In Slip, his first book about the rise and fall of the petite bourgeoisie,
the parents are disguised as one another– father as woman, but enraged,
mother as man but unpaid, a hostage to who she is and who she tries to be.
The son’s the little darling but lives in irony. Does he love the man
or the woman or the X? Life is beautiful, duplicitous, a sex detective mystery
like the ones mother read. Chandler and Cain. Father cuts the books up
with scissors, shreds them to protect his son from the fatale. Like the boy
in the book, he grew elliptical. Who’d want to look beneath the drag of skirts
to find that pleasure is a hair shirt? Born of the dream and disillusionment
of noir, the retailed wrecks and splendors of nowhere,
he lived ravished by color, like Dorothy in Oz. Color
like an imprinted name– Smith or Rodriguez– whispered in the dark
to him something vast and swarming and munificent, some clamoring
for red and gold and vermilion like a sunset, the suffering of nations stilled
for a minute. He tried, as in his next book, Snarl, to hide the body or evolve
from his nervous system (like a fish) a mind with God and Nature and Mankind
in it, when all there was was a shadow and a sax and the voice of a melancholiac
singing a love song freighted with shame. Like one of his heroes he is lame,
Northern, can’t dance. Sensitive. A Jew nearsighted and poor and passing.
He stews in Philadelphia, enters the University of the Dark, develops a dysphasia,
develops eyes like sea creatures in the Pacific trenches, survives a heart-attack,
a few, sleeps on benches, speaks in tongues or hums, writes his bildungsroman
(which goes up in flames when a match his father strikes ignites the manuscript).
But still he’s happy being in the dark with things slowed down or exploded, the tick
of the projector, the private dreams made public, faces the size of houses, the politics
of heartbreak, the astrology of money, guys and dolls, paleface and redskin, funny
stuff, weepers, horror porn, sleepers, all the rare huge mystery taboos,
all the ripped and rearranged blues become the book he is most remembered for:
Fugue, more music than story, more vamp and pan and zoom
than empire, history, and doom, in which a man in prison
sings to himself translations of the language of the news he receives
in the altered frequencies of memory: pink, then more pink, then the necessary
felony of self, then the minstelsry, and a feeling that he had been inside
of other people, like a virus or a song, and so survived.