Death and Desire
FALKENBERG, BETTY
Death and Desire Confessions of a Lady-Killer By George Stade Norton. 379pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review" They're off together again, Eros and Thanatos....
...It, too, was called (and criticized for being) mainly a novel of ideas...
...The section that begins, "Thus began our first conversation" and continues, "It was not easy for me to forgive my father...
...Its tone was also bitter and ironic, its anger profound...
...If so, this reader looked in vain for the clues...
...his moral indignation resides in the head...
...If the motive of revenge is a mere literary device, the outrage is not: "How come there are so many people around today for whom everything must be something other than what it is...
...Cosmic miles away from New York and The Reality Principle...
...If only she had not been corrupted by her own success...
...For what...
...he seems incapable of depicting females in any except the nastiest of terms...
...Both authors happen to share as well a delight in culinary lore...
...and mother of Victor's best friend, who is murdered by only-God-knows-who) is a woman to be reckoned with...
...But even some of the good set-pieces are too long...
...returns to the woods, to his father's land, reunited with his ewig-weibliches Weib...
...As a result, the deeper we get into the gore, the more the novel loses force...
...Quite apart from the fact that he addresses himself solely to a male audience ("Have you ever had a wet dream...
...In his first novel, George Stade sets out to demolish the mentality that gives rise not only to feminism but to all isms, "right, left, or beyond the pale...
...The broad canvas allows Stade take-offs on every mode of jargon, up and down the social ladder, and a fine time he gives us here...
...For being my father...
...So is Erika von Plaack, leader of the feminist movement, who was the last to be killed...
...His program will include all the current kooky methods of staying fit, along with all their oppo-sites (e.g., reverting to a carnivorous "hunter" diet...
...Nor does it help when he lets the father slip back into folksy diction: "Ain't nothing more worth doing than what we're doing up here...
...Stade is aware of this problem: "For a reconstructed carpenter, he was pretty fluent...
...What is worse, although the author claims to deplore feminism because he loves women, he seems peculiarly uncharitable to them...
...Nonetheless, his most engaging characters are female...
...Stade's dart is aimed both at the rottenness of American culture and at all the phony panaceas that set the millen-arian wheels in motion...
...The castration of the piglets on Victor's father's farm is a lovely bit of satire...
...Finally, when the stage is littered with enough corpses and severed heads, Victor (still panting for breath, or is it more blood...
...Though each killing is premeditated, none ever comes about quite as planned...
...But Grass' novel stemmed from a deep compassion, and despite its epic expanse, did contain memorable human beings...
...Yet what, if not this, are the last pages to mean...
...But the critic's comment does not solve the author's problem...
...A chapter that gallops off to a lusty start on the nutty First Church of Christ, Androgynous (its walls hung with the photo-portraits of Sri-Ramakrishna, Judith Malina, Jim Jones, Julien Beck, Theodore Roszak, and other latter-day sacred and secular saints) winds up in a muddle...
...Surely the critic Stade, a professor of English at Columbia, who can't stomach the building of any fake "arks far removed from the collapse of civilization," is not going to offer us such pap...
...Back to Ruritania...
...Victor recognizes a worthy opponent in her, a person whose wit, intelligence, humor, and nobility are a fair match to his...
...Victor Grant, manager of the Columbia University Bookstore, quits his job to more rigorously prepare himself in mind and body to avenge his wife's desertion to a band of consciousness-raising feminists...
...Confessions of a Lady-Killer begs comparison with another satiric anti-feminist novel that came out last year, Gunter Grass' The Flounder...
...After 379 pages of wallowing in gore, though, the author emerges as pretty bloody-minded himself, and one begins to have one's qualms...
...Yet one is left to conclude: A man may admire an Erika von Plaack, but he will love his wife for her feminine flaws...
...But his method comes to resemble too closely the objects he deplores...
...Are they part of the joke...
...And when Stade does come round to praising women, it is always in cliche-ridden terms: "I shall regret the time when women are no longer endearingly scatter-brained...
...we get a kind of action-painting or Happening effect with every new bizarre twist of a murder...
...For my need of his help...
...Furthermore, Stade had said elsewhere that he prefers the comfortable, old superstitions to the new-fangled ones...
...For all his thirst for blood, in the end Stade's characters are bloodless...
...So adept is he at adopting the smart-alecky tone of his hero-villain that he cannot shake it off even when he wants to...
...Perhaps the most dramatic scene in the book comes when the sow goes after the old man, seeking revenge for the crime perpetrated on her young...
...There is something petty and mean-spirited in his tirades against alleged female foibles...
...Anyway, it is fun to hear Victor say, "Ever since adolescence, I have yearned for some beautiful woman to treat me as a sex object...
...Unfortunately, as the murders go on there seems less dramatic motivation for them, given the narrator's original premise of revenge...
...Why has reality gone soft...
...For his willingness to give it," is reminiscent of Rilke's "Prodigal Son," and has some of the same moving quality of that poem...
...There are other disturbing aspects of this novel—on its own terms, and in terms of reader expectations...
...Thus the harmless stranger who sits next to, "and partially on," Victor in the bus is cow-like, fat, spreading out her Daily News—gratuitously disgusting...
...The book contains some marvelous set-pieces...
...Confessions of a Lady-Killer recounts, in unsparing detail, a series of murders inspired by one man's outrage at the loss of his wife to radical feminism...
...The description of the father and of life in Hicksville is very effective, partly because the tone of voice is less city-smart, less crass, if not less brutal...
...even the humor gets too cruel to be funny...
...Miss Lilly, the matriarch-owner of Lily-Belle Swimwear, Inc...
...the events it takes up become virtually incomprehensible...
...Then the father, a fine figure, starts to get too wordy...
...Nearly all the book's wisdom gets stuffed into his mouth...
...In the process of refurbishing his personality, he will also engage in such consciousness-expanding activities as visits to vernissages, as well as to topless bars and whorehouses...
Vol. 63 • January 1980 • No. 1
