Gentlemanly Writing

A novel like this should come swaddled in party balloons. Sam Savage has brought out his second effort on the honored but modest Coffee House Press, the same as published his 2006 debut Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, and for that alone, the new book deserves a toast. Firmin became an actual moneymaker, though its way to success was intriguingly backdoor.

American reviewers wouldn't take time for the 2006 novel, a debut by an unknown well into his sixties, and besides that a story difficult to characterize. Firmin has a comic premise, its narrator a rat who reads, but a formal style, verging on the Baroque, while its material keeps returning to death and destruction. It's as if W. G. Sebald had tried his hand at a feature-length cartoon. Yet over in Italy, some editor believed in the book, and soon enough anyone paging through the newspapers out of that country found that "Firmino" had clambered to the top of the best-seller lists. In time, Firmin was moving briskly all over the Continent, and earlier this year, a new edition appeared with a US commercial publisher. Such good fortune seems a testament to the resilience of the storytelling imagination, and that Savage has come back to Coffee House for his new one seems a victory for God over Mammon. Balloons for everyone!

The Cry of the Sloth doesn't offer such a creature-feature as its predecessor. The title is a metaphor; the tree dweller never comes onstage. Indeed, in most respects, there's only one character here, a blocked novelist, shoestring publisher, bankrupt landlord, and all-around lonely guy named Andrew Whittaker. Or that's his name when he's not ducking behind some anagrammatic stand-in, my favorite of them "Kitten Hardway." The gambit recalls Valdimir Nabokov, of course, and it occurs in one of the genres that Nabokov toyed with from time to time, namely, an epistolary novel. Savage shows us letters from Whittaker, only, as well as scraps of other writing, in particular excerpts from a novel-in-fits-and-starts.

The clown that emerges from the collage rivals those of other metafictions, from John Barth's Ebeneezer Cooke to Gilbert Sorrentino's Tony Lamont. To be sure, such sorry figures and tricks of presentation occur in more traditional writers as well. The new novel's recurring note of comic agony goes back as far as Don Quixote. Nonetheless, Sloth presents more of a formal experiment than Firmin; it charms us less, but fascinates more.

The fascination is, in large part, the same as we enjoy while crawling past a wreck on the highway. The story's location is "Rapid Falls," vaguely Midwestern, its setting in time the fall of Richard Nixon, and its four chapters are named for the months that take us into fall, July to October. So Whittaker, forty three, with a "little paunch...bad teeth...ill-fitting pants," picks up speed as he plummets. His first letter is to a tenant in arrears, in one of his rundown apartment buildings, and his next is to his runaway wife Jolie—a beauty, yes—explaining why his latest support check is so small. Whittaker aches wittily, poking fun for instance at the language of his and Jolie's separation agreements: "You know as well as I do the properties are not 'income-generating assets.'" But his jibes won't help when his mother dies, not far into the story, leaving no inheritance other than the chill of a loveless family. Meanwhile, the house fills with trash, the lawyer and bank officer loom scarily, and Whittaker's letters totter ever more crazily along a tightrope suspended between heartbreak and hilarity. Yet the more significant collapse has to do with his career as writer and editor.

In that first letter to Jolie disparue, Whittaker describes himself as a "literary gent." As in Firmin, too, the sentences tend toward the gentlemanly, clever about clarifying a pronoun, unafraid of an old-fangled flourish like "diaphanous in...