PEARL K. l3ELL
485
her death. When, in the midst of his endless dialogues with himself and
his MacGuffin, Druff announces that "everything was linked, everything.
Everything inevitable and conjoined in the vast, limitless network of
things, merged in the world's absolute ecology," this epiphany seems
unearned and implausible. Druff is less a convincingly troubled human
being than a jumble of tics,
kvetches,
longings and lusts, wasted op–
portunities, and too many tedious asides of self-justification and self-re–
proach. Among other things the MacGuffin is an inner voice of paranoid
dread - hence the connection with "plot." (We've come a long way
from Hitchcock.)
In the past Elkin rarely missed his comic targets. With all his outra–
geously ornate and corkscrewed prose, he has been one of the most in–
ventively funny writers in America, an original whose books were buoy–
ant with comic surprise. But there's not much comedy in
The MacCuffin.
In this baggy assemblage of wiseacre idiom, cliche, equivocation and
incoherence, the "spirit of narrative" that supposedly provides the novel's
structure collapses under the oppressive weight of Elkin's arched and
buttressed obfuscations, his giddy addiction to catalogues, inventories,
lists, puns. Druff is too dreary to arouse our laughter, and the MacGuffin
device is too snarled in obscurity to be funny. We will forgive a writer
just about anything - if he will only make us laugh.
Sometime back, in a lecture on "the future of the novel," Elkin
remarked that "the reasonable and recognizable
is
where it's at." When
"the recognizable" informs the work of an uncommonly perceptive and
lyrical writer like Michael Cunningham, the ordinary can acquire the
luster of transcendence without sacrificing the veracity of the common–
place. This is one of the rarest and most valuable of literary gifts. While
the postmodern fascination with pastiche and parody is state-of-the-art
for flashy writers, the compassionate intelligence that Cunningham brings
to his first novel,
A Home at the End oj the World,s
is a far more affecting
way to confront the vagaries and sorrows of contemporary experience.
Despite his title, Cunningham does not attempt to draw apocalyp–
tic implications from such experience, and he is certainly not invoking
the specter of atomic conflagration that closes Mooney's
Traffic and
Laughter.
Rather, he is talking about death and the vulnerability of
expectations in the plague years of AIDS (though the word itself is not
mentioned). And he is also exploring the way the absolutes of family and
home can splinter and break, and then re-form in new, not necessarily
better, configurations of hope and uncertainty.
5A HOllie at the Elld
(if
tl/{' World.
l3y
Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
518.95.
