Philip Roth, the top-tier Jewish-American novelist and native of New Jersey, greatest state in the union, has been in the news lately, so I figured it was a propitious time to read another of his works.  (During the campaign of terror that has been this blog's life, I have reread Roth's famous Portnoy's Complaint and read "Goodbye, Columbus.")  Last week I settled on 1972's The Breast because it was short (like 75 pages of text) and seemed like it might be crazy.  I read a scan of a first edition hardcover (cover price $4.95) I found at the internet archive.

Our narrator, David Alan Kepesh, is a 38-year-old  hypochondriac and professor of literature whose parents ran a hotel in the Catskills when he was a kid; he has a failed marriage behind him, but is in the third or fourth year of a relatively stable and satisfying relationship with a twenty-something woman, Claire Ovington.  He relates to us an amazing, astounding, fantastic phenomenon which began with a radical increase in the sensitivity of his penis and a corresponding renaissance of his physical desire for Claire and ability to enjoy sexual intercourse.  After a few weeks of this surprising and welcome change in his sex life, he noticed a discoloration around his penis.  Kepesh scheduled a visit to his doctor, but before his appointment came he underwent an unbelievable, and monstrously painful, transformation.  He woke up in a hospital, blind, with no arms or legs, shrieking and sobbing in horror and misery for days, thinking he had been in a boiler explosion--in fact, due to a bizarre hormonal event, he had been transformed into a six-foot-long bag of flesh, his radically altered penis at one end--he is a huge womanly breast.

Roth doesn't present this scenario as an absurd farce, but rather like a serious science fiction horror story, describing the biological realities of this transformation (e. g., how he can still hear and talk and breathe without a proper mouth, nose or ears), the efforts of the medical community to keep him alive (Kepesh is fed intravenously, and tubes carry away his wastes) and, most importantly, Kepesh's psychological responses to this phenomenon as well as the reactions of his parents, colleagues, and Claire, his loyal girlfriend.  Roth succeeds in making all this pretty disturbing.

I think it is fair to say that, once the initial background has been laid out, the novella chronicles three distinct periods in Kepesh's life as a breast, each characterized by a different tack he takes in his response to his unique and unprecedented predicament.  Early on, he tries to drown his sorrows in sensual pleasure.  He can't read, he can't walk around, he can't taste or smell, but he can experience sexual pleasure when somebody stimulates his nipple.  And, since he is incapable of orgasm, he could, theoretically, experience sexual pleasure endlessly.  Our narrator becomes obsessed with the idea of having women stroke and squeeze the nipple that his penis has become, or even have intercourse with it as if it was still a penis, but is unable to get much cooperation from the small number of women who enter his hospital room--he strives desperately, beyond all limits of decorum and decency, to persuade the nurse who gives him his daily sponge bath to satisfy his desires, without success.  Long-suffering Claire agrees to stimulate the nipple with her hand and mouth, but for only brief periods.  (Perhaps significantly, Claire was always resistant to having anal sex with Kepesh, or to letting him ejaculate into her mouth.)  Kepesh, in what he describes as a "battle," achieves some control over this obsession, with the help of his doctors, who provide anesthetizing drugs and assign him a male nurse--Kepesh can't get excited over the idea of a man touching him.  

Kepesh's next method of dealing with his tragedy is denial--he declares that he is not really a huge breast kept alive via tubes in a hospital, but that he has gone insane and is in a mental institution.  He theorizes that teaching Kafka and Gogol year after year has lead to his bizarre delusion that he has become a six-foot long woman's breast.  However, all evidence seems to point to the fact that this seemingly impossible transformation has truly occurred, and Kepesh must accept this incredible fate.

Kepesh's final tack is something of a reversion to form and an abandonment of any pretensions to high values or adult responsibility.  (Maybe we should see Kepesh's transformation as not just from whole man to partial female, but from not quite successful adult to helpless selfish baby.)  Kepesh begins, perhaps only rhetorically, to plan to use his unique malady to become famous and rich, which will attract to him women who will do for him the things Claire and the female nurse he tried to bribe have refused to do.  This book, perhaps, is the first blow in his campaign to become a wealthy celebrity, and the story ends without resolution, though it seems doubtful Kepesh will achieve his wild dreams of escaping the hospital, getting rich through public performances and attracting legions of groupies (he suggests that if the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Charles Manson can do it, he can as well) and enjoying hours-long orgies in which five or six girls, including ones as young as twelve, stimulate him in every way he can imagine.

The Breast is a smooth and easy read, and (despite being the work of a celebrated mainstream literary author) is successful as an SF horror story about helplessness, loss of identity, and one's relationship with one's own body--are we at the mercy of our bodies' needs and limitations, our identities determined by our physical forms, or can we control and transcend the body and create a self with the force of our minds?  So I recommend it. 

But is there more?  Philip Roth won a big stack of awards, awards like America's National Book Award, Britain's W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the Czech Republic's Franz Kafka Prize, so maybe we should be able to wring from this little book something deep. something about life or American culture or something.  Well, let's squeeze until the pips squeak.  Maybe Roth is writing about how men treat women as sex objects, and, in particular, how men (or maybe just American men or Jewish men?) fetishize women's breasts--after the way he has treated women like Claire and his ex-wife, perhaps this horrible transformation is a little bit of cosmic justice.

That feminist read is maybe what we expect to find when reading books in 2021, the era of "Me Too" and all that.  Now I'll wrestle something out of the text that is a little more personal: a theme of debunking of academia and the intellectual elite--Kepesh and his colleagues at the university, and the entire academic enterprise, don't exactly come off as particularly serious or admirable in The Breast.  Here I will take the liberty if connecting The Breast to one of the formative texts in my own life of reading--Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.  Now, Roth doesn't mention Proust in The Breast, but I will trot out our favorite Frenchman anyway.  (Roth does mention Robert Musil, but I haven't read The Man Without Qualities so I can't do anything with that.)  One of the many recurring themes in In Search of Lost Time, and one which struck a chord with me, is the idea that "the pleasures of the intellectual life," as well as friendship, are a sterile waste of time, that what is worthwhile is the pursuit of a variety of sensual, sexual experiences.*  Of course, a more pervasive theme of Proust is that sexual relationships (at least heterosexual ones and those between gay men) are inherently frustrating and disappointing and generally asymmetrical and exploitative (Proust can leave you thinking that people and life are pretty crummy.)  Well, I believe we can see these same sad themes in The Breast--take a look at this passage near the very end:

Well, I don't think I'm going to be able wring anything else out of The Breast.  It's a worthwhile read; maybe I'll read 1977's The Professor of Desire, which, it appears, chronicles Kepesh's life, including his relationship with Claire Ovington, before the fantastical events of The Breast.

