NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE:

A Guide to the Novels of
JONATHAN CARROLL

Marek JedliÒski

M.A. thesis, written at

Department of American Literature and Culture,
University of Lodz, Poland, 1993
under the supervision of Prof. Agnieszka Salska
 

"Wipe your glasses with what you know."
James Joyce

Lodz, Poland, 1993

Table of Contents:

  1. Title page (this page)

     

  2. Acknowledgements
  3. Foreword: A Point to Go Forward From
  4. Introduction

     

  5. Part 1: Generation

     

  6. Part 2: Operation
    • Chapter 1 Guilt Paranoia (Voice of our Shadow; Bones of the Moon)
    • Chapter 2 Fatherhood Paranoia (Sleeping in Flame)
    • Chapter 3 Art Paranoia (Child Across the Sky; Outside the Dog Museum)

     

  7. Part 3: Destruction
    • Chapter 1 Back to Kansas... (After Silence)
  8. Afterword
  9. Bibliography
  10. Copyright note

Note about the HTML version of this document

This document is a HTML version of the MA thesis I wrote in 1993. The original was edited in WordPerfect 5.1. The HTML version preserves much of the original formatting, along with footnotes, but with only an abbreviated index.

If you have any comments or questions, if you enjoy this text or if it caused you pain in the head, click away and tell me. Thank you.

Abbreviations used in this document

Throughout this document, the titles of Jonathan Carroll's novels are written out in full when they are first mentioned in each chapter; subsequently abbreviations are used for conservation of space. No other abbreviations are used apart from the following:

LL - The Land of Laughs

VS - Voice of our Shadow

BM - Bones of the Moon

SF - Sleeping in Flame

CAS - A Child Across the Sky

ODM - Outside the Dog Museum

AS - After Silence

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express his gratitude to the following people who assisted him in many ways while writing this guide:

     
  • To Professor Agnieszka Salska for insight and patience in supervising the project;
  • to Professor David Pichaske and to Anna Reading, BA, for kindly supplying copies of the novels;
  • to Ewa Bednarowicz for research and opportunity to discuss After Silence, but most of all for staying in touch;
  • to Joanna Kazik, the brightest mind around;
  • to Marek Cie�lik, the Guardian Angel in and out of the land of fantasy, for generosity and help along the way;
  • to Mr. Jonathan Carroll, the maker of the Land of Laughs.

FOREWORD:

a point to go forward from.

"Writing is organizing one's personal chaos."
- Jonathan Carroll

The purpose that a preface to any written work is supposed to serve is either for the author to introduce or justify the subject matter he has chosen to tackle, or for the readers to find out what can be expected in the pages that follow. Often such a presentation will be redundant: the self-explanatory title or the readers' previous knowledge and a degree of interest in the topic will suffice to establish the necessary link - and the readers will want to skip the preliminaries which would provide little essential information or clarification. However, as it is inference and deduction that are at work here, said "previous knowledge" is a sine qua non condition for such a fast identification to take place. To give an example (and I am going to resort to these quite often on these pages), if the title of this work read: "Objective correlative: the concept and its application in the poems of T. S. Eliot" or "The use of catalectic meter in Frank O'Hara's poems", any self-conscious introduction to it would be superfluous, and here is why: an authorial excuse for devoting whatever time and effort it takes to compose this kind of dissertation would be pure rhetoric and smelling of self-indulgence - and that regardless of the readers' potential interest in highly academic matters like these, regardless even of whether they comprehend the title or not. A heading of this sort provides enough data to conclude about the intended "target audience" of the piece in question as well as about its contents... unless it marks the author's wittily perfidious nature, that is. Moreover, to handle either of the topics, it would mostly be unnecessary to deal with anything that is not directly and thoroughly related to the implied subject matter, e.g. in order to discuss the peculiar meter of Frank O'Hara's poetry (i.e. first to describe it and then to study the role it serves in the syntactic/semiotic structure of the poems) the critic would hardly need to find himself supplying the poet's date and place of birth or discussing his position in the American literature of the 20th century. He would be right to assume that his readers will have a prior understanding of these issues or that these issues will be considered altogether irrelevant, given the scope of the work in question.

This, however, is not the case with the work the introduction to which you are in the process of reading. This work's subject matter is the study of (or indeed, the introduction to) the writings of Jonathan Carroll, an American novelist. Having published seven novels since 1981, this Vienna-based New Yorker remains largely unfamiliar to the readers of American literature. (The cult followings in Sweden and Japan, though indicative, do not seem to have made much difference.) Despite favorable reviews he has received in some widely read magazines, to this author's knowledge there has been no serious criticism of his work so far, and he is still often regarded as a writer "in the making." Therefore it must be assumed here that the readers of this commentary will not be familiar with either Jonathan Carroll himself or any critical opinions pertaining. This is exactly the source of the problem that the author of this introduction is facing: it is relatively easy to discuss (and follow the discussion of) a subject that is not entirely unfamiliar to the audience, who can draw upon what they already know to incorporate the new information into the preexisting cognitive structure in their minds. It could be argued that the difference between knowing one thing about a particular subject and knowing plenty is much smaller than that between knowing nothing and knowing one thing only. The position in which both this author and his readers find themselves might then be described as "breaking past the zero knowledge point" and involves the need to establish an agreement, an understanding, of "exactly what it is that we're talking about here." In the attempt to solve this problem a number of approaches have been considered. The simplest of them would entail starting off with a biographical note on the author Jonathan Carroll - and run the risk of sounding like a high-school second grader's composition piece (three hundred words or less). Anyway, this can be taken care of in as few as three lines, as will be shown presently. Another way was to bypass any preliminaries altogether and hope that in due time all things will fall into their proper places. It is this author's belief, however, that hope is a concept of little critical advantage. Yet another method, and a fortunate one in that it reflects the idea found in a piece of writing by Jonathan Carroll himself, is to expose the readers to an inventory of ideas in order to provide them from the very beginning with as many facts and notions as possible, later on to be sorted out and built upon, to precede mental understanding with intuitive "feel." The obvious danger which this approach poses lies in the randomness of selection and the opportunity it gives for unforeseen misconceptions to be formed in place of the previous informational vacuum (for example: one of the few things about Jonathan Carroll we have mentioned in the above paragraphs is that, after thirteen years of writing so far, he has received little critical acclaim - this might easily lead to an impression that we're going to talk about some big time failure). All is not lost though, because this very randomness, in its arbitrary process, will likely alleviate any such danger by the law of equal distribution: for any mis- there should be a conception formed, for any person discouraged, there may to be one inspired to read on.

INTRODUCTION

"You know something? At first he was a teacher of English.
Next he became a teacher of English.
Now he is - of all things - a teacher of English."
- a friend of the author's, having read a biographical note on Jonathan Carroll

He rarely gives interviews. For years he resisted having his photograph on the back covers of his books. He is the son of Sydney Carroll, a screenwriter, who made his mark with the screenplay for Paul Newman's The Hustler; his mother is a comedy actress, his sister a painter, and his half-brother, Steve Reich, a renowned composer. He collects expensive fountain pens and asserts that he has no hobbies, no politics, nothing besides raising his son and walking the dog. Dogs are the creatures he seems particularly fond of and he grants them most unexpected names like Nails for him and Petals for her. He was a juvenile delinquent before he graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University. In what might be a significant act, given the heritage of American literature, he moved from New York to settle permanently in Vienna. He precedes his novels with quotations taken from John Ashbery's cryptic poems. He has a rare gift for inventing titles for the novels he writes, as well as for those he only allows the reader to imagine: Bones of the Moon, Peach Shadows, Sorrow and Son...

