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PARTISAN REVIEW
pleasure in the carefully excogitated detail. . . ." The careful detail
in this novel certainly gives great pleasure. For example, Staines, a
character we can't stand, explains his house, his fruit trees, and his
"sky-blue tiled pool": "He'd also, with related panache, shown me
how the aquatic vacuum cleaner sucked leaves and bugs from the
water and erased the algae from the tiles." The very brilliance of this
detail makes us wonder, as Kermode seems to wonder in his double–
edged praise, whether our pleasure should be an embarrassed one–
whether the brilliance is for brilliance's sake alone, or whether it
serves something more than the guilty pleasure of the connoisseur.
I think it serves something more. Like James, his evident
master, Engel offers us precision of observation, particularly of
psychological observation, as a way of being in the world. Fish
("real" name Harry Karp), like James's protagonists, establishes
his superior subtlety, his sensitivity to the kind of truth we can find
only in the particular, against a background of reductive, distorting
stereotype. Moreover, he insists on the same freedom from
stereotype in his life that he is allowed in his thought, which
puts him in the great American countercultural tradition of the
Thoreauvian rebel.
The bad guys in this novel-and, for all its Jamesian moral
complexity and epistemological uncertainty, it resolves itself clearly
into the good guys against the bad-take bland cultural stereotypes
as the limit of life's possibility. Fish's father, a successful New York
Jewish businessman, had bought an eighteenth-century seat in
Connecticut, "acquired a dog and a thorn stick and he walked the
acreage of his modest estate in corduroy trousers and heavy shoes,
... squiring." Elsewhere, the algae-erasing Staines proffers his life
history in a neat package, lasting exactly the duration of a restaurant
meal, complete with smug, self-satisfied moral. Fish says of Staines:
The tempo of his speech is intended to convey, I suppose,
something of the duration of this process of discovery-that his
worries had been ignorant or innocent, that he'd missed
nothing of real value, that in the long run not only was most of
what was gainable in the world going to come to him anyway
but that if much of it had come earlier and more easily he might
have mistaken those rewards for the whole process and received
less rather than more ultimately.
This silly life story, reeled off without pause for breath, makes us feel
just how unsummarizable Fish's life, by contrast, is. This passage
