Pitch Dark
Renata Adler [New York Review Books]
The real event of Renata Adler’s 1983 novel Pitch Dark is its narrative voice: that of an urbane New York journalist much like Adler herself. In the book’s post-Nixon, post-Vietnam context of narrative collapse, where words are no longer bound to events or even things, there is no freedom or escape: there is only an exhaustion that feels like one or the other of these (‘What I understand about Greek tragedy is that the Athenians went to three dramas in a single day, and at the end they were so exhausted, that was the catharsis’).
As is mimetic of a work willing itself to stay calm in the midst of personal and political panic, this is a tightly controlled, high-tempo performance. Its logic is the paragraph, not the narrative, as if to escape the big stories in which we are too easily trapped. Short lines recur until they gain the force of a punchline, or of an aphorism flung hard as if to break a way out.
Adler’s speaker’s attempt at escape sees her switch identities, but she can only do so with someone may be the ‘real’ author. Moreover, the novel’s embedded framing device (a short story, in which a male and a female speaker discuss events similar to those of the book) hints at the real trap Adler’s speaker both must and cannot escape. ‘The Man’ gets to decide what the events really mean. He also gets to decide when to end the book. Here, Adler masterfully exposes both the wish for closure and the mechanism of closure as being equally culpable: secretly, we all want to be sealed in a ‘real story’. This is the problem.
Pitch Dark is a doomed, agile exercise in escapology and distraction tactics. Stories may keep us alive, runs Adler’s argument, but only at the expense of our freedom. As such, this reissue – which coincides with that of her debut, Speedboat – is a disquietingly timely survival manual. – Tim Smyth
The Word on the Street
Paul Muldoon [Faber]
If you didn’t already know, Paul Muldoon moonlights as a rock musician. It sounds like a recipe for disaster – and sort of is. Still, one hears in The Word on the Street, a collection of his lyrics for Wayward Shrines, the flections germane to his poetry. From the outset, one is aware of allusions used as bait, puns that turn the key on their perceiver, phonic gags that expose hidden formulae, even as they reveal themselves as red-herrings. Muldoon loves to outfox us, to keep score against his listener.
The songbook has Tin Pan Alley in its ears, but the awnings of Cole Porter & co. are also its Achilles’ heel. Enumerative pairings – ‘Lennon and McCartney / Lot and his wife / The unconscious and Freud’ – become tedious. The elastic conceits sometimes snap: ‘I won’t be feeling flush / Till you’re my WC’.
At his best, Muldoon can pen a line like ‘You look like your own winding sheet / Held up by two clothespins’, but more often he appropriates none of Dylan’s acerbic, only his troping, wit: You Say You’re Just Hanging Out (But I Know You’re Just Hanging In). Further unsubtleties abound: the penultimate lyric is called You’d Better Think Twice, the final lyric name-checks Bob and Cole.
You can listen to the songs, for free, on the Wayward Shrine’s website. However, Muldoon’s rhymes are so galvanized – ‘persuasive / noninvasive’, ‘lift off /Kalashnikov’, ‘ancient Greek / Mozambique’ – their timbre so oppressively exact, that music can rarely metabolize the verbal density. – Joanne O’Leary
Those Whom I Would Like To Meet Again
Giedra Radvilaviciute [Dalkey Archive]
Comprised of ten semi-fictional diary-essays, Those Whom I Would Like To Meet Again is a slim collection about exile, motherhood and the act of writing that its author, Giedra Radvilaviciute, attempts to keep unified with a consistency of tone and a rather twee set of motifs (seeds, cats, autumn, the moon) whose constant accumulation renders them unintentionally funny. When these eventually start to seem less like literary motifs than comedic call-backs, the otherwise well-maintained consistency of tone suffers, causing the collection to lose its way somewhat.
At its best, the book ably scrutinises the day-to-day relationship between reality and fiction. References to the radical work of Baudrillard and McLuhan ground a brand of humour that occasionally falls just the right of mild. (‘Terrorism, the plague of the twenty-first century, would meet its final defeat this coming Monday night at the hands of Bruce Willis.’) But at its worse – which is where it’s very often at – Those Whom I Would Like To Meet Again is a meandering amalgam of unsuccessful jokes, romantic platitudes (‘writers follow the rhyme of their hearts’), banal observations on no-longer topical subjects (‘avian flu is considerably worse than anyone realizes’), and angsty, reactionary remarks on contemporary art, modern-day vanity and poorly-written bestsellers. Some texts point to the banal and make it interesting. This one just draws it into focus. – Kevin Breathnach
