Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

Начало книги

One bright New York day over two decades ago—1990 or thereabouts — in a booth at the Viand Diner, on Second Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, Donald Antrim handed me the first twenty pages of a manuscript that became, in the fullness of time, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. This was back in the waning days of the typewriter, Antrim’s model, if I remember correctly, being a slim Olivetti whose keystrokes left impressions on those onion-skin sheets as delicate, airy, and stylish as the opening lines: “See a town stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine the town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish. That’s what my wife, Meredith, calls the ocean.” At the time, I didn’t know that this paragraph commenced not only the manuscript I was holding but two others that would follow, comprising what came to be a trilogy of short novels narrated by pedantic, syntactically well-behaved, semi-insane middle-aged men. I had no idea that marine imagery would play such a large role in the novel (later on, Meredith’s self-induced “ichthyomorphic trances” become a barrier in her marriage to the narrator). All I knew was that, following the trajectory of those opening lines, I was suddenly pulled into a never-before-experienced realm: the sunken world of a strange and marvelous book. Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is that very rare thing: a book without antecedents. To compare it to other books is to invite frustration: the templates don’t match up. The novel is satirical without becoming satire. It presents recognizable characters in a recognizably American suburb without conforming to realism.

Читать дальше →