THE SECRET LIFE OF E. ROBERT PENDLETON
By Michael Collins
Edgar Allen Poe has always been one of the great mysteries of American
literature. People can't be sure how to read him. As a hack, the inventor
of the detective story and science-fiction, dabbler in all things sensational? Or as a genius,
his work suffused with postmodern irony and self-awareness, learned asides
and dubious theory? In what
spirit should he be approached? With respectful seriousness, or as the creator
of spirited literary larks? Was he cruelly disregarded by his native land, or rather,
like a nineteenth-century Jerry Lewis, wildly overrated by the French (because,
as Eliot sniped, he improved in translation). The truth, as James Russell Lowell understood, lies somewhere
in-between. Break it down as "three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths
sheer fudge."
Michael Collins is an Irish author (and "extreme athlete") who has,
in The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton, brought us as Poe-esque a
dog's breakfast of a novel as one
could imagine. A good part - if not quite three-fifths - is sheer fudge. That is
to say, it is sensational, campy, and somewhat absurd genre trash. The story is
a campus mystery/thriller that begins with the title character - once a
promising young literary talent, now a middle-aged college creative writing
instructor - botching his suicide. Reduced to a semi-vegetative state, his
literary legacy falls to buxom grad student Adi Wiltshire (we know she's buxom
because she's "known to have tit-fucked no less than two Pulitzer Prize
recipients"). On moving in to Pendleton's house, Adi finds a box filled
with copies of a self-published semi-autobiographical thriller about a child
murder. Upon publishing it, with
the assistance of Allen Horowitz, a hornier, more successful writer of
Pendleton's generation, it goes on to become a critical and commercial hit. The wrinkle is that the
crime Pendleton describes at the heart of his book is real, making the events it
describes potential evidence in solving a decade-old mystery.
The campus of Bannockburn, Pendleton's mid-West college, is an oddly Gothic
location. It is exotic. We don't usually think of the American mid-West as being
exotic or Gothic, but this is the effect Collins has achieved, resurrecting a
kind of Grant Wood-creepiness. Adding to the sense of distance and oddity is the
fact that the book is, weirdly, set in the mid-1980s. This is weird because it is hard to understand why Collins
would set the novel in a time and a place he seems to have so little sympathy
for, or understanding of. A lot of the slutty parts, in particular, are
anachronistic (eleven-year-old girls in the rural mid-West, of whatever socio-economic background,
were not getting butterfly tattoos on their thighs in the 1970s). The backdating
seems to only exist in order to make this world - a world where, we learn, Adi
has even been raised with an ape by hippy parents - a little more alien and unreal.
Along with all of this weirdness comes a healthy greasing of cliché. Pendleton
himself, the creative writing teacher with a great future behind him, is a
familiar figure to any reader of campus lit. Meanwhile, the cop on the
murderer's trail is correctly identified by Horowitz as "the stuff of pulp
fiction." There is even a painful scene near the end where he is threatened
by his superior with being taken off the case. "This isn't time to play the
lone wolf," his boss tells him. Before you are finished rolling your
eyes over that one he responds with "They want me taken out,
right? They got to you." Sigh.
And yet, despite having a trash factor score that even Poe might have envied,
this is an oddly compelling novel. Like any imagining of the American Gothic
there is a genuine uneasiness about the "reality" that American life,
its conventions and mythologies, guards against - "the bogeyman horror that
had come to characterize the American experience." Every family has its
dirty secrets, its hidden bodies, its dark rooms painted in gusts of semen. And,
when he wants to turn it on, Collins has a knack for describing this horror, a
genius like Pendleton's (and Poe's) for tapping into the "subtext of his
culture." One only has to consider what he has to say about story-telling
and plagiarism to see just how in tune he is with the spirit of our current literary
age.
Can one finally separate the campus from the camp? Stephen King's dark
fantasies from the National Book Awards short list? The point, I think, is that
you can't. High art is always, consciously or not, plagiarizing from the low. Of
most of the work we acknowledge to be genius, two-fifths is probably sheer fudge. In its
own perverse way, The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton is an
acknowledgment of this "cultural subtext," an expression of sympathy
for that sugary bogeyman who resides in the foul paperback-and-bone shop of the
heart.
Notes:
Review first published June 23, 2006.
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