Quest for the Absurd
LORENTZEN, CHRISTIAN
Quest for the Absurd Voyage to the End of the Room By Tibor Fischer Counterpoint. 251 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen ROGUES, not hermits, are the traditional tellers of...
...Better still, be an economist...
...But we meet few Spaniards and learn nothing about Barcelona, since the young Oceane does not get out much either...
...In Voyage, the stakes are necessarily lower, the looming threats more far-fetched, and the laughs, as a result, milder...
...And if nothing else, London is deliverable...
...Its mirthful mix of sports, sex and totalitarianism delighted critics and won Fischer a spot on Granta's list of Best Young British Novelists in 1993...
...the stench of masculine bravura in their prose...
...Under the Frog (1992), Fischer's first novel, tracked the mishaps of a semi-professional basketball team in Hungary during the first decade of Communist rule...
...You rarely get shot at...
...On the roof deck Oceane makes the acquaintance of the dozen dancers on staff, most of them as anatomically remarkable as her partner and all of them graced with biographies as loopy...
...Oceane's descriptions of her lovers take an oddly self-congratulatory tone, and Fischer's mock admiration for male parts is one of the novel's stalest gags...
...The terrors of World War II and the onset of Communism deepen the pathos ofthat novel's heroes and set off its sardonic sparks...
...Oceane's literary forerunners include Dostoevsky's Underground Man...
...Nor does it require one of the hyphenated neologisms Fischer is fond of coining...
...The story behind the contract, involving her one-night stand with a lawyer, has a throw-away quality that is humorous until she stretches for a note of mock wisdom, "My only tip for becoming rich is not to try...
...You can fiddle your own tax...
...Most of my life," she says, "goes down the broadband...
...Despite a series of nose jobs, he has never been satisfied with the shape of his beak and has turned down the flood of skin flick roles sent his way...
...An agent arranges for a few tourists to join her at home for dinner...
...Oceane's leisure knows no bounds, nor does it entail anything out of the ordinary...
...The result is satire without substance...
...Des Esseintes in J.-K...
...Vanity and Schwarzenegger-size aspirations have stalled Rhino's career and left him the club's longest-serving employee...
...Huysmans' Against Nature—a novel built largely on the domestic eccentricities of interior decoration and experimental dieting...
...Accountants have to get the sums right...
...You get all sorts of benefits...
...Tibor Fischer has turned that convention on its head in his new novel, a raunchy and scattershot affair narrated by a 31 - year-old woman who never leaves her London flat...
...she prepares by reading guidebooks and follows up by watching the news in their native countries on satellite television...
...The telling of the last third of the novel is thus ceded to a rogue more suited to Fischer's purposes—Audley, a debt collector and former soldier for hire...
...Disturbed only by the occasional act of assault or vandalism committed outside her window, she listens to her enormous library of compact discs, watches films, scans hundreds of TV channels, and wades the infinite streams of the Internet...
...Given the elder writer's stature, he instantly became "the guy who dissed Martin Amis...
...When Oceane leaves Barcelona, Walter follows her to London and tracks her down in a Soho coffee shop...
...Fischer's one twist to rescue his heroine from complete mundanity is a form of "travel" that requires no ticket...
...You used to become a soldier for adventure, for travel, for loot...
...I didn't recognize him because he had his clothes on...
...Her isolation, in other words, is an acute form of laziness, and her solitude is of the type any middle class city dweller can enjoy given a free Saturday afternoon...
...Walter had been a colleague...
...Fischer hinges her financial security on royalties from a video game character she designed...
...The better part of the book is told in flashbacks or relayed through a satellite video hookup...
...In his attack on the author, Fischer took care to cite him as one of his influences...
...Tiptoeing around an embargo on advance disclosure of the contents of Martin Amis' new novel, Yellow Dog, Fischer launched a pre-emptive strike by calling it "not-knowing-where-to-look bad" in the Daily Telegraph without actually reviewing it...
...The only hitch: She has to journey to the island herself to find the last clue...
...Audley's trip to Chuuk, a series of encounters with boozy vacationers capped by an adventure on the sea, builds to a grand anticlimax...
...Ten years later, his letters to Oceane from the island of Chuuk in the South Pacific promise to reveal the identity of the killer...
...AFTER 50 pages of reflections on her sedentary lifestyle, Fischer himself seems to recognize the limitations of Oceane's story...
...Strip joint debauchery and the vacuity of the Internet are, relative to the absurdities of totalitarianism, unworthy objects of Fischer's ample talents...
...Neither author is convincing when writing from a woman's point of view...
...Oceane, by contrast, wallows in her own well-adjusted complacency...
