A Hare in the Field of Existence

Burn continuedfrom previous page a man called Rip. This is LeClair's hint that Bond's flight from home belongs in the tradition of the classic American escape from family, and society, whose template was established by Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle. There are other allusions—to Stanley Elkin, to Thomas Pynchon— while the looping structure recalls DeLiIIo, but LeClair's book is most memorable for its prose. The narrator confesses that he "studied marketing and advertising, learned the allure of alliteration ," and, as a consequence, his prose is full of aphoristic asides and puns that sound like the cleverest sales pitch. So when he is cursing consumerism, Bond complains that "the American ideal lost its 'i' and became pure 'deal,'" and when he realizes that he'll almost certainly abandon his family again, he offers the pithy observation: "Leave and let live." But one subtle irony that escapes Bond is that his own name is, itself, a pun. The OED defines bond as a "shackle, chain, fetter, manacle," and of course this dovetails neatly with LeClair's parasitic echo of the shackles of Sutpen's slaves. But bond also means "a uniting or cementing force," and, of course, this is precisely what Bond fails to be to either his family or his company. With this kind of subtle attention to detail, The Liquidators is a clever, intricate novel, attentive to multiple meanings and ambiguities. As such, it partially fulfills the description LeClair gave in "False Pretenses" of the novel as "a monster of culture: a fabled, combinatory, unnatural, hypertrophied use of language that grotesquely deviates from normal discourse." The pun-rich prose of The Liquidators is a radical and rewarding deviation from the redundancy of normal discourse, but my only reservation is that I wish that LeClair had indulged the monstrous qualities of his novel more. His control of language and structure is always so present in The Liquidators that he seems reluctant to risk the anarchic monstrosity that characterizes the novels he praised in The Art of Excess. But for readers with a taste for clever details, and intricate wordplay, The Liquidators will escape the failures it documents. Stephen Burn is the author o/David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Continuum). He teaches English at Northern Michigan University. A Hare in the Field of Existence Victoria Frenkel Harris My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy Robert BIy HarperCollins http://www.harpercollins.com 112 pages; cloth, $22.95 For all his nay-saying about postmodernism, in My Sentence Was A Thousand Years OfJoy Robert BIy has once again written a testimony against the language of realism. BIy refuses any language construct that presumes to be literally ekphrastic to a scene. In the current volume, his real does not differ so much from that which implicitly undergirds his first volume, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), where, for example, we must infer that the inability to see a "tear inside the stone" underlies our complicity with national slaughter; or when, during the Vietnam War, in the masked performances of poetry from The Light Around the Body (1967), he hurled language at us, angry words reviling the mad words we hear reporting the madness of our government's official language. In that volume, BIy skewered official versions of our nation's history. "Underneath all the cement of the Pentagon," he wrote, "There is a drop of Indian blood preserved in snow" ("Hatred ofMen with Black Hair"). Forty years later, BIy still refuses to let our nation off the hook for its genocidal beginnings: "We'll never be able to remedy the wounds /That Columbus made in the sea. . ." ("Jacob and Rachel "). BIy returns to the medieval Persian ghazal, a form he also used in his 2001 volume The Night Abraham Called to the Stars. This Middle Eastern form, usually meditative and aphoristic, such as those written by Rumi and Hafiz, have held Bly's interest for years, and over the course of his career he has translated several into English versions for the first time. In My Sentence, BIy replaces the traditional form of eighteen-syllable couplets with stanzas of three shorter lines that usually...