Volume 33, Number 7 · April 24, 1986
Screams and Whispers
By Robert Towers
Gerald's Party
by Robert Coover
Simon and Schuster/Linden Press, 316 pp., $17.95
The Sportswriter
by Richard Ford
Random House/Vintage, 375 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Assault, rape, brutal domination, exquisite torture—such activities figure largely in what might be called the higher pornography (L'Histoire d'O, for instance), where they are the expected lot of the heroine-victim. But there is another kind of novel (perhaps not unrelated) in which the palpably aggressive component is directed not so much at a character as at the reader. Here the intention seems to be to enslave the reader's imagination, to subdue it to every twist, extravagance, or ramification of the writer's imagination. A number of brilliantly executed contemporary works—Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Barth's Giles Goat-Boy, Gaddis's JR—come to mind. Wooing or seduction plays no part in the strategy of such novels; as Ogden Nash wrote somewhere, seduction is for sissies, a he-man likes his rape. The inflatio ad absurdum of the species is no doubt Ancient Evenings. Often there is a paranoid coloration to fiction of this kind, as if the impulse to total control reflects the fear of such control from outside—by a network of omniscient spies, perhaps, or some universal 'system' from which there is no escape.
Review, 2984 words
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