $10.90 for 42 factory-fresh...
...GERALD'S PARTY Robert Coover/Linden Press-Simon and Schuster/$17.95 James Harkness 5o THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986...
...Wadlough is confined to hospital with "contusions of the forehead, a fractured clavicle and a ruptured plantaris...
...ONLY _ CREDIT CARD USERS SPEED TOLL-FREE 1- 800-237-2559 DELIVERY BY CALLING IN FLORIDA, CALL 1-800-282-0646 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 49 there's a nice chapter on the Triangle Trade—the slave-and-rum-running that helped build, among other things, Brown University and Adam Dwyer's old-line family guilt complex...
...Glad t' see ya...
...I like a narrator who talks to the reader, patiently: "You think these things just happened...
...started going there, before Amy Carter started sitting in in the ad-ministration building against apartheid...
...Why can't they leave the guy alone...
...Are you suggesting that someone put curare in the scones on purpose...
...Christopher Buckley has created a comic figure comparable in grandeur to the Ignatius Reilly of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces...
...he's talking about...
...the first body is discovered: Ros, her blood "still fountaining from a hole between her breasts, soaking her silvery frock, puddling the carpet...
...Experts can't tell them from Havanas...
...Good as Dutch Shea, Jr...
...The President is presented with scores of good samaritan awards from the Republic's scores of do-gooder organizations...
...A dutiful maid thrust the telephone into the shower, nearly electrocuting him and leaving him sprawled across the bathroom floor bruised, bleeding, and, of course, bereft of his glasses...
...poignant reminiscences give way to ominous intent...
...Cuban-seed-leaf cigars...
...When Christopher Buckley, Priscilla Buckley's nephew, served as speech-writer to Vice President George Bush he collected every telling detail of high political life, carefully pasting them in-to his notebooks...
...It's the key to it all, it always is, the key to everything...
...Time . . . It's a mockery...
...Come on in...
...When someone up there whispers `be careful' to a convict, or a member of a jury, this is not the same as when your mom says `be careful.' " No, College Hill was not Federal Hill, and never for long are those particular twain going to intertwine...
...Car, or steamer...
...Then there is the time when the President telephoned whilst Wadlough was showering...
...new murders occur, along with adulteries and dangerous liaisons...
...Print all digits) Exp...
...Germaine...
...There is the time the President's young son inadvertently knees him in his private parts...
...Castro befools him, and the revolutionary leader of Bermuda creates a genuine threat to national security...
...Of course his glasses fell off...
...I'm going to mention Superficially, Robert Coover's new novel is an antic send-up of murder mysteries: roughly the British drawing room variety, where the detective knows his tropical fish as well as his criminology, and where the suspects are always bursting out with lines like, "My word, Lord Effingwod...
...Read it and you will recognize some of the giants of recent times...
...No longer are they the celebrated figures on the Washington cocktail circuit...
...This one takes place along slippery rocks beside raging waters and ends with the President falling head first to certain death were his fall not broken by the hapless Wadlough crawling beneath him...
...Following in the hoof prints of thousands of other would-be Harry Hopkinses and Harold Ickeses, this Wadlough has come to Washington to serve his master and his cartoon vision of history...
...Before Brown stopped being the backwater of the Ivy League and got chic, which is to say before Cosima von Billow started going there, which is to say years before her father (allegedly) sent her mommy on "that long journey to napland...
...Tom used to be a good cop, didn't like envelopes (offer him one and Tom "would cuff your hands behind your back and maybe fuck up your Rolex"), but oh, Lisa messed up his head very bad...
...They fret over corner offices, parking spaces for themselves and their staffs, White House mess permits, and other such immensities...
...It was cool...
...Once on the ground he is arrested and reluctant White House personnel have to go down to the lock-up to spring him...
...If these cigars aren't all you expected...
...one more Providence memory...
...I didn't think this was a particularly interesting fact, because I was too high-minded and young to realize in those days that crooked auto-body shops have far more to do with real life than invasions of Cambodia, just as the Mafia is a far more enduring and significant institution than the Black Panthers (screw you, Yale...
