Terminally Debased
GRAY, PAUL
Terminally Debased In the Hand of Dante By Nick Tosches Little, Brown. 343 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Paul Gray Former senior writer, "Time" magazine Nick Tosches launched his writing career...
...What The Stuffed Owl did for poetry, anthologizing snippets of high-minded verse pratfalls, In the Hand of Dante does for prose, singlehandedly, no outside malefactors required...
...and with the mighty groan of hull, the sails did billow with loud blast and deep rumbling creak of mast, as the Adriatic wind came carrying down...
...This question is transmitted to a Manhattan boss who, knowing that his acquaintance Nick Tosches is a Dante freak, calls in the author for a consultation...
...It may seem a reach from this level of philosophical discourse to the imagined musings of Dante, and it is, but Tosches is undaunted...
...Or: "Slow, lugubrious, with bold and heavy clank, lode of iron link by lode of iron link, the anchor was raised...
...it's easier to believe a publishing industry that considers this novel worth buying and lavishly promotes and publicizes it may be, as Tosches argues, terminally debased...
...Plenty of things make him furious, although he reserves his longest rant for the current state of the U.S...
...Never mind the improbabilities...
...The source of Tosches' rage against publishing seems a trifle obscure, since he elsewhere boasts that once he began appearing in print "I had gone on to make and to blow millions...
...For that reason alone...
...Slow, lugubrious, the passages about Dante in Tosches' novel grow ever less toothsome and become, sooth to say, unreadable...
...But the payoff here is not clear...
...And as he sucked he pondered further...
...Why pretend otherwise...
...Reviewed by Paul Gray Former senior writer, "Time" magazine Nick Tosches launched his writing career as a critic of mainly rock and country music...
...It is the comedy of my own self and vainglory: an ornate mirror that reflects none but me and the folly of myself, who wrought it...
...What did it bespeak, what awful thing, that he could only love as dear, divina beata purissima, she who, now rotted to carrion in her grave, had in life given him but merest glance...
...Paul Theroux used it in My Other Life, as did Martin Amis in Monev: A Suicide Note, both for teasing, unsettling effects...
...F— the other guy...
...The sweet flesh of the apricot was done, entered into him, and he did suck upon the pit, which was most toothsome...
...But he remains beyond reach, assuring readers that he is realizing millions from selling pages of Dante's manuscript to wealthy collectors...
...Along about this point a question arises...
...Tosches' Dante, unsurprisingly, agrees with Tosches...
...I named it rightly, though unknowingly...
...F__you, whoever you are...
...No one is likely to believe the real Nick Tosches is confessing to being an accessory to murders, and later, to committing multiple murders himself...
...Dante had chosen a cage of rhyme and meter so confining that no majestic creation could survive within it, so often did it necessitate unnatural affectation to accommodate structure, so often were soul and beauty and power sacrificed to sustain the structure of the work, as might be done by one so cold as to value artfulness above art...
...Why did Tosches elect to make himself a character in the novel...
...The device is hardly unfamiliar...
...he talked tough and dressed like a mobster and owned, perhaps still does, a pair of leopard-skin loafers...
...The other is named Dante Alighieri...
...He obviously didn't do them, and the character who did, fictionally, is not Nick Tosches...
...It bespoke that he knew nought of love, and of heart itself possessed by shrift, possessed but lovely rhyme and song thereof, unmortared by the higher, silent song of heart itself...
...It's very hard to take pleasure in this fictive triumph...
...and slow, lugubrious, the ponderous weight sail was hoisted...
...The primary reason, apparently, is that putting himself in his novel allows Tosches ample opportunities for giving readers a piece of his mind...
...The novel's central plot actually shows considerable promise and might, if Tosches had been content to keep his eye on it, have furnished a taut literary thriller...
...book business: "In 30 years, I had seen the publishing racket reduced to a drab, unimaginative, and unsuccessful form of corporate salesmanship that grew every day more devastating in its mediocrity...
...Such accomplishments can be pulledoff only by those with vaunting ambition and skills that prove unequal to the self-imposed challenge...
...And more: "What knew he of heat and love, who could give of them but to undef iled boyhood dream and not to she who gave all of heart and love to him...
...The novel's interpolated chapters portray the poet's thoughts, mainly after he has completed his masterpiece and become disenchanted with the result...
...Readers who already hear alarm bells echoing through their crania should probably heed them...
...Here is Tosches' rendition of Dante vis-à-vis Beatrice, as opposed to his wife: "Countless words of love had he writ—the words flowed from his pen as the drool from the mouth agape of one stricken—and yet not one for she who had borne him daughter and sons, and had borne his fate of exile as well as her own...
...What to do with this priceless treasure...
...It takes hubris to do what Tosches has done, and hubris, no matter how disastrous its consequences, is always an entertaining spectacle...
...The temptation to quote generously is strong, and it will be indulged, so that prospective readers can judge the matter for themselves...
...But if "artfulness" is inimical to "art," why does Tosches couch Dante's appearances in his novel in patently contrived and flowery language...
...And we're off on a nearly 20-page spree of vituperation, including the reprinting of a lengthy letter of complaint that Tosches once sent to one of his editors...
...F__ her...
...The urge to groan in despair when the author flashes back from his presumptive criminal purloining of Dante's manuscript to Dante himself swells toward an impulse to throw the novel at the nearest wall or, if fantasies came true, at the author himself...
...Tosches agrees to fly to Sicily with a sociopath named Louie to inspect the goods...
...they furnish some of the fun...
...He then went on to produce a number of intermittently successful books, including a couple of novels about New York City street thugs...
...During repeated consultations with a wise old Jew who is a kabbalist, the poet comes to realize that his work was undone by terza rima: "The grand thing...
...To write one is beyond the capacities of talentless drones...
...Yep, that one...
...A complete manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy is discovered in a longsealed storeroom of a Vatican library and transported somehow to an aging Mafia don in Sicily...
...But where to begin...
...Tosches manifest sympathies for these devils appeared to be reflected in his own flamboyant style...
...I point this out because one of the two main characters in his new novel is named Nick Tosches...
...But his nonfiction, chiefly biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin and Sonny Liston, gained more attention and notoriety...
...In the Hand of Dante is that rather rare thing, a spectacularly, unforgettably bad novel...
...slow, lugubrious, the hulking vessel was hove...
...the effort seems worthy of some attention...
...For Tosches has perceived the "great flaw" of the Divine Comedy: "It was a flaw of form...
...But he sums up his tirade pithily: "F__him...
...The former journalist became a magnet for other journalists in search of good copy...
...Once he says the manuscript is genuine, Louie sprays gunfire into the hosts and the two visitors fly back to America with Dante's pages in tow...
...F__you all...
Vol. 85 • July 2002 • No. 4