*See for example pp. 196-7 and pp. 664-6 of the paperback 1998 Modern Library Edition of Within a Budding Grove (that would be pp. 144-5 and 485-7 in the 2002 hardcover James Grieve trans, which is titled In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.)  

For the first time I admitted to myself that there was a possibility of connection between small, disturbing things in the past and the present fact of Jerry's death.  What that common denominator was I did not know, but I was certain that I did not want to find it out.

The copy I read looked more or less like this

What does cosmic horror mean to you?  To me, cosmic horror is the horror of the realization of man's true place in the universe; cosmic horror, if only metaphorically through the medium of stories about alien monsters, refutes the thinking of men of religion (who claim the universe is orderly because God orders it, and God loves us and guides us and enforces justice) and men of science (who claim the universe is orderly because it follows laws we can comprehend, and comprehension of these laws can improve our lives.)  In a classic story of cosmic horror the characters come to realize that the universe and/or "gods" are indifferent or actually inimical to us, our lives are meaningless, the universe is essentially incomprehensible, and what knowledge we can acquire threatens our sanity and our society.

In 2015 the people at New York Review of Books released a new edition of The Rim of Morning, a 1964 omnibus of two 1930s novels by William Sloane; the NYRB volume has the subtitle "Two Tales of Cosmic Horror."  I am a fan of cosmic horror, so I thought it worthwhile to check out at least one of Sloane's novels.  In a piece of good fortune that perhaps undermines my suspicions that all the tenets of cosmic horror are true, there was actually a copy of The Rim of Morning at a library nearby MPorcius headquarters here in suburban Maryland.  I borrowed said volume and today discuss 1937's To Walk the Night.

The first and last chapters of To Walk the Night, which is like 215 pages long in this edition, are a sort of frame for the main body of the tale.  As we meet him, our narrator Berkeley M. Jones, after three days on a train from the desert of the SouthWest, is returning to the Long Island house of Dr. Lister, the house in which he grew up with his best friend Jerry Lister, the doctor's son.  (Jones's own mother, whom he calls by her first name, "Grace," is an artistic woman about town who had no time for or interest in raising her own son and was happy to hand her kid over to the stable and respectable medical man Lister.)  Jones, or "Bark" as his friends call him, has horrible news to tell the man he calls "Dad": out West, Jerry, while Bark and Jerry's wife Selena watched, shot himself in the head!

This first chapter directly addresses the cosmic horror themes I outlined above.  Dr. Lister, a man of science and logic, wants Bark to tell him all the details he knows of Jerry's life out West, to try to figure out why a dependable and decent young man like Jerry would take his own life, presumptively an act of cowardice and selfishness and weakness.  Bark resists telling him all the details, saying that thinking and logic cannot solve this problem, even arguing that thinking over what has happened could be dangerous:

"I don't want to die.  Jerry thought this thing through, and that's why he's not alive now."

Bark, of course, relents, or we wouldn't have a novel.  As they sit on the porch of that big Long Island home, the hissing of the surf audible in the near distance, Bark tells Dr. Lister everything, starting two years ago, his tale of the uncanny Selena and her relationships making up the bulk of the succeeding 13 of the novel's 15 chapters.

Two years after graduation, and two years before Jerry's death, Jerry and Bark visit their alma mater which is like two hours from New York City.  (Sloane never specifies what state or town the university is in, not what arid state in the SouthWest Jerry commits suicide in.)  After taking in a football game they call on the world famous mathematician and astronomer LeNormand, whose assistant Jerry, a math whiz, had been as a student.  As they enter the observatory they catch sight of LeNormand as he is burned to death in a mysterious fire that doesn't burn the chair he is sitting on.  The book at this point takes on much of the apparatus of a locked-room detective story--presumably somebody murdered the scientist, but how could they have gotten out of the observatory without Jerry and Bark seeing him?--with policemen and detectives looking for footprints and considering possible suspects and all that jazz.

Almost as shocking as LeNormand's bizarre death is the fact Jerry and Bark learn from the University President whom they (Chappaquiddick-style) summon before calling the cops--just three months ago the reclusive and solitary LeNormand, who had apparently had no use for women and spent all his time and energy coming up with theories contravening Einstein, married a beautiful woman named Selena!  (Selena's very name, of course, signals to us readers that she is of another world and of superior rank and power.)  When Bark meets this female, he can't deny that she is a striking beauty, but also has the nagging feeling that there is something cold and emotionless about her, that she lacks personality and expression--that is until she gets a load of Jerry.  Jerry seems to bring her to life!   And the feeling is mutual!  LeNormand's blackened corpse is hardly in the ground before Selena has moved to New York, where Jerry and Bark live as roommates, and hanging around with them; in a few weeks it becomes clear to everybody that Jerry is going to marry this woman, even though she refuses to say anything about her family or her past!

Bark can sense that this chick is bad news, but he has no luck getting the bros before hos message across to his bro.  Jerry enlists the fashion forward Grace to guide Selena in picking out new clothes--though she obviously has a powerful analytic mind, Selena seems naive and ignorant of fashion, art and culture: she makes a cogent assessment of a Brancusi in Grace's apartment in seconds, but apparently has never heard of Brancusi before; nor is she familiar with Noel Coward or even Shakespeare!  Grace doesn't like Selena, either, remarking on how she has a flawless young body but the eyes of an older woman, eyes that are "cool and wise."  Bark begins thinking of her as being like a foreigner who has little knowledge of American life, and we readers of course begin thinking of her (if we haven't been thinking this already) as being a space alien with little knowledge of human life.

Halfway through the novel, four weeks or so after the murder of Dr. LeNormand, the detective in charge of that case reenters the story, summoning Bark to his office, and we learn where Selena's body came from--just two days before Selena and LeNormand got their marriage license a twenty-something retarded woman who looks just like Selena disappeared while her impoverished parents, driving through the area, were temporarily distracted.  (Of course, in this 1937 book the characters don't say this poor missing woman is "retarded," they say she is an "idiot.")  The idea that genius Selena is really this developmentally disabled woman who couldn't talk or even feed herself four months ago is so incredible that the gumshoe and Bark don't share it with anybody.

