Odd Jobs (76 page)

We murder to dissect, Wordsworth said; and under the scalpel of Süskind’s sharply observant prose all objects yield a redolence of death, even the bodies of the young girls whom the hero of
Perfume
kills to extract their complex, enchanting aromas. The pigeon’s lifeless button-eye makes almost understandable the bank guard’s hysterical fear; and the fraction that we do not quite understand leads us to read on. The guard’s day of standing on the bank steps is full of suspense, as the sensations of standing still are rendered with an ominous, half-humorous exactitude:

When he eats lunch, his tense mood inflames the simple act of swallowing:

And when, in his distraction, he rips his trousers on the back of a park bench, the little tear becomes a crevasse:

As with the contemporary work in German of Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, rage lurks beneath the taut surface of Süskind’s world. Jonathan, as the sun climbs higher, spitefully exults in his sweating and itching: “The suffering suited him fine, it justified and inflamed his hate and his rage, and the rage and the hate in turn inflamed the suffering, for it set his blood surging ever more fiercely, continually squeezing new ripples of sweat from the pores of his skin.” The bank guard has not always lived insulated from the agonies of his times; we are told at the outset that his parents disappeared in World War II, he became a farm laborer in the tyrannical care of an uncle, and as a young man he served and was wounded in Indochina. But, more than Handke and Bernhard, Süskind balances his dark side with a healing, comedic tendency:
The Pigeon
ends not unhappily, after Jonathan’s recognition that even he needs people and his return, “on the wings of bliss,” to the rain-puddled innocence of his childhood. In the course of its tiny adventure, the novella seems to run through most of the relations a man can strike with the world, and, by virtue of Süskind’s acute powers of focus, achieves a surprising largeness.

The young French writer Emmanuel Carrère is also a formidable magnifier, at least in
The Mustache
. It is his third novel; his second,
Bravoure
, won two prizes, the Prix Passion and the Prix de la Vocation, and this one comes to translation into English bedecked with Franco-American praise. The tale’s point of departure seems as trivial as a pigeon in the hall: a young Parisian architect, left nameless, decides to shave off the mustache he has been sporting for ten years. Like the bank guard of Süskind’s tale, he is a man of routine, who shaves twice a day, the second time while luxuriating in his bathtub, which is surrounded by mirrors. “He’d prepare a drink, kept within arm’s reach, then lavishly spread the shaving cream on his chin, going back and forth with the razor, making sure not to come too close to the mustache, which he would later trim with a scissors.” Any fictional character with a razor in his hand makes a reader nervous, and our hero’s impulsive, impish decision to surprise his wife, Agnes, by shaving off his mustache feels like a dangerous violation of the quotidian order. So it proves. Returning to
their apartment and to her husband, she notices nothing different, though his upper lip is not only bare but paler than his ski-vacation-tanned face. When pressed, she claims that he never
had
a mustache. His friends and colleagues, too, assert he never wore a mustache, and Agnes maintains this fiction or delusion even while staring at vacation photographs of her husband’s mustached self or when confronted with the mustache’s remnants, rescued from the garbage.

What has happened? We never quite know, though the permutations of progressively malignant confusion are exquisitely described; in a sense, the book offers a paradigm of marital misunderstanding, with its volatile alternations of tenderness and rage, quarrel and lovemaking, empathy and bafflement. Agnes, who works at a publishing house, does have a history of willful and stubborn lying, even in the teeth of contradictory evidence, but this does not explain the apparent blindness of his colleagues at work and of the café-owner across the street to the hero’s newly clean-shaven condition, or her perfectly enacted appearance of distress at what she construes as
his
loss of sanity. At one point, when he confronts her with a mustached identity photo of himself, she rubs a wet finger across the mustache and shows him a spot of ink on her fingertip, accusing him of doctoring the photo with Magic Marker. Then she produces a razor blade from her pocketbook and scrapes away the mustache in the photo. As their grapple approaches full-fledged “conjugal guerrilla warfare,” each suspecting the other of insanity, what had been a loving relationship and a thriving conventional marriage reasserts itself in painful oscillations of mood:

Agnes’s denials of her husband’s reality grow in scope: she denies that they have ever been on vacation in Java, though a blanket bought there hangs on the wall, and she tells him his father is dead, though he has just
heard his father’s voice on the answering machine. Yet the spreading irrationality is not only in her—an old Cary Grant picture that the couple watch together on television turns into a preposterous mélange—and
The Mustache
is not simply
Gaslight
with a female Charles Boyer. The irrationality lies in the tale itself, and the author has a nimble job of it to keep his hero away from a character who might restore order. The architect flees, for instance, from a scheduled appointment with a psychiatrist, and he unaccountably cannot find the apartment building where his parents live and where he himself lived for ten years.
The Mustache
, fine and glossy and inexorable, like a machine with one lost gear-tooth, processes reactions and emotions within a universe whose laws have slipped. The only rational explanation—if one is demanded—is that somehow, at the moment of his shaving off his mustache, the hero and his wife enter parallel universes, which one respectable contemporary school of cosmology holds are generated with every ambiguity of quantum measurement. In the words of physicist Bryce DeWitt, “Every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriads of copies of itself.”

