Volume 42, Number 11 · June 22, 1995
Un-Efican Activities
By April Bernard
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith
by Peter Carey
Knopf, 422 pp., $24.00
Sometimes the most original of writers will wear his influences on his sleeve. Novelist Peter Carey goes further, draping himself in the full motley of his ancestors—chiefly, Swift, Sterne, and Dickens. But in his wiry prose and in his outrageous, hypnotic plots Carey does not insist in any dreary academic way on his allusions and borrowings. Heedless of their pedigree, his densely populated novels zoom about from the macabre to the comic to the romantic to the raunchy to the horrific. A snatch of Pecksniffy dialogue, a Swiftian catalog of outrages, an amused aside to the reader that, as in Sterne, calls the entire enterprise into question—all occupy the mind for only a moment, then are put aside with a nimble contemporary shrug, gone before the reader has time to ponder. Throughout, the framing fairy-tale tone in the narrator's voice invites you to accept a world in which the familiar and the preposterous coexist; this is not, however, to be confused with the murkier world of magical realism. Carey's fables are sharp and pointed, less about the strange interior landscape of the psyche than about the external collisions of human society.
Review, 4606 words
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