BOOK REVIEWS : Heart Is Gone . . . and Head Won’t Do

Hortense Is Abducted by Jacques Roubaud, translated by Dominic Di Bernardi (The Dalkey Archive Press: $19.95; 229 pages).

I promised myself I wouldn’t be tempted, but by the time I’d riddled through the cluttered narrative to the fourth chapter, I could feel the old addiction to literary esoterica coming over me.

For years I’ve been fatally attracted to the hermetic tradition--the “closed” (and, some would say, inaccessible) literature of Dante and Cervantes and Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” and Joyce--literature holding the mirror to itself. Eavesdropping on a beloved mistress talking to herself is an irresistible temptation. Isn’t it?

So I was listening as Jacques Roubaud began to weave his arcane spell, evoking the spirits of his countryman Rabelais, of Flann O’Brian, Jorge Luis Borges, Gilbert Sorrentino, Julio Cortazar, Umberto Eco, Tom Robbins--the elitist tradition of self-reflexive narrative. You can tell you’re in that literary cul-de-sac when you hear the narrator blame his “dear Reader” for leaving the door to a character’s garden ajar.

Under the guise of a detective novel, Roubaud’s text is filled with mathematical contrivances; philosophical and rhetorical paradoxes; narrative “splitting” (“Me-1 looks and explains what is going on. . . . Me-2 is still me, the Author, but a ‘me’ directly entering into the story, a ‘me’ made of flesh and blood as much as of eye and thought”); clever--and sometimes less than clever--lists; recipes; intermittent transference of narrator, reader, victim and suspect; voluminous complaining letters from the author to the publisher regarding his previous novel, “Our Beautiful Heroine,” and the publisher’s one terse reply; fanciful bibliographies; spurious etymologies mixed with true etymologies presented as spurious; digressions to tell us the “cleaning product” used by the narrator to clean his linoleum floors: “Brilliance of Seltzer”; maps and anatomical diagrams; caveats and cajoleries to the Reader; an inspector who deduces while shaving, with scars to evidence “multiple insights”; and threats to take the art of narrative to hitherto unexplored levels of logical sabotage: “. . . I had proposed to my Publisher, in spite of the enormous amount of additional work it would have imposed upon me, to furnish him with an absolute forest of multiple diverging and reconverging tales, with approved spatiotemporal travel maps, and a guide provided for the tourists of the fiction . . . each reader would have his own personalized book.”

Roubaud seduces with felicitous--and feline--moments of humor: “Hotello had shown up a few months before at Laurie and Carlotta’s place. He had scratched at the third floor right on C stairway. He explained that it had come to his attention that there was a vacancy for a cat in this apartment.”

For all its punning fun, Roubaud’s writing has the emotional impact of a crossword puzzle. His plot is too contrived for the human mind; his characters are paper dolls; and what’s at stake, whether criminally or sexually, is never clear enough to matter. When you remove the syntactical cotton candy, what you have in your hand is a hollow cardboard tube.

All books like this restate the question: Can the head pose as the heart? And they lure the reader who believes it can beneath their non-reflecting surface where deep waters lie dead still. The heart, with its turbulently unmathematical demands, is missing--a serious loss to any engagement with art.

Toward the end the narrator observes: “Carlotta had understood everything but was not there. The others didn’t give a damn. The Reader, maybe?” And maybe not.