Gerald's Party

...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...

...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...

...Marcie...

...What if it's the world that's in-substantial, time the immovable stage for its ghostly oscillations...

...Time lost get it...

...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...

...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...

...Escher print...

...Come on in...

...Time...

...She won't let him say "chemo": "Please, no abbreviations, no familiarities, no fraternizing with the enemy...

...passe as a tie-dyed T-shirt—hey, Roxanne, love your tropical fish, baby...

...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...

...and Time...

...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...

...one more Providence memory...

...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...

...Gerry's wife pillages the refrigerator for more hors d'oeuvres...

...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...

...GERALD'S PARTY Robert Coover/Linden Press-Simon and Schuster/$17.95 James Harkness 5o THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986...

...It's the key to it all, it always is, the key to everything...

...Glad t' see ya...

...but] no longer that attentive," James Harkness is a writer and translator who lives in upstate New York...

...his disparaging mother-inlaw has endless trouble keeping his kid in bed...

...But what the hell's this stuff in the cheese balls...

...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...

...jostle of tweedy shoulders and the graceful swoop of peasant skirts (Arlene...

...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...

...Time . . . It's a mockery...

...the first body is discovered: Ros, her blood "still fountaining from a hole between her breasts, soaking her silvery frock, puddling the carpet...

...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...

...Consternation reigns—distraction, anyway...

...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...

...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...

...But what if it's the other way around...

...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...

...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...

...That hardly a page turns without this boffo, pseudo-philosophical bludgeoning may in fact be the true crime of the evening...

...Germaine...

...Clues and evidence are collected...

...We're talking about time...

...investigations and interrogations go forward...

...old friends and recent neighbors drop in...

...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...

...Uncertainty...

...and throughout everything, Gerry himself mopes portentously about Love, Life, Art, Theater...

...We've got to watch Clara and Adam make up new rules...

...Strangely effective in its way, but certainly an odious experience...

...a tableau vivant is staged...

...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...

...I'm not going to close on a downer like this, though...

...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...

...poignant reminiscences give way to ominous intent...

...Or are they, along with all the chic jargon-juggling about "synchronicity" and "self-referentiality," essentially satirical...

...A corruption...

...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...

...Time, especially—since Time, not Crime, is the real object of ratiocination in Gerald's Party...

...new murders occur, along with adulteries and dangerous liaisons...

...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...

...Are you suggesting that someone put curare in the scones on purpose...

...shifting alliances form and dissolve...

...The police are summoned and soon arrive, Inspector Pardew and a pair of Keystone Kops flunkies named Fred and Bob...

...Her husband died and died...

...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...

...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...