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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
day than in ours, or did they just have more servants?) As the dusty veils
of secrecy gradually lift away from the illicit love affair of Ash and
LaMotte - he supposedly content in his marriage, she proudly single and
independent - we are given not only all of the impassioned letters the
two exchanged, containing long accounts of their work in progress, but
the entire texts of epics, dramatic monologues, tales for children, short
Dickinsonesque lyrics, not to mention entries in various thick diaries, plus
the by no means briefjournal kept by Christabel's niece, who reveals that
a child was born of the poets' clandestine week in Yorkshire. It is all of
a frenzied, extravagant prodigality of words, words, words that tries the
patience - and arouses the temptation to skip - of the most
conscientious reader. As my eyes glazed amid Ash's epic "Swammerdam"
and LaMotte's mythical fantasy "Melusine," I could not always suppress
that temptation.
Why has Byatt loaded the circuits of
Possession
with such intemper–
ate overabundance? Why did she feel it necessary time and again to
interrupt a charming story of quest and passion with so many numbing
pages of dull Victorian verse written by herself? (Browning was not dull;
neither was Emily Dickinson.) Part of the problem is an obsessively liter–
ary novelist's zeal to show what she can do, to strut her stuff with exhi–
bitionistic panache. But even more important may be the modish refusal
of a present-day novelist to tell a story straight. The postmodern infatua–
tion with pastiche, the high-vaulting dazzle of ingenuity - these are the
rules of the game today, and Byatt can play it superbly. But she is so
truly
possessed
by her need to celebrate and demonstrate "the power and
delight of words" that the immediate human music of this romance is all
but drowned out by the verbal thunder. When Byatt now and then
manages to control her cleverness, she casts fresh light on love and desire
in Victoria's day compared with our own. It is her "postmodern" schol–
ars who are the priggish and frightened "children of a time that mis–
trusted love," and the supposedly repressed Victorians who are not afraid
of the risk or their passion. But this intriguing reversal of received ideas is
soon overwhelmed by her deluge of words.
If Byatt's sobriety and learning form one end of the literary spec–
trum, Ted Mooney's flashy, jazzy
Traffi( and Lallghte,2
belongs at the op–
posite extreme. The novel begins and ends with devastating fires, and in
between the conflagrations it alights on a dizzying variety of matters and
places: international diplomacy, sex, South African apartheid, disc jock–
eys, sex, rock bands, sex, Los Angeles, more sex, and everything in the
2
Traffic and Lallghter.
13y Ted Mooney. Alfred A. Knopf. $19.95.