Little events occur that let us readers know that Selena can read minds and hypnotize people and see around corners and that sort of thing, though the narrator doesn't put two and two together.  After Jerry and Serena get married Jerry gets bored at his job at a statistics firm, and decides to become a math professor.  He publishes an article in a scholarly journal and moves to the desert in the SouthWest to work on his thesis, which is apparently based on LeNormand's controversial theories which go against Einstein.  Selena simultaneously assures everyone that Jerry's math theories are correct and discourages him from pursuing them.

Over a year after moving to the desert Jerry summons Bark via telegram, and Bark makes the long train ride to the barren Southwest; Sloane puts a lot of effort into describing how barren and uncomfortable and depressing the desert is--the heat, the vast lifeless spaces, the tiny ugly town with zero culture or sophistication or amenities.  (Maybe we should see this as a parochial New Jersey/New York view--Sloane went to college at Princeton and worked for Rutgers University Press and other publishers for most of his career.  As I know from bitter experience, leaving the NY/NJ area for the provinces can be a painful, even soul-crushing, experience.)  While Bark is visiting, Jerry suddenly figures out LeNormand's equations and Selena's true nature and kills himself tout suite, before he can explain to Bark.  Selena slips out and, after he deals with the inquest and funeral, Bark rides the train back to New York to see Dr. Lister.

In the novel's fifteenth and final chapter Bark, having reviewed all the clues, including Selena's response to reading Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid," figures out that Selena must be an immaterial mind from another time and/or planet who inhabited the retarded girl's body and sought out mathematical geniuses like LeNormand and Jerry.  Unfortunately, when those math whizzes' calculations led them to realize that minds can move between times, Selena felt threatened--those brainiacs had to be neutralized, lest the world know of the possibility of such alien invasion.  Selena appears at the seaside Lister house, and explains herself; the author mitigates her responsibility to some extent--Selena only killed LeNormand by mistake, the collective psychic force of that nearby football game increasing the power of her effort to erase data from LeNormand's mind.  As for Jerry, it is suggested that Selena's husband killed himself because he couldn't face the reality that he fell in love with and had sex with an alien who had hypnotized him.  Selena feels no need to kill Bark and Dr. Lister because, without the mathematical evidence, nobody will believe their crazy story that an alien mind came to Earth to take over an idiot's body.  Selena leaves the house, and a sort of epilogue lets us know that Selena must have left this planet or time or whatever because the beautiful body, that of the idiot, returns home to her loving parents, just as idiotic as before.

The big name in cosmic horror, of course, is H. P. Lovecraft.  A major reason famous French novelist and Lovecraft fan Michel Houellebecq cites for his fascination with Lovecraft is that the Rhode Islander doesn't write much about sex and money, a central facet of most of our lives and a prominent topic in much literature.  As anybody who has been following this blog knows, I find sexual relationships, and the challenges and problems they cause, fascinating, and so I very much appreciated that To Walk The Night integrates with its cosmic horror themes the themes of irresistible, inexplicable and unhealthy sexual relationships, and the way the appearance of a woman can wreck the warm and life-affirming relationships men can have with each other.  Many men have the experience of being manipulated by women, of taking stupid risks and making foolish sacrifices because they desire some woman only to later find their reckless devotion incomprehensible*, and Selena, an inexplicable alien who can read your mind and hypnotize you, is a good allegory for that common but mystifying phenomenon.

*Remember the last lines of Part II of Swann's Way: "To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!" (trans. Lydia Davis)

(One might see To Walk the Night as being pretty hard on women, especially smart women; besides the life-destroying alien Selena we have Grace, who cares more about interior design and fashion and social functions than her own son.  The relationship we see between Grace and Bark, now an adult, is also pretty odd--they seem to be flirting with each other in a way that I found sort of uncomfortable.  Selena as femme fatale, of course, is another connection of To Walk the Night with detective fiction.)

I liked To Walk the Night, but I didn't love it.  Each individual scene is good, but taken as a whole the novel feels long--the scenes can be a little redundant, Sloane belaboring his points a bit.  There are multiple scenes about how nobody knows about Selena's past, multiple scenes in which Selena's psychic powers manifest themselves, multiple scenes in which Selena discourages Jerry from digging too deeply into LeNormand's equations.  Once Sloane has transmitted this info to us, and made clear that Jerry and Bark haven't picked upon the info, there's not much value in presenting similar scenes that achieve the same goal.  There is also a sort of plot hole at the end--it appears that Selena needs to be near a mathematical genius to thrive; after LeNormand's death and before she meets Jerry, Selena is without character or personality.  As Bark says in Chapter 15:

When we met her first, after his [LeNormand's] death, she was dull and stupid, almost in a trance, till she met Jerry.

But after Jerry's death she isn't dull and lifeless; Selena destroys Jerry's notes, makes her way to Long Island from the SouthWest, and is clever and emotional when she talks to Bark and Dr. Lister, claiming she loved Jerry and criticizing us humans for thinking we are special ("Did you suppose...that you were one in the enormous spaces of the universe?  Do you believe that you are the ultimate product of creation?  There is nothing unique about you.")  Oh, well.   

A solid piece of work, but perhaps not as terrific as advertised.  These end of year holidays and the demands of the pursuit of remuneration have severely cut down on the time I have to read and write, but I hope to read Sloane's other novel, The Edge of Running Water, soon.

He was obsessed.  If he did not discover and make known to himself these delights, they might be lost for ever.  He wished he had a hundred men's energies, with which to enjoy her.  He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue.  He wanted to wallow in her, bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.  

Front cover of copy I read

In an effort to justify my mother's complaints that I am a snob and my father's fears that I am a dangerous reactionary who is putting his good name at risk, I have been reading T. S. Eliot's earlier poetry and about the St. Louis native and London habitue's early life (basically up to 1922 and the publication of The Waste Land.)  In Robert Crawford's Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land and in The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein, mention is made of Lawrence's 1915 novel The Rainbow as a controversial book that was "suppressed for indecency."  I've never read anything by D. H. Lawrence, and seeing that the novel was (apparently) full of sex and that the more famous Women in Love was a sequel to it, I decided The Rainbow would be a good place to start my D. H. Lawrence experience and tracked down a copy (Penguin 2007, edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes) at the Baltigore County Public Library.  For what it's worth, this edition claims to be the closest ever published to what Lawrence intended.

