Grant Gallicho. - Review - book review

Commonweal, June 15, 2001 by Grant Gallicho

Grant Gallicho is Commonweal's editorial assistant.

I am not one for beach reading. Or for beaches at all. When I think of summer reading, I think of being cooked in a subway station, thankful for a book engaging enough to take my mind away from slow roasting until the next refrigerator on rails arrives. A good book levels dramatic external changes in temperature by inducing some of its own in the reader. There are two sorts of books that achieve this: Those that can be closed as you enter a train car and returned to, once inside, without much loss of momentum or meaning; and those that require continual reading even as you navigate the sea of commuters trying to exit the train.

Lucchesi and the Whale (Duke University Press, $17.95, 115 pp.) falls into the latter category. Frank Lentricchia, the "Dirty Harry of contemporary literary theory," as the Village Voice dubbed him, has melded the genres of literary criticism and fiction in the rarest of ways--one that works. In a fragmentary fictional structure, Lentricchia waxes philosophical about language, the act of writing, and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Don't let Melville put you off. The difficult literary criticism that forms the centerpiece of Lucchesi and the Whale is well worth the effort. By the time you arrive at it, you've been wooed into accepting both the authorial eccentricities of Lentricchia, and those of his fictional counterpart, Thomas Lucchesi.

Introduced as a "recessed bachelor," Lucchesi is a one-time college professor, living with his parents. He leaves his home only to visit dying friends--not to comfort them or their loved ones-- but because only during his travels to deathbeds is he inspired to write.

The book is largely a portrait of Lucchesi's mind, through which biographical scenes, like that of an unconsummated childhood crush, and Kafkaesque dream sequences run. It's not always clear when the scene is a dream and when a memory--but that's the point, memory often being equal parts authenticity and revision.

Interspersed are snippets of Lucchesi's theories on writing. His credo: "Cancel all sentiment." Memoirs, he opines, are "the literary disgrace of our time," little more than forced vulnerability. The remedy? "Have no shame. Reach in. Smear it on the wall...hide nothing, so that you'll be freed for serious writing."

The serious writing here is literary theory. Lentricchia wedges a brilliant riff on Moby-Dick into the voice of Lucchesi, who asks, "Is this, then, already, the tedious debacle of what they call, in the academy, a reading?" Lucchesi practices textual criticism. But, at the same time, he indicts himself and the process by which interpretation deprives a literary work of its "shimmer." He knows, in the end, art will win. "Death by criticism. I die; M-D survives."

M-D? Yes, Lucchesi tells us: "Moby HYPHEN Dick, title of book. Moby UNHYPHEN Dick, name of the White Whale." If all of that sounds a bit cerebral, that's because it is. But voyage with Lucchesi and Lentricchia and you'll emerge with a new, broader understanding of Melville, Moby-Dick, and perhaps even the immortality of writing.

If Lucchesi is a book you cannot easily read piecemeal, Dan Rhodes's Anthropology (Random House, $18.95, 217 pp.) is its opposite. With 101 short stories of 101 words each, Anthropology is built for single-serving reading. This is more gimmick than art form, but it's a gimmick I'm happy to abide. And Rhodes's single-minded attention to his male narrators' failed relationships yields real insights.

Some of the vignettes are brutally pointed and hilarious: "My girlfriend is so beautiful that she has never had cause to develop any kind of personality." Others are timely and even touching: "Unable to accept that Celestia was no more than a haphazard cluster of chemicals brought together by chance in a universe out of control, I started to believe." Still others are outrageous: "Petrified at the thought of age withering my boyish good looks, Sundial blinded herself with a soldering iron." While the stories often seem like miniature episodes of "The Twilight Zone," Anthropology manages to convey, with a remarkable economy of words, and in mostly ironic tones, how absurd we can be, how desperate, how obsessed with sex and surfaces and ourselves--often in that order.

A warning to the sensitive: there are some slightly shocking moments of vulgarity. I am quite pleased to be jolted out of subway catatonia by something other than stench, and even more satisfied knowing I can keep this book in my bag and return to it whenever I want.

Alan Lightman, MIT physicist and now professor of writing, made a splash in 1993 with his first foray into fiction, Einstein's Dreams (Warner Books, $10.95, 181 pp.). If you haven't gotten to it yet, put it on your summer reading list. Lightman imagines a young Einstein in 1905, patent clerk in Berne, hunched over his desk after another long night composing his theory of time. He dreams of other worlds in which time's meaning varies.