bones of the moon
black cocktail
a child across the sky
outside the dog museum
the panic hand
kissing the beehive
the land of laughs
the marriage of sticks
from the teeth of angels
sleeping in flame
voice of our shadow
the wooden sea
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[ Featured Reviews ]
No one believes more fervently than the underappreciated novelist that with the publication of each new book his or her work will finally find the audience it deserves -- no one, that is, except for the novelist's already devoted readers. In the case of the Vienna-based American expatriate Jonathan Carroll, the members of this faithful audience make up the classic definition of a literary cumt -- buu Carroll is such an intellectually diverting writer that it must be only a matter of time before his readership swells, before the cult begins to resemble a convention. ''The Wooden Sea'' may well be the book that brings those new readers in. It is set, as is some of Carroll's other fiction, in the imaginary Hudson Valley town of Crane's View. The action begins with the local police chief (and the novel's narrator), a Vietnam veteran and former bad boy named Frannie McCabe, taking in an abandoned dog at the station house. This turns out to be no ordinary dog. A mixed breed, ''mainly pit bull covered by a swirl of brown and black markings so he looks like a marble cake,'' the dog wears a red leather collar with a heart-shaped tag bearing the name Old Vertue. He ''has only three and a half legs, is missing an eye, and breathes weird.'' Frannie does his best with his new pet, but a few days later the dog dies (albeit not before giving him a big wink, ''as if we shared a secret''). Frannie dutifully buries Old Vertue in a nearby patch of woods, but when he gets home and opens up the trunk of his car, the corpse is still there. Mystified, Frannie consults one of his closest friends, a first-class eccentric named George Dalemwood, who carries ''no preconceived notions about anything.'' George eats nothing but boiled beef, Mars bars and Greek mountain tea and makes his living writing instruction manuals. He's the one who suggests that the dog's initial appearance -- and apparent death and return -- may be a sign from ''a greater power.'' ''There are two ways of approaching this,'' George explains, ''as mischief or met`physics. The fhrst is simple: Someone saw you burying the dog and decided to play a trick. . . . The other possibility is it's a sign. . . . It happened because you've been chosen for some reason.'' It takes some time for Frannie to figure out just what that reason might be, and meanwhile things get more and more peculiar. For starters, George's very own library contains an art book with a picture of a dog, painted by an unknown artist in 1750, entitled ''Old Vertue'' -- an exact replica of Frannie's not-so-deceased pet. Frannie is quickly besieged by the bizarre. When he goes to the high school to investigate the death of a young female student, a bookworm who has inexplicably died of a heroin overdose, he opens her locker and finds a notebook full of drawings that faithfully reproduce some of the recent events in his own life, including the appearance of Old Vertue. AS the novel proceeds, Frannie encounters a number of doubles, versions of himself at various ages, and meets up with an otherworldly figure, a black gentleman named Astopel, who steals his watch and reveals a phrase -- holes in the rain'' -- that sends Frannie hurtling into the future. As if that weren't enough, he also travels back in time to his favorite Crane's View diner for a poignant and revelatory meeting with his long-dead father. I don't want to give away much more of the novel's unconventional plot; it's enough to say that Carroll makes Frannie's trip -- and the reader's -- worthwhile. In ''The Wooden Sea,'' Carroll confounds the genre-rigid standards of most literary criticism, crossing from fantasy to psychological thriller to science ficuion as easily as Fraonie ventures back and forth in time. In the end, whether what happens in this novel is mischief or metaphysics doesn't really matter. What does is that Carroll turns them both into his own distinctive kind of intelligent entertainment. Alan Cheuse's essay collection ''Listening to the Page: Adventures in Reading and Writing'' will be published this spring. |
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