The Rainbow is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, relatively prosperous owners of the farm known as the Marsh in or near the village of Cossethay on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, a tale that runs from the mid 19th century to the first years of the 20th.  After a brief look at his immediate ancestors, we spend 100 or so pages with Tom Brangwen as our main character.  Though not the eldest, Tom succeeds to ownership of the Marsh, his older brother Alfred moving to Nottingham to take a job as "a draughtsman in a lace-factory."  After an encounter with a foreign gentleman, Tom becomes fascinated with foreigners and aristocrats—one of the themes of The Rainbow is of people who yearn to be more, to grow into something different, something bigger, or to have children who do so  These hopes are generally frustrated; for example, Tom's mother wanted her children to be educated, but Tom was a horrible student, "a hopeless duffer at learning," "a fool" who "had not the power to controvert even the stupidest argument...."

...and the back

Tom becomes enchanted with Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow with a little girl, Anna.  Lydia, the daughter of a landowner, and her husband, a physician, were forced to leave Poland because they were patriots and got mixed up in a rebellion against the Russians--her husband died of illness in London, leaving her and little Anna penniless.  Tom and Lydia marry, and we learn all about the joys and miseries of their marriage. Their marriage is contrasted with Alfred’s; Alfred cheats on his wife with an intelligent woman who lives in a house full of books with her father--Alfred and the woman read Herbert Spencer and Robert Browning together.

When Anna is eighteen, Alfred’s son Will moves near the Marsh to take up work himself as a draughtsman at a lace factory. Anna and Will, a sensitive sort who likes to visit churches and look at books of reproductions of church architecture and Christian paintings and sculptures (Ruskin has had a big influence on him), fall in love, and we get 100-something pages in which their marriage, the joys and miseries of which are even more extreme than that of Tom and Lydia's, is described in detail.

Lawrence’s book is focused primarily on psychology, on the characters’ inner lives and on their feelings, feelings mostly related to their sexual and family relationships. There is quite little description of people’s work or their relationships with other people in the community--we don’t get scenes of Tom haggling with customers over prices for his butter or beef or Will trying to get a raise from his boss, and we learn very little of the economics of managing a farm or the intricacies of designing lace patterns, we don't hear people's complaints about government trade or tax or foreign policy.  Again and again the characters eschew the outside world, shutting themselves up in the family:

Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always busy, often harassed, but always contained in her trance of motherhood....No responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her.  The outside, public life was less than nothing to her, really.  

.... 

And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen, and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody else buried, themselves two blissful survivors....

or themselves:

...she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things....she became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived in the little separate world of her own violent will.

The descriptions of people’s family relationships, particularly relationships between spouses, ring very true and are very effective. Just like in real life, everybody’s feelings are ambiguous, equivocal,  subject to endless revision, and Lawrence's character's emotions shift from one extreme to the other from one moment to the next.   Lawrence addresses, in detail, many of the challenges faced by married people: you can't live without your wife, can't imagine a life without her, she is the center of your being, but at the same time that you adore her and desire her, you resent her because of her power over you.  She makes fun of your hobbies, and it hurts so much you throw the woodcarving you've been working on for months into the fire!  (When this happened to Will I was reminded of scenes in Kipling's The Light that Failed and in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage in which women destroyed men's art work.)  Your wife criticizes your religion, your deepest beliefs, and you begin to doubt.  You love your husband and desire him sexually, but there is nothing more delicious than being alone at home while he's at work, and you can't get any sleep in the same bed with him, so you send him to another room every night.  Lawrence goes into all these things at great length, as well as into Tom's relationship with Anna and Will's with his and Anna's first daughter, Ursula.

"There was this man, you see, from some sect she called the Dumb Beasts--I mean, if there is such a sect.  But considering all that happened, how do you tell if any of it was real?  I don't know big their endowment was...and maybe the 'endowment' was part of the 'theater' too." 

Recently Joachim Boaz, Fred Kiesche, Winchell Chung and I had a conversation via twitter about the Mitchell Hooks cover of Samuel R. Delany's 1976 novel Triton.  Martin Wisse spoke up, urging me to read the novel tout suite.  I didn't have anything in particular planned after The Future Is Now, so I figured, why not? 

Triton appears to have been more successful than a lot of the books I talk about on this blog, going through many different printings and editions and being included in a Book-Of-The-Month Club omnibus edition called Radical Utopias along with Joanna Russ's The Female Man and Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World.  Joachim Boaz harbors doubts that I will like the novel, and it is true that I thought Delany's Nova and Empire Star were just OK, but the copy on the back cover of my edition, an eighth printing that does not include Frederick Pohl's name on the cover (Triton was a "Frederick Pohl Selection" and the first printing was labelled as such) but does include a reference to the 1979 Tales of Nevèrÿon, makes it sound awesome:


On the other hand I have an aversion to utopias and the novel's table of contents and other front matter, like a half-page epigraph from British anthropologist Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, make we wonder if Triton isn't the kind of extravagant New Wave artifact that Terry Dixon so recently warned me about.  Well, let's just read Triton and see if it passes the MPorcius test (some, no doubt, will prefer to see this excursion as an inquiry into the possibility of MPorcius passing the Delany test.)

The first (brief at 24 pages) chapter of Triton introduces us to the city of Tethys, which lies on Neptune's largest moon, and the book's themes, which revolve around the fact that real knowledge is very difficult to come by--we can almost never really know anything for sure--and that communicating real knowledge is very difficult--defining and describing things accurately is practically impossible.  In this chapter Delany foregrounds various weird religious sects--some mendicants and others dangerously violent--and a troupe of bohemian performers who live off government endowments and present one-of-a-kind spectacles to more or less randomly chosen individuals they run into in Tethys's "unlicensed sector," a neighborhood where the law is not enforced.  The one-person audiences of these "micro-theater dramas" are drugged (surreptitiously, without their prior consent) to foster "better access to the aesthetic parameters" of the troupe.

Tethys is a place where things are not as they seem and communications cannot be trusted, and these two dozen pages are rife with examples of hidden knowledge revealed, deceptions, and garbled or meaningless communications.  The city is covered with a "sensory shield" that alters (prettifies) the appearance of space and Neptune from Triton's surface; artwork is torn down from a wall to reveal further, fragmented, layers of artwork and texts (Delany uses the word "palimpsests") that our protagonist interprets from his perhaps vague memories of seeing such texts before; one religious sect assigns its members new names that consist of long strings of random numbers, another trains its members to precisely mumble absolutely meaningless sequences of dozens of syllables, and yet another forbids its members to speak.  Our protagonist is tricked into attending a performance of the aforementioned troupe, and he is not sure if a fight he witnesses is part of the performance or an actual violent encounter.  One of the odd cults we hear about may not be real at all, but an invention of the troupe's leader, a woman named "The Spike."  Sexual ambiguity is one major component of this theme of malleable and unknowable truth; besides the woman with the phallic name, the troupe's ranks include a "hirsute woman" with a horrible scar indicating "an incredibly clumsy mastectomy" whom the protagonist mistakes for a man, and who may have actually been portraying a man earlier in the performance.

