Still life: Two short novels

Here are two short, closely worked novels—Still Life and Lifeblood—which explore in complementary modes the consequences of repression. From entirely different viewpoints, in entirely different styles and settings, these tales exemplify the truth that life is a continuity that can never be stilled. In both narratives,the forces of unreason, of earth and instinct, exact a terrible toll from those who would deny their powers. Still Life describes what occurs in the course of a single evening in the Wahl family's Park Avenue apartment when the youngest member, Danny, comes home from a mental hospital for a trial weekend. The life Danny would still, until it might be as immutable as the paintings his art dealer father exhibits on the walls, rages here in an everlasting battle between parents and brothers, who lacerate each other with venomous accuracy, the accuracy of love itself. Far from stilling his family's tumultuous life, however, Danny is driven by it into his old fears and obsessions, over which he has only tenuous control. Unable to enter open combat with the flesh and blood members of his family, he withdraws to the solitude of his bedroom to do battle—a duel to the death—with his demons, two gangs of beings who, in his delusion, contend for his body and his soul. In the end Danny submits to life in the only terms he can recognize, and the novel mounts to its violent, inevitable climax in an act of paradoxical affirmation. To the murky domestic terror of Still Life, the mythic clarity of Lifeblood offers a stabling contrast. Summoned by Apollo, champion of reason, the gods of Olympus must devise a way to still the hermaphrodite divinity Agdistis who is ravaging and profaning King Midas's realm of Phrygia. The means they find is castration. Without explaining, without "psychologizing," moving in the style of myth which has a realism of its own, the tale presents the effects of that divine mutilation in the birth and death of Attis, "beautiful boy," son, paramour, and eventual victim of Agdistis. Once again the author builds his tale to a dreadful crisis, this time in a scene of carnage as communal as Danny's final solution is private. These are novels of high literary merit, radical in concept, intricate in execution, tremendously exciting in their dramatic presentation of rape, reverence, and destruction.