BOOKS
703
To return to Richard, the park- going parent and author of several
novels no one can read: his prose is hopelessly intricate and complex. His
latest labor,
Untitled,
makes its readers physically ill (try to get past page
nine without winding up in the hospital). But Richard is a serious
writer. He stands his ground for "the not-so-worldly, the contorted, the
difficult." Everything about this man ought properly to arouse sympathy
and attachment, primarily because the humor with which his troubles are
described is so rich. Whether Richard is winding himself up to deliver a
"passionate speech" ("You don't think that's extraordinary? Oh, but it
is. Try and think of the last time you did it."), or overcoming his revul–
sion and forcing himself to face his job at the Tantalus Press, a vanity
publishing house where he does his best to remain gainfully employed
("the Tantalus howled to the talentless: the talentless howled back"), or
stealing the time
to
write at home while his son Marco balances a toy
on various parts of his anatomy and intones "does that bolla you?" the
reader is with him. Even when Richard is wrestling with mid-life traumas
- everything from bathing compulsively to rid himself of repellent
(imaginary) odors, to fighting off a full-blown attack of sexual impo–
tence, we gladly consent to be amused. How can we help but be in–
trigued by a man whose idea of revenge is to deliver to the home of
Gwyn, his literary rival, a copy of the Sunday
L.
A. Times,
("that forest–
razing suitcase of smeared print), with the following note attached,
"Dear Gwyn, Something to interest you here. The price of fame! Yours
ever, John." Of course such a trick is bound to backfire and it will be
Richard himself who sifts the paper for a reference to Gwyn.
But Amis hasn't even begun. What kind of postmodern decadent
novel would give us a lovable comic hero and his long-suffering virtuous
wife on the one side and on the other a rich creep, untalented, married
to a depressed aristocratic wife? The mirror held up to
this
world must
reflect nothing but slovenly ugliness. No freshness here, no morality, no
purity, no loyalty, no innocence. As for love - heaven forbid! To get
down and dirty is, in these circumstances, inescapable. Richard will be
obliged to make his pact with Steve Cousins - with Scozz, the
quintessential post-modern decadent devil - and make
him
the instrument
of his revenge. And then everybody will be infected by the evil, and as–
signed a role in the low-life London nightmare that Scozzy represents.
(Richard: What do you do for a living? Scozz - with a shrug - "I fuck
people up. ")
Once you get used to the language spoken by Arnis's thugs - and I
have to admit, it wasn't until my second time through the novel that I
had any idea what Scozz and Co . (characters with names like Thirteen