Our protagonist is Bron Helstrom, a traveler from off-colony come to study and practice "metalogics," a type of "computer mathematics."  Bron was born and grew up on Mars, where he worked as a prostitute who served women before coming out to the colonies on the satellites of the gas giants.  Delany scrambles up all our 20th-century expectations about gender in this book; examples include the characters in the novel who have names traditionally associated with the opposite sex, and the fact that most of the cops in Tethys are women (in the last quarter of the novel we learn that women in the time of the novel, the year 2112, are as tall and as strong as men, maybe due to rapid evolution, maybe because 21st- and 22nd-century adults are equally affectionate towards female and male infants, whereas parents for thousands of years prior lavished attention on boys and neglected girls.)  Bron is an intellectual traveler as well as a geographic (astronomic?) one--in the past he studied to join one of those bizarre religious sects before abandoning it (he couldn't memorize those pointless chants) and currently he is friends with an elderly homosexual, Lawrence.  Bron always rejects Lawrence's regular sexual advances, and the septuagenarian acts as a sort of mentor or guru, dispensing wisdom to Bron; in particular, Lawrence talks about how all people are "types."  (Identity--what makes you who you are, whether who you are is natural or artificial, and how malleable who you are might be--is another of the novel's themes, and there is much discussion of people's names and ID numbers and a taboo in Tethys on talking about your parents, a taboo ignored, like most customs, in the unlicensed sector.)

We meet Lawrence in the flesh and learn about Bron's home life in Chapter 2.  Bron lives in a "single-sex unspecified-preference co-op" with both straight and gay men.  (There are several types of co-ops and communes on Triton and Delany gives us a whole rundown of what proportions of the population live in each type.)  Lawrence is teaching Bron vlet, a complex war game, and the chapter revolves around a match between them. (You'll notice that Mitchell Hook's at-first-glance fine but generic painting on the cover of the novel is in fact very specific, incorporating chess pieces, as well as the kinds of mirrors and goops an actor might use in preparation for a performance, direct references to some of Triton's plot elements and themes.)  Watching the game are other residents, including the handsome and well-educated diplomat Sam, and a retarded man who goes by the nickname Flossie, whose mental shortcomings are partially alleviated by computer finger rings, and his ten-year-old son Freddie.  (Freddie presents one of the several opportunities Delany takes advantage of to hint to us readers that in Tethys it is normal for children to have sex with each other and with adults.)  As befits a SF utopia (we all know how SF titans Robert Heinlein and his pal Theodore Sturgeon felt about the subject!), most of these people hang around naked, and even go to work naked on occassion.

 
In keeping with the novel's themes of incomprehensibility, the rules of vlet are astoundingly complicated; below is the "modulus by which the even more difficult scoring system...proceeded."


The vlet match is interrupted by a power outage that temporarily disables the sensory screen and allows the inhabitants of Triton to see the real sky for once.  The second chapter of Triton ends as Bron does research in a computer directory on The Spike, learning her real name and reading critical analyses of her work; again Delany pushes home his theme of inscrutability as we learn that The Spike's writing is deliberately opaque, and, while widely commented upon, actually seen by very few people (Bron is one of the lucky ones!)

In the third chapter we see Bron at the office, where he uses metalogic to program a computer to make predictions (or something--Delany here, as elsewhere, is deliberately obscure.)  He meets a new employee, Miriamne, a woman who is "his type," and gives her (and us) a nine-page lecture on metalogic, much of which is difficult going; I think this fairly represents the salient part:

Areas of significance space intermesh and fade into one another like color-clouds in a three-dimensional spectrum.  They don't fit together like hard-edged bricks in a box.  What makes "logical" bonding so risky is that the assertion of the formal logician that a boundary can be placed around an area of significance space gives you, in such a cloudy situation, no way to say where to set the boundary, how to set it, or if, once set, it will turn out in the least useful.  Nor does it allow any way for two people to be sure they have set their boundaries around the same area.  

Bron hopes to seduce Miriamne, but soon learns she is a lesbian (for now, at least.)  Luckily, she lives in the same co-op as The Spike, with whom Bron (as he reluctantly admits to himself) is infatuated, and facilitates the beginning of Bron's brief sexual relationship with The Spike.  Then we get some sitcom/soap opera business from Delany--Bron is jealous, thinking The Spike and Miriamne may have a relationship, and so he acts in such a way that Miriamne loses her job.

(I wondered if this business with Miriamne was a nod to Proust; Marcel famously acts crazy because he is jealous of Albertine's lesbian affairs.  A number of times I thought I detected hints of Proust in the novel; late in the book The Spike is directing a performance of Phedra, presumably the same play by Racine that plays a prominent role in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.  Marcel's confusion when seeing Phedra and his changing opinion of the performances mirror some of Delany's own themes about knowledge here in Triton.  The very template of Triton--a long story about varying types of love and sex among intellectual/artistic types set against a background of international diplomacy, intrigue and war--is similar to In Search of Lost Time.) 

Bron is then chagrined to learn that The Spike's troupe is leaving the colony in a matter of hours.   

All through the first three chapters, looming in the background and bubbling under the surface, has been vague talk about a war between an Earth-Mars alliance ("the worlds") and the colonies on Luna and the moons of the gas giants ("the satellites.")  Neither Bron nor us readers know much about the war, save that Triton has been trying to stay out of it and everybody assumes Triton will soon be dragged into it anyway.  The war moves closer to center stage in Chapters 4 and 5 as Sam goes to Earth on a diplomatic mission and brings Bron along with him, but we learn absolutely nothing about the negotiations (or whatever) that take place on Earth, and, as far as the war is concerned, apparently it is just a matter of espionage and tariffs and the like, a cold war with no space fleets or marines or anything of that nature.  Delany keeps hammering home his same themes, and early in the trip Sam reveals to Bron a secret--now a black man, Sam used to be a white woman.  Chapter 4, another short one, consists of the trip from Tethys to Earth--I always like reading this sort of thing, the author describing how people experience and cope with lift off and the view of space through the ports and low gravity and all that.