"FAIRY TALES FOR ADULTS"

"If you want to know how the rockets are going to work in any hypothetical future, turn to Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein;
if you want literature about what the future might hold, you must go to Ray Bradbury or perhaps to Kurt Vonnegut.
What powers rockets is 'Popular Mechanics' stuff. The province of the writer is what powers the people."
Stephen King (1)

If at all, booksellers store his novels on their 'Fantasy' or 'Horror' shelves. Whether this label is attached to Carroll's works on the basis of their titles, cover art, or trade gossip (for want of informed critical opinion) - it is probably as relevant to their content as the label of science fiction is to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Such a label however may make or mar an author, as Vonnegut's history of initial lack of recognition attests; the normative theories of literature are equally removed from the critical practice and from the reading habits of the public at large. Then again, even such well-established and elevated pieces of literature as Alice In Wonderland will be found among children's books as well as in the Penguin Classics, depending on the issue format. Suffice it to say that, despite their face value, Jonathan Carroll's novels would not score high as horror: not when measured against the works of such masters of the genre as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King. For most part they fail to evoke and sustain the emotion of fear, and it is the characters, rather then the readers, who experience most suspense in the course of action. In fact, the readers will usually be allowed the comfort of watching the scenes unfold, with minds cool and collected, much as they might be drawn to sympathize with the protagonists, and so a question should arise, whether the author - the one responsible for the feelings of both his characters and his readers - actually undertakes to "frighten" anybody, whether horror is either his target genre or the target emotion. That understood, it might still be possible to endeavor a comparative study: to examine in what ways Carroll's writings depart from horror, still retaining enough qualities of the genre for the association to be evident; the usefulness of such an attempt this author finds at least questionable. (2) The last thing a critic could do to save this concept would be to observe that in Carroll's work the feeling of fear is secondary to that of paranoia and then... either proclaim the emergence of "a new type of horror"(3), or better, to refocus his attention: from the general (the genre) to the particular (the set of writings). This would lead the hypothetical critic to what this author wishes to make the scope of his inquiry: the novels of Jonathan Carroll, without further qualifications. And as it is impossible to comment on them without referring to the notion of horror - or fear, or paranoia - in the pages of this guide, the reader is asked to assume that henceforward any mention of the word "horror" will refer to the concept or emotion it signifies, and not (unless clearly indicated) to the genre.

The reason why this misplaced label has become so firmly attached to his novels probably lies in the difficulty of defining, or "describing" Carroll's style and subject matter. In a few words, that is. If the hundred-word reviewers and authors of back-cover blurbs are to be masters in the art of expression both concise and precise, perhaps it is not out of way to resort to these excerpts. After all, they provide the first information a potential reader is likely to find, save for the title and the cover price of a book. Here they are, in order of appearance. The Land of Laughs was thus hailed by Washington Post: "Beguiling and original. An intricate, challenging, ultimately chilling tale." Voice of Our Shadow, International Herald Tribune: "Jonathan Carroll seems to have invented the tale that is convincingly supernatural in some episodes, psychological in others, and totally ambiguous in others." (seems to have invented... totally ambiguous... Are we being enlightened yet?) Bones of the Moon, Library Journal: "A powerful story that traverses the two-way street between the dreams and the reality" (not quite illuminating, given the fact that the plot of this particular novel develops in two interwoven lines, one narrating the apparently "real" world events, while the other describes the main character's sequence of dreams - the quoted excerpt is thus no more than a statement of an obvious fact). Sleeping in Flame, Kirkus Reviews: "Fever-dream writing; many vivid images" (the same can be said of hard-core pornography). A Child Across the Sky, Observer: "Searching, cold, quicksilver tale... Carroll is sly and taxing and corrosive." (Brilliant adjectives certainly help advertise, but hardly elucidate.) Outside the Dog Museum, Million: "Quirky, wondrous, pithy, magical, poignant, scary, luxurious, profound, uplifting, enigmatic..." Fortunately, no blurbs for the latest novel, After Silence, as yet. To conclude this eloquent parade, here are the spare words Jonathan Carroll himself used to describe the quirky and the wondrous: "Outside the Dog Museum is 100% serious." (4)

It is probably this seriousness that mostly eludes description, or that has often been put aside for the purposes of commerce; the seriousness of an author, as The Times' critic puts it, "with more ambition in his little fingernail than most novelists have in their entire bodies." It is this very seriousness that I will be looking for in the writings of Jonathan Carroll. I will try to show that on this seriousness relies the artistry of his stories, the stories that Carroll himself likes to call "the fairy tales for adults." Yes, there are talking dogs there, there are tattooed birds that fly off a man's skin, there are videotapes from behind the grave, there is magic and there are angels - just as, it might be said, there are rifles and horses and saloons in a western movie. A poor one will make these objects its prime characters, along with the good guys, the bad guys, and the women and Indians somewhere in between. The heroes of a poor western will be lost when deprived of the props that justify their existence and give them the setting within which to perform, and the story line will rely on these items being (masterfully) utilized. A "good" - that is, an artful - western will use the same objects only as the means to create the scenery for a human story to unfold, and if the characters are put to a test, it won't exactly be to measure how fast their draw is: not so much the story as its implications will be the main concern.

UNRELIABLE REALITY

"There is a saying - and I would be happy to attribute it if I could remember who to attribute it to -
that PERFECT PARANOIA IS PERFECT AWARENESS."
Stephen King

In a Franz Rottensteiner interview, shortly after The Land of Laughs was published, Jonathan Carroll thus summed up the main concern in his first novel: "I have tried to show that in literature as well as in life, the very things that delight us may well turn around and hurt or scare us, unendingly." In The Land of Laughs, as well as in most of his subsequent novels, he achieves this by following what amounts to a classical ghost-story structure: introducing the reader to a perfectly lifelike, almost tangible (though rarely mundane) world of his characters, disguising his intents under a pretense of a romance, an autobiography or a detective story. It is only later, when the protagonists have assumed their identities and began exploring their world and themselves that they start to discover ghastly cracks which suddenly appear on the seamless surface of their reality. Imagine a thick cover of ice breaking slowly but relentlessly, coming apart under your feet. Imagine taking a walk down New York's Fifth Avenue, the street flooded with sunlight and suddenly splitting into countless, disconnected pieces: the sidewalk, the sky-scrapers and the sky itself; imagine catching a glimpse of the clockwork machinery or maybe theatrical strings behind them and, yes, the horror that comes with it, but more important, the necessity to walk on with the new knowledge and maybe the futile wish you had chosen some other day for the innocent stroll: this is the situation, if not quite the scenery, in which Carroll's characters are sooner or later bound to find themselves. Carroll however doesn't take particular interest in whatever the mechanics are that underlie such phenomena - these are acknowledged, then taken for granted. The essence, and the really enticing part of Carroll's show is instead to examine the characters' minds and to see what happens to people facing such an alarming revelation: how they will react, how - and if - they can cope and go on living with the Faustian knowledge, when the alternative to assenting to its logic is assenting to one's own insanity. Anything from the fleeting sensation of uneasiness arising from having come across a crack in Nature's otherwise smoothly running plan, to the disturbing suspicion that there is another life going on silently along its own tracks, to the dizzying realization that some unthinkable powers are pulling the strings of one's life for reasons inscrutable - all of this is craftily woven into the plot of Jonathan Carroll's novels, taken a slightest bit further step by a careful step, until one cannot but admit that something is very wrong indeed with life as we know it - and as this slow but irrefutable conclusion settles in, the cracks in the sky disappear, the mundane reality resumes its ways, while the heroes, the accidental hunters of the unknown, become the hunted, or haunted rather, by whatever powers they involuntarily stirred.

