Two Plots, Two Heroes For some time now, ever since the rise of the New Novel and the tide of postmodern fiction, Ihave been glancing anxiously over my shoulder, hoping to spot the next wave before it crests so that I can get out of its way. How high will it tower above me, will it sweep everything before it, and will I have time to call it the postcontemporary novel? Now I think I discern a ripple out there in the deep sea of fiction. Not the New Novel but the Old. The novel of a previous century written today, newborn yet already dignified by the wrinkles of an older age and created more or less tongue in cheek. Throwbacks have been washing ashore in increasing numbers lately. Not long ago John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman" made a great splash, and the past few years have brought us "Clara Reeve" by the pseudonymous Leonie Hargrave (Thomas M. Disch), William Golding's "Rites of Passage" and Erica Jong's "Fanny." The latest in this line is "Water Music" by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Set in the. decade between 1795 and 1805, it very deliberately goes about mimicking and mocking the novels of both the 18th and 19th centuries. The core of the plot comes from a document left to us by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who ventured up the River Niger twice, in 1795 and 1805. Park's account of his first journey, "Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa," appeared in 1799. As a protagonist in Mr. Boyle's novel, Mungo Park seems a bit callow when we first meet him, but he soon turns out to be a hero in the old style. He's generous, ambitious, plucky and undefeatable. He escapes, in the course of the story, a hundred merciless deaths at the hands of thousands of white-hating natives of the African continent. But these high jinks constitute only half the plot. For contrast, there's a second hero, a rogue and a con man. His exploits are invented rather than given by history. He's a street-wise native of the jungle of London who survives by his wits against all odds and comers. He sells tickets to obscene performances. He markets fake caviar. He robs graves to provide cadavers for the medical profession. Two heroes, two plots. The first hero genteel, the second hero vulgar, and both plots picaresque. The narrative rocks back and forth between them, from Africa to England, from the Niger to the Thames. The author, as though with a nod to the Old Novel, supplies short essays, set pieces that interrupt the tale, in order to provide (unnecessary) moral and historical perspectives. Although the rogue, like the explorer, escapes almost certain death any number of times, he dies by hanging midway through the book—only to rise again. His name, Ned Rise, is another of the indicators pointing, us back to the Old Novel, in this case to the practice of giving. characters tag names like Heathcliff and Roderick Random, Allworthy and Jonathan Wild (the mock-heroic rogue that Fielding hanged). T. C. Boyle is the author previously of "Descent of Man," a collection of stories I found irresistible, because they were so deliciously bizarre, when I happened across the book a couple of years ago. More or less experimental, these short pieces were curios, stylized and often morbid stories written with razzledazzle wit. It's disappointing to have to say that I like his first novel nowhere near so well. The style of the new book is a freewheeling mixture of elegant polysyllabic rhetoric ("porcipophagic," "testudineous") with current colloquialisms: "It was big of her"; "Okay, already"; "Hey, let's face it."' These two forms of discourse, the rhetorical and the chatty, occur in both high plot and low plot, and they occur together: "So long, mortal coil"; "Orestes couldn't have had it worse"; "But hey, this is Africa, man. The eye of the needle, mother of mystery, heart of darkness." Humor? I'm not so sure. Here is how the explorer Mungo Park speaks to his wife, Ailie: " ' I uh—I've been meaning to tell you, uh, about what Sir Joseph—' he begins, only to be saved by the bell." (No bell rings; that's our cliche, not his.) Often the narrative voice of the novel speaks to the reader in precisely the same casual way: "No two ways about it"; "Categorically a mess"; "Little did he realize." "But life isn't always so simple." That trenchant observation has a paragraph all to itself. Mr. Boyle uses similar commonplaces in characterizing relationships. The following half-dozen sentences, for example, all occur within the space of a page: "Ailie couldn't quite believe the whole thing.... Of course they had had their problems… They grew to know one another again. It was like it once was… But then the pull of Africa exerted its influence yet again… Mungo was up in the air." The intention of such writing is, I think, not precisely humor; its intention is to limn the characters of another century with the most colorless expressions of our own in order to make them recognizable, to make them look and feellike ourselves. But that's not the effect. Cobbled together out of such banalities, Mungo Park and his wife Ailie, Ned Rise and Ned's true love Fanny exist neither here nor there. Like other instances of the New Old Novel, "Water Music," while self-consciously honoring certain codes and manners of the past, goes out of its way to keep us aware that we are reading a work of our own times: "It was the nineteenth century. What else was a poor heroine to do but make her way to the river?" Behind the backs of his characters, author winks knowingly to reader, reader nods smugly at characters. Hardly ever does the novel allow the reader to enter the world it creates. When bones are crushed or buttocks lacerated, when characters suffer (and, poor dears, how they suffer!), their sufferings seem for the, most part contrived to elicit crocodile tears. Throughout the novel Mr. Boyle seems to want to establish an equality and fraternity with the past both for himself and for the reader. But unfortunately the effort too often serves as an extended occasion for comic-strip pathos.
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