...The Yugoslavia passages are among the novel's funniest, sending up heroism, military discipline and bloodlust...
...While we are suffering, back in Zagreb, the...
...and Bucky Wunderlick, the shut-in rock star in Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street...
...You travel the world first-class...
...Although my wealth is modest," she says, "I defy any dictator, any potentate, anyone richer than me to have betterhome entertainment...
...Theirtall tales lift Voyage (slightly) off the ground, and Fischer's crisp ventriloquism works on a comic level even as the novel spirals into incoherence...
...When he comes home, he continues to "visible" Oceane via satellite, and she witnesses his ambush...
...Audley is a village tough guy who sees the world from the bottom up, a ranting thug and an ideal mouthpiece for Fischer's cultural critiques...
...Under the Frog was grounded in his father's experience as a basketball player in Hungary and his own time as a correspondent in Budapest...
...Spooked by the rising body count, Oceane packs up and heads back to London...
...His next three books—two novels and a short story collection—were inventive and respected, but a mass audience has eluded him...
...they're stealing everything...
...She moves into a room above the club, takes to her work with enthusiasm, and spends most of her off-hours sunning by the pool on the roof...
...With its farcical serial murders and relentless riffs on sex and drugs, the Barcelona episode bears much resemblance to Amis' 1974 novel Dead Babies...
...Like any Fischer character, he has his own stories to tell, and before he sets out we learn of a sojourn in Croatia when he enlisted in an inept militia-for-hire, defending a village from a strangely absent Serbian menace: "The war is a disappointment for everyone...
...So the novel's premise proves to be false— a transgression that would be forgivable if its merits matched the author's earlier work...
...Now you'd be better off as an accountant...
...That might be why he made a rogue of himself in British literary circles last fall...
...He sets in motion a mystery plot with a letter from her long deceased ex-boyfriend Walter...
...After a few months, the dancers' good times are interrupted by a string of mysterious deaths...
...But like the rest, Audley's Balkan experience is empty at the core: He is a mercenary who never sees action...
...This formal tactic is intriguing, but it quickly fizzles out...
...I wanted to take a photograph of Rhino and send it to everyone I knew with the inscription: This is my job...
...In the first section of the novel, the narrator, Oceane, lauds her housebound existence...
...It is simply mediocre...
...what's a good word in English for a complete freeloader, a disgusting, impotent, stinking, parasitic amphibian...
...The only difference is that Oceane's Saturday afternoon never stops...
...Casting the solitary urbanité in the lead role is not a new concept...
...Her act calls for onstage performance of "climactics"—one of Fischer's sly wordplays—pairing Oceane with an Andalusian stud named Rhino, usually found in the nude save for a bondage mask over his face: "Perfect formations of muscle, perfect amount of hair, perfect hair, even his pedicure was better than mine, nails rounded like church windows...
...Corpses turnup at the bottom of the pool, a police helicopter crashes on approach to the roof, and a dancer is killed by a cow that apparently dropped from the sky...
...and prompts a lengthy digression on Oceane's tenure as a stripper in Barcelona a decade earlier...
...Oceane's femininity is barely more realistic than that of Mike Hoolihan, the female cop of Amis' 1997 noir travesty Night Train...
...Captivated by his unhinged comedy, many readers may forgive him (as they have Amis) for these faults, but Voyage to the End of the Room doesn't come close to his best work...
...A relationship ensues, but after a few months he disappears, suffering from a secret terminal illness and hoping to discover the rooftop killer before his own demise...
...Voyage to the End of the Room will not change that...
...All right, let's call them economists, back in Zagreb, economists who know nothing about this country...
...But those are exceptionally alienated or decadent figures...
...Now bonded by their thirst for buzz, the two have similar strengths—mastery of a sardonic voice, literary erudition, stinging wit...
...And in the end the murder plot lacks a murderer...
...With her private dick in trouble, the novel's biggest surprise transpires...
...Actual travel is, of course, out of the question, so she hires a surrogate...
...Fischer summons each of these lowlifes and dropouts to the fore to tell a shaggy dog story—a shark attack, an exploding whale, a mutt that could predict stock prices— between puffs from the hookah...
...A meal shared with a few visitors from Helsinki makes for one of the novel's flattest scenes...
...Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen ROGUES, not hermits, are the traditional tellers of picaresque tales...
...The note reads only "Hello...
...I don't want to be ashamed of my early films," he explains...
...They are also prone to the same excesses—an adolescent preoccupation with narcotics and violence, as well as carnal and scatological matters...
...a smug air of being impressed with their own big ideas...
Vol. 87 • January 2004 • No. 1