In Chapter 5 Delany does more traditional SF stuff I always enjoy, as Bron, who has always lived under domes and breathed artificial atmospheres, for the first time breathes natural air and walks under an unobstructed sky on the surface of mother Earth!  (This stuff brought to mind Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth, another novel from 1976 about a guy who travels from a gas giant satellite to Earth.)  Bron also gets tossed into jail briefly, and I always find descriptions of being imprisoned oddly compelling.

Later editions appeared under the title Trouble on Triton

Bron only spends a few pages in jail, but Delany gives us many pages on Bron's date with The Spike, who, by coincidence, is also visiting Earth for the first time.  Whereas in Chapter 1 The Spike stage managed an elaborate performance for Bron, here in Chapter 5, on their date to a fancy restaurant, to which they are transported by a flying limo staffed by four naked female footmen, Bron draws on his experience as a prostitute on Mars (when accompanied women on similarly fancy dates many times) to stage manage an event for The Spike.  I won't be providing any more examples, but rest assured that on every page Delany bombards the reader with his themes of the impossibility of pinning down true facts and transmitting reliable knowledge to others.  Bron declares his love for The Spike and asks her to spend her life with him (marriage is illegal on Triton) but she rejects him.

Just as Bron returns home in Chapter 6 the war gets hot and Triton is right there in the middle of it.  Tethys is battered, with buildings collapsing and some minor characters killed.  Minutes before the devastation (apparently wrought by saboteurs) Bron receives a somewhat garbled letter from The Spike in which she says she doesn't like him and never wants to see him again.  It is here in Chapter 6 that Delany's purposes become, perhaps, a bit more clear and direct.  It is revealed that there are Christians and Jews in Tethys, and they are denounced as troublemakers, Delany suggesting Judaism and Christianity are religions that drive people insane or perhaps appeal only to insane people.  Lawrence, our mentor and guru, is one of the survivors, and Bron makes to him a speech that I guess is Delany's paraphrase of his view of typical 20th-century male thinking: women don't understand men, and men are individuals who have to stand apart from society, which is the domain of women and children, in order to protect that society.  Lawrence calls Bron a fool and tells him such thinking is a perversion that was once almost universal but that now only afflicts one in fifty men and one in five thousand women, and gives a feminist speech about how women for thousands of years were not treated as human beings and men are to blame for all the wars.  (Did this thing go through so many printings because it was being assigned to college students?)  And, by the way, the war is over and the satellites have defeated the worlds, in the process massacring 75% (or more) of Earth's population.

Italian edition

Bron jumps up and runs through the rubble-strewn streets to request a sex-change operation.  After a ten-page lecture and a brief operation (in Tethys a sex change is same-day surgery, no appointment required) he returns to his half-ruined co-op (his room is in the not-ruined half.)  Did Bron become a woman because he got "woke" and didn't want to be a beneficiary and perpetrator of patriarchy?  That is what I expected, but Delany is not so easy to predict.  Back home, Bron tells Lawrence that he still believes all that stuff he told him about men being lonely heroes who have to protect society, that it is those one in fifty men and one in five thousand women who keep our race going.  Bron became a woman to bolster the tiny number of women who have those traditional values, and hopes to be the perfect woman for the sort of heroic old-fashioned man he (thinks he) used to be!

Chapter 7 takes place six months after Bron's sex change.  Bron runs into The Spike again (it's a small solar system) and she again rejects his proposal that they spend their lives together.  Bron makes friends with a fifteen-year-old girl whose regular recreation is sex with 55-year-old men, and this kid tries to help Bron find a man, but Bron has no luck.  I think maybe Delany is using Bron-as-woman-with-traditional-values to show how our 20th-century values make (in Delany's opinion, at least) healthy and happy relationships almost impossible.  The chapter, and the novel proper, ends without Bron's sexual life being at all resolved, though we do see a number of ways that Bron's becoming a woman has changed his/her own psychology and altered how people around him/her feel about and interact with Bron.

German edition; check out the typeface

After the novel proper we have the two appendices.  Appendix A consists of SF criticism, some in the mouths of characters from the novel, that mentions Heinlein, Gernsback and Bester and celebrates the possibilities of SF, its superiority to "mundane" fiction because of its "extended repertoire of sentences" and "consequent greater range of possible incident" and "more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization."  (Delany really slings the academese here.)  Delany likens the relationship of SF to mundane fiction to the relationship of abstract art and atonal music to "conventional" art, something I had never considered.  (I just recently was talking to commentor and blogger Lawrence Burton about A. E. van Vogt's belief that what distinguishes SF from regular old fiction is the fact that the "good" reader of "good" SF has to bring something to the material, because the author has deliberately left something out, providing the reader and opportunity to use his imagination to build upon the material or presenting the reader an obligation to figure out the material--isn't this something like what people commonly say about abstract art?) 

It is nice to hear Delany championing SF after so often reading Malzberg bemoan the field's decline, imply it is a slum he had to resort to after literary markets were closed to him, and lament the way SF killed Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth and Mark Clifton (in his 1980 essay "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963.")

Appendix B is a brief biography of Ashima Slade, one of the most important intellectual founders of metalogics and an associate of The Spike's, and a person who had multiple sex changes.  Slade was born in 2051 and killed in the war on the day Bron had his own sex change operation.  In keeping with Delany's themes throughout the book, many facts about Slade's life are unknowable and in a footnote it is made clear that evidence presented in this biography is not trustworthy.  Also, Delany reveals to us something potentially very important that he has kept from us for 350 pages--the lingua franca of the year 2212, the language spoken by all people on the satellites and 80% of people on Earth, is "a Magyar-Cantonese dialect," suggesting a radical political and cultural change between our own time and Bron's that we didn't know about as we followed Bron's story.  This is comparable to the revelation late in Starship Troopers that Rico is non-white, one of the Heinlein passages Delany talks about in Appendix A.

A later British edition

In a recent blog post I compared Ted White's By Furies Possessed to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, wondering to what extent White's novel was a response to or inspired by Heinlein's.  (In a 2016 talk that I highly recommend to SF, pulp, and comics fans, pointed out to us in a comment by Paul Chadwick, White talks about how important Heinlein was to him as a youth.)  I think it might also be useful to ponder how much Triton may have been influenced by Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress--both are about a colony on a moon where people have new innovative familial and sexual relationships, and both involve a war between the colonials and the Earth--and I Will Fear No Evil, in which a man's brain is implanted in a woman's body?  Delany has no doubt thought seriously about Heinlein's body of work--he wrote the intro to the edition of Glory Road I read some years ago and in his Appendix A here in Triton talks about important sentences in Starship Troopers and Beyond This Horizon, sentences which obliquely tell the reader about the imagined future world of the novel.

