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Impresario of the Improbable
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20470 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
2,536 Words |
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Alexadra Johnson
Alexandra Johnson teaches in the writing program at Harvard
University and has written for the New Yorker, the Nation,
the New York Times Book Reviews, Ms, the Christian Science
Monitor, and Boston Review. She won a 1990 PEN Special
Citation for The Novel Self, a portrait of women writers and
their diaries. |
WISE CHILDREN
Angela Carter
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1992
234 pp., $21.00
Imagine, if in act 1, scene 1 of Hamlet Horatio had told the young Dane that his father wasn't really his father. Or if the long-suffering Cordelia in King Lear had learned the same thing about her paternity. Imagine how different those tragedies, and therefore literature itself, would be. Yet also imagine, as Angela Carter does in her latest novel, how Shakespeare's final comedies "would darken considerably in tone . . . if Marina and, especially, Perdita weren't really the daughters of . . . "
You don't have to imagine too hard as Angela Carter has done it for us instead--and she has done it splendidly. In Wise Children, where Shakespeare meets the screwball comedy, Carter seizes on paternity to explore that often fine line separating tragedy from comedy. Chronicling the free-falling fate of a British theatrical dynasty, the author notes "comedy is tragedy that happens to other people." In her ninth novel, it's a glorious lot of other people, among them: four sets of identical twins, flocks of foundlings, a Hollywood producer named Genghis Khan, a vaudeville trouper with a map of the British Empire tattooed on his stomach, and a cooking show star with a dedicated flair for food poisoning.
To anyone familiar with Carter's previous novels and two collections of short stories, there is nothing out of the ordinary about such a cast. Carter is the impresario of the improbable: a consummate wordsmith able to conjure characters, Chagall-like, who float upside down in reality. In Nights at the Circus, for example, her prizewinning 1985 novel, Carter's central character Sophia (Fevvers to her chums) is a six foot two inch aerialist with wings. Hatched from a swan's egg, she consorts with Siberian shamans. In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1971), reality-altering machines produce Hegel-quoting pigeons, singing centaurs, Moroccan acrobats juggling their own heads.
If an exuberant imagination is the hallmark of Carter's writing, so too is her ability to make its fantasies concrete. Her prose is some of the finest being written today: precisely observed, richly detailed, lyrically crafted. While it has won her numerous awards, among them Britain's prestigious Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, in America, Carter has enjoyed more of a cult literary status up till
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