But
The Mustache
is not science fiction; it is a fantasy located just to one side of our world and an alarming commentary upon it. The stability of our personal lives rests upon a consensus of perception and memory that in fact has no guarantee. We are solipsists who in uneasy conjunction with other solipsists construct a society and a shared world. The apparatus and conventions of modern bourgeois life—the credit cards, the answering machines, the vacations by jet, the matter-of-fact sensuality, the days beginning with a shave and a “hiccuping coffee-pot”—glitter familiarly through the slats of Carrère’s subtly distorting, abruptly lowered blind. The relatively exotic settings of Hong Kong and Macao are realistically rendered, with plenty of tourist information, when the maddened hero flees there. The denouement is drastic but, then, so is any dislocation, however apparently minor, in our structure of shared perceptions. The book gets under one’s skin; more than once, I turned to the back of the jacket to ponder, in the photograph of the boyish-looking author, the naked expanse of his prominent upper lip, to see whether something was growing there, or had been recently removed.
The Mustache
has been likened to “The Metamorphosis,” but in Kafka’s fable, once we accept that Gregor Samsa awakes in the body of a large insect, everything proceeds sturdily, dependably, knitting itself like
a healing wound around this initial violation of the ordinary, whereas Carrère’s mise-en-scène deteriorates more and more; it melts away until nothing remains but the hero’s French determination to think, in a world where thought no longer works. Gogol’s “The Nose” offers a closer parallel, since the world of the eccentric Russian master is also slippery and inconsistent. But Gogol’s nonsense is forgiving: he conjures up a Russia so brightly tinted and primitive as to casually permit physical miracles—a nose in a loaf of bread, a blank space where a man can no longer take snuff—and the nose reappears on its proper face one morning as if its interval of absence were a dream. A much grimmer effort is necessary in
The Mustache
to put everything “back in place.”

The book’s ending shocks us, and we are additionally shocked to read, in a notation under the last line, that it was written in five weeks—“Biarritz-Paris / April 22–May 27, 1985.” This is an arrogant miniaturization of Joyce’s dating of his majestic labor on
Ulysses
—“Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921.” But
Candide
, it is said, was written in three days, and perhaps
The Mustache
could only have been rapidly improvised, a nightmare of slippage the author pulled quickly from the placid yuppie trivia of the life around him. His book is, to risk a rather devalued word, stunning—stunning in the speed and agility with which it slices through to its underlying desolation, and stunning in its final impact. In less than a hundred fifty pages, it packs a punch.

IRIS MURDOCH, PAIRED WITH OTHERS

T
HE
N
AME OF THE
R
OSE
, by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 502 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

T
HE
P
HILOSOPHER
’
S
P
UPIL
, by Iris Murdoch. 576 pp. Viking, 1983.

Henry James wrote deprecatingly of novels he deemed to be “baggy monsters”; by way of illustration he cited—a grouping that would not occur to many critics these days—
War and Peace, The Three Musketeers
, and Thackeray’s
The Newcomes
. But how, this very assortment of titles begs us to ask, can the novel
not
be somewhat baggy, as its heritage of roles as historical chronicle, adventure saga, social panorama, and personal confession descends to it and ever more self-consciously complicates and thickens? The masterpieces of this century, as represented by
Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses
, and
The Magic Mountain
, yield nothing in farraginous ambitious bulk to those of the nineteenth cited by James, and the admired American careers of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Thomas Pynchon show that bagginess, if not esteemed as a virtue in itself, is nevertheless deferred to and indulged, like prankishness in young men, as a sign of vitality. For is not the novel a progeny of the epic, by way of medieval romances and
Don Quixote
? To its already vastly stretched potentialities modernism has added, from Flaubert on, the option that the novel form a marvellously extended prose poem. As philosophy has withdrawn
from the epic mode of Hegel and Schopenhauer into an academic language of inscrutable nicety, philosophical messages further bulge the novel’s bag. Indeed, prose fiction has become the one podium where philosophy can speak not in the mincing accents of semantics but in commentary upon our existential lives, along the lines laid down by Plato and Aristotle and Christian theology. The characteristic question of modern philosophy has become “Are we speaking clearly?”; but an atavistic element in us still asks, “How shall we live?” and “Is there Something Else?” When philosophers ask these questions now, it would seem they must ask them away from their lecterns, within that permissive genre which since the Renaissance has offered sanctuary to the otherwise inexpressively, unofficially, less-than-respectably human. The past summer’s airy reading fare has been varied by two baggy and brilliant novels, totalling over a thousand pages, by teachers of philosophy in European universities.