BOO KS
749
Trinidadians who call a job a "work." The case is that the middle
of life (Brossard's "upper" is anachronistic) is everywhere disap–
pearing as a resource for fiction, as an object to be taken seriously.
The im'aginative writer who seeks to comment on this level of life
-it is, after all, the experience most people believe they know best
-must communicate an awareness that what he is dealing with
does not resemble a level of life so much as it does a dandelion in
a dung hill. And the writer who seeks to create urban experience of
genuine substance and freshness is obliged to avoid it altogether.
Th e Double View,
to return to Mr. Bossard, is not quite bare.
of middling level (or better) social detail. Chicken creole and a gold
leaf clock, Scotch and soda, a Packard convertible, and volunteer
work for the Spanish refugees turn up in its pages. The details men–
tioned, though, are darts of contempt (the target is the expensive
hide of a posh
voyeuse)
, not furnishings of a familiar world. The
society of the tony lady who has a Sargeant of Granny on her wall
is at first limited to hoods and whores, and it widens with the book
only to take in Village types-Negro professors, hospitalized para–
noiacs, hipsterish admen, jobless Jewish writers and assorted re–
viewers and partygivers. In short this novelist, whose idea of Up–
town at the beginning of his career was the Garden, is still staring
hardest at the declasse.
What he sees are multiple guises, self-deceit, the hell of super–
consciousness, and the impossibility of human connection. The style
of his reporting is rapid and crisp (about a pompous party-sociolo–
gist it is said that "he uses language as a means of excommunica–
tion"). And his intelligence has a blade. Offered a choice between
liberal platitudes and hipster soulmaking he chooses neither. He al–
lows his thoughtful adman, a believer in "exploiting schizophrenia"
who by night guns with a mob, to spell out a program of self-help:
... your philosophy of niceness. It isn't relevant to modern life.
Niceness is sick, neurotic, and not, as you seem to think, "human".
. . . Instead of destroying yourself with anxiety by repressing certain
aspects of your whole self, aspects that conflict with the so-called
moral self, why, it would be better to try to express them all. For
example, if you have some criminal desires, become a part-time
thief, or at least let the emotion have some badly needed exercise.
See what I mean?
