454
PARTISAN REVIEW
novel which gives serious contemporary fiction a bad name, and helps
to explain why most people contentedly wallow in pulp-fiction.
Detour
is more radically disdainful of its audience than, say, Renata
Adler's
SPeedboat,
which at least went through the gestures of rustling
up a subject, even if that subject proved only to be a certain style, an
elegant mode of perceiving a vastly inelegant world. The narrator of
Detour
has not gotten that far; Brodsky writes brilliantly, assuredly,
but that brilliance cannot be said to have solidified into a style, because
it is concerned with something more elementary, with that which
predates style: identity. "Where was the caretaker for the stall," Brodsky
writes, "where was the staff member like Steve to examine my urine, to
decide whether I was innocent or guilty, man or child, man or woman,
living or dead, solid citizen or derelict, nice guy or deviate?"
Detour
has to be acknowledged, critically speaking, less for the
ways in which it approximates other novels than for the ways in which
it departs from them, even fraudulently. Brodsky has unlearned all the
age-old, circumscribing rules of storytelling: he
shows
nothing and
narrates everything. The idea of "character" falls hopelessly by the
wayside, although there are several differently-named speakers who
hold forth in similarly congested, intermittently fascinating mono–
logues. "Anne, " for instance, is a former heroin addict whom the
unnamed, first-person narrator meets at the Thalia movie theater.
Within no time she is asking piercing visceral questions-"Are you a
virgin?" -and the narrator is answering with the agile intellectualiza–
tions that are his stock-in-trade: " I am a virgin .... But even if I were to
fuck you I would still retain my virginity. Virginity is incessant. Why
does one fuck herald the end of apprenticeship. Every woman is
different. Every other woman would still be a threat, a challenge. And
anyway, virgin is viable, black is beautiful, gay is good, epileptic is
echt. We live in the age of the slogan. "
Their relationship follows an uneasy course as they take walks in
the Village and along the Upper West Side. Eventually, after several
lengthy soliloquies in which Anne has proven herself to be the
narrator's equal in maladaptive tendencies, she accompanies him to
Cleveland, where he is to begin medical school. Once there they meet
up with Steve, who is roaming the streets in search of people to share
his house with him. They obligingly take up residence with Steve and
his roommates, a social worker and another medical student; Linda
and Ed are cheery,
lumpen
types who go about their daily lives
untraumatically, without the extraordinary difficulty in accomodating
themselves to the habit of existence that Anne, Steve and the narrator
all share: "There were no more roles, there was no spontaneity, there
