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focuses the novel's moral center. Where we had been thinking of
Fish as likable but lost, irresponsible, out of control, we suddenly
realize that we have also been seeing him as a conscientious objector
to life's easy answers.
It's not just the ease of those answers he objects to-he also
objects to their content. The bad guys are rich, the sap of their lives
transfused to their possessions. The good guys, particularly Fish
himself, have obeyed Thoreau's injunction to "simplify, simplify."
The bare simplicity of Fish's material life is inversely proportional to
the richness of his consciousness. Since his divorce, he has divested
himself of possessions. But simplifying proves to be just as much
symptom as it is cure of Fish's malaise. Now forty-two, he is an
English teacher at a prep school near Boston-a comfortable way to
make a living without having to make a life. He takes a summer job
in Cambridge, at Municipal Systems, Inc.-ostensibly to pay for a
new car, but actually to make himself believe in the existence of the
real world.
Fish's main problem, like one of our culture's, is a lack of
reality. (Engel uses the now-unfashionable device of the
representative protagonist, whose psychological dilemma mirrors
the dilemma of the culture, and he does it in a way that vindicates
the device.) Fish has trouble feeling the "world's thingishness" (as
we know by now, the very proliferation of objects and messages
makes our objects a mirage and our messages empty). Fish's
problem with reality has culminated, just before the novel begins, in
a self-destructive automobile accident, which left a long scar down
one side of his face, severing the "smooth mask of the
well-nourished but deracinated American Jew." This scar is the
emblem of the change in Fish, which, both psychologically and
culturally, is Engel's ultimate subject in the novel.
The accident initiates the events that lead Fish to change his
life, which he does on the old Freudian battlefronts oflove and work.
Appropriately, his work at Municipal Systems is to bring to life the
dead prose of worthwhile, group-written reports on urban pilot
projects. The solipsist is redeemed by redeeming the denatured
group writing of reports on projects conducted by groups for the
benefit of other groups. The office of Municipal Systems itself is a
lesson in discovering the possibility of community in unlikely places.
Located in a renovated mill, on the "undesirable" periphery of
hopelessly trendy and commodity-corrupted Harvard Square, it is a
large, open room, full of light, in which