If all these deliberations seem baffling, or at least vague at this point, their purpose is to provide a general pattern, a mold, a paradigm, that will take on more particular meanings as soon as we have left this troubled introduction. Yet another example may however be provided within its bounds - the common, real-life experience of déja vu: the "I've-been-here" or "I've-seen-it-before" sort of revelation. For all we know it's quite impossible - surely untransferable - and yet it occurs every now and then, a fleeting glimpse of... horror? the other world? or the machinery of the brain gone haywire for a split second, like a glitch in a computer's logic circuits? Whatever the cause, most people will be familiar with the effect. After that, it takes no more than a couple of seconds for the doubt to arise if it ever was real - until there it comes again, real as fear itself, the next time. It shouldn't even happen - yes, but this is only tantamount to saying that brakes should never fail in a car; they certainly do, at times, and when that happens it is quite immaterial exactly which screw or cable went loose: not so much what powers the car becomes critical then, but what powers the driver in his ability to handle the crisis. In a Jonathan Carroll novel (as opposed to "straight" genre horror) a moment like this would be the beginning, not the climax, of a good story.

* * *

"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois,
so that you may be violent and original in your work."
Flaubert

It has already been mentioned that, an author of seven novels and a book of short stories so far, Jonathan Carroll has not received much serious critical attention - and the fact has been attributed to the pervasive difficulty in finding a clear "label" for the sort of writing he creates, in defining a "handle" to his original - there is a critical consensus on this point at least - style. This, of course, doesn't exhaust the issue. Another fact that may be as well responsible for the apparent lack of recognition (despite favorable press reviews which cannot conceal the absence of "highbrow" criticism) is that not only are his writings hard enough to place, but so is the man himself. In 1974 he left his home for Vienna, and although he did not speak German at the time and though it was his first visit to Europe, he has lived there ever since. Consequently, most of his novels are at least partly set in Europe, some of them entirely so. Also his popularity is definitely greater in Europe than in the States: as of January 1992 the aforementioned collection of short stories, The Panic Hand, had not been available in the original version, but had been published in Germany (as Die Panische Hand). It may be a simplistic but nonetheless defendable view that, although neither of these facts necessarily makes him a more "European" than an "American" writer, they may lead to a confusion as to exactly who is in charge of assessing his literary achievement, to "which literature" he rather belongs (and there is no doubt at all about the dissimilarity in the English writing on the two sides of the Atlantic).

For better or worse, Carroll himself has never done much to help sort this question out. He has so far resisted a biography, and the brief notes he allows his novels to bear read simply: "Jonathan Carroll is an American writer. He lives in Vienna." It seems that, contrary to our century's prevailing tendencies, Carroll never allows himself an ego trip. In fact, even the interviews that are published are scarce and far between - and Publishers Weekly's Michelle Field, a rare journalist to obtain one, discloses that "in an interview Carroll can be rather discomforting." (5) So, too, this author, in the course of research, has come across a disappointingly small number of applicable sources. When, in a matter of a page or two, we begin to concentrate on the subject of this work - and that means the novels, not their author - we will be looking at texts, their implications, the imaginary worlds they project and possibly the conclusions that the analysis will yield; consequently little time will be devoted to the creator of the artifacts in question. At the moment, however, this author would like to take the liberty to use what limited sources are available in order to present the reader with a brief look at Jonathan Carroll - the live person.

Born January 6, 1949 in New York, he was brought up in somewhat bohemian manner in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Worried by his record of juvenile delinquency, his parents sent him to Loomis, the Hartford, Conn. prep school. About these early years he says: "I was a delinquent because everybody else in my family was such a glow-worm." He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts from Rutgers University in 1971, and in 1973 he received the M.A. degree at the University of Virginia. He was a teacher of English at North State Academy, Hicory, N.C. and in St Louis and, since 1974, along with his wife Beverley at the American International School in Vienna, Austria. Apart from teaching and writing novels, his other source of income is rewriting scripts on Hollywood movies, but he is reluctant even to name the films to which he has contributed: "I never put my name on a credit because I don't think it's my work."

Among the awards and honors he has received for his writings are the French Prix Apollo for The Land of Laughs, awarded in 1987 and Washington Post's Book of The Year award for Voice of Our Shadow (1983). A few years ago an upscale German magazine, Tempo, named The Land of Laughs number 4 on a list of the one hundred best books of the 1980s.

Although he was born into a Jewish family and raised a Christian Scientist, he describes himself as an agnostic and he declares that, unlike the characters in his novels, he has never had a mystical experience. His parents have remained Christian Scientists, his brother, the composer Steve Reich is an Orthodox Jew and his other brother a Sufi. Carroll's comment? "Table conversation is interesting."

Michelle Field, the author of the interview from which the quotations are taken, describes Carroll's physique in these words: "He is very tall and very tidily dressed. His face has sharp. almost aristocratic features, which seem never to relax into a grin. His voice still carries all the American inflections, but his manner is so decorous as to suggest other antecedents."

The quotation from Gustave Flaubert which precedes this section is one that Carroll himself chose as the motto for The Land of Laughs. Very appropriately so, it seems. Here is what he has to say about his method of writing: "Everyone laughs at the way I work. I first write a book very fast by computer, then I write it by hand as fast as I can, and then I buy these rare, expensive notebooks that look like something from the old days and I get a beautiful pen - and I rewrite the novel very, very slowly. To me, 'fast,' 'less fast' and 'very slow' are the three stages, and by the time it is finished I go back to the computer and make changes." Regular and orderly, and thorough, like so much about Carroll, but the slight oddity that might be observed even here, in employing modern technology on par with old-fashioned notebooks and stylish fountain pens is a characteristic one and will be observed, in many shapes, throughout his novels. In The Land of Laughs, the first time the main character feels a touch of magic in the air is while eating spare ribs by a hot-dog stand. In A Child Across the Sky a notorious Hollywood movie director, who died by his own hand, sends enigmatic messages to the living by means of videotapes. It remains to be seen whether this clash of worlds and juxtaposition of styles go beyond Carroll's manners and the surface structure of his novels, but at this point the observation itself provides a valuable clue as to how his writing can be approached.

For the last words of the introduction we will once again turn to The Times' anonymous critic who, in a few words, did perhaps embrace this very idea: "Carroll's world is one that is subtly out of kilter, and which can take a turn for the sinister at any time, yet his depiction of characters and dissection of their relationships is unflinching in its honesty. If he were a Latin American writer with a three-part name, his books would be described as magical-realist. . .an inventive and endlessly fascinating writer."

Enough said. We have completed the first approximation, and the domain of Jonathan Carroll's writing, as yet unexplored, should not be entirely unfamiliar to the readers by now. Those interested, please follow the guide. Welcome to The Land of Laughs.

