Book About Middle Class Isn’t Middle Of The Road
By BEN SZMANDA
It takes a while before you can get a glimpse of what’s going on in Robert Coover’s bizarre novel Gerald’s Party. For the first 50 pages or so, all you really get is a blur of movement; there is an endless, feverish, parade of people, half finished drunken dirty jokes, grotesque scenes, and scatological humor. The story telling never settles down, but what you begin to realize is how amazingly well constructed it is. Those snapshots of people begin to gel into recognizable personalities, the punch lines are blurted out pages later, and the central story, a parlor murder mystery, begins to take shape in the middle of the riot.
Riot is a good word; Bacchanal would be another, perhaps better one. Coover lets his main character, Gerald, tell the story, which begins with the memorable opener ”No one noticed the body at first.” That body turns out to be the recently departed remains of a hypersexual, if marginally talented, young actress by the name of Ros. If it’ not lurid enough that she was stabbed to death at a party, she was stabbed to death in the living room, in the middle of a crowd of drunken revelers, and no one seemed to notice husband came looking for her.
The police are called, and because of the weird nature of the murder, the inspector refuses to let anybody leave. Gerald and his wife obligingly continue feeding their guest booze and guacamole, and the party creaks on, in full view of their dead friend, who is stripped naked by the cops and photographed by callous reporters.
Ros’s husband Roger ads a further grim touch to the festivities. He had been clinging to the corpse and wailing , and when the cops move into examine the body he attacks them. In the process of restraining Roger, the police chase him around the room, splattering Ros’s blood over everything and every one. He also destroys most of the house. Later on, we are told by various guests, he is clubbed to death by the police and left in Gerald’s study. More bodies follow.
I had said the voices of the partygoers gel into personalities. That’s not quite true. You begin to identify personal flaws with names. But for the most part, the dialogue comes from everyone’s mouth. Each guest is by turns lecherous, crude, and philosophical. Barely anyone seems really, truly bothered by the bloody display in front of them. There were a few late comers, actors, who fling themselves on their dead colleague and put on a show for all those around., but it is just that: A Show. You get the ugly sense that they may care for the departed even less than the rest of the people in attendance.
I suppose you could take all of this as an indictment of hedonism. Although at the same time there really is no moral condemnation to be found, anywhere. Gerald’s Party is a 300 page depiction of frenzy, in all of its forms: You have the intoxication, the sexuality, the bloodlust — all of it. The partygoers lose their inhibitions and their sense of responsibility in the crowd.Who they are makes it all the funnier. This is a collection of upper middle class artists and intellectuals, and they spout off about the nature of time and art and so forth, but all their attempts to seem cerebral and detached are perpetually mocked by the long procession of dirty jokes and awful puns. Coover seems to have a lot of fun reducing these people to this state, and it is fun to watch, but it’s not an easy thing to read. Not that the book it badly written — it’s very well done — but it is just exhausting. One reviewer described it as “a work of the purest, unremitting malevolence.” He may have a point, but I’m glad Coover wrote it anyway.