|
George W. S. Trow, who may be the New Yorker's archest
feuilletonist, has chosen for his "beat" the
periphery of pop culture. Not the mainstream, the important,
the healthy, the familiar, but the detritus -- the eccentric
magnates, the expensive failures, the avant garde of
fashionable trivia. It was Trow who trailed Atlantic Records
president Ahmet Ertegun for five years to get the definitive
profile. It was Trow who went to lunch with the Rock Critic
Establishment and told all. It was Trow who conceived
the notion of the Bobby Bison Affordables, "attractive
but superfluous young people" who could be hired to
consume on demand.
His first book Bullies is the sort of slim volume that
Ronald Firbank might have scribbled onto his famous blue note
cards before tying up in a ribbon and delivering, dangled from
an index finger, to his publisher. These 16 stories, all
originally printed in the New Yorker, are baroque
little fictions that are distinct yet interlocking, as though
the author were too impatient or neurasthenic to shape them
into a novel.
They are full of: odd brochure talk; self-congratulatory
buzzwords such as "the new" this or
"special" that (i.e., "just for us");
concern with security -- security not in wealth or position
but in protection from bodily harm; intimations of recent
global catastrophe; graceful insinuations of the worst aspects
of expensive people. They display a sensibility so rarefied as
to transcend sensibility, so rarefied as to make you want to
throw the book down and cry "Faugh!" (or wose). This
is writing about a certain kind of self-absorbed person for a
certain kind of reader who loves to hear about frivolous high
life and feel superior, who knows there is more to life than
chic, such as reading baroque fiction of a certain kind. These
are a few reasons why I love to read every word Trow writes.
I am the sort of reader who, when reading in a story called
"Obstruction" about Morgan Aspair, the intensely
neurotic and spoiled daughter of legendary film producer
Hemming Aspair, who is feuding with her sister Vanessa,
remembers reading earlier in "At Lunch with the Rock
Critic Establishment" about Vivian Aspair, the editor of
feminist rock-and-roll quarterly Mother Rock and
wonders if Morgan, Vanessa and Vivian are supposed to be
sisters and who further wonders what their relation is to the
Aspairs of "Moon Over Alani Beach," whose folly it
was to build the rococo Palacio de Bellas Artes hotel
"which failed to catch on, which failed even before the
general failure, which had not even the distinction of
triggering the general failure."
At his best -- in the first section of Bullies -- Trow
recalls Forgetting Elena, Edmund White's lyrical rococo
mythicization of Fire Island. Trow's territory is Alani Beach,
an imaginary community of hotels inhabited mostly by helpless,
wealthy, phony royalty, old movie stars who look like
"sad, little sticks" as they stand on the staircase
and wave, and other deluded American aristocracy. So detailed,
yet so fuzzy around the edges, this place could only exist in
the mind, or on paper, or in a bottle, like Atlantis. The
book's middle section is its least successful; it invents a
new genre of writing that might be called "commodity
satire" but for which there can be little demand,
although it is amusing to encounter such vividly drawn
characters as Gerry Plume, whose elderly magnate husband has
suffered a massive stroke while humping a model on his office
sofa, thus inspiring Gerry to market a line of sofas with the
slogan, "Gerry Plume Adult Divans, Did You Have To Be
That Comfortable?"
The books' final section combines Trow's mock-mythmaking with
his insufferably contorted in-joking in a stylization of pop
culture more entertaining, more offhandedly scathing and
probably more long-lived that any documentary: rock critics,
Bob Dylan and Renaldo and Clara, Hollywood, Brooke
Hayward, all squeezed through a style that combines Gertrude
Stein's flat cadences, Donald Barthelme's whimsical obscurity
and Firbank's descriptive wit. Trow is all style; style is as
important to him as it is to the people he writes about, many
of whom are so frivolous they don't deserve to live, obsessed
as they are with vogues and fashion and social status and
physical beauty -- "all the things," Andrew Holleran
wrote in Dancer From the Dance, "one shouldn't
throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw
away a life pursuing."
Occasionally Trow stumbles upon something that is not only
precious but valuable, a "wreath of insight" about
our fascination with the rich and famous, the
heroes-by-default who occupy our fantasies, tiny truisms about
silly social manners -- some surprisingly vicious. "I
find that high-powered dynamic men like to humiliate easy
women, and that makes a party go," Mrs. Armand
Reef (who "Likes to Entertain) says
"frankly." A character in the title story has such a
weakness that "sometimes he has to buy a car or join a
health club or make a woman absorb his fear." A young
professional mentioned in "I Expand My Horizons"
does all his errands in New Haven in order to imply that he
went to Yale. "This technique, over the years, has been
strangely effective." So has Trow's. You may hate his
voice -- for its pretentious confidentiality, its barely
contained starstruckness, its militant stylishness -- but you
always know exactly whose it is.
Soho News, April 30, 1980
|
