BOOK REVIEW : Antic Short Stories Are Lighter Than Air
Men Under Water by Ralph Lombreglia (Doubleday: $17.95: 212 pages).
As with most good short-story writers, Ralph Lombreglia’s work cuts to the bone. In his case, unusually, it is often the funny-bone.
With its careful self-absorption and its circuitry of personal relations so complex as to regularly short out, modern life is a trap. A Lombreglia protagonist, generally the narrator, has followed so many subtle instructions so conscientiously that he has worked himself into passive depression. The way out is not more subtlety, but outrageousness.
Outrageousness we get a lot of these days, but it tends to be synthetic; a formulaic excess along the lines of a “War of the Roses.” The genuine article is a rarity. It is not a willed choice. It is logic backed against its will into a corner so tight that it has no alternative to leaping out into space. In the best stories in “Men Under Water,” the leap is not only instructive but fun; it is a flying lesson, something learned in the air.
The narrator in “Jungle Video,” one of the best of the stories, gets out of his corner with the help of the three antic spirits he works for. Anita, Dwight and the Professor make videos in a broken-down house in Boston. The narrator, aimless and inhibited, lives downstairs as their tenant. Before long, they hire him as a writer.
He is skillful but conventional; they are moonbeams. A computer company hires them to do a video to promote its image. They prepare a straightforward treatment; then they rip it apart in the wild, far-out style they win prizes for. The company representative is furious; the video doesn’t even show his president. It is a frequent tribal custom, the Professor--an anthropologist--explains loftily, that the chief does not take part in the ceremonies.
Nevertheless, they will redo it. Meanwhile, they clue in the bewildered narrator. Clients don’t know what they want, Dwight explains, but they think that they do. If you do what they think they want, instead of what you know you should do, they will be disappointed. Even if they’re not, you will be. The point is not to make videos but to be “brilliant media wizards.”
They all go to a video-game arcade and play a game in which an ape has to pick up a proliferating array of bananas. Of course, Dwight explains, it’s not the ape who does it but the players. “But in seeing it as the ape’s situation you get this peculiar distance on yourself.”
“It becomes something apart from you,” the narrator ventures.
“ You become something apart from you.”
“You become the ape.”
“Yes,” Dwight says.
By the end, the narrator, dressed in a gorilla suit, is cavorting uninhibitedly as the subject for the trio’s even wilder remake of the company video. He has freed himself; he has also become the ape. Lombreglia’s message cuts cheerfully both ways.
In “Good Year,” two lovers, on the verge of a depressive separation, drive out to visit friends in the country. On the way, their spirits lift momentarily when they catch sight of the Goodyear blimp floating by, silvery and improbable. The narrator gets out to watch, and his girlfriend is “tickled by how much I like it.”
The friends, whose exuberance is on the order of the video trio’s, drive them later that day to the field where the blimp is moored. The husband has put on a kid’s space helmet and carries a toy ray-gun; he performs a mock marriage ceremony for the low-spirited couple.
“ ‘I have here two sample earthlings,’ ” he intones to the blimp. “ ‘They have not been happy on this planet, and have volunteered to leave. I offer them in exchange for information about your world. Take us to your leader.’ ” If blimps can tug upward, why not people?
Most of the stories have an equivalent moment of breaking free. Two or three seem a little forced in these moments. “Monarchs,” on the other hand, manages with astonishing success to use a swarm of butterflies as an emblem of happiness. Another, wickedly funny, tells of Edgar, whose girlfriend has walked out, leaving all her things behind, and of the trendy museum curator who persuades him to turn their house and mingled possessions into a “Museum of the Love Affair.”
There will be a “Before Each Other Room” containing his stuff, then a group of rooms with the things they use together. In the last room, Edgar will sit in a rocking chair, clutching her negligee. Not only can he make a living at it, the curator explains, but it will be therapeutic for him.
“Inn Essence,” the initial story, is a lovely Lombreglian extravaganza. The narrator is the sensible but anemic still-center of a comically instructive whirlwind. He is the salad chef at a country restaurant.
The place features a brilliant but insane pastry chef and five Thai students whom the owner, an enthusiast of Eastern culture, has hired as waiters. It also features the owner’s long-suffering mistress, Ethel, whom he never quite marries.
Victor, the pastry chef, attempts to stab one of the Thai students; they clamor for justice. The owner’s version of justice is to reward everybody. He proposes to give both sides enormous raises. “Money is love,” he explains. It is no use. Victor denounces the Thais to the authorities, and two immigration inspectors arrive.
At this point, Ethel rouses from her gloom and brings about an extravagant salvation. When the inspectors get there, the waiters have disappeared and so has Victor. The narrator finds them all in the pastry cooler. Victor is tied up; Ethel and the Thais are bombarding him with cream puffs and stuffing his mouth with pastry cream.
“Five young men from a distant land are looking at me with questioning eyes, the sweet pastries of revenge in their hands,” the narrator says. “They’re waiting for me to confirm that whatever we are doing is indeed the way justice is done in my country.”
It is the last of many deflections in a story as light and flaky as one of the pastries, built upon a lacework of misunderstandings and ricochets, and lifting off with the buoyancy of the Goodyear blimp.
Friday: Elaine Kendall reviews “A Slight Lapse” by Robert Chibka, (W.W. Norton).