450
STEPHEN
DONADIO
ing it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a
city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban
horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence."
Oedipa Maas is the heroine's name; the story is concerned with her
inv.olvement in a mystery which she is never wholly sure she under–
stands. Acting as the executrix of Pierce Inverarity's will (even his name
is an imperative), she discovers evidence of W.A.S.T.E., a secret postal
system which has as its symbol a muted horn (the letters stand for "We
Await Silent Tristero's Empire"). To the end, when Inverarity's intrigu–
ing stamp collection is auctioned off as Lot 49, Oedipa remains in doubt
about the system's operation, meaning, even its existence: " ... they'll call
it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of
LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed
density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are
truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine,
arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery
system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the ab–
sence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American
you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot
has been mounted against you...."
The ironies are intricate, the prose composed
in
styles varying from
scholarly exposition to parodies of J acobean tragedy to TV commer–
cialese; but Mr. Pynchon does not lose control. His primary observation
remains central, and it is one which our current foreign policy only
seems to confirm: that paranoia is the last sense of community left us.
Set
in
Gilean, Ohio,
Omensetter's Luck)
a first novel by William
H. Gass, explores other possibilities. For Mr. Gass, apparently a devotee
of Jean-Paul Sartre's
Nausea)
the greatest threat to the happy society
seems to be the existence of a conflict between comprehending and being.
Indeed, if Brackett Omensetter is an unusual man, it is because, as one
character notes, "It seemed to me that you were like those clouds, as
natural and beautiful. You knew the secret-how to be." Omensetter
lives beyond the reach of language; by refusing to define himself, he is
refusing to live in a world of words, a world conceived rather than
directly experienced.
The central struggle in the novel is between Omensetter and the
Reverend Jethro Furber, whose "fierce puritan intensity" is entirely in
keeping with his lurid sexual fantasies--constructions of words which
free
him
from the consequences of action. For Furber, then, "word's were
superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your
touching, they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole and
