Return of the diva

In 1975, James McCourt published the most delightful novel about the opera milieu ever written, “Mawrdew Czgowchwz” (pronounced mardu gorgeous), detailing the triumphant 1956 season of a Czech-Irish singer. It is also the brainiest -- a tour de force of opera lore and Celtic mythology -- and written in an erudite style that approaches Joycean heights. (It was reissued a few years ago by New York Review Books and is ardently recommended.) Since then, McCourt has written other novels and stories about La Czgowchwz and her friends, but in his brilliant new novel he returns to pick up where the first one left off. “Mawrdew Czgowchwz” ended with the singer and her lover embarking for Ireland to make a movie; “Now Voyagers” records their sea journey and their first days in the old country.

You don’t go to an opera for the story but for the performance of the story; “Now Voyagers” is essentially a showcase for McCourt’s vast knowledge of opera, movies and literature, specifically the cultural currency exchanged by sophisticates in post-World War II New York. The novel’s rather demanding overture, surely designed to scare off the unworthy, begins on the night of June 16, 2004 -- and, honey, if you don’t know the literary significance of June 16, this novel isn’t for you. The elderly singer and her poet-friend Jameson O’Maurigan have unearthed materials about that triumphant 1956 season, including a metafictional version of “Mawrdew Czgowchwz,” and decide to rewrite that opera buffa as a Wagnerian epic with libretto by Oscar Wilde. (“Now Voyagers” is the first of a planned tetralogy.)

The result is dazzling, if at times disorienting. In opera terms, “Now Voyagers” is more “Einstein on the Beach” than “Abduction From the Seraglio,” and like Glass’ opera it doesn’t have a conventional plot. McCourt’s cast dissects performances, dishes gossip, divulges their past -- often outrageous tales of abuse and “I Will Survive” determination -- and serves cocktails of allusions, as in this riff on lyricistTom Lehrer:

“Lehrer? Yes, a terribly bright boy -- so much happier in show business than he was in academic life, I believe. . . . “

“A wizard mathematician, isn’t he?”

“Yes, dear, but he realized how utterly constraining mathematics can be.”

“You mean his Godel was killing him?”

“Ha-ha. He came to understand that any discipline that attempts to tell the truth by relying on the proposition if . . . then inevitably leads to unavailing grief.”

“But surely his songs do that -- all songs do that.”

“That may be true, dear, but as you may have noticed, if you can sing a thing, almost nobody minds in the least what it’s saying or doing.”

So what is McCourt’s epic song saying or doing? For one thing, “Now Voyagers” erases the distinction between high and low culture, and McCourt’s erudite novel provides a liberal education in everything from Eastern religion to Mae West. (I agree with him that the latter is a saner guide to life than the former.) For another, it preserves a time and place of remarkable sophistication, the fin-de-demi-siecle of Manhattan in the 1950s. Those with a fondness for old New York, classic movies like “Now, Voyager,” Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts from the Met and hot gossip about the stars of stage and screen will find much pleasure here.

But this isn’t a novel for your bachelor uncle; it’s closer to Joyce’s “Ulysses” than to Kirk Douglas’. Beneath the gossip and one-liners, a Jungian psychodrama unfolds as Mawrdew Czgowchwz reflects on her troubled childhood, her new lover and midlife career change. The “night sea journey” of the title refers to Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” (not to be confused with “7 Faces of Dr. Lao,” a McCourt character might add) and the necessary confrontation with the psyche’s dark elements before one can attain wholeness. It is the same psychodrama that Ishmael undergoes in “Moby-Dick,” mentioned often in “Now Voyagers” and an obvious influence. Mawrdew is the heroine of a thousand faces (via opera roles and mythic archetypes), revisiting this crucial period of her life 47 years later. We’re told she later became a psychoanalyst, appropriately enough.

Opera is not for everyone, and postmodern opera for fewer still. “Now Voyagers” is the most ostentatiously literary novel of the year, the one most likely to become the subject of dissertations and scholarly papers. It is steeped in literary theory, encyclopedic in its range of references, speaks half a dozen languages and is unapologetically elitist. McCourt makes it clear in the opening pages, where Czgowchwz and O’Maurigan discuss their postmodern makeover of the earlier novel, that their ambitious project entails “representing in language of a certain prolixity and complexity some approximation -- quite impossible to realize by means of the routine deployment of ostensibly simpler and more direct syntactical constructions -- of the tessellated and polyphonic texture of even the least educated, inquisitive, and sophisticated human natures’ interior colloquies, almost never attempted in present times by either the writing of history or the fictionalization of it.”

But the serious intellection of the novel is leavened by so much wit and campy fun that it goes down easy. It may be the most literary novel of the year, but also the silliest; like Gaddis and Pynchon (whose fans are the ideal audience for this novel), McCourt knows comedy and tragedy are not antithetical and that one can write a novel appealing to both the brain and the funny bone. No new novel of 2007 gave me greater pleasure than “Now Voyagers,” and I eagerly await the next book in the saga of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. *