More Mystification than Mystery

...Through the motive may be seen the lack it is aimed to fill...

...Cartwright has a precarious marriage, a mistress who is his wife's best friend, a bright young son interested in computers, and a 17-year-old daughter he may or may not be able to trust...

...Nonetheless, I think even so gifted a writer as McElroy should be called to account for undue difficulty...

...Unless a person had somehow managed to hole up for the last two decades, reading nothing but Dickens, a novel like this one would remind him that the form of fiction is changing constantly and that someone who refuses to change with it might miss out on all the excitement...

...I.e., if as appears to be true this slot is, say, the place where (not to be too specific) motives for making the Di-Gorro-Cartwright film can be found, isn't it true that when these appear in the slot thus filling it or causing it to cease to be empty, it thus ceases to be itself...

...Maybe only so...

...Hence the rapid scene changes, suggesting jump cuts, from New York to London and back again, to Corsica, Stonehenge and the Hebrides-with long shots, closeups, flashbacks, flash forwards, and chapter titles such as "Yellow Filter Insert...

...McElroy's first effort, A Smuggler's Bible, established him as an adventurous writer with a sorcerer's store of ideas and inventions, and this volume is similarly innovative...

...A man with a strong bent toward mysticism, Cartwright sees the destruction of the film as secondary to the multitude of possible motives that may directly or indirectly explain what happened...

...The second, still more important, is the one Lookout Cartridge violates most damagingly: Joycean monologues, chic montages, unconventional punctuation, and other tricks of the novelistic trade work only when they point beyond themselves...

...Profundity or elaborate nonsense...

...Just as Cartwright keeps a film diary that is somehow another incarnation of the original movie, preserving and recreating its existence after it has been destroyed, McElroy is making his own experimental film on the printed page...

...A murder at the beginning of the book, for example, is never really explained, despite the fact that the murderer is an old college classmate of Cartwright's and is later implicated in the vast, dim plot...

...Included in the book are glimpses of a vast, inscrutable conspiracy involving Druids, revolutionaries, a woman artist, and a film distributor, among others...

...The author's fluent prose, pouring onto the page in what appears to be a spontaneous flow, produces more mystification than mystery, more irritation than intrigue...

...He also has a prolific, highly speculative mind, so that when DiGorro's house is broken into and their undeveloped film is exposed to sunlight, Cartwright becomes obsessed with finding out why...

...This slot, then-has it identity unfilled...

...Though it is described by the publisher as "a gigantic mystery," Lookout Cartridge is many removes from conventional mystery or conventional narrative...

...Because his active life is less significant than his constant internalizing, he seems at times pure disembodied mind, and as the story progresses, his quest becomes increasingly hallucinatory...

...Since McElroy makes the egotist's mistake of believing that everything interesting to him is equally interesting to us as well, Cartwright ultimately becomes a bore...

...But unlike McElroy's previous work, it is self-indulgent...

...and numerous passages like the following, attempting to demonstrate in the language of film technology and computers Cartwright's belief that nothing happens at random: "Witness a different cartridge: not a thing solidly instated in a slot, rather a slot inserted in a thing...

...Cartwright, the narrator and protagonist, is an American living in London, a successful entrepreneur whose latest venture is a film made in partnership with his friend Dagger DiGorro...

...His narrative moves with the freedom of the camera from past to present, present to future...

...A distant, distinctly American cousin to the French New Novel, Lookout Cartridge vividly illustrates the strengths and weaknesses, as well as the special demands, of the kind of fiction that subordinates plot and plausibility to small, closely observed details, subtleties of landscape and human relations, and degrees of light and shade...

...The plot as such rapidly becomes almost incidental to the greater goal of Cartwright's travels, his search for truth...

...His account of that obsession is the novel...

...What happens...

...For there are two bare-bones necessities of fiction, traditional as yesterday or newer than tomorrow, which, it seems to me, cannot be set aside...

...Shift a something to make room for an emptiness...

...When it falls from the window of a New York apartment building, expeditiously killing a master plotter, it provides McElroy with another brilliantly cinematic scene that makes no other kind of sense...

...In a world of ambiguities and shifting perceptions, which events are real...

...These separate scenes are related only if one accepts the notion that all human phenomena are related...

...Hence, too, the lengthy stretches of "cinematic prose," highly imagistic descriptions that are often stunning in themselves but are loosely connected to what precedes or what follows them...

...Each one, as it fills the inserted slot, is also transparent...

...Certainly one can't read Robbe-Grillet the same way one reads The Pickwick Papers...

...What appears to be such motives...

...The constant distortion of the time sequence adds to the difficulty...

...Is she somehow collaborating, albeit unwittingly, with her father's enemies...

...Finally, at the end of the book, a television set functions as an appropriately technological deus ex machina...

...neither position is particularly convincing because his personal mysticism and his enigmatic associational monologues obscure rather than clarify his thinking process...

...Cartwright thinks so, then changes his mind...

...The first is that the pieces of a narrative, whatever their separate shapes, eventually fit together into a coherent whole...

...Reviewed by Cyra McFadden Department of English, San Francisco State College If a prize existed for the "most difficult novel," Joseph McElroy's dense, ambitious and technically accomplished fourth book would be a strong contender for this year's award...

...His attempt to solve the riddle takes the form of abrupt transatlantic leaps, endless cryptic conversations, encounters accidental and deliberate, and experiences real and remembered...

...Lookout Cartridge raises the issue of what expectations one may legitimately bring to highly experimental fiction...

...extended descriptions of the film itself...

...Cartwright rephrases the question ceaselessly, using analogies ranging from the Mayan calendar to the properties of liquid crystals...

...The daughter, Jenny, plays a larger but equally confusing role...

...Whichever, McElroy's own motives here are far from transparent...