JOHN TYTELL
283
Peter Spielberg's collection of stories,
The Hermetic Whore,
shares
many of the characteristics of recent experimental fiction-a thematic
focus on auguries of apocalypse, a ribaldry intending to shock exclu–
sively, a reliance on sexual fantasy as the supreme animation (a trait
evident also in his novel,
Twiddledum, Twaddledum).
The point of
departure is usually that of what has been called speculative fiction,
where the writer's energy is more concerned with the twists and
implications of the most bizarre possibilities than with character in
action. So, in the title story, we encounter a program to encourage
masturbation as a means of preventing anomie among the aged, in
another story incestuous children adopt new parents, and in "Love's
Hot
&
Cold Compresses" a couple becomes locked in a permanent
coitus. While the conceptions are clever, the humor seems sensational
rather than able to help us understand the ways of the world, and some
of the sexual circumstance, as in "The Last Skirt Trick," will amuse
only men. For me, the strongest part of the book is its final section, a
sinister fable called "Dog Days," in which some guests at a dinner
party meet a congregation of lifeless blacks on a roof, and a marvellous
geneological triptych called "The Duration Of Life."
Leon Rooke's
The Broad Back of the Angel
is another well crafted
collection of stories with a successfully bouyant sense of fantasy in
three sketches about a surrealist magician, grim comedy in a pair of
stories set in Mexico, and two superb pieces about antipathetic friends
aging. The thematic link here is instances of failed love, and Rooke
demonstrates a deft fluency in handling a woman's viewpoint. Both
Rooke and Spielberg are capable of restraint as well as imagination,
and they avoid the easy gimmicks and electronic kitsch that has marred
some experimental writing lately. Although they are both interested in
the comedy of sexual confrontation, it is usually not as much for erotic
purpose as to emphasize the awkwardness and anxiety of relationship.
Which brings me
to
Steven Millhauser's
Portrait of a Romantic,
a
substantial novel about the adolescence of Arthur Grumm, a bored,
moody and perplexed product of the middle class. Millhauser is an–
other gifted writer with good descriptive abilities and a finely devel–
oped sense of detail who is chiefly occupied, in this book, with the
sensibility of maturation. Like Rooke, Spielberg, and most experimen–
talists, Millhauser romantically asserts that a work of fiction should
"supplant the world" rather than render it exactly. Unlike Rooke and
Spielberg, however, Millhauser tries to suppress the element of the
grotesque and his ensuing mood can often be drab and unanimated.
His adolescent enjoys precisely the kind of lugubrious melancholy that
a writer like Spielberg would mercilessly burlesque. But Millhauser
