306
PARTISAN REVIEW
everyone works visible to everyone else at
all
times, a condition
I'd learned first to tolerate and then quickly to like. . .. One of
the secondary advantages of working at Municipal Systems this
summer is a growing suspicion that the need for private being
can be exaggerated.
Fish's new job is one step toward growing up and finding
himself. By rescuing Fish from his twenty-five-year adolescence, this
successful resolution also redeems the possibility of unalienated,
unstereotyped adulthood-adulthood that takes on responsibility,
community, and the "thingishness of the world," without
succumbing to the reduction and distortion that Fish had avoided by
remaining an adolescent .
Unfortunately, Engel works out Fish's redemption primarily
through love, and in doing so partly reduces it to crude oedipal
terms. Gretta, the heroine of sorts, is yet another Eternal Female,
with a "full, somnolent body." We first see her lounging ludicrously
in her son's little plastic pool: "Thick, sun-ruddied, the woman's
hide was dappled by a blue bikini and the shadows of leaves. There
was something intimidating as well as attractive.. .. " She is also
Mysterious and Elusive. But more-or worse-than that, winning
Gretta ultimately becomes, for Fish, a question of beating out the
other male baboons, the main one being chubby, sickly Michael,
Gretta's son. One suspects that Engel has made Michael potbellied,
ill,
sedentary, and wise beyond his years precisely because he
represents the central sexual threat. (These details both neutralize
the threat and enact the guilty resentment it occasions.) Early in the
novel, Michael interrupts a dinner party and forces Gretta to go
upstairs with him because he can't sleep. As Fish watches them go,
"something closes around the center of [his] body like a cold collar."
Fish's ex-wife Janet is a smothering mother with enormous
breasts. Fish becomes a man (his intimidating father having finally
died) by casting off the guilt Janet has always made him feel,
preempting other people's claims on Gretta, imposing his will on her
(he is her patsy until the novel's climax), and finally taking charge of
Michael, paying him back for that "cold collar" by being the one to
administer Michael's insulin shots
in the stomach.
But, when the novel
is not controlled by this resentful, aggressive desire-and, in spite of
the dominance of the "love" plot, most of the time it is not-its
character drawing is highly inflected and unpredictable, and its
vision is worthy of its style.
MARIANNE DEKOVEN
