PEARL K. BELL
mosquito, soul of silt, the Okefenokee is the swamp archetypal, the
swamp of legend, of racial memory, of HoUywood ... Four hun–
dred and thirty acres of stinging, biting, and boring insects, of maiden
cane and gum and cypress, of palmetto, slash pine and peat, of muck,
mud, slime and ooze. Things fester here, things cook down, decom–
pose, deliquesce....
483
And so on, and on, in a roaring, deafening cascade of facts, names,
creaturely customs, statistics, nature lore, for the next five paragraphs.
If
Ted Mooney likes to get things wrong, Boyle is fanatically fond
of getting things right. Two of his previous novels -
Water Music,
about
the real-life eighteenth-century explorer Mungo Park, and
World's End,
which traces the history of three Dutch and Indian families in the Hudson
River Valley over three hundred years - were anchored in substantial
research. Boyle has also done his homework for
East Is East,
with its
suave command of Japanese words and habits, the flora and fauna of
Georgia, rare species of fish, and the contentious sniping of literary rivals
in the artists' colony.
Yet some aspects of
East Is East
are disturbing. His satirical send-up
of literary infighting is obvious and predictable. The uninspired and silly
Ruth Dershowitz is subjected to more humiliation than she deserves.
When a writer named Mignonette Teitelbaum arrives on the scene, we
can't help remembering that S.
J.
Perelman did this sort of thing much
better. More seriously, though Boyle's feelings about Hiro oscillate be–
tween laughter and pity, it is the comedy of the poor wretch's ordeal
that engages him most fervently. Boyle is indeed a virtuoso of exuberant
prose and a very clever fellow, but the stench of
Schadenfreude
inevitably
tempers - or curdles - our admiration for an exuberant talent who needs
a more fruitful subject than comic victims and literary fools.
Stanley Elkin has written some wonderfully funny novels -
The
Dick Gibson Show, The Living End,
and
The Franchiser,
among others - in
which he miraculously transformed the most unlikely dross into comic
gold. He fitted God with contact lenses and unearthed a yeshiva in the
Maldive Islands. Against all odds, teetering on the edge of the unforgiv–
able, Elkin wrote a nutty, hilarious novel,
The Magic Kingdom,
about an
excursion to Disney World by an unruly bunch of terminally sick chil–
dren. Elkin has consistently thumbed his nose at the tiresome pedantry of
critics who have complained about his indifference to coherent narrative
structure and his stubborn refusal to tell a straightforward story.