...but] no longer that attentive," James Harkness is a writer and translator who lives in upstate New York...
...Time lost get it...
...Today he's just "an old fart in his peejays, with diabetes and a crummy pump, vegging out on All My Children, As the World Turns, refusing to watch or even think about General Hospital...
...Of all the cigars I have smoked, both cheap and expensive, yours is the best of the bunch," wrote another...
...You won't be able to either, when you try them...
...Now begins what Wadlough himself calls his time of "public humiliation...
...He fucking made them happen...
...Then they pass on...
...James Carroll...
...Priscilla will be proud...
...Now, as an amused Tacitus, he returns, and in creating the memoir of Wadlough he has written one of the most hilarious books on Washington ever to come to my attention, and I once read every memoir written by the immortal memoirists of the Carter administration...
...no restoratives were allowed me until the last word of the last page of the last preposterous book...
...We never, so far as I remember, went to Federal Hill, which Geoffrey Wolff knows about and which was populated by the ethnic group from which the Governor of New York State descends...
...The police are summoned and soon arrive, Inspector Pardew and a pair of Keystone Kops flunkies named Fred and Bob...
...Nice girl, Lisa: not "an uncaring person, she just didn't have an awesome memory...
...Or are they, along with all the chic jargon-juggling about "synchronicity" and "self-referentiality," essentially satirical...
...My friends and I once or twice forayed into Manny Almeida's Ringside lounge ("Where You Meet the Leading Sports Figures of the World," the sign said, meaning, I think, guys who used to wrestle in South Attleboro...
...The violence occurred in the executive quarters of the White House itself, and there the First Lady bashed him to the floor, pinned him behind a door ("I could hear her exertions on the other side as she leaned against the door, at-tempting, I would guess, to inhibit the flow of oxygen into my lungs"), and belabored him about the calves and shins with her shoes ("I was grateful she was not wearing high heels...
...You want Baltimore, go to Anne Tyler...
...the benign nature of the vapors...
...Larry McMurtry...
...I'm not going to explain any more of the plot, because that's often unnecessary and unkind in a review...
...But let me tell you: if WJAR, and the Bark's Head Building, and Almacs super-markets and dee-jay "Salty" Brine (all in this novel) set off not one bell, nor crumble for you a single Proustian cookie, you should still buy this novel because it's probably the best one that's going to come out in America in 1986...
...But what if it's the other way around...
...Because Adam is a nice guy, good husband, good dad, Boy Scout lawyer, even does public defense...
...No questions asked...
...West Texas...
...Finally there is the time that the wretch—dubbed "Auntie Herbert" by the White House staff—is summoned to accompany President Backer on one of his seaside walks...
...In an agelastic city Buckley has written a very amusing book about the misogelastic toadies...
...But what the hell's this stuff in the cheese balls...
...shifting alliances form and dissolve...
...Meanwhile, plot, character, and voice decompose (Coover might prefer "deconstruct") into a weird series of moony monologues, dispersed dialogues, and fractured colloquies, interlinked with the drugged, distantly alarming illogic of a bad dream...
...Ship me the Silver Medallion Sampler under your money-back guarantee for only $10.90...
...In-to every award banquet the presidential aides roll Wadlough, now con-fined to a wheelchair...
...She won't let him say "chemo": "Please, no abbreviations, no familiarities, no fraternizing with the enemy...
...But I want to make more points: like forget John Gregory Dunne...
...Wolff describes things a little differently than we would have"The bakery was within handgun range of Atwells Avenue"—but he makes me remember a lot of the streets Thomas Mallon teaches English at Vassar College and is the author of A Book of One's Own...
...What there is in Coover's book, in other words, is enough grad-school folderol to keep a whole Comp-Lit department wired into the wee hours of the night—fodder enough for a real party even, say a faculty get-together where (we all know the drill) people stumble past in an agreeable haze of cannabis and Gallo Hearty Burgundy, and where amid the random (Heisenberg...
