Edmund Wilson wasn’t an admirer of genre fiction, mystery novels especially. He asked, testily, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?”
I
held Wilson’s comment in my mind while reading Marcel Theroux’s new
novel, “Strange Bodies.” It’s a pop narrative with a payload of plot
contrivance. I wouldn’t call it genre fiction exactly; it’s too
eccentric for that. But its machinations snap together like something
bought at Ikea.
Mr.
Theroux’s novel is a techno-thriller with echoes of both “Frankenstein”
and a Sherlock Holmes whodunit. It’s the kind of book in which people
fall and bonk their heads on doorknobs at inopportune moments. It’s got
brain implants and reincarnation and Russian bad guys and sneaky
murders. It’s all pretty baroque.
The
good news about “Strange Bodies” is that Mr. Theroux, when he can
extricate himself from the Silly String of his plot and find some open
ground, is a superb writer. His novel would charm Wilson, were he alive,
when it didn’t bore him out of his mind.
Mr. Theroux — he is the son of Paul Theroux — is the author of four previous novels, including “Far North“ (2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. My favorite among his books is “The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes” (2001), a prickly entertainment that rummages around in his literary family’s dynamics.
How
good can Mr. Theroux’s prose be? One woman in his new novel is
described as “so etiolated by Bikram yoga that she looked like gristle.”
Another has “false eyelashes so big and silver they opened and shut
like Venus flytraps.”
This author has a well-stocked mind. Noting the smell of blood in the air, his main character says, “It was Assia Wevill,
wasn’t it, who said Ted Hughes’s hands smelled like a butcher’s?” At
another point, this man declares, “I seemed to have turned into a
superfluous and pitiful character, like someone in a William Trevor
story.”
The
plot in “Strange Bodies” spins around Dr. Nicholas Slopen, an
impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar whose wife, a classical musician,
has left him. She’s taken their kids and fled with a wealthier, groovier
man. Slopen is 39 and comprehensively miserable about his blasted life.
“I could barely,” he says, “afford to buy books in hardback.”
A
notable thing about Slopen is that when we first meet him, he’s already
been killed in a car crash. So who’s this man who’s walking around,
telling everyone he is Nicholas Slopen? Before long, the new fellow —
Slopen 2.0 — is tossed into a mental hospital.
It
wouldn’t be sporting to give too much of this book’s plot away. The
narrative hops back and forth in time, and comes to involve a cache of
newly found letters apparently written by Johnson.
Perhaps
the best thing about the strange plot of “Strange Bodies” is that it
gives us the splendid vista of Dr. Samuel Johnson, seemingly reborn in a
thuggish body, in 21st-century London. Johnson dashes home, his house
now a tourist site. He is taken out for pizza, an event that prompts him
to utter what is probably the most delightful sentence of this young
year: “Depend upon it, sir, many a rich man dining tonight upon roast
swan would as lief exchange his vittles for a plate of this cooked
cheese!”
Watching
Johnson perambulate around London is an upside to this novel’s plot. A
downside is that Mr. Theroux, given his novel’s interest in various
kinds of authenticity, too often spells out its themes, most of them
about the nature of humanity. “Oughtn’t we to celebrate our sameness,
our commonalities?” we read. “The truth is, we are virtually identical.
We are interchangeable. That is the true beauty of humanity: ant beauty,
not peacock beauty.”
This novel is also filled with little cliffhangers and small utterances that could appear in an Arthur Conan Doyle novel:
“I
was drawing closer to the hidden chamber of the infinitely dark truth”;
“I felt a chill come over me”; “This was the thread that I followed
into the heart of the labyrinth.”
On
some level, Mr. Theroux is sending up mystery conventions as well as
aping them. There’s an element of spoof here, if not a successful
element. The novelist John Barth was once accused of writing spoofs. He
replied that the word sounds like imperfectly suppressed flatulence.
There
are beautiful things, real things, tucked in this novel. When Slopen
comes across apparently new prose from Samuel Johnson, the style is so
familiar to him that he becomes emotional. It is as if he were seeing
“the gait of a loved one on a distant hillside, the smell of my
children’s hair, the varied sensations evoked by my mother’s cooking.”
Slopen,
a young fogy, explains this novel’s sensibility, somewhat, by stating
that his father was technically a Victorian. “He was born in 1899 and
was in his 70s when I was conceived.” The foxy humorist in Mr. Theroux
can’t resist adding that Slopen was thus “the belated product of
19th-century testicles.”
It’s this side of Mr. Theroux, unboxed by plot and pastiche, that you want to come out and play.
STRANGE BODIES
By Marcel Theroux
292 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário