PARTISAN REVIEW
131
And like Sartre, Wurlitzer is trying to find in the novel a mode
for his ideas. The book is highly intellectual; its confusions are carefully
written and deliberate. It is a record of a state of mind-of a world
supposedly timeless without history or responsibility, a world that Wur–
litzer, for all his skill, cannot sustain even within the pages of a short
novel. Time does become apparent, events sequential. From the moment
the nameless hero calls himself "Nog" and falls in with Meredith and
Lockett he is involved in their Bonnie and Clyde arrangements and,
when Lockett dies, Meredith forces him to fulfill Lockett's role in their
"plan." Utterly passive, save for the invention of fantasies that protect
him
from reality, Nog thinks: "I am helpless before a plan. She must
know that. I am so tired. I might as well embrace the plan. I will any–
way." The plan involves boarding a mysterious freighter headed for the
Panama Canal with a doctor's bag full of drugs. Their mission on board
seems rather pointless, though they administer drugs to the one fellow
passenger, an old Tennessee Williams crone, her cabin complete with
brass bed, potted ferns, orange cat on yellow chaise lounge. Wurlitzer is
versatile. He can go from a Western set to Haight Ashbury to a Cali–
fornia beach party with complete accuracy, but he never stays long-the
withdrawal is always to preserve the narrator's lack of involvement and
personality. Especially toward the end some of the events of
Nog
seem
melodramatic and arbitrary, though one can appreciate Wurlitzer's in–
tention to keep the novel open-ended, with the hero drifting into new
visions of old incidents.
One of the best maneuvers in
Nog
is the transferral of names from
one character to another, not because they are interchangeable-they
are not-but because they would like to play another role in fantasy.
The narrator calls
himself
Nog (after a wandering Finn he's run across
in Oregon) only when Meredith first asks his name. Until this time the
name has been given to an elusive being (perhaps real) and is used by
Lockett before his death as though it had some magic powers. And
Meredith accuses the narrator: "You killed Lockett. You wanted to be
Lockett and when he abandoned you on the ledge you had him killed."
Finally she has the man we have come to know as Nog tattooed on the
ass with the name Lockett, but the inventions of the mind can play
havoc even with the indelible. At the end this man recalls his first meet–
ing with Meredith:
I first met Meredith over a jar of artichoke hearts. But it's Lockett
now ... Lockett's hands moved easily over the frozen-meat pack–
ages, slipping them into his army overcoat. We discovered each other
stealing.
