MILLICENT BELL
FICTION CHRONICLE
BRIAR ROSE. By Robert Coover.
Grove Press: $18.00.
ALTERED STATES. By Anita Brookner.
Random House. $23.00.
DOWN BY THE RIVER. By Edna O'Brien .
Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. $23.00.
GIRLS. By Frederick Busch.
Harmony Books. $23.00.
THE EMIGRANTS. By
W.
G. Sebald.
New Directions. $22.95.
MARTIN DRESSLER: THE TALE OF AN AMERICAN
DREAMER. By Steven Millhauser.
Crown. $24.00.
"What's the story, Wishbone?" the song asks the fox terrier as though even
a dog in a PBS children's program would know that stories are the secret of
meaning, our way of making sense of our lives. Beginnings, middles and
ends. Cause and effect. Character and plot. This happened because this other
thing had happened before. Or because someone of a certain kind was the
doer of the deed. Ever so often we think that the non-story-ness of our
experience is the truth about it-and writers write postmodern novels.
But the ache these induce! How we want someone to put it all together, to
make a tale!
Robert Coover-who has written postmodern fiction and directs, at
Brown University, the study of the serendipitous cohesions of hyper text–
is still at it when he rewrites a fairy tale, one of the oldest of narrative
forms . His
jeu d'esprit
called
Briar Rose
is as riddling as it is exquisite, and
not at all the Legend of the Sleeping Beauty to which Charles Perrault gave
nursery form in the seventeenth century. Wishbone would have difficulty
telling it to the kids. The little chapters that compose this novelette
each
seem to return to the beginning or arrive at the end, though always wi th a
difference, and there is never a clear sign that the story has progressed at all.
There is certainly a prince who has undertaken the great adventure, but
"not for the supposed reward-what is another lonely bedridden
princess?-but in order to provoke a confrontation with the awful powers
of enchantment itself." But, as he struggles in the "flesh-rending embrace"
of the briars, the bones of his predecessors speak to
him
of the futility of
his quest, for " all affirmations are grounded in willing self-delusion, masks,
artifice, a blind eye cast toward the abyss." On and on the prince struggles
in the briar hedge till he reaches the princess's room which is stinking with
