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ous label : of course his hero is a voyeur, but so are other characters
in the novel, and the reader is implicated too. There's also the faint
suggestion of a case history . Morrison's title does not refer to her
heroine but is instead a passionate and incomplete epithet which is
also an epitaph . We never learn the dead girl's actual name, and a
powerful , unfinished gesture of love is enacted by the word. These
titles tell us a good deal about how each novelist goes about present–
ing his or her materials. Tournier is lavish with vivid, tangible sym–
bols; Mathews is more abstract, deadpan, and removed, leaving
more cogitation up to the reader; Moravia, for all his psychological
penetration , is also ironically withheld and ambiguous; Morrison is
the most sweeping and sympathetic in her treatment of the story; she
seems closest to her material .
The lives depicted with such stylistic variations by Tournier,
Moravia, Mathews, and Morrison vary widely. We're not in Beattie
or Carver country ; no disaffected suburbanites or glum neo-Ver–
monters walk these pages .
The Golden Droplet
recounts a Berber
shepherd's odyssey (the word reveals my Eurocentric bias, but I can
think of no better one, except possibly pilgrimage) from his native
oasis via Oran and Marseille to the
ne plus ultra
of Western chic, the
Place Vendome . Idris's journey takes him from a timeless nomadic
past to a harried present both familiar (to us) and exotic (to him) .
Whether the little shepherd is moving from reality toward artifice is
a topic Tournier never tires of elegantly troping.
The narrator-hero of Moravia's
The Voyeur,
a professor of
French literature in present-day Rome, looks back nostalgically to
his student days in the sixties as the era that made his life meaningful
by, among other things, locking him into conflict with his father,
also a university professor, in whose house Edoardo and his wife
Sylvia live. The most spatially enclosed of these four novels,
The
Voyeur
never loses an air of paranoid claustrophobia that tempts one
to transform the work in one's imagination into cinema, as has in
fact been done with other Moravia novels. The long hall, night
noises , rumpled bedclothes would be easy; but the bedridden father's
penis , described with a fascinated precision reminiscent of
Portnoy's
Complaint,
might be more challenging to the cinematographer.
In
Cigarettes ,
Harry Mathews uses fifteen slimmish sections to
cut back and forth between 1936 and 1963, and also between and
among the lives of thirteen characters; the settings are Saratoga and
Greenwich Village, the characters an artist, a lawyer, a critic, a stu–
dent , parents , lovers , siblings , patients, rivals , and whatever else
