BOOK REVIEW : The Implausible Adventure of a Magic Realist

A Slight Lapse by Robert Chibka (W.W. Norton: $19.95; 458 pages).

Though none of the admirers quoted on the jacket states flat-out that Chibka is a magic realist, a few key adjectives suggest that “A Slight Lapse” will be something more or less than a straightforward picaresque novel. Any lingering doubts or hopes are dispelled within the first few pages, when we learn that the narrator-hero spent the first two months of his life still tethered to his mother by the umbilical cord.

While magic realists tend to be as different as snowflakes in the way they bend plausibility, they do have a few things in common. Distinctions between conscious and unconscious states usually range from vague to nonexistent. When a magic realist’s immense vocabulary doesn’t contain the precise words he needs, he invents them, deliberately inviting comparisons with James Joyce. Literary allusions abound, keeping the reader alert and on edge.

The heroes and heroines of such novels seldom begin life in the ordinary way, welcomed after nine months by joyful parents and taken home from the hospital in a car seat of approved design. (Think of Pynchon, early Irving, Barth, Vonnegut, and that cohort). Once grown up, the protagonists are generally free to wander the world without visible means of support. Regardless of gender, they’re sexual marvels.

Following the emerging pattern, this hero is called Laurence Paprika, the peculiar surname handed to an immigrant antecedent by an impatient clerk at Ellis Island. Magic realists luxuriate, one might even say wallow, in elaborate, often archaic syntax and arcane vocabulary, exhibiting their virtuosity immediately.

Here’s Laurence describing his earliest memory of his mother: “I was not unhardy for a foetal extraction, and soon mastered the art of clutching, then set gently on the carpet, of rolling to and fro on a flexible protospine between her dainty, as I later learned, feet.”

Despite this unpromising start, Laurence thrives, though he continues to be wizened and undersized. Still, he’s married by the age of 27, enjoying the connubial pleasure of simultaneous shaving: Irene working on her legs while our hero deals with his face. When their perfect timing is thrown off by Irene’s false pregnancy, Laurence sets off on the search for identity that will fill the next 400 pages to overflowing. He leaves for New York, “barrel of fear, trigger of possible release. New York, first home of parents, underground spring, vessel of everything altogether.”

He’s fortunate in meeting, virtually at once, an albino cellist named Gretchen Barron who takes him home to her loft, where Laurence proves that his acrobatic skills are not only verbal but also sexual.

In magic realism, educational digressions are de rigueur , and the early segments of the book include a card-by-card poker hand; an eight-stanza version of “This Little Piggy Went to Market” in German; extended meditations on toenails, lawn mowing and urination, the last leading to a learned, though scatological, riff on the common French expression “tant pis.”

When Laurence finally runs his aged grandfather Theo to ground in his hand-painted-tie store in the Bronx, we meet a philosopher-artist whose impenetrable accent is rendered phonetically, so that even when one reads aloud (recommended by Jane Howard in her jacket quote) Grandpa Theo’s wisdom remains opaque.

Here he seems to be celebrating the salubrious effects of meerschaum smoking. “Eyeful tally oo fawn tink dy foot int foury: eye foot tint foury inny mower dot eye shoot die yunk.” Fortunately, Laurence has no difficulty with this language, and while he doesn’t translate it for us, he learns hitherto mysterious facts about his own origins, insights that contribute significantly to his self-knowledge.

Why shouldn’t the privileges of magic realism extend to the critic as well as to the writer? If an author has rejected the rigorous demands of structure, plot and sense, wouldn’t it be grossly presumptuous, not to say impossible, to apply those discarded criteria to the novel?

As the narrator comments at the end of his quest, “Theo as dino revives Laurence’s spirits too. Oldest terrestrial omnivore in Papyrushchka history. Not extinct, extant: Theodactyl, from whom evolved this Paprika who chickens out, whose evasive action avoids midair collision, who now removes bones from a clotless teppil.” Can’t argue with that, though Chibka should know that Persian lamb is the fur with the tight tiny curls, while chinchilla is fluffy, like super-rabbit.

On second thought, that error may actually be the slight lapse of the title.

Monday: Carolyn See reviews “Loose Jam” by Wayne Wilson (Delacorte Press).