Part One:

GENERATION

(The Land of Laughs)

I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto...
- from Wizard of Oz

Chapter One:
INTO THE LAND OF LAUGHS

"He didn't like tomatoes. He collected picture postcards of railroad stations. He found names for his characters in a small Missouri graveyard. He began his books on a school-size blackboard in a musty room in his basement. He kept everything he had ever accumulated as a child, and when he came to America from Europe, changed his name to that of an imaginary character he created when he was a boy. He spent his free time working in a grocery store as a clerk at the cash register..." (from Thomas Abbey's biography of writer Marshall France, 6)

Jonathan Carroll's first novel, The Land of Laughs, is built around an imaginary character - or rather a ghost of one - a reclusive and largely mysterious writer of children's books named Marshall France. Already deceased at the time when the plot begins and never appearing "in person," he is the novel's focal point, the center of its literary microcosm: his silent presence pervades the whole of the novel and in a sense he is as much the author of The Land of Laughs as Jonathan Carroll himself. In the most straightforward reading, the novel develops as a biographer's quest for facts about the late writer's life to finally arrive at a complete, life-size portrait of Marshall France. For this reason it seems appropriate to begin the analysis by introducing the reader to the central figure of the novel (whose image reveals itself gradually from painstakingly collected artifacts and memories) before we proceed to the more immediately observed dramatis personae of the book.

Marshall France, an Austrian Jew, lived in a small town of Galen, Missouri, where he moved as a young man shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He was the author of peculiarly sad, eerie and enchanting books for children, books whose very titles would evoke feelings of magic and unfulfilled longing: The Pool of Stars, Peach Shadows, The Green Dog's Sorrow, or Night Races Into Anna. Although he earned for himself not only immense popularity and love of both young and adult readers, but also academic recognition of a "classic" author (a comparison with Lewis Carroll is not out of the way), France went to great lengths to avoid all publicity that came with literary success, and when he died of heart attack at the age of forty four, very little was known about him outside Galen, his American home town. Whatever there was to be known was fervently guarded by Anna France, his daughter, who took care of his estate and rarely allowed any of his stories to be reprinted and consistently refused to authorize any biography of her father. As the years passed, however, the power of France's writing did not seem to diminish and it still held thousands of devout readers under its spell. The examination and homage to this power, the magical creative power of an artist, make perhaps the most easily recognizable theme of The Land of Laughs. Jonathan Carroll's novel is however much more than a reflective essay on art: it is a fast-paced, captivating fiction which invites as many questions as it offers reflections. The trick that gets the story rolling is an intellectual experiment: the assumption that France's artful power did not exhaust itself in winning the hearts of young readers. In fact, as we are gradually led to understand, it extended far beyond any living author's dream...

The opening paragraph of The Land of Laughs introduces the readers to the bright mind of the narrator: Thomas Abbey, a thirty years' old teacher of English from Connecticut who - and this is the very first thing we learn about him - is the son of the late Stephen Abbey, a Hollywood actor of notorious fame. An ordinary, though very likable character that Thomas is, his life is overshadowed by the memory of his father, an icon, a star to thousands upon thousands of American moviegoers. Consequently, any personal interest that people may invest in Thomas is strongly marked by the true fascination (or mere curiosity) that the figure of his father arouses: "I recently told my mother that my name isn't Thomas Abbey, but rather Stephen Abbey's Son." (LL, p.1) Jonathan Carroll, who declares a regular, understanding relationship with his own father, makes this kind of situation, and the resulting emotional conflict, the starting point of almost all of his novels, as will be shown later on; at this point it is worthwhile to notice the parallel between the figure of Marshall France and that of Stephen Abbey: both famous and admired artists, albeit of different ilk, both are present in the novel as shadows of characters only, yet it is them who are responsible for whatever course its plot takes.

The second most important fact about Thomas Abbey is that he is endlessly fascinated by Marshall France's books. Since his father gave him a copy of France's The Land of Laughs (the self-reflexivity is characteristic) as a present for his ninth birthday, Thomas has become a lifetime enthusiast of France's art, his love bordering on obsession. He has collected the rare editions and tried to gather scarcely available facts about the life of his favorite author, treasuring each more than anything else in his life. His fascination went still further: "My dream was to write a biography of Marshall France, the very mysterious, very wonderful author of the greatest children's books in the world. Books like The Land of Laughs and The Pool of Stars that had helped me to keep my sanity on and off throughout my thirty years." (LL, p.4) Having received his birthday present he

read the book from cover to cover for the first time. When I refused to put it down after a year, my mother threatened to call Dr. Kintner, my hundred-dollar-a-minute analyst, and tell him I wasn't 'cooperating.' As always in those days, I ignored her and turned the page.

'The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one's seen.'

I expected everyone in the world to know that line. I sang it constantly to myself in that low intimate voice that children use to talk-sing to themselves when they're alone and happy. (LL, p.5)

As has been said, everything that happens in The Land of Laughs is, directly or indirectly, stimulated by art and artists. When we have finished the discussion of Carroll's first novel it will be clear how "artist as a god" is its central concept. To achieve this, we will employ an analytic rather than synthetic approach, saving the latter for Carroll's other novels: here we will be examining the plot itself more carefully, concentrating on specific passages, not only to provide the reader with insight into the characteristics of style and manner of writing, but most of all to show how the complete, consistent universe is created from scratch, to be operated upon in Carroll's later novels. Almost all of the key character types, settings and rules have their origin in The Land of Laughs and the guide to an unmapped territory that this study aspires to be, will point them out to the reader as potential places of intellectual interest.

From the very beginning we are able to notice that The Land of Laughs is a novel about art: its powers, lures and dangers. This pervading theme is conveyed on three levels, or modes of communication between the author and the readers. The first, most general of them, has already been mentioned: it is the story line itself, with the mysterious figure of the writer Marshall France at its core. Another level is more of a suggestive than explicit type: works of art of various kinds create the setting for the events and evoke the overall atmosphere of the book: they are quoted, bought, discussed, given as gifts of friendship. Thomas Abbey is a proud owner of a collection of exotic masks - among them the death mask of John Keats: not an accidental choice, given the romantic provenance of the English poet. The novel's first momentous event, the starting point of the plot, occurs when Thomas meets Saxony Gardner - a skillful puppeteer and, as himself, a devout reader of Marshall France's books - meets her where else but in a second-hand bookstore, searching for a rare copy of France's Peach Shadows. In similar manner, in the second chapter we watch Abbey discussing - or rather attempting to discuss - Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher:

In February, the month when suicide always looks good to me, I taught a class in Poe that helped me to decide at least to apply for a leave of absence for the following fall before something dangerous happened to my brain. A normal lunkhead named Davis bell was supposed to give a report to the class on The Fall of the House of Usher. He got up in front of us and said this. I quote. 'The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, who was an alcoholic and married his younger cousin.' I had told them all that several days before in hopes of stimulating their curiosity. To continue. '...married his younger cousin. This house, or I mean this story, is about this house of ushers...'

'Who fall?' I prompted him, at the risk of giving the plot away to his classmates, who hadn't read the story either.

'Yeah, who fall.'

Time to leave. (LL, p.6)

The reader will notice the irony behind the simple humor in the quoted sequence: the schoolboy's knowledge of Poe is limited to few, and probably misunderstood, facts of the writer's life, whereas the art and its meaning remain an enigma.(7) Carroll however goes further than that, and Poe's story resounds in the pages of The Land of Laughs. As Thomas is invited into Saxony's flat on the top floor of a house in an unpleasant district of the town, a dark flat where air is laden with incense and where only apple or chamomile tea is served, he remarks: "I shrugged again and said okay to the tea, and she led me into the House of Usher." (LL, p.12) A more distant analogy appears in the description of the Galen house of Marshall France himself, the photograph of which Thomas treasures: "It was one of those great old Victorian monsters that had been plopped down on an average little street in the middle of Middle America." (LL, p.6) And yet another, more disturbing parallel may be found in the closing section of the novel, when Saxony dies (and Thomas just barely escapes death) in the explosion of the house they lived in in Galen, which echoes with a distant but unmistakable analogy the dramatic "fall" of Poe's House of Usher.

