“Following that gig, when he pours from the limousine in front of his house, he looks at it for a fleeing moment of rare self-awareness and wonders if it is a palace or a prison. As he approaches the front door a motion-sensitive light snaps on, causing him to blink and shade his eyes, and once inside he must deactivate and then reactivate the alarm. He doesn’t think about these things at the time because he doesn’t want to.”
This is a good moment, which follows another, longer good moment, and Warner’s an excellent writer, and based on his other work he’s someone I’m predisposed to want to like; it makes me wonder why I’m not enjoying this book more. It should surprise nobody that I’ve come up with a couple of explanations. One is simple and technical and small: the protagonist is referred to throughout — or at least thus far — as “the funny man.” There’s a reason for this, but it’s only handed out late, and is a side-joke that nothing ever gets done with — more on that soon. Occasionally there is a pronoun, but most often “the funny man,” and the style is the pleasant mock-formal intentionally-stilted prose used in the better parts of the internet, which one suspects will age in the same way one reads sixties thrillers or seventies suburban romance and can date the book without flipping to see the copyright date. It’s a set of stylistic choices that are, perhaps, unsustainable over 300-odd pages. The other explanation is more general, and may be more correct: the “fleeing moment of rare self-awareness.” Obviously, this is what the comedy depends on — a lack of self-awareness, the mis-fit between what the hero is and what he thinks he is. More functionally, the important element is the mis-fit between what what his narrator tells us about him, and what his narrator is, because it really is the narrator who tells us jokes and amuses us, not the funny man. And this places us in the rather unsatisfying postmodern situation of the package being more interesting, more enticing, than its contents.
This is a good moment, which follows another, longer good moment, and Warner’s an excellent writer, and based on his other work he’s someone I’m predisposed to want to like; it makes me wonder why I’m not enjoying this book more. It should surprise nobody that I’ve come up with a couple of explanations. One is simple and technical and small: the protagonist is referred to throughout — or at least thus far — as “the funny man.” There’s a reason for this, but it’s only handed out late, and is a side-joke that nothing ever gets done with — more on that soon. Occasionally there is a pronoun, but most often “the funny man,” and the style is the pleasant mock-formal intentionally-stilted prose used in the better parts of the internet, which one suspects will age in the same way one reads sixties thrillers or seventies suburban romance and can date the book without flipping to see the copyright date. It’s a set of stylistic choices that are, perhaps, unsustainable over 300-odd pages. The other explanation is more general, and may be more correct: the “fleeing moment of rare self-awareness.” Obviously, this is what the comedy depends on — a lack of self-awareness, the mis-fit between what the hero is and what he thinks he is. More functionally, the important element is the mis-fit between what what his narrator tells us about him, and what his narrator is, because it really is the narrator who tells us jokes and amuses us, not the funny man. And this places us in the rather unsatisfying postmodern situation of the package being more interesting, more enticing, than its contents.
November 28, 2011, 7:29am Comments
