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was only laborious camouflage, the minimum of hubbub to camou–
flage a long joyless vigil that was called living."
The narrator abortively attends classes, abortively makes love to
Anne, takes a part-time job teaching in a language school from which
he is fired. He has, it appears, not yet been fully born: " For all of my
posturings I was only a superannuated fetus ." Even the language he
uses with such fierce skill is not his birthright: "'Cut it,' I said. I never
use that expression. From whom was I borrowing it. One wintry night
he would bang at my door and demand payment for unauthorized use
of phrase and inflection." He decides to pull up his shaky, newly–
acquired roots and flies to Canada, where he wanders around various
cities (" I had intended to go to Toronto but I found myself in
Montreal" ) for several days, absorbedly poking at his psychic wounds.
He goes to the movies, which, throughout the novel, feature as his
great passion-allowing him to escape from his relentlessly, derisively
observing conscious self into "the sacred time of celluloid," where he
floats peaceably among borrowed, star-touched selves. He imparts
some of his impressive, rehearsed-sounding observations to a girl who
stops him in the street: " I grew up among Jews . . .. And I never
associated them with the sexual urge. They always seemed to have too
much contempt for it .... And yet I am pleased they are more than
human. They don't drink or beat their wives ... . They evicted the
goyische part of themselves. They did not have time for tenderness,
tenderness was an impediment on the way to self-defense." The girl is
confused by this fellow who darts around, pecking at his tiny crumb of
brain-food like a frantic sparrow; what she does understand is that he
doesn' t want-can't tolerate-unmediated, "goyische" forms of nour–
ishment: '''You don 't have
to
make love to me,' she said. " Then,
quixotically, he decides to return to Cleveland and arrives home to find
Steve on the sofa, caressing Anne's foot. The novel closes on a resigned
sentiment, expressed straight-facedly by an unironic personality but
which resonates with an almost noble irony within the context of
Detour
because it is a long-deferred concession to the public domain,
the first chink of daylight to penetrate a womb-like atmosphere: " For a
change Ed had the last word. 'You do what you have to do. '"
It
is hardly surprising that Brodsky's narrator, like Alexander
Portnoy, is fixated on bowel movements, especially paternal ones; he
can, indeed, be seen as an attenuated, less earthy version of that earlier
Jewish Son-swamped in the same anguished self-consciousness, a
terror of being-in-the-flesh so extreme that it traverses the neurotic into
the painfully, tellingly absurd. But most
unlike
Roth, Brodsky has
