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PARTISAN REVIEW
man who wrote the other stories. Thus life and art, on paper at least,
become parallel texts; thus the last story sheds light on the first six,
and vice versa. This clever gimmick is, of course, wasted on any
reader who has no intention of rereading the pieces in the pale fire–
light of the delayed revelation.
It
also seems like a piece of legerde–
main dreamed up after the fact to make the impact of the sketches
somehow greater than the sum of their parts.
The most worrisome problem of all, however, is that this final
novella, which occupies half of the volume, takes us back into the
busy hands and idle mind of a middle-aged writer heavy with self–
pity, lustful and lonely and, for all his earnest ruminations, com–
mitted to somewhat unremarkable pursuits ("I'm fairly sure I can
summon anyone of a half-dozen women who on little or no notice
will be delighted to spend the night with me. That's a modest
estimate. They will get in their cars, fly in from other cities.") When
this character is not, quite literally, analyzing his scrotum, he is go–
ing through the with-it, well-educated and thoroughly hollow mo–
tions of a Greenwich Village trendy showing a visitor round all
things chic or de rigueur- the stream of his consciousness babbles
past all the familiar topics of a Manhattan dinner party: roaches,
doormen, muggers, graffiti, the subway and, en passant, New Age
salons, Caribbean trips, Club Med Zen retreats and-inescapably–
analysts. In the course of this guided tour around the penthouses of
the glitterati, we are introduced to Freddie who "spends his days now
trying to live down his Pulitzer in fiction," and in the grand show–
stopping finale, we are invited to a publishing party at the Dakota
where we catch glimpses of "Norman and Kurt, Joyce ... Bill and
Rose," and even, inexplicably, Boy George. The loftiest thing in the
entire story are its Soho apartments.
Connecting this surface-thin metropolite with the shadowed
beat of the earlier stories does not seem a profitable exercise. More
distressingly, however, the final story reads like a self-addressed
greeting-card: not only does Doctorow confer upon his narrative
persona his own alma mater, age, profession and hometown, but he
also, like Yates, makes no attempt to dissociate himself from this
charmless and superficial lecher. Most of all, he does not bother to
put into perspective such opinions of his mouthpiece as "But of
course, happiness is intolerable for more than two seconds" or "I
want to be who 1 really am with everyone, all the time." Either this is
authorial compassion-to a fault-or it is something worse.
At the end, Doctorow tries to dignify his meanderings by add-
