302
STEPHEN DONADIO
surprise that by the end of this book, Hector, despite his dissatisfaction,
is right out there playing ball.
Burt Blechman's game is more ambitious. As the recurring diagram
reiterates, the
Stations
in his book are 'Stations of the cross and subway.
The theme is the human condition, or the pursuit of corruption. The
role of Christ is played (ironically) by 901 ("a hunched-up nine
la:boriously peeping through a zero hole, .. . phallus at full attention"),
a voyeur, an aging pervert, modem man; pestered, in this hallucinated
subway, by Our Leader, Hero, and man-eating Mom (Madonna), he
is vaguely pursued by the middle-class
D,
Dominick Wright, Dom, doom,
angel of death, a crooked morals officer, America.
This anxious chase is carried on in a prose of puns and anagrams,
allusive and ornate, composed of borrowings and leavings from the Bible,
nursery rhymes, and Shakespeare. But Mr. Blechman's literacy cannot
save this book: it is both kittenish and morbid, a combination as un–
pleasant as it is improbable. The author's glibness 'cannot conceal the
hollowness of all the brooding
angst
cliches in which he deals, cliches
relating to a world more theoretical than real, in whicl1 rrtan moves
mechanically, "a wound-up toy." Nevertheless, "the stations must
be
traveled, like it or not. From a troubled cave toward Egypt. Or was it
another place--JGrand Central, 42nd, what's the difference?
[N.B.,
there
is a difference.] Greece, Constantinople, Rome, all aboard for Constan–
tinople. As man reaches the end, that last black station called now,
he looks over his shoulder and sees it's been nothing but a game, a grim
hopeless game on a forlorn pear-shaped board." So much for history.
As for modern man's predicament, "There is no moral. There never w.as.
There's only life and, 901, you've spent it. You're an old turd, an old
dried-up dungheap searching for a toilet resting place." The less said
about this, the better.
'
The mood of
J.
P. Donleavy's stories is very different: it is that
of the late afternoon of a long day of lone and worried loafing, with a
"fat red sun" which seems to mock the leanness of one's life. The frag–
ments collected in
Meet My Maker The Mad Molecule
are likable but
slight; their charm is an inadequate virtue. The flatness of this prose of
questions without question marks is unrelieved by characters distinguish–
able from it; indeed, there is only one real character, and Alphonse A,
Franz F, and Gustav G, Cornelius Christian, Mike, 'and Mr. D are all
names for that lackadaisical and melancholy man.
Gently troubled, disengaged, he hardly seems to touch the world;
insisting, quietly, upon his singularity, he makes up little mental poems
to keep himself alive, to give experience a pleasant shape, to be trium–
phant. Now and then attempting roguishness
to
cheer himself up, he
