Angelica's Grotto: A Novel (Hardcover)

So why should not the British cult writer Russell Hoban get his turn? Like Kubrick in that double bill of yearning toward amniotic bliss, EYES WIDE SHUT and A.I., Hoban sees one brand of medication for the pain of failing daylight: the tender vent we all call home. In this hiccuppingly eccentric, deliberately minor-key novel, Hoban places his own alter ego, an impotent, diabetic, sclerotic art historian, at a worshipful stoop before a website called Angelica's Grotto. [....]Here, a feminist grad student lures potential wankers with homemade still-photo porn and 1-900-style storytelling. Hoban's aesthete, Harold Klein, is fascinated--and thus begins an improbable series of adventures that includes Angelica's accepting Klein's tongue into her grotto (out of "curiosity") and climaxes with an act of vengeance against a black stud that would make Norman Mailer and James Toback blush and hold hands.

Hey--if the Yanks can do it, let it all hang out, finally admit that they're doing it for the nookie, why can't a dotty, attention-deficited, crazy-quilt-headed old prof like Hoban drop trou too? His version certainly has more charm and gentleness, and is pointedly less misogynistic and more self-candid, than lusty-old-goat cannonades like Updike's ROGER'S VERSION or Roth's DYING ANIMAL. But like all contemporary British novelists who mark themselves as middle-class or above, Hoban is less a slave to the tang than to a public-school education. Hard, crumbly bits of German phraseology, twice-removed references to scenes from ORLANDO FURIOSO, a smug description of a dinner chat about "Klimt and Kieslowski," clot the soup and interrupt the tasty parts. Hoban still feels the urge to name-drop and to cerebralize--even though the drop-kick at the climax of the novel is that a horny old coot will literally drop a million bucks just to wet his whistle on a butchy grad student who doesn't always smell so good. [....] Like a milder, post-Zoloft Peter Greenaway, Hoban's hands flit through Jansen's History of Art and the O.E.D. while his eyes dart toward the busty sylph at the cappuccino cart.

Americans may just want him to get on with it--and get over it. Less rageful and accusatory than his American analogs, Hoban also commits a sin they don't--he puts on a slightly Mitteleuropa, who-little-old-me? act. The Angelica character calls him on it, but he keeps it up, as it were--making himself seem meek, mild, lamely inquisitive, prodding at his willingness to sacrifice all for sex as if it were a fancy, unfamiliar cushion that somehow wound up on a kitchen chair. The Americans plowing this terrain own up more freely to the bawl of their soon-to-be-terminal inner child. For their sourness, the Updike and Roth versions of the old-man-with-an-itch have a bitter grandeur, and an impressive surrender before the mysterious simplicity of our biological hardwiring. Hoban tries to stave off anxiety with art-review chatter and three-card-monte cultural crossreference. [...]

Unwittingly, ANGELICA'S GROTTO demonstrates a peculiar neurosis of the aging urban intelligentsia that is the only real drama the book permits: the arm-wrestle between "I wanna go out and live!" and "Eek--a germ!" [....] Some may find Hoban's avuncular, donnish treatment of this vacillation surprisingly warm and humane. Everyone else will find himself speeding through the pages, eager to get back to a world where Hoban's issues can be discussed without the mimeographed proprieties of a teacher-student conference.

My girlfriend is a Berlinerin, and while visiting her a couple months ago, taking the S-Bahn to her college, we passed a typically cryptic graffiti scrawl -- even the hoodlums in Germany fancy themselves Nietzsches -- that said "There are 20 great men in the world today, and we are here to help them." It's a sign of either my prescience or psychosis that I immediately thought of... well, myself, but that's the typical reaction. Right afterwards I thought of a much more deserving candidate for a member of this illustrious, if somewhat arbitrary 20; Russell Hoban, author of the book you're reading about here and, this is not an opinion, one of the most important writers alive. The irony is that there is no one on earth who has gotten less "help" with his project, his career, his LIFE than Hoban -- after scoring a cult success with Riddley Walker in 1981, he had the unforgivable audacity to better it with Pilgermann, my candidate for the greatest novel of the second half of the 20th century, a visionary and bottomlessly complex work that put him in the rarefied company of Kleist, Kafka and Borges... and which was promptly rejected, along with its creator, as if Hoban were the literary equivalent of Right Said Fred. People just did not want to go beyond Riddley.

As it turns out, we couldn't have helped Hoban more than by ignoring him -- like Proust's composer Vinteuil, Hoban has lived and worked in relative limbo, admired by fellow novelists but ignored by the ox populi, having nothing to guide him but his own instincts. "I have been denied my rightful martyrdom," complained George Bernhard Shaw in a preface, knowing full well his new play, like all the others, would be a thumping success. Hoban, however, has suffered multiple martyrdoms, almost every time he's put out a book -- this is the first of his books to even be PUBLISHED in America since Pilgermann in 1983! -- and here we see him reaping the benefits of a lifetime of bitterness, loss and unjustified neglect.

What possible benefits could there be from such a horrid fate? Well, what other 75-year old could have written a book as immediate and personal, possibly even as era-defining, as The Catcher in the Rye? The central character of Angelica's Grotto, Harold Klein, could almost be a geriatric Holden Caulfield, if he weren't so distinctly Hobanian -- an adjective that will come to mean "wistful, yet cranky, and apt to make random connections between everyday life and myth, B-movies and obscure paintings." The book works because Klein is also, to put none too fine a point upon it, Hoban himself. He makes sport of his angina, his impotence, his irrelevance, but every stunning sentence, every radiant description of London and exhibition of puppyish sexual curiosity, belies his self-loathing and reveals he has the heart of a much younger man -- or a child. Hence the heartbreak of growing old, and of this book.

The plot, Hoban's most clever and subtle variation yet on the Orpheus myth -- all his books since 1986's The Medusa Frequency work this territory -- kicks off when art-critic and aging bachelor Klein becomes obsessed by an Internet porn-chippie who reminds him of a dead lover ( and one of his beloved paintings. ) What follows is an eye-opening, if ultimately nihilistic, peek into the inner life of a man whose spirit is willing, but whose flesh is falling off his brittle old bones. Hoban, like Kubrick with Eyes Wide Shut, scoffs at any notion of wisdom coming with age -- instead of the repugnant Yoda-like apothegms of John Updike, we get the uncertainty, naked fear, and helpless lust more associated with autobiographical first novels written by 20-somethings. More importantly, we also get a story with actual relevance.

It must be said, if this book were to become a movie, it would go unrated. Klein/Hoban does not shy away from graphic descriptions of what he sees on his favorite websites. But since Internet porn is practically an epidemic, and certainly worthy of intelligent debate, I see no reason why this should bother anyone -- what I'm trying to say is that Hoban is not a hypocrite, which is why he's had so little success in this simultaneously priggish and debauched country. The book is simply the truth, and the truth, as always, is harsh. If this is all we have to look forward to from our golden years, I thought during more than one passage, we might as well pack it in now -- except then we might miss the next book from Russell Hoban. May he live forever.