Finally, there is the most immediate literary device the use of which makes The Land of Laughs very much "a novel about art," that is, references. Explicitly and implicitly, Carroll alludes to literally countless sources, names and titles, of which The Fall of the House of Usher is only the first. The angered Saxony in a rain-soaked poncho looked "like a rubber Bela Lugosi" (LL, p.18; the actor who starred as Count Dracula in Tod Browning's original 1931 version, as well as in other horror movies). France's books were illustrated by a mysterious Van Walt - Disney? - who later turns out to be France himself. In the course of the novel, a number of well-known books are mentioned: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the Grimm Brothers' tales, Bruno Bettelheim's famous Uses of Enchantment and even Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats again). Maybe the best example of all is the following sentence taken from a paragraph in which Thomas Abbey describes his late father's typical film role: "Richard Eliot, a.k.a. 'Shakespeare,' who just happens to be England's most effective secret agent in Nazi-occupied France, has been found out." (LL, p.194) An inventory of hints: T. S. Eliot, William Shakespeare and... Marshall France (who escaped from Austria fearing Nazi persecution) in a single sentence, as if an equal mark was put between these names, the three geniuses of literature. And not only is there Thomas' father's spirit hovering in the air of narration, but even the name Richard is one of major significance in the whole novel. By way of less direct implication, Carroll makes Thomas Abbey describe the second-hand bookshop assistant in the following words: "He had a Southern accent and reminded me of some character who lives with his dead mama in a rotting mansion and sleeps under a mosquito net." (LL, p.9) Such concrete and atmospheric imagery is not only characteristic of Carroll's style, but also rings with a distant echo of William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily.

As can be seen, from the very beginning The Land of Laughs works its meanings by way of hints and suggestions rather than definite statements, and Carroll prefers simple presentation of things as they appear to his characters to elaborating upon them by way of authorial comments: this is how Carroll achieves the high semiotic density in The Land of Laughs. Still, as far as its formal structure is considered, the novel appears to be quite traditional in the techniques of presentation it employs, which makes it easily accessible to the audience. At the end of Chapter Three of this section we will demonstrate a number of possible "readings" or interpretations that The Land of Laughs can yield on different levels of inquiry. For the moment it is only important to remember that the novel never tries to force its intricacies upon the readers, and that, self-conscious in the postmodern sense as it is, at no point does it become ostensibly "modern" or experimental. In this respect it seems to follow the rare tradition of such works of fiction as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland which, having given rise to numerous scholarly interpretations(8), still manage to work perfectly well on the simplest level as entertaining and emotionally engaging stories. Back to the story, then.

Having met accidentally (but this is an illusion: nothing happens in The Land of Laughs that is not, in one way or another, controlled and orchestrated by the shadows of the two great fathers: Stephen Abbey and Marshall France), Thomas Abbey and Saxony Gardner join their efforts in search for facts about the life of Marshall France, who in effect dominates their relationship.(9) What they are able to find only adds to their curiosity and stirs more questions:

First of all, his name wasn't really France - it was Frank. He was born Martin Emil Frank in Rattenberg, Austria, in 1922. Rattenberg is a little town about forty miles from Innsbruck, in the mountains. His father's name was David, his mother's name was Hannah, with an H. (...) He had an older brother Isaac, who died at Dachau in 1944. (...) France arrived in America in 1938 and moved to Galen, Missouri, sometime after that. (LL, p.19)

Leaving Saxony behind, Thomas travels to New York to gather more information from France's editor, David Louis. Louis, who remains one of the few authorities on France's life, questions some of Abbey's findings (e.g. he denies that France ever had a brother, or that his real name was Frank) and goes to great lengths to discourage Thomas from his plans. According to Louis, not only was France reclusive and eccentric himself (this is popular knowledge: even the shopkeeper mentioned above remarks: "Now, he was a strangey, that Mr. France", LL, p.8), but his daughter Anna, whom Louis gruesomely portrays as calculating and resentful, almost witchlike, is supposed to live in the closeted world of memories of his father, admitting entry to no one, scornful of any attempt to unravel the mysteries of Marshall France's life and art. It is also from David Louis that Thomas learns, in a true horror story fashion:

A couple of years ago an eager-beaver grad student from Princeton came through here on his way out to Galen. (...) I was interested to see how he'd fare up against the mighty Anna. I asked him to write if anything happened out there, but I never heard from him again. (LL, p.27)

Nobody has, in fact, but the morbid fate of the hapless scholar doesn't become unraveled until the final chapters, and the quoted digression provides only a limited clue to the goings-on in the small town of Galen, Missouri.

While in New York, Thomas pays another visit - to an Italian undertaker named Lucente, for whom young France supposedly worked in his early days in America. That a sensitive individual, which a writer - especially a children's writer! - is expected to be, should follow such a grim profession may seem suspicious. As a matter of fact it does "stand out," and rightly so. It is perhaps the first time that the novel ventures to avow its identity (partly a horror story, partly a pastiche of one); its theme (art as a human - as it were - undertaking, but most of all the darker side of art and any act of creation, possibly including the Genesis); and, last but not least, one of its major techniques of presentation and story-line development: the technique of opposites, of startling juxtapositions which allow certain expectations to be formed, only to be subverted in the next paragraph, the next page or chapter. It is characteristic that Carroll is reluctant to disclose his bearings until very late in the novel and that the clues he provides may be understood, if at all perceived on the first reading, as "distractors" rather than early warning signals.

Still, The Land of Laughs is a more complex novel, and Carroll's mind a more perverse one than this. With all the weirdness and resulting "suggestive" function of the passage, there is still a peculiar symmetry to be found there: Lucente's story grants us a valuable insight into the oddities and talents of the late Marshall France:

One day Lucente was working on a very beautiful girl who had killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. He was halfway through the job when he stopped for lunch. When he returned, the woman's arm was on her stomach and she held a big chocolate-chip cookie in her hand. Next to her on a small side table was a glass of milk. Lucente thought it was a great joke - this kind of black humor was traditional in the funeral business. A few weeks later, a mean old woman from down the block died in her sleep. A big yellow-and-black butterfly was taped to her nose the morning after they brought her to the funeral home. Lucente laughed again, but I felt differently: perhaps Marshall France had been creating his first characters. (LL, p.35)

And further on: Marshall France, alias Martin Frank, used the time he was free from work to study Gray's Anatomy. The newly acquired knowledge obviously was not lost on him, as we learn from Lucente that

...after six months Frank developed an extraordinary ability to model an expression on a face that was as lifelike as any the old man had ever seen.

'That's the hardest thing, you see. Making them look alive is the hardest thing there is. Did you ever look in a casket? Sure, one look and you know they're dead. Big deal. But Martin had it, if you know what I mean. He had something that made even me jealous. You looked at one of his jobs and you'd wonder why the hell the guy was lying down in there!' (LL, p.35-6)

This may be read as a beautiful passage about the making of an artist, stressing the role of solid craftsmanship as the basis for the creative flights of imagination, and it certainly does that. What is also important to notice, however, is the way Lucente's anecdotes foreshadow the revelation of France's real artistic power - that of "making them look alive" (an understatement) or how they may even be generalized as a parable of artistic talent.

