Tale Plumbs Act of Creating--and Omitting

We examine the dust jacket. No blurb on the front flap. A bold refusal to offer any kind of come-on, summary, or explanation of the book’s contents? Not quite: The back of the dust jacket has the usual praise and precis, in this case inviting us to compare the book with “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Slaughterhouse Five.”

Intriguingly, “Time for Robo,” a novel by an artist and art critic, opens with blackness: a rectangle of solid black print giving way to alternating lines of black stripes and Xs, then to a jumble of letters and, finally, to recognizable English words. No, this is not a test page produced by hypothetical monkeys hammering away at typewriters in the absurd hope of accidentally duplicating “Hamlet.” It is meant, rather, to represent the very process of creation itself: out of nothingness, the beginnings of differentiation, and out of a babble of possible combinations, distinct patterns of letters that somehow make sense. A voice is emerging: “Don’t use all the [damned] words at once. Nobody’ll understand. . . . Use a few, throw away most. . . . You even have to be stupid sometimes. You can’t know it all, and then tell it all, all at the same time. . . . Nobody’ll understand.” The voice belongs to--or, rather, has been selected from an infinite array of possible voices by--an entity calling itself “the ghost,” a quasi-divine spirit who seems to be co-extensive with the universe. Creation, the ghost explains, whether of the cosmos or of an artwork, is dependent on “editing down”: narrowing one’s focus from infinite possibilities to a few possibilities. In short: It has a lot to do with deciding what to leave out.

Having explained all this, our friendly ghost steps aside to give the storytelling stage to an ordinary human writer named Billy Lockjaw, the putative author of most of the rest of this novel. Billy offers a convoluted tale involving a late medieval Flemish painting, a 19th century preacher, a religious cult in Idaho, a brilliant immigrant who makes remarkable discoveries in physics, a super-jock named Robo whose father has raised him to be a kind of human machine, a 20th century preacher called Noam Sain with a pudgy physique and a fondness for fellatio, the wife who leaves him to become an Axis Sally for the Nazis, plus spies, tunnels, drugs, secret weapons, doomsday prophecies, and much more in this vein.

Toward the end, the story is interrupted by some rather exasperated comments from our original friend, the quacking ghost, who seems to find Billy’s book an improbable and not very skillful farrago. At this point, one suspects that the book’s true author, Peter Plagens, may well be entertaining similar doubts and has inserted the ghost’s critique as a way of warding off--or at least anticipating--the reader’s objections.

On the plus side, Plagens, an artist, professor of art and art critic for Newsweek magazine, is a master of prose: versatile, adroit and elegant. He has a good ear not only for spoken dialogue, but also for the interior monologues that go on in his characters’ minds. He also brings to his descriptions of the visible world the sensitivity and precision of a painter. When he stretches his imagination to try and comprehend or explain the strange paradoxes of the cosmos--the mysteries of the time-space continuum, the mind-body question, theories of creation--the result is intriguing, even spellbinding. But when he gets bogged down in sports metaphors, palaver about the meaning of paternity, and jokes about preachers and oral sex, things get a bit tedious. Then again, I’m someone who finds even Thomas Pynchon a bit tedious.

The vein of apocalyptic fantasy satire mined by the likes of Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gass and William Gaddis is probably far from exhausted. But I’m not sure that Plagens has quite managed to discover enough fresh material to make this novel more than a bravura exercise--a warm-up, let’s hope, for something more substantial.