Pliant Plante
Francis King
The Foreigner David Plante (Chatto. & Windus £9.95) God Knows Joseph Heller (Cape £8.95)
David Plante's last book, Difficult Women, had a rough ride. No one could object to the quality of the writing or to the uncanny manner in which, as one's eyes moved over a page, one seemed to hear the voice of Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell or Germaine Greer actually talking from behind one's shoulder. Yet the hostility was widespread. 'Bad taste' was the phrase most often used; but I think that what really disturbed both reviewers and readers was something more subtle. Few people Who knew these three woman could, hand mi heart, dissent from Plante's judgments of them; but there was something eerie about the passivity and pliancy with which he had submitted himself to their wills and Whims, while at the same time remaining sO watchful and so critical. Jean Rhys's importunate egotism and Sonia Orwell's ferocious unreasonableness had often driven the kindest and mildest of people to exasperation and even fury. It was precise- ly because Plante's narrative never bet- rayed either of these two emotions — rjecisely because he never said 'Oh, for o a s sake, Jean, think of someone else for a change!' or 'Oh, do shut up, Sonia!'
— that the word 'creepy' was used of the book in at least one review.
The same passivity and pliancy characterise the narrator, never named, of Plante's fascinating, tantalising, deman- ding new novel The Foreigner. Plante always writes best when he is closest to his own experience, and I should guess that there is a strong element of autobiography in this account of how a French-Canadian boy, financed by a doting older brother, leaves Providence, Rhode Island, to sub- mit himself to what is, in effect, his spiritual rape by Europe. Hemingway has set him the example — 'He was what I wanted to be, but would have to risk everything to become: a foreigner.'
On board the liner that is taking him across the Atlantic, he meets up with a black American woman, Angela, and through her with an enigmatic man, who persuades him to carry a mysterious parcel from Le Havre to Paris, The boy dares not speculate, much less ask either Angela or her friend what the parcel contains. Throughout the story he is similarly docile and unquestioning. There is a significant passage, near the close, when, entrusted now with an equally mysterious letter, he has to Make the journey from Barcelona to Almeria. Inertly, as though he were some inanimate object, he suffers now one Span- iard to put him on a train and now another to put him off it. Even on board this or that train on the interminable journey, he goes where he is summoned by his fellow passengers. He has already been similarly obedient to everyone else with whom he has come into contact — running errands that might well compromise him, handing over his money and even his clothes, shacking up here and wandering the streets there.
What he feels towards other people — the black American girl, an Englishwoman trying to make a living as a cabaret artiste in Barcelona, his Spanish landlady in Paris — is, with one notable exception, never revealed, much less analysed. The excep- tion is his declaration at one point in the narrative that he has fallen in love with Vincent, a mentally disturbed, possibly criminal American, who has lived in Spain since the Civil War. Why does the black girl take him to live with her in her apartment near Barcelona? What precisely are the feelings of the Englishwoman towards him? Why should the Spanish landlady choose him as her emissary? We are never told.
Constantly the boy is described as touching himself, smelling the odours of his own body and looking at his reflection. It is as though he were under an unrelent- ing compulsion to establish not merely who he is but whether he exists at all. Vincent is also constantly touching himself, at one point even violently pinching his body all over, at another 'palpating a nipple'. Hav- ing exchanged his isolation as a Frenchman in America for no less desolate isolation as an American in France and Spain, Plante's 'foreigner' exhibits the voracious voyeurisme of a starved urchin.pressing his nose against the plate-glass of an expensive restaurant. The climax of this voyeurisme comes when, watching Angela and Vincent make love, he achieves a spontaneous orgasm.
This book employs many of the devices — clandestine letters and parcels to be delivered, guns to be .concealed, rendez- vous to be kept — of the modern thriller; but this is a thriller without solution, even without explanations, so that when, on the last page, the unheroic hero arrives in Almeria with his letter, we never learn what it contains or to whom he delivers it. What we have here is the fictional equiva- lent of one of those Pinter plays — The Homecoming is the obvious example — in which a fog of criminality and sexual passion thickens and thickens, never to be dispersed. The narrator constantly seems to be saying 'Do with me what you will', the book no less constantly to be saying 'Make of me what you will'.
In extremely short sentences, with little use of simile or metaphor, Plante writes with an airy clarity in which the most familiar things — a walk along a street, a wait on a railway platform, a meal in a restaurant — become as new and strange for the reader as they are for the narrator. It is in this creation of a 'foreign' world, peopled by 'foreigners', within the hum- drum world already known to us, that the success of an elusive but always absorbing novel must chiefly be sought.
From Browning to Barrie to Stefan Heym and Dan Jacobsen, writers have constantly been drawn to the Biblical story of King David. The narrator of Joseph Heller's God Knows, David himself, sees this as perfectly reasonable: 'I don't like to boast — but honestly I think I've got the best story in the Bible. Job? Forget him. Genesis? The cosmology is for kids . . Lying on his deathbed, with Abishag the Shulamite to comfort him, instead of Bath- sheba, for whom he still yearns, David reminisces in the manner of some present- day, elderly New York Jew tediously going over and over all the events of a long and chequered life. The basic joke is the contrast between the language of the Old Testament and that of the West Side speakeasy. A typical example is 'I was dodging javelins to save my ass'. Some- times David 'lies with' this or that of his concubines, sometimes he merely fucks. On one occasion, David comes on Bath- sheba when she is using a tincture of loosestrife and hyssop to bleach her hair — 'Bathsheba was trying to turn herself into a WASP!' Such anachronisms, ranging from Michelangelo to miniskirts, are common.
All in all, despite some good jokes and some interesting comments on the Old Testament, modern Jewry and God, this is a disappointing work to have come from the author of Catch-22. The blurb de- scribes it as intoxicatingly funny and deeply affecting; but it is about as intoxicating, funny, deep and affecting as a glass of flat ginger-beer.
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