Surprised, confused and enchanted by the stories he heard from Louis and Lucente, Thomas returns to the earthly realities of his life at home:

One of the kids on the hall was standing in front of my apartment when I got home. 'There's a woman in your apartment, Mr. Abbey. I think she got Mr. Rosenberg to let her in.'

I opened the door and dropped my briefcase on the floor. I kicked the door shut and closed my eyes. The whole place smelled of curry. I hate curry.

'Hello?' a voice called.

'Hi. Uh, hi. Saxony?' (LL, p.36)

And then:

"'Do you like curry, Thomas?'

Halfway through the meal my tongue was a five-alarm fire, but I winked back the tears and nodded and pointed my fork at my plate a couple of times. '...love it.' (LL, p.37)

The hassle of the journey, the initial surprise and embarrassment of meeting his female friend in his home, soon give way to a more romantic development - but is it accidental that the pretending is always there?

'I...' She looked at me, then away, then at me, away. 'I was really happy here this afternoon, Thomas. I came over right after I talked to you on the phone. I was really happy being here, cooking... Do you understand what I mean?' Her glare dissolved back into lip biting, but she was watching me very carefully.

'Yes, well, sure. I mean, of course I understand... Boy, that curry was excellent, Saxony.' (LL, p.37)

The discreet lovemaking scene that follows closes Part One of the novel. In typical Carroll style, we are not shown the act, but the foreplay - and despite the romantic aura, any unnecessary sweetness is avoided, along with dangerous clichés, by means of the matter-of-fact narration and, again, a sudden turn of the focus, as the erotic tension gets relieved in somewhat grotesque humor:

She looked over her shoulder and gave a little grimace. 'Can I ask a favor?'

'Of course.'

'I'm very shy about undressing in front of someone. I'm sorry, but do you think you could close your eyes or look away while I do it?'

I leaned across the bed and kissed her shoulder. 'Sure. I get embarrassed about that too.'

It was perfect. I hate taking off my pants in front of a woman I don't know. So this was great - I'd turn my back to her, pull off my pants while she pulled off hers, we'd both slip under the covers at the same time, turn off the light for a little while...

RRRrriiinnnggg!

I'd just stepped out of my boxer shorts when the phone rang. No one ever called me, especially not at twelve o'clock at night. The phone was on the other side of the room, so, naked, I sprang for it. Saxony let out a whoop, and unconsciously I turned and faced her. Her green panties were down around her knees, and from the look on her face, she didn't know whether to push them down or pull them up.

'Thomas, where have you been? I've been trying to get in touch with you for days!'

'Ma?'

'Yes. The only time I can ever get you is in the middle of the night. Did you get those pants that I sent you from Bloomingdale's?'

'Pants? Ma...' (...)

I got off the phone as fast as I could.(10)

Ushered into the Land of Laughs some twenty pages ago, the reader may already feel more comfortable here. For Thomas and Saxony, as they leave their quiet (and unidentified) Connecticut town for Galen, home of the France family, the real adventure is just about to begin.

Chapter Two:
CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

"The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glass.
They sang cruel songs at each other. Ping. Clank. Tink.
This kind of meanness three times a day."
- Marshall France, Peach Shadows

There is one important quality of Jonathan Carroll's writing, especially evident in The Land of Laughs, that has so far gone largely unmentioned, and that is its realism. It should be evident from the outline of the plot we have so far covered as well as from the excerpts quoted, that whatever "quirky, wondrous, magical" phenomena are lying in wait in the pages of the novel, both its author and his characters stand firmly with both feet on the solid ground. It is mostly due to this uncompromising realism (in the development of the plot, in the descriptions of setting, in psychological portraits) that readers may be at a loss when trying to "locate" the novel on the genre continuum and trying to predict the events to come. The rigorous insistence on realism enables Carroll to achieve two effects that are vital for the novel's reception. First, he manages to win the readers' belief (or, to speak in more precise terms, the suspension of disbelief) as to the whole situation within the novel and the actions taken by its protagonists. Secondly - and this is a direct consequence of the previous argument - when eventually the push comes to shove and the world as we know it gives way to the sinister and magical drama (the literal cracks which will soon appear in the Galen sky), not only is the intentional shock all the greater, but at the same time it is no longer easy for the reader to "switch" the register of expectations: having come so far it is more natural to continue "believing" than to revise the approach and recreate the novel's contrived world from scratch. The following excerpt by an undeniable authority on the subject, Stephen King, refers originally to the cinematic art, but seems equally suitable for enlightening our discourse here: "We might be able to say, paradox or not, that movies of fairy-tale horror demand a heavy dose of reality to get them rolling. Such reality frees the imagination of excess baggage and makes the weight of unbelief easier to lift. The audience is propelled into the movie by the feeling that, under the right set of circumstances, this could happen."(11)

A shorter, more aphoristic in form, is the opinion on the same subject expressed by another acclaimed horror writer, Anne Rivers Siddons: "Without belief there is no terror." (12) When the time for terror comes in The Land of Laughs, the belief will have already been firmly established.

We rejoin Thomas and Saxony as they are driving towards the town of Galen: apprehensive and uncertain of how they are going to be welcomed there, but at the same time quite happy to be on their way, at the verge of fulfilling their lifelong dreams. They are enjoying the drive and take their time to talk, argue, see the sights and make love in the motels on the long way from Connecticut to Missouri. The conventional narrative techniques that Carroll employs are particularly easy to observe in this section, as the changes in nature seem to reflect the emotional changes and the state of the relationship of the characters and - but the irony of this is almost evident - may be perceived as signs of warning, indicating that the world into which Thomas and his friend are venturing is not quite friendly after all(13):

A big thunderstorm was brewing up in front of us, and we drove into a lowering curtain of smoky pearl clouds. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the sun still shining down on where we'd just come from. I knew that most of the people back there had no idea of what they were in for later that afternoon. (LL, p.44)

Another important idea that this passage conveys is that of remoteness: as Thomas and Saxony share their intimate feelings (on Marshall France's books, understandably) and memories (of their parents - who else? - and of childhood traumas) and thus become ever closer attached to each other, they are leaving the safe world where "everybody else" lives (there is no storm there yet) and the more susceptible among the readers just might begin to worry, as "the radio had become almost pure static" (LL, p.44) and the heroes have clearly passed the point of no return: "The lightning and thunder were simultaneous now, so I knew that the storm was right over us." (LL, p.45) The same idea will be further developed as they approach the destination of their journey and, waiting at a railroad crossing, are surprised to notice how deserted the highway is:

We were just at the crossing for what, five or eight minutes, right? Well, in the East if you were there half that long there would be a line of cars ten miles long waiting to go. Here... well, just look behind us. You see? Not a car. Not one. That's your difference. (LL, p.54)

Away from the safety of familiar civilization (and possibly elated and at the same time timid to be entering the dream land of his childhood, anxious to meet the daughter of his cherished writer, so darkly portrayed by David Louis) Thomas projects his emotions onto the outside world:

When the train was gone, the red-and-white-striped bars began rising slowly, almost as if they were tired and weren't in the mood to go up.(14)

Whatever ominous symptoms may lurk in Galen air, Jonathan Carroll's skillful handling of the scenes ensures that we will not be haunted by the gruesome mood for long - comic relief is always on its way, as in the following passage where Thomas' appetite and Saxony's impatience lead to a brief fight (anxiety causing their nerves to run on the last fuse, always ready to short-circuit) which soon breaks into cracks of laughter:

'All right, do you want something to eat or what?'

