“Many of the residents right here aren’t geared up for all times as it’s generally regulated,” displays the narcissistic, madly distracted but profoundly cultured narrator Helen close to the tip of this fascinating, unusual novel by New York creator Lynne Tillman (who writes novels, quick tales and criticism). Least of all this intelligent ex-historian whom I took to be Tillman’s realisation of a postmodern successor to such endearingly digressive ladies as Winnie from Beckett’s Completely happy Days or Joyce’s Molly Bloom.
That mentioned, our heroine most resembles Ronnie Corbett, who in his weekly monologues on The Two Ronnies would go off on a number of tangents earlier than concluding apologetically: “However I digress.” Helen is like that: a digressive flaneur by a mindscape seething with fixations on chair design, textile manufacture, the Zulu language, Kant’s account of psychological illnesses, how parasitical fleas prey on kittens in Amsterdam and plenty extra. Helen displays repeatedly on one of many Manson murderers, Leslie Van Houten, seeing in her destiny, maybe, one thing of America’s capability for evil and refusal of redemption. She additionally obsessively recollects her mum killing her beloved childhood cat as a result of the cat killed Helen’s parakeet. Not like Ronnie Corbett, although, Helen by no means stops digressing lengthy sufficient to search out time to apologise for her self-indulgences.
It’s not clear the place the novel unfolds. Is Helen in rehab, a psychiatric establishment, spa or east-coast retool of the Resort California? Fairly probably she’s in a postmodern New England simulation of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the place posh inmates develop into struggling not a lot from bodily illnesses however searching for respite from the awfulness that’s Twenty first-century America.
Helen, like Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey on the Claremont, readily assimilates this preposterous-sounding joint populated by perfunctorily described and principally anonymous eccentrics whose concept of post-dinner leisure is a staged studying of the unwritten correspondence between Franz Kafka and his fiancee Felice.
Helen even contemplates intercourse with one in every of these shadowy inmates whom she calls the Rely. He’s, she tells us, “a bitterly provocative man, whose lively disdain for widespread issues and a love of evil may need carried the day and myself to his mattress, briefly”. That mentioned, the prospect “feels athletic and tiring, as if we’d performed intercourse in opposition to one another within the Olympics”.
This can be a lady, one feels, so hobbled by her unstoppably roving creativeness that she might speak herself out of something after which again into it once more. However what finally decides her in opposition to an affair with the Rely is one thing key to the novel. His pores and skin. It’s tough with giant pores and there are blackheads round his nostrils. Deal-breaker!
For a girl who spends most of the novel’s 359 pages describing her difficult skincare routine and disdainfully diagnosing the moles, rashes and psoriatic encrustations of fellow residents, the inadequately moisturised Rely is clearly not an appropriate sexual accomplice.
As an alternative, she has a resort room quickie with the gauche younger kitchen helper whose largest organ (which, as she repeatedly tells us, is the pores and skin) proves to be simply pretty.
Helen’s dermatological fixation figures in American Genius as an allegory of our hypermediated, death-denying age. The sensitivity of Helen’s pores and skin displays how not possible (and paradoxically fascinating) it’s to stay as a delicate soul, along with your psychic borders incessantly breached by forces – historical past, different folks, recollections of lifeless cats – past your management.
However the pores and skin trope can also be to do with America. In a single passage, Helen recollects instructing the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s discredited frontier thesis, whereby his nation’s character was moulded by its westward growth, giving that oxymoron, American civilisation, a roughness not like that of its European forebears. That thesis, for Helen, encodes the will to reincarnate in recent new pores and skin. Helen writes of “the widespread however distinctive American fantasy of life as a completely totally different individual with a virgin’s physique whose hymen, a membrane of skinny pores and skin defending a vital orifice that… can also be simply one other frontier”.
The ethical? America’s genius lies in convincing itself that its civilisation will not be barbarous, that its frontiers have to be shored up, ideally with partitions to maintain out the pet-eating different. And, most of all, that it may be born once more, every time with a pores and skin as innocent as a child’s backside’s.
However all that may be to impose a liminally limiting thesis on Tillman’s superb gallimaufry of 1 lady’s antinomian tastes and outre obsessions. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, American Genius takes place over a single day; not like it, little or no occurs. Helen takes breakfast, pours the delivered lunchtime tomato soup down the bathroom and later has dinner. The drama is all within the thoughts.
Close to the tip, although, one thing occurs. Helen leaves this anonymous asylum to rejoin the actual world. And particularly to go to her ailing mom. The distinction is poignant: on the one hand, an oversensitive, self-obsessed daughter whose life appears, no less than to me, unbearably charged and uncooked; on the opposite, a mom dropping her thoughts, more and more insensitive to the actual world. Tillman doesn’t push the ethical, however after such a protracted guide a couple of lady consumed by her obsessions to the purpose of insanity, it’s troublesome to determine which is the more serious destiny.
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American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman is revealed by Peninsula Press (£12.99). To assist the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply expenses could apply
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