Four years and two states ago I read Delany's Empire Star and admired its structure and the evident hard work Delany put into it, but I didn't find it very fun.  My feelings about Triton are somewhat similar.  Delany is working ably in a literary tradition (I've already compared Triton to Proust) with a story that strongly pushes its themes and includes clever devices, like speaking in different voices and effective foreshadowing (the attack on Christianity on page 245, for example, is foreshadowed on page 2 in a way that is quite effective).  He also works masterfully in the SF tradition (I've already mentioned similarities to Heinlein), filling his book with hard science and social science, presenting speculations on what space travel and interplanetary war might be like, and giving us an inhabitant's eye view of a society radically different from our own, one with no marriage in which only 20% of women have children, people live communally, sex involving children is normal, there is a government that provides services to the unemployed and supports a diplomatic and defense apparatus but (somehow) collects no taxes, there is income inequality and social distinctions but (so they say) no money.  (Instead of money everyone has an amount of "credit" based on his or her job; Delany hints that in practice this "credit" is just like money but with the added "benefit" that it makes it easier for the government to keep tabs on you.  How the beggars and artsy fartsy recipients of government endowments we meet in Chapter 1 fit into Tethys's economy I do not understand.)

An early British edition--I'm afraid there are no dog fights in the novel

There are all these good things to say about Triton, but somehow the novel lacks excitement and fun despite all the war and espionage business, lacks feeling despite all the love and sex and death elements; Triton feels a little too cool and a little too intellectual.  Delany, to me, comes across as a skilled technician whose work is built on a strong foundation of thought and knowledge, who lacks some kind of (difficult for me to define) emotional fire or breath of human life.  Or maybe Delany and I are just on such different wavelengths that I can't receive the spark or passion he is transmitting?

Triton is well put together and thought-provoking, but it is easier to admire than to love, one of those books that I'm enjoying more now as I think back on it that than I did while actually in the process of reading it.  Mild to moderate recommendation from me, though it is easy to see that Triton is exactly the kind of SF book that will hold a powerful appeal for some but be prohibitively tedious and opaque to others.

She had to be capable of anything now.  When the surface of her life flowed on like rote--as it usually did--still the lower currents wandered among the stony surprises of an unknown stream bed.  

I spent some time in Des Moines on my recent Thanksgiving travels, and found that the public library was selling books for five cents each! Among those I purchased for this cheap as free price was R. V. Cassill’s Pretty Leslie, a Bantam paperback from 1964 with an interesting red cover that proclaims it to be “the brilliant, moving novel of modern sexual life!”, complete with exclamation point! (The book first appeared as a Simon and Schuster hardcover with a repulsive cover in 1963.) The back cover text of my paperback suggests this 295-page book is about a horny chick whose horniness gets her in some kind of trouble; I guess we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Ronald Verlin Cassill was born in Iowa, and my copy of Pretty Leslie was once part of the Des Moines Public Library’s collection of books by Iowa authors. It is in quite good shape; evidently nobody found the sexalicious cover enticing  enough to actually sit in the library ("FOR USE IN LIBRARY ONLY") and read it. I guess it does look more like one of those "curl up all alone with" type of books.  But don’t think that I purchased Pretty Leslie in hopes it was a piece of pornography!  Not only did Cassill win various literary awards as well as the praises of the snobs at the New York Times and James Dickey (whose Deliverance I read about six years ago and am happy to recommend)--for two decades Cassill edited The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, a perch of great power and prestige in the world of wordsmithery!  All the evidence suggests that Pretty Leslie, even if it is about a horny chick, is a respectable piece of modern literature!


Leslie Skinner (Skinner?  hmmmm...) grew up in the tony Long Island suburb of Manhasset, and then moved to Manhattan and worked at a famous magazine. As our story begins, Leslie is 27 and has lived with her husband, Ben Daniels, a pediatrician, for three years in Sardis, Illinois.  Leslie loves attention, and is a skilled liar and clever manipulator: “She could, and did, still make anyone she wanted to fall in love with her.  The tactics were exactly those that had worked in Manhasset High...."  She flirts with Ben's friends and the men at the ad agency where she works part time, and tells white lies to her female coworkers to get them to tell her their own secrets--these secrets she relays to her husband.  Leslie, Ben reflects, has a "contagious lust for drama."

The back cover of Pretty Leslie, with its handwritten quote from the title character's diary, had given me hopes that this novel would be a first person narrative from a nymphomaniac or someone with some other psychological problem, but it is in fact written in the third person omniscient form, and we follow several characters, learn their backstories, look into their minds, and witness events from their points of view. In the first of the novel's four parts we learn Ben Daniels' deep dark secret: As a child growing up in Kansas he cunningly murdered another boy, meting out rough justice for that boy's having tortured a dog. The murder was ruled an accident, and Ben and his stepmother moved to New York City to start a new life. Throughout his life Ben has wrestled with a dilemma: can he unburden himself of this weighty secret, tell anyone, even his wife, how he coaxed Billy Kirkland behind a car parked on an incline and then, oops, released the brake so Billy was crushed?

In Part Two we learn about Leslie's past: she was fat, which scarred her mind, making her obsessed with keeping off weight.  She developed a slender figure as a young adult, but she is haunted by a "Fat Girl" and at times of stress will quickly gain weight and resort to girdles.  Cassill's novel is full of Freudian mumbo jumbo: we not only learn about the childhood incidents which have caused the various characters' adult fetishes and hangups, but read all about their stupid dreams, and all the characters fling around goofy psychological analyses of each other. Ben, for example, thinks that when Leslie gains weight it may be because she subconsciously wants to be pregnant.

Did I say "fetishes and hangups?"  Leslie wants to be treated roughly by a man, dominated, or at a least part of her she isn't quite ready to admit to, even to herself, does. One of Cassill's recurring themes is personalities split in two, entities composed of two opposing or complementary elements.  Leslie is both the sexy sophisticated professional and the Fat Girl, while Ben is both the cunning assassin of a child and the devoted preserver of children's lives.

