BOOKS
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where Melville begins, where Faulkner begins, where Irwin begins.
Robert Bridges's poem ends:
o
king of joy, what is thy thought?
I dream thou knowest it is nought,
And wouldst in darkness come, but thou
Makest the light wher'er thou go.
Ah yet no victim of thy grace,
None who e'er long'd for thy embrace,
Hath cared to look upon thy face.
INTERIORS
NEIL SCHMITZ
DETOUR. By Michael Brodsky.
Urizen Press. $8.95.
Michael Brodsky knows nothing of reticence. Or tact. He
writes in what could be called the tradition of Great Ranters, of
Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, and Philip Roth-obsessed excavators
of bumpy inner terrain. Both the charm and the frustration of this
tradition lie in its infantile, exhibitionist quality: the novels it pro–
duces tend to be marvelously, liberatingly undignified but, at the same
time, disturbingly arrested. This mixed aspect is reflected, too, in the
writing, which is frequently dazzling but strangely limited in repre–
sentative power; the world of these novels is an intensely privatized
one, without conventional give-and-take. Dramatic interchange be–
tween characters is rare, almost as though the primal fissure between
inner and outer, between the imperious writerly self and the created
written selves that intrude their presences into the narrative, has not yet
occurred.
Michael Brodsky's first novel,
Detour,
is remarkable precisely
because it explores the condition of its own involution-an "I"
constantly threatened by its potential for extinction in the face of other,
competing 'T's-with an arrogant disregard for anything but the
entanglements of that condition.
Detour,
therefore, is not, as one of the
jacket-blurbs has it, "implicitly about growing up in the 1970s."
Perhaps the novel's acute, chronic disengagement is characteristic of
the 70s, but it is hard to see where
Detour
is "about" anything other
than its own meticulous, privileged sensibility.
It
is, in fact, the sort of
