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The Best Woman a Man Could Make
| Article
# : |
10897 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
4,146 Words |
| Author
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R.H.W. Dillard
R.H.W. Dillard is professor of English and chair of the
Creative Writing Program at Hollins College in Virginia. He
is the author of five books of poems, two novels (The Book of
Changes and The First Man on the Sun), and a collection of
stories (Omniphobia). |
Readers of Alasdair Gray's Poor Things may well come away shaking their heads and agreeing with Alice after she first read "Jabberwocky" on the other side of the looking glass: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are." A complicated postmodernist novel, at once intelligent, moving, puzzling, and very funny, Poor Things caused a great stir of positive but often appropriately confused reviews when it was published in Britain last year--before it went on to win the prestigious Whitbread Award. And now it has crossed the ocean to America to baffle and delight another, even larger, audience of readers who have (thanks to the vagaries of corporate American publishing) become lazy on a diet of such bland realism that even John Updike appears to be innovative and profound.
[Editor's note: The author of this review, a little-known American metafictionist, must be excused certain vagaries himself, especially a tendency to demean his betters and to blame his own failures on others.]
Poor Things is Gray's fourth novel (if you don't count two novellas). The first, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, has become something of a modern classic in his native Scotland since its publication in 1981, and Anthony Burgess has even called Gray "the first major Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott." Lanark and the two novels that followed it, 1982, Janine and Something Leather, all abjure the standard form and devices of the "great tradition" of the realistic novel, looking back past the towering edifices of British realism to discover, with the fierce thoroughness of an urban renewal project, far more interesting structures among the too often demeaned or misunderstood work of such writers as Laurence Sterne and William Blake.
All his novels have bee Shandean in form. Lanark's prologue only shows up after the reader has covered a hundred pages or so, and its epilogue appears well before the end. Included is an index listing various kinds of "plagiarisms" that occur in the books-block, imbedded, and diffuse (Blockplag, Implag, and Difplag). The last chapter of Something Leather, woe to the library borrower, appears only on the back flap of the dust jacket. The influence of Blake's illuminated books is clearly apparent in Gray's control of the design of his books--dust jackets, bindings, endpapers, fake errata slips, typefaces, illustrations (many of which he renders himself), blurbs from such journals as the Times Literary Implement and Private Nose, and all. These are not books that will allow themselves to be put easily into paperback (although some of them have been), condensed, put on CD ROMs, or
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