Leslie's desire to be roughly handled is all mixed up in her attitudes about race.  While she calls herself a liberal and was "madly for Adlai" during her high school days, she was sexually aroused when she heard a horror story from the South about a black woman who was gang raped by whites while held up against the fender of a car, and was also excited when she saw a cop on the streets of Greenwich Village beating Puerto Rican boys with his billy club.  That very same cop later tried to make the moves on her, and when she resisted he hit her with the very same club, a beating she found cathartic.

Ben has his own complicated views of blacks and Hispanics, which are all mixed up in his beliefs in superstition and "the uncanny."  Ben's father died in Africa where his parents were missionaries devoted to helping whom Ben calls "black idiots;" a "witch doctor" tended Ben's father on his deathbed and Ben's mother soon after went insane. Ben himself volunteers two days a week at a clinic in an Illinois ghetto, looking after "Negro" children.  In an early part of the novel Ben fails to save a black baby (the little boy ate lead paint chips and dies of lead poisoning) and the same day revives an apparently doomed white little girl; Ben conceives the ridiculous notion that the events are inextricably linked, that somehow the little Negro boy was sacrificed to rescue the Caucasian child.

I should probably note that animals also play a role in the novel (there is the aforementioned dog, for example, as well as a pet bird, some pet fish, and a recurring reference to a chimpanzee) and that these animals play a role in the novel similar to that of the numerous minor nonwhite figures--they are alien inferiors, and the way the three white principals treat them reveals something about their character.  

First edition; are those gummy worms or mitochondria?  Hideous!

The climax of Part Two comes when Ben is down in Caracas, at a medical conference where he learns about the plight of Latin American children.  After a party at her boss's fancy house Leslie has a brief affair with a social inferior, Donald Patch.  We learn all about Patch in Part Three.  A short man Leslie doesn't even like, Patch is a loutish commercial artist and science fiction fan (!) whom nobody respects; he uses an airbrush to paint highly detailed and "garishly" realistic depictions of people, aircraft and military equipment (sophisticated people like Leslie prefer abstract modern art, even if they work at an ad agency which makes its money by offering clients Patch's realistic work.)  Patch is a serial womanizer, but he has only ever had lower class women, including many "Negro" women--white, educated middle-class Leslie is a major catch for him.  Patch seduces women by being dismissive and cruel to them (I guess nowadays people call this "negging") and he is a violent lover who hurts Leslie.  This selfish creep brings Leslie to orgasm, something her kind and gentle husband has never done!

Also in Part Three Ben returns from Venezuela, his contact with poor Latin American kids having fired him with the idea that he and Leslie (who have been unable to have their own child) should adopt.  But when he suggests this idea to Leslie over dinner at a fancy restaurant she isn't even listening to him--she's thinking of Patch!  Over the succeeding weeks various clues convince Ben that Leslie had another man in his absence.  He tries to be modern and liberal about it ("If someone had her on her back, what's the harm in it?  Who am I to rock the boat?") but the knowledge of her infidelity has terrible effects on his mind; he becomes impotent, for example.  Patch badgers Leslie into resuming the affair; she spends her days in Patch's crummy apartment and her nights in the house Ben bought her.  Cassill suggests that Leslie needs both gentle Ben and brutal Patch to achieve satisfaction, and even that Ben and Patch are different versions of the same person, shaped by different circumstances. The climax of Part Three is when Leslie discovers she is finally pregnant!

In Part Four Leslie flees west and Ben finally realizes what is going on and confronts Patch; he and Patch (it appears) die, while Leslie, sower of discord, moves on to another phase of her life.

There are some good things in Pretty Leslie; the sex stuff is more or less entertaining, and the uncomfortable race stuff, Leslie and Ben's powerful but condescending, ambivalent, and at times hypocritical feelings about blacks and Hispanics, is interesting.  I liked the character of Donald Patch, the brutish artist consigned to the edges of polite society.  I give Pretty Leslie a passing grade.  But there are also lots of problems--it is certainly not as "brilliant" or "moving" as advertised.  Cassill doesn't have a very engaging prose style, and he uses lots and lots of elaborate metaphors and similes.  Some of these work, but some just weigh down the narrative, expressing an idea with more words but no more clarity than a simple declaration would have.  Some of the longer metaphorical passages I found distracting and, as my mind wandered, incomprehensible.

The profusion of metaphors suggests Cassill is trying to produce a serious literary novel; he also assumes a level of cultural literacy on the part of the reader, including plenty of references to artists like George Bellows and Willem De Kooning and fictional characters like Circe, Madame Bovary, and Mrs. Miniver.  Cassill never uses Maugham's name, but makes it clear Patch thinks of himself as Strickland, the protagonist of Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence, an artist above the stifling strictures of bourgeois morality.

In the same way the overabundance of metaphors makes the book feel a little too long and too slow, there is a superfluity of minor, uninteresting characters who appear briefly and then never show up again; maybe Cassill could have combined some of them--how many friends and colleagues do the Daniels really need for the narrative to function?

A recent edition

The novel's biggest problem is probably that it is about a marriage, but neither the husband nor the wife is very interesting, and their relationship isn't compelling either.  Leslie and Ben Daniels are wishy washy--why should the reader be "moved" if Ben and Leslie themselves are so bland and hesitant, so ambivalent, about each other?  I can't remember why they even got married, what attracted them to each other in the first place, they never exhibit the kind of deep love or ferocious hate I want to see in drama. Don Patch, a man driven by big emotions who stands at odds with society, is the book's most interesting character--he acts and reacts, he feels things and he does things.  Leslie and Ben just go with the flow, they think and talk but can't make up their minds about what they feel and what they should to do, and end up feeling and doing very little.  Leslie and Ben are passive victims to whom things happen, and victims are boring--Patch is a villain or antihero who makes things happen.

A part of the problem is all that modern psychology jazz; it quashes the characters' agency as well as any romance or tragedy the story might have had, turning them into malfunctioning machines instead of flesh and blood people you can feel for.  The idea of people as deterministic machines may make sense as a description of real life, but it can ruin fiction, especially when the characters, instead of rebelling against determinism, blandy accept it.

Pretty Leslie wasn't a waste of my time, but Cassill lacks the sort of special something--depth of feeling, a beautiful style, a unique point of view, humor or a sense of fun, surprising ideas--that excites me about the "mainstream" or "literary" writers I really like, such as Proust or Nabokov or Maugham or Orwell or Henry Miller or Bukowski, so I don't think I will be reading any other of his numerous works.