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move") and he strives for this by continuous acts of decomposition so
that the text never jells. Rather, it keeps blinking, and with every blink
it is doing something else. "This novel has to keep changing. Horn–
beam trees should stand tall in it. Characters should beat drums.
Beloved friends should arrive at airports.... " and so on. That there is
another side to this strategy of constant metamorphosis emerges in a
later comment. "Changes. Nothing seems to stop changing; things
slide or bump into things. I can't speak anymore." But by metamor–
phosing his own role the narrator keeps on writing, now as undertaker,
burying and commemorating his dead characters, now as detective
trying to apprehend the plot of his own plot, now a tour guide. "I take
people through many changes, across state lines, into new zones. " I am
inclined to accept the offered metaphor and assert that the book is well
worth the trip.
Things in Place
is made up of a series of short stories in which
things get to be very much out of place, or into new, unexpected and
often rather disturbing places. In one story a golf ball poacher (sic)
starts walking into a lake at night in search of his loot, moving from
secure shallows to unnegotiable depths. Suddenly-"there's no bot–
toml He's farther out than where he dived, and there's a drop in this
lake, as there is in every lake and pond in our land. These drop-offs
remind the unwary that
small things hide whole mysteries.
The drop–
off is crude, but it has the quality; we're reminded of endless lines,
special yearnings, tilted hills, knobless doors, immense cheeses, sudden
circles, swastikas in a row, blue stones, giant mushrooms" (my italics).
Jerry Bumpus' stories exploit the proposition I have italicised and
contain just such lexical drop-offs so that the reader, wary or unwary,
finds himself as they say, displaced. Partly it's a matter of moving from
daylight clarities to twiiight and nocturnal zones in which things take
up new places, very often to our considerable dis-composure. "All day
he's aware of the placid jury of clocks looking on, he feels the homage
of desks and swivel chairs, and with acquaintances all day he gets and
gives, and has careful conversations with strangers. Things usually stay
put and when there's a slip he looks the other way. But nights in bed he
closes his eyes and gives over-it all must end and begin again
I ...
Till
dawn he tries to find his way home, stumbling through such debris it's
as if the soup of the universe had sloshed out some of its logic for him
to
study." Of course these strategies are familiar from the work of the
surrealists and as with any surrealism there is always the danger of a
merely facile weirdness which can quickly bore. But with one or two
exceptions these stories do seem to shift us briefly "over into that loose