'Eat? Why? We've only been on the road for an hour.'

'Oh, well, I'm sorry, dear - I'm not supposed to be hungry, huh? I'm not allowed to eat anything unless you do, is that it?' I sounded like a kid who's just discovered sarcasm but doesn't know how to use it yet.

'Just shut up, Thomas. Go outside and have a fishburger or something. I don't care what you do. I don't deserve your anger.'

There wasn't much else I could do but go. We both knew that I was making more and more of an ass of myself, but by then I didn't know how to stop. If I'd been her, I would have been royally bored by me.

'Do you want any...? Oh, shit, I'll be back in a little while.'

I opened the door and stepped right into this monstrous puddle, drenching both my sneaker and sock in one plunge. I looked to see if she'd been watching, but her eyes were closed, hands still folded in her lap. I put my other, dry foot carefully into the puddle and left it there until I felt the cold seeping in. Then I paddled both feet up and down in my new little footbath. Splish splat.

'What...are...you...doing?'

Splish splat.

'Thomas, don't do that.' She started to laugh. It sounded so much better than the rain. (LL, p.47-8)

The principle of oppositions is thus always at the ready. The following exchange takes place as Saxony asks Thomas which is his favorite scene in France's books:

'Jeez, I couldn't say what my favorite scene is. Something out of The Land of Laughs, though. Definitely. But I'd have trouble choosing between a funny scene and a magical one. In many ways I like the funny scenes more now, but when I was little those battles between the Words and the Silence... phew!'

'Thomas, don't drive off the road.'(15)

Approaching the town, they give a ride to a teenage boy from Galen (he will return much later in our analysis) and, full of excitement, stop to take their first look at Galen. What they see is apparently a regular, humdrum reality of a middle-American small town, but this normality is deceptive, of which the following passage makes a clear point:

The air smelled of hot dust and something else.

'Hey, look, Sax, a barbecue! Let's have some lunch.'

A big green canopy had been set up in an open lot between Phend's Sporting Goods and the Glass Insurance Company.

Underneath the canopy about twenty people were sitting at redwood picnic tables, eating and talking. A hand-painted sign in front announced that it was the annual Lions Club barbecue. I parked the car next to a dirty pickup truck and got out. The air was still and redolent with the smell of woodsmoke and grilled meat. A slight breeze pushed by. I started to stretch, but when I happened to look toward the eaters I stopped in midflight. Almost all of them had stopped eating and were looking at us. Except for one nice-looking woman with short black hair who was hurrying by with a couple of boxes of hamburger rolls in her hands, they were all frozen in position - a fat man in a straw hat with a sparerib held near his open mouth, a woman pouring an empty Coke into a full cup, a child holding a stuffed pink-and-white rabbit over his head with two hands. 'What is this, Ode on a Grecian Urn?' I mumbled to no one. (LL, p.54)

The same vision that stopped Thomas "in midflight" should also stop the careful reader, and it is high time we asked ourselves, as does the little girl in The Wizard of Oz, if we're in Kansas (read: Missouri) anymore.

First of all, the scene is too static not to be disturbing. It is unusual enough to have a large group of strange people stop doing whatever they were and look at one intently; no wonder that one subject to such scrutiny begins to feel oppressed. But less directly, this motionlessness can be understood as characteristic of artifacts, as opposed to living creatures. For the sake of the analysis we have to reveal most of Marshall France's mystery right now, a long time before Thomas and Saxony are allowed this knowledge: the whole population of Galen (with the exception of two persons) consists of people who were not born but created, "written" by France. Although they appear to lead normal lives, they cannot be described as exactly human: the essence of their existence is that they are very much "works of art." In this light, neither the lack of movement in the scene nor Thomas' invocation of the famous poem by Keats should remain unexplained. Furthermore we will notice that there is one person moving among all that stillness: she will soon turn out to be Anna France, the daughter of the writer and a woman of flesh and blood. To add a few lesser insights: the pouring of an empty Coke into a full cup suggests reversal (of what, we cannot yet tell - but "of the cause and effect chain" is a good guess); the pink-and-white color of the boy's rabbit is almost red-and-white (these somehow symbolic colors will reappear at least twice more), and the rabbit itself can easily lead to associations with magic, but "white" rather than "black," as the very softness of the toy confirms.

Whatever bizarre associations this scene might suggest, they pass rapidly as "stop-motion" changes into "play." Recovering from the fleeting shock Thomas and Saxony join the townspeople at the barbecue: there is a lot of friendly banter and tasty food waiting to be ordered. Saxony is fast to reveal the reason why they came to the town which sets the Galeners wary and makes Thomas angry at her, but even this is soon forgotten as they are introduced to Anna France, who turns out to be an attractive woman in her late thirties. Thomas remarks:

All in all, she was great-looking in a kind of hip, clean, youngish Midwestern housewife way. Where the hell was the Charles Addams character David Louis had referred to? This woman looked like she'd just had the family station wagon washed at the Shell station. (LL, p.61)

In fact, he soon realizes that his girlfriend is definitely less handsome than Anna:

I looked at their two faces and tried not to think that Anna was lovely and Saxony was wholesome. Maybe it was just my temporary anger at Sax. (LL, p.62)

The conversation that ensues succeeds in dissolving the grim picture of Anna that David Louis elicited. She even appears rational as she calmly explains the reasons why she has so far refused to authorize any biography of her late father:

I've been against it because the people who have wanted to write about him have come out here to our town for all the wrong reasons. They would all like to become an authority on Marshall France. But when you talk to them it's easy to see they aren't interested in what kind of man he was. To them he is just a literary figure. (...) If you had known my father, Mr. Abbey, you would understand why I'm so sensitive about this. He was a very private person. (...) Everybody knew him and liked him, but he hated being in the public eye and worked very hard to avoid it. (LL, p.63)

When Thomas and Saxony leave the barbecue all tension is already gone and they may even enjoy a small success: Anna has invited them to her house for dinner that night. Mrs. Fletcher, a friend of Anna's has offered to rent them rooms on the ground floor of her house and as they are moving in, Thomas formulates his first impression:

It was great. To get there you went up a flagstone walk that cut through a garden of six-foot high sunflowers, chestnut-size pumpkins, watermelons and tomato vines. According to her, the only kind of garden she could see was one that you ate. She didn't hold with roses and honey-suckle, no matter how good they smelled.(16)

They make themselves comfortable in their new home and are surprised to find a copy of France's Night Races into Anna and to meet Mrs. Fletcher's dog, a bull-terrier called Nails, for which Thomas develops a fondness despite his usual aversion to animals. Saxony still betrays certain uneasiness about their visit to Galen, but Thomas does not let it bother him - the more so that what they have so far seen looks more promising than they could ever expect.

Before we go on, a digression. In The Land of Laughs (as probably in any novel of conventional narrative style) we may observe three different modes of description, performing different but complementary tasks. First of all, there are descriptions that have immediate relevance to the course of action and to the readers' grasp of the story line: e.g. physical portrayal of the characters which allows us to "understand" them, build their images - here this function is particularly important for developing a consistent image of Marshall France, whom we get to know on "second-hand" basis only, retrieving his portrait from other people's memories, the inventory of his belongings and the look of his house, which his daughter has left very much unchanged since his death.

