422
PARTISAN REVIEW
illustrate his contradictory stiffuess and super-rationalism. There is a
remembered moment when first-grade Nora gets her father to admit that
everyone dies. She rages at the disclosure, which he tries to soften, "So who
thought this up? This is the worst rule of all!"
Plot is a meager representation of the succession of such occasions.
Edith, who teaches writing, probably speaks for the author when she says,
late in the book:
I once told my brightest student about plot. First I made fun of her
infatuation with Hollywood high-concept plots-nothing more than
assaults on our nervous systems, and most of the characters nothing
more than test-crash dummies. I told her that the proper use of plot is
to apply pressure to a fully human character until she cracks open, and
we get a savor of her inmost psyche. When I said this I surprised myself.
What I had in the back of my mind was a clear memory of Dad and
me gathering kindling. I was four. Dad picked up a stick of red cedar,
which looked more or less like the other sticks. He broke it on his knee
and showed me the inner vein of red. He held it up to my nose. I had
no words for how it smelled...
.I
found this sort of surprising pleasure
again in certain stories and poems when some piece of business would
break the plain brown stick of words open to the inner red.
The marriage of Mike and Joss does develop a plot, though, as they move on
into a more and more disordered time. Character, while it remains
unchanged, breaks into view with new meanings. The shared dinners of the
"gang" continue, and the reader may feel simply diverted by hilarious
description of the occasion when the women shave off Tyler's beard-unless
perceiving the de-masculinizing vengeance of the barbers. There is one illus–
tration after another of Mike's ineffectual good nature-his awkward racial
benevolence, for an example, towards Ezra, a black prizefighter with a crim–
inal record, whom he once defended in court. Edmond and Evelyn get new
jobs away from Charlottesville and move. The fun and games grow more
dangerous. Bundy commits suicide. Joss's alcoholism gets worse, and she is
arrested for drunk driving. Mike's stoic masculine restraint looks more and
more like inertia. He asks, "How come he ended up the party of quiet res–
ignation? The grow-old-with-me party? How come Joss got to be the one
who ranted and raved?" The last time he got to be the crazy one was when
he caught his finger in the hole in the cover of the box of baby wipes.
The breakup of former coherences that is most shattering to him
arrives when Joss falls in love with Tyler's girlfriend, Bonnie, and the two
women are involved in an electric union that makes Mike's dalliances seem
trivial. An absent-minded relationship with a new-wave psychologist and
