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MARCIA CAVELL
Kirby Farrell's first novel ("cony-catching" - the art of the con–
fidence man) is also, in a very different temper, about deception and
self-deception, love a game of confidence betrayed. As one of the char–
acters says, "every love affair is a detective story the object of which
is to identify not the criminal alone, but the crime also."
Mr. Farrell loves words, and his images often strike me as exact:
a broken window "seeds" the rug with glass; a woman tuning a harp–
sichord "trips each note over and over until it warps into pitch in a
muffled alarum." But as for his larger theme, I never did identify either
criminal or crime and fairly quickly came not to care whether I did.
For it
is
the manner of fiction which appeals to Mr. Farrell and not
the mind. The story is narrated,
a
la
The Alexandria Quartet
to which
it owes much, from three different points of view; characters appear
before they are properly introduced; tense shifts not only between action
I
and recollection but between innumerable past and past presents. And
none of these devices serves to focus and refocus the reader's conscious–
ness in surprising ways; they simply lead it astray.
Moving between Cambridge and Cape Cod, the novel concerns a
lot of fairly decadent characters: an ambivalent harpsichordist, Naomi
Balfour, and a pontificating writer, Sebastian DeNuys, both of whom
we are told at the beginning will die - or rather, have died - in
violent and pointless ways; the first narrator, Clive Halwynd, who from
time to time shares Naomi and her harpsichord with Sebastian; an
archaeologist, a wealthy Radcliffe girl, a wealthy industrialist and so
on. The intrigues are not only sexual but economic and political.
Nothing comes from all this - no marvelously baroque portrait of
an involuted society, not, as promised, a psychological mystery story, not
a tale of relationships interesting on their own account. Once one has
I
identified the characters by profession and class there is little else to
I
say about them. And I find that the theme of deception between people
[
who are portrayed as so little able to commit themselves to anything
in the first place is self-deceived. Halwynd says at the beginning that
he wants "to make a poetry of the past, to feel a tide of words sifting
it harmlessly" out of his mind. He speaks, unwittingly I presume, for
the accomplishment of the novel as a whole.
In the year of the assassinations of Kennedy and King and of the
Chicago convention, a composer, Wendt, spends a summer with his
wife and teen-age children in paradisal Santa Barbara. He is at work
on his
Opus
43, an opera about the loves of Horace Walpole.
This is the protagonist of the short novel which, together with a