Secondly, there are the descriptions which are not related directly to the events in the novel, and could possibly be omitted without causing the readers to have trouble understanding the plot or even interpreting the novel. These however play an equally important role: they serve to establish an "atmosphere" that the author intends his audience to react to, they may create or destroy the readers' expectations of what is to follow. This category will include most of the descriptions of Galen, which will usually suggest that it is a regular, maybe a little dull, but not in any way bizarre town, as in the passage that reads:

A lawnmower whined somewhere and the air smelled of cut grass, and of oil and gasoline when we passed Bert Keener's Exxon Station. A guy was sitting in front of the office in a red aluminum lawn chair with a can of beer propped on a pile of old worn tires nearby. (LL, p.71)

Eventually, such prosaic pictures will give way to less mundane ones, but their function will remain the same: creating the ambience, the tone for the story to unfold.

Finally - and this is where we are getting to the crucial point - there are the descriptions that do not appear to serve any particular role within the narrative. There is an amount of them in most novels and, usually quite short, the are easily skipped while reading - and if noticed, they may be dismissed as mere "fillers" whose presence is perhaps justified by their aesthetic value, or the purpose they might serve as intermissions between passages of fast-paced action, enhancing the suspense and giving the readers time to slow down, to reflect on what has recently been said. If, however, we encounter a fragment like this in the early parts of the novel, when too little has happened so far to require any kind of slowdown and moreover, when the passage is too short to serve as this kind of filling, we need to decide on how to treat it. We may either insist on the uselessness of such a passage (and that would bear on our judgment of the artistic values of the novel) or try to find in it some hidden, possibly symbolic meanings.(17)

While Thomas and Saxony are walking down the streets of Galen toward Anna's house, the following image is provided:

It was the beginning of the evening, and the sky had cleared to cobalt blue with a streak of sharp white airplane exhaust vapor through its center. (LL, p.71)

There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about this purely realistic picture, until we realize that, completely irrelevant to the action and bearing negligible aesthetic value, it should not be included there in the first place. It appears to be just one of those inconsequential passages that most readers will pay little attention to - and indeed, it is hard to interpret it differently at the present stage of the development of the story, despite even the numerous hints that we have mentioned before.

On the second reading, however, the meaning well-hidden in the airplane passage becomes perfectly clear: what we have there is a literal crack running through the very center of the Galen sky. It is since this particular moment that the novel begins to take a more sinister turn and to its main characters, Thomas Abbey and Saxony Gardner, whatever events occur and sights appear, the world of Galen is becoming "curiouser and curiouser" (a lovely phrase borrowed from Alice in Wonderland 18).

Arriving at Anna's, Thomas and Saxony face another setback. Having been told at the barbecue about how the Galeners, who appear to be a pretty exclusive society, prevented some outside people from setting up a business in their town, they are made to wonder yet again if they perhaps are rather unwelcome guests in Galen:

I looked at the floor and saw a matching brown mat that said 'GO AWAY!' I nudged Saxony and pointed to it.

'Do you think she means us?'

That's all I needed. I had thought the mat was a funny idea, (19) and then she had to make it into something else to worry about. What if Anna really didn't want us-

'Hi. Come in. I'd better not shake hands with you. I'm a little greasy from the chicken.' (LL, p.73)

And "greasy" (read: slippery) she obviously is. As she ushers them into the home of her father, pretending to disclose more than to anyone before, she leads them onto many false paths, providing incorrect information (of which Thomas and Saxony are partly aware) and neither agreeing nor refusing to authorize the biography that they are determined to write.

As for the house itself, the key word for describing it is definitely "exotic." Overwhelmed and enchanted, Thomas says only: "It's all him. It's completely Marshall France." (LL, p.75) Marshall France collected masks - like Thomas - and marionettes, like Saxony, among which he had an original work by Paul Klee. Everything is "in the mood" there, and most of the images in this section are directly related to art, but whether "high" or "low" one can not always decide as the sublime is so often undermined by the decadent (e.g. the soundtrack from Cabaret playing in the background). There is a wooden ceiling fan there which hangs unmoving, as if to suggest that the air we're breathing is the air which Marshall France would himself breathe, nothing has been changed, or stirred, since the time he died. Among France's books biographies and autobiographies, ranging from Mein Kampf to Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, take the prominent place. We learn about France's fascination with trains and train stations, of which he had an impressive collection of postcards. The whole house resembles a huge museum of artifacts, but some of these items are not for display only: they are the part of everyday life where nothing is allowed to be ordinary. Sitting at the dinner table Thomas (who is going to find the food horrible again) is amazed to see the cutlery:

My fork was a silver clown. His head was bent back and the tines of the fork came out of his open mouth. My knife was a long-muscled arm holding a kind of paddle. Not Ping-Pong or anything like that; more sinister-looking - the sort of thing they smack kids with in English public schools. Saxony held hers up to the light, and they were completely different. Her fork was a witch riding a broom. The tines were the brush part, the shaft the broomstick. (20)

The next day's morning brings more disturbing events. Thomas is a witness to a fatal accident as a pickup truck runs over a young boy crossing the street in front of Mrs. Fletcher's house. He runs out onto the street and this is what he sees:

The first thing I saw when I got there was the green ice cream, half-covered with dirt and pebbles and already beginning to melt on the black pavement.

No one else was around. I came up to [the driver] and hesitantly peered over his shoulder. He smelled of sweat and human heat. The boy was on his side on the ground, his legs splayed apart in such a way that he looked as if he'd been stop-framed, running. He was bleeding from the mouth and his eyes were wide open. No, one of his eyes was wide open; the other was half-shut and fluttering. (LL, p.89)

Within the agonizing grief of the scene, doesn't the boy appear to be giving Thomas (and the readers) the Persian eye? The accident itself may be dreadful but it is not unusual; the real surprise comes from the Galeners' reaction to it: the driver's voice is "half-angry, half-self-pitying. There was no fear there at all. No remorse, either." which puzzles Thomas a little, but Mrs. Fletcher seems to speak in riddles: "Joe Jordan! It wasn't supposed to be you!" (LL, p.90) Thomas, always looking for a rational explanation, assumes that the unfortunate driver is in a state of shock which, he says, "makes people act crazy and say mad things." Shock however cannot be responsible for Mrs. Fletcher's behavior, and unless Thomas wants to believe that she's insane (as Anna will so often falsely suggest), he has to notice the peculiarity in her reaction and conclude that there is more to Galen's world than meets the eye. Jordan's indignant words seem to confirm that:

How many things are going to fuck up before we get this straightened out? Did you hear about last night? How many things've been dead already, four? Five? No one knows nothin' anymore, nothin'! (LL, p.90)

The more Thomas hears, the more sure he becomes that the Galeners' interpretation of the accident is far removed from what might be normally expected. No less puzzling are the questions Mrs. Fletcher asks of him, as the direct witness of the scene:

'Was the boy laughing before he got hit?'

'Laughing? I don't know what you mean.'

'Laughing. You know, laughing? He was eating that pistachio cone, but was he laughing too?'

She was totally serious. What the hell kind of question was that?

'No, not that I remember.'

'You're sure about that? You're sure that he wasn't laughing?'

'Yes, I guess so. (...) Why is it so important?'

'But he was touching the fence with his hand, right?'

'Yes, he was touching the fence. He was touching the top of it with his free hand.' (LL, p.91)

Thomas calls an ambulance and the fatally injured boy is taken to hospital. While Saxon