The Amero-Englishman Russell Hoban is a genuine literary anomaly. His combination of Yankee energy and Brit irony has lifted many of his 30-odd books into the first rank of modern fantastical literature. Hoban’s new novel, Linger Awhile, displays much of the singular mix of grit, whimsy, and economical prose that has earned him a small, loyal cult readership.
And a nice cult it is, by the way. I’ll disclose that I’m a third- or fourth-tier Hobanist myself-converted in adolescence, actually. But even we in his church can’t deny that Linger Awhile feels a bit knocked-off compared to some of the writer’s previous accomplishments. The fable, The Mouse and His Child, the postapocalyptic narrative, Riddley Walker, and the eccentric love story, Turtle Diary, will remain the pillars of Hoban’s achievement, on the evidence here.
Linger Awhile, with its fragile but ruthless pensioners using techno-magic to make their nostalgia walk and talk, might seem charmingly innovative as the debut novel of a talented twenty-five-year-old. From Russell Hoban, it reads like an octogenarian prodigy’s casual display of ongoing mastery. (Hoban is eighty-two.) Actually, it’s a decent novel in any context, crammed as it is with ideas, personalities, and events.
Linger Awhile begins with a London oldster, Irving Goodman, who can’t forget the deep-chested cowgirls of American Western flicks he watched in his 1950s youth. He causes one such pointy-brassiere icon to rise out of the film dimension, into his 3-D, curry-eating, 2006 Golders Green life. It’s Goodman’s perverse old-man wish, and its speedy fulfillment launches this novel’s unpredictable journey.
Now, filmic characters coming to life, or the entry of real people into a movie universe, aren’t unknown concepts (consider The Last Action Hero, or Pleasantville.) But the nympho-murderousness of Hoban’s Justine Trimble, a luscious zombie predator assembled from the forgotten celluloid of a dead actress, shows that he’s a great explorer of that chancy, half-mapped region where serious writing addresses the fantastic.
Hoban’s whimsy is related to that of fellow Americans like Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut. But it’s superior. The very old monk in Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a horny, half-immortal, prattling symbol of hippie literature’s inability to depict character, for example. By contrast, Irving Goodman and his aging, fractious coconspirators Istvan, Grace, and Chauncey, are breathing people who drive Linger Awhile’s impossibilities believably forward. It’s in the prose-and remember, this is lesser Hoban:
“When I first saw the interference pattern on the white card I thought, Well, yes, I am interfering. Maybe she wants to stop in the video, maybe she wants to stay dead. But I was hot for her and I wanted her alive and I was in charge. Now she was with Chauncey Lim and for the most part I was glad to have her off my hands. Maybe I was a little jealous. Dead people!”
Philosophy tends to follow action, in Hoban’s literary world. His characters can’t help doing what they’re capable of-cooking up the ghoulish embodiment of a dead diva just for the screwing, say-and generally don’t contemplate the consequences of a thing till it’s done.
Well, do any of us? This is the writerly empathy, the puzzled patience with human foibles, that makes Hoban’s fabulism so unique. In 1967’s The Mouse and His Child (it would be a canonical kids’ tale, if there was any justice), the surviving spear-carriers of a total war between shrew armies can’t quite recall what it was fought for.
And the London old-timers of Linger Awhile, having constructed a full-bodied cowgirl from ancient video stock, get so caught up in squabbling they barely notice that she has to suck blood to live in colour (as opposed to black and white.) Those who survive the lusty monster’s metamedia rampages don’t brood on the puncture wounds and drained corpses till quite late in the novel:
“Everything goes away after a while,” [Irving] said. “This whole thing started with me. Don’t ask me to explain how I got fixated on Justine Trimble because I can’t. It must have been some kind of senile dementia.”
This explains, clearly, not much. The human response to mad, improbable or impossible circumstances, Hoban has always suggested, is quick and impulsive: we shrug and adapt. Context, rationalisation, and explanation are backwards-facing considerations in Hoban’s view. You certainly can’t predict what’s going to happen next, and even people or characters you know well may react strangely, once things get strange.
In other words, there’s a psychological acuity in Russell Hoban’s work that has helped it stand out from institutionally mutinous literary schools like cyberpunk or magic realism (and made him a school of one, which is what he has essentially become). Linger Awhile is as sharp about human self-delusion as Hoban’s writing has always been, but there’s a new tone here, a madcap sprightliness bordering on the vicious:
“I saw Justine Trimble commit murder last night. I’d been keeping an eye on Fallok’s place when I saw her come out. In full colour, which was startling. After reaching the street . . . a woman who was passing spoke to her. Suddenly, before you could say ‘Chow Yun Fat,’ Justine had the other woman in a close embrace . . . I hurried to where she’d left her victim. The woman was young and pretty, white as a sheet and stone-cold dead. Very sad but there was nothing I could do for her so I hurried after Justine.”
At his age, Hoban is certainly entitled to doff the cloak of melancholy and get on with things-this is quite a speedy read, at 160 pages of short chapters narrated by eleven characters (twelve if you’re picky)-but readers, especially long-time devotees, are entitled to ask what we’re getting in return. If late-period Hoban is no longer to feature the large-hearted sadness that marked his earlier eras, what will keep it valuable, and readable?
Well, there’s his philosophical bent, at least, which remains intact. There is his London, a setting faultlessly deployed, in the best anglophile tradition. (“When PC Plod got to Cecil Court . . . ”) There’s Hoban’s skill with the small intimate dialogues that bond lovers, even elderly and opportunistic ones with much else on their minds. Consider Grace and Irv, boozing it up:
“That’s what I like about you, Irv, everything doesn’t have to be spelt out.”
“So tell me, I’m all ears. Tell me while I’m still coherent.”
“I think,” she said, “it’s time for me to stop getting mad and start getting even.”
“Every woman’s right,” I said . . .
But these are classic and ongoing Hoban virtues, whereas Linger Awhile tends to drag, even to irritate, when he departs from his usual modes, and looks to innovate. Now, I’m trying not to be fetishistic in that reactionary fan-club way, where you demand that your artistic heroes rewrite their old hits forever; but, God, the whole police-procedural aspect of Linger Awhile is a bolted-on, distracting mess.
And there’s an occasional failure of humour here, a very surprising thing in Hoban (especially if you remember the Caws of Art Experimental Theatre from The Mouse and His Child, a side-splitting trope even if you didn’t know what he was satirising: “A manyness of dogs. A moreness of dogs . . .”). While much of Linger Awhile is acceptably witty, you do get repeated nudges about the fluid from which the cowgirl revenant is, pseudoscientifically, hatched: it’s the “suspension of disbelief”, see?
There are a couple other instances of aggressive, Robbins-esque, choke-on-it whimsy in this book. And there remains that slight, troublesome chilliness of tone, which has caused some consternation in Hobanist church circles. Not that Hoban’s ever been a comforting writer, exactly; there’s far too much death and strangeness in his work for that. But he once had a patience for human life, a slight warmth, that in Linger Awhile he seems to have abandoned.
It remains a decent novel. This latest of Hoban’s impossible worlds still has far more grit in it, more old shoes and cottage cheese, than the checklist fairylands of just about any vaguely similar writer working today. (Might J. K. Rowling’s legions of fans, once Harry Potter’s protracted self-realisation finally ends, seek out a more meaningful fabulism, like Hoban’s? Hard to say.) Linger Awhile might be a misstep, or the onset of Russell Hoban’s Cranky Period, but it’s enough to keep us acolytes from drinking the Kool-Aid, just yet.
Lyle Neff (Books in Canada)
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