...Manny's had a separate ladies' entrance, and we thought Diane Johnson was a great girl to put up with that in 1972...
...Having collected the wrist-watches of all the guests, the inspector will determine the first murder to have taken place precisely one half hour after his arrival, prompting one among many reveries that swerve, stagger, and reel drunkenly along under their load of Significance: We tend to think of time as something that passes by . . . a kind of endless flow, like a river, coming out of nowhere and going into nowhere, with space the theater in which this drama of pure process is acted out...
...On Capitol Hill and in each presidential administration such amusing stoneheads are plentiful...
...Listen, I'm no less over-ego-blown than any other reviewer...
...If you're ready for a luxuriously enjoyable smoking experience, try them now...
...J. Perelman, Brown '25...
...old friends and recent neighbors drop in...
...A moebius-strip concatenation of all the suburban booze-bashes that ever went down in flames at four a.m., the scenes that make up Gerald's Party merge and emerge from one another like swallows or alligators in an M.C...
...I never went to Yale...
...Textual evidence may even support such an interpretation—for instance, the musings of Inspector Pardew (who has, on the whole, the role of Readers' Guide to this item of Periodical Literature) on the possibility that he may be in the presence of "some unspeakable crimewithin-a-crime, some dalliance, as it were . . . with oblivion itself " Are signposts like these, so blatant at times that they might be labeled "directions for use," genuine clues to an honest mystery...
...For the immortal Wadlough there are only discomfitures and misadventures...
...On the Eastern shuttle he hears that his President has been shot, begs to use the plane's radio, and is immediately identified as a crank...
...B530, Box 30303, Tampa, FL 33630...
...The man who directs the music of these spheres is The Boss, who once responded to a question of Bobby Kennedy's about people stuffed in a trunk with his own interrogative: "Trunk...
...I slavedaway on that project for several hours of a summer afternoon...
...all through the book, and we've got to watch it too, go through the hopeless "marrow harvest" and everything else: "They took his marrow when it was good marrow, mezzo-mezzo marrow, to return it when it got worse...
...Escher print...
...ro order fill in and mail coupon to — BDO THOMPSON CIGAR CO, 15401 Hangar Ct., Dept...
...Check for $10.90 enclosed (Fla...
...That quotation is from Geoffrey Wolff, who's just written the great Providence novel—not about "rich-bitch Brownies" on Thayer Street, but about the rest of that "runt town of 156,000," that tight little gear box of hoods and lawyers and judges and small-timers that's still not so different from the way it was in 1970...
...But those places are out, and Providence is in...
...Upon retreating from her enraged presence, Wadlough is summoned downstairs to the Oval Office, and there he promptly impales himself on one of his President's favorite objets d'art, Frederick Hart's "Javelin...
...Backer's seaside fall takes place during his idiotic reelection campaign, a campaign that put me in mind of Jimmy Carter's last great venture into mass seduction...
...Anyway, Geoffrey Wolff has dropped me off on memory lane...
...Time...
...Time, especially—since Time, not Crime, is the real object of ratiocination in Gerald's Party...
...So how come all I want to keep doing is quoting this guy, this guy who's so good with the verbs that he doesn't say shame leads to rage, or shame feeds rage, he says shame manures rage...
...Very instructive, too...
...Forget John O'Hara, too, although I can't think of any writer any other writer should more like to be compared to...
...Clues and evidence are collected...
...Yours is the only decent cigar I have had in over 12 years," one new customer wrote me the other day...
...1 O.K., TOM...
...view an exercise in structuralist dechiffiement" "Ironically, for a book about time, a kind of anachronism in and of itself, a hallucinatory sixties metafiction, as embarrassingly" ['L--like finding your path through a Labyrinth by following the minotaur's farts...
...Unfortunately, we learn a lot about their characters from Wolffs inventory of items that get ripped off from their house by Skippy Carbone...
...I don't like to give away any more of my 1200 words to quotations from the author than is absolutely necessary...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
