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Echoes of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, in David Gilmour novel
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Subject: Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, the minor-league poet, professor and
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Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 16:14:32 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
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Fiction
Losing It
'Sparrow Nights' by David Gilmour
Reviewed by James Hynes
Sunday, June 16, 2002; Page BW06
SPARROW NIGHTS
By David Gilmour
Counterpoint. 217 pp. $24
The spectacle of an intellectual unhinged by passion has been endlessly
fascinating to artists of all eras and persuasions. From Marlowe's Dr.
Faustus selling his soul to the devil for a crack at Helen of Troy,
through hapless Emil Jannings's servitude to Marlene Dietrich in "Der
Blaue Engel," to a buck-toothed chemistry professor Jekyll-and-Hyding
himself into the super-slick Buddy Love in "The Nutty Professor," the
randy scholar has become a stock character. More recent literary avatars
have been more subtle: Francine Prose's Professor Ted Swenson in her
version of The Blue Angel, Penelope Fitzgerald's account of the German
romantic poet Novalis's passion for a dreamy 12-year-old girl in The
Blue Flower. The greatest of them all, and the creepiest, most eloquent
expression of the type, is Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, the minor-league
poet, professor and lover of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, a k a Lolita.
While it might seem impossible to imagine a taxonomy that encompasses
Vladimir Nabokov and Jerry Lewis, most of these narratives share several
important features. The passionate intellectual is usually arrogant, for
one thing, operating under the delusion that his mastery of the life of
the mind encompasses mastery of the unrulier life of regions lower down;
this fatal mistake is almost always the root of the intellectual's
undoing. In the end, these stories are about hubris as much as they are
about passion, and their chief purpose is to provide a series of
entertainingly humiliating correctives to the professor's inflated sense
of self. And while the professor's downfall sometimes contains an
element of pathos, most of these stories are exercises in ironic comedy,
ranging from the bemused to the bitter.
Canadian novelist David Gilmour's mordantly hilarious and dazzlingly
written new novel, Sparrow Nights, falls solidly in this tradition, but
it does not simply ring the changes. Even as Gilmour provides some of
the familiar satisfactions -- a caustically articulate narrator à la
Humbert Humbert and an increasingly bleak and dangerous series of
humiliating misadventures -- he also manages to put a new twist or two
into it. While most stories of this sort concentrate on the seduction
and end with the loss of the professor's beloved, Sparrow Nights begins
with the main character's beloved already receding in the rearview
mirror, as it were, and the rest of the story concentrates on the bereft
lover's increasingly desperate and pathetic attempts to forget and/or
replace her.
The novel is narrated by the entertainingly insufferable Darius
Halloway, a professor of French literature in Toronto, who has just been
left by his grad-student lover, Emma. Having lived together for several
years, Emma and Halloway have gradually grown apart, until one day
Halloway comes home to find the empty hangers still swinging in Emma's
closet, a haunting image that rings all the way through this brief
novel. We get a fairly vivid portrait of Emma in flashback, with
particular attention to her avidity in the bedroom, which tells us more
about Halloway than it does about Emma.
But most of the novel is given over to the aftermath of Emma, as
Halloway vents his rage in a series of petty and increasingly cruel acts
of revenge against various neighbors who had nothing to do with Emma's
leaving. In the first chapter, driven to distraction by the banging of a
neighbor's flag against the flagpole, he goes out in the middle of the
night and slashes the flag's rope, leaving the flag "floating like a
corpse in the swimming pool." From there, Halloway descends into the
demimonde, frequenting massage parlors and attempting to strike up a
relationship with one of the girls, who has the gleefully ironic name of
Passion. This leads to disastrous consequences, which I won't reveal
here. Suffice it to say that Halloway, in the tradition of petty
psychopaths everywhere, proceeds from the murder of defenseless animals
to something much worse (though not what you'd expect), and ends up
still thinking of Emma.
For all the bizarre incidents in this book, there's something episodic
about it, and what holds it together in the end is not the plot but the
voice of the narrator and Gilmour's lapidary prose. In spite of his
obvious connection to earlier examples of his breed, Halloway is his own
man, alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) infuriating, pitiable
and charming. In the flag-cutting scene, for example, Halloway's rage
and wit harmonize in perfect pitch:
"For a second I understood in my blood the lure of crime, its focus and
clarity. I thought perhaps I should go back and give Dostoevsky another
go. So overwritten, so talkative, like a Methedrine addict. But still,
he was on to something. I went about my preparations with automatic
precision. I showered and shaved. I brushed my teeth and gargled
vigorously just in case I was arrested. I laid out a selection of
knives: a paring knife, a steak knife. But they dissatisfied me and I
went into a bottom drawer and fetched a rusting carpet cutter.
Everything was so clear; the kitchen danced with light. (I really must
give Crime and Punishment another whirl.)"
In spite of everything, the reader is likely to be as captivated by the
sound of Halloway's voice as Halloway himself is. Halloway may be a
major-league jackass, not to mention a vandal and worse, but he's a
hugely entertaining one. As Humbert Humbert used to say, you can always
count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. ?
James Hynes is the author, most recently, of "The Lecturer's Tale."
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