294
PARTISAN REVIEW
modulations into a different narrative key, so that stories in a relatively
conventional mode about life in New Hampshire and Massachusetts
alternate and mingle with slightly surreal pieces referring to Chi!, and
again with strange unlocatable pieces which are indeed set out almost
like abstract problems, with an eerie atmosphere which seems
to
place
them at a metaphysical distance while at the same time making them
seem oddly close to home: ("The Investiture, " "The Nap," 'The Lie,"
and-a marvellous one in a rather Pirandelloesque mood-"The
Masquerade" ). A good example of Banks' unobtrusive skills is "With
Chi! at Kitty Hawk, " which focusses on the feelings of a woman who
has just left her husband in an attempt to start a "new life," only to
realise that she has entered a new form of "entrapment" -a familiar
enough theme, perhaps, but here handled with unusual nuance and
understanding as Banks traces out the ensuing feelings. The final
episode consists of a visit
to
the Wright Brothers Museum, where the
sense of their achievement gives the woman a plausibly epiphanic
exhilaration, and a determination to make some kind of knockabout
flying machine of her own "out of the junk of her life so far. " "Then as
if a wonder were unfolding before her eyes, filling her with awe, she
saw a large, clear image of the two men from the midwest, their clumsy
wire, wood and cloth aircraft, the sustained passion, the obsession,
which was the work, their love for it and for each other.
It
was like
discovering a room in her own house that she had never before
suspected even existed, opening a door that she'd never before opened,
looking in and seeing an entire room, unused, unknown, altering
thoroughly and from then on her view of the entire house." Banks'
stores have just such an effect, opening up new areas of domestic space
which we didn 't know were in the house. The collection is nicely
framed by two stories concerning, precisely, searches for survivors. The
first recalls the fate of the explorer, Hudson, and imagines searching
for that unfortunate captain of the
Discovery
who was set adrift by his
own crew. The last moves to the present with a train crash in
California and the loss of a young boy in the wreckage. A search is
made of the "devastated site" but it is suddenly realised how futile it is.
"It looked like a place where a war had been lost. " The search goes on
at the fictional level as the author opens other doors, quietly recording
what does survive-and what does not.
I must confess that I had some trouble with Mark Mirsky's
The
Secret Table,
though it was clearly written with passion at a high level
of intensity.
In
describing it I can' t do better than the blurb which, for
once, I will quote. "Mark Mirsky sets side by side two novellas of young
