There’s
an invigorating Jonathan Lethem short story in the March 19th New
Yorker (ostensibly and pointlessly designated The Style Issue). ‘Lucky
Alan’ brings to mind Saul Bellow, not just for the excited, jumbled rush of
adjectives but for the rugged and unexpected camaraderie that his characters feel
for one another. Since Bellow died he’s been mentioned a lot; at the Key West Literary Seminar his
name came up repeatedly, and Ian McEwan’s introduction page to Saturday
features a lengthy quotation from Herzog. In a world of intellectual
dissispation and general detachment, Bellow’s feverish, unfettered humanity and
reckless erudition is missed. That’s why Lethem’s dense prose is so welcome.
It’s not the ‘what’s not there’ school of style, but the ‘cradle your darlings’
school, and it requires commitment--and a dictionary.
There
are echoes of Humboldt’s Gift here in the prickly, garrulous relationship
between Blondy and Grahame that is part friendship, part mentor/student. In this
passage the central characters--one an underemployed actor, the other a theatre
director-have just watched a film together.
“”Ugetsu”
astonished me. Discussing it after the two-fifteen matinee, while we looked on
Sixth Avenue for a restaurant with a suitable bar, Blondy said that for years
he’d felt that two scenes toward the end of the film were reversed from their
ideal order-the only flaw, he’d always thought, in a perfect work of art-but
that today, sitting at Film Forum, waiting for it, he couldn’t spot the flaw
he’d earlier been so certain of. “What’s so pathetic is that I’d presumed to go
around all these years sure that I knew better than Mizoguchi! It’s as though I
had to defend myself against the film’s perfection.” I was awed, as I maybe was
supposed to be, at the scrupulousness with which he dwelled on what he cared
for.”
It’s
the passion of the art fanboy, a soulful fanaticism that is so refreshing in an era
that feels entirely about becoming more distracted, not more focussed.