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Life on the Brink
| Article
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19607 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
2,749 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
THE ACCIDENT
David Plante
New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991
151 pp., $18.95
God had made me, from my birth, want to be in another world. I had come to another, but this foreign world was not the one in which my longings could be realized. That was an altogether other world. The longings that pulled me in Paris, because religious, were unrealizable in Paris, and I wished I had never believed in God.
So on the first page are we introduced to the unnamed narrator of David Plante's The Accident. The speaker is nineteen and, like Planet at that age, a Boston College student of French-Canadian background spending a year at the University of Louvain in Belgium, a renowned theological center. For the remaining 150 pages, this intense, tormented consciousness compels the reader to follow its oscillations between longing for and despair over the possibilities of life, and between the need to love and a twisting egotism and jealousy that isolate the self from others. For the reader as for the narrator, the experience is intense, lucid, rigidly focused, and painful.
In the strict sense, there is little real plot in this short novel. We follow the consciousness of the narrator as he swings between rejecting and surrendering to divine and human love (mostly the latter). As is usual in his fiction, Plante employs few characters (five seems the most common number). In addition to the narrator, there is fellow student Tom Donlon, an American girl, named Karen, and two marginal figures--a student called Vincent and an older women, an American teacher named Pauline Flanagan. Tom Donlon is by far the most important. An Irish Catholic and Fordham University student also spending the year abroad, Tom seems at first a foil to the narrator. Plump and rosy cheeked, a refreshingly unself-conscious contrast to our narrator, Tom appears initially to represent a robust but insensitive normalcy in contrast to the anguished artistic temperament of the speaker.
As the book develops, we see there is more to Tom. The son of a factory worker, he is lonely and deeply devout, a closet ascetic who deliberately chooses the poorest of lodgings and refrains from heating his room. Tom is someone who senses the narrator's despair and--in spite of frequent coldness, snubs, and rejections--tries to help him. Seemingly cut out for the priesthood, Tom wants to live in the world for the sake of aiding others. Though he is troubled at
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