BRILLIANT.

ET_E_6_E6_LA_1_12-10-05_sa_2_CMYK
2005:12:09:14:56:22_
LOS ANGELES TIMES
E6 SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2005
CALENDAR
, JOE MORGENSTERN
THE SATURDAY READ
”DEADPAN-HILARIOUS!”
Too much talk clouds a surreal afterlife
, A.O. SCOTT
“FELICITY
HUFFMAN’S
PERFORMANCE IS
THRILLING TO WATCH!”
By Anne Boles Levy
“ TWO
THUMBS UP.”
®
Special to The Times
, ARMOND WHITE
Glass Soup
“THE
MOST ORIGINAL
AMERICAN MOVIE
COMEDY THIS YEAR!“
A Novel
Jonathan Carroll
Tor: 318 pp., $24.95
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“AN EDGE-OF-YOUR-SEAT
PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER.”
David Ansen, NEWSWEEK
★★★★
“
A CRACKLING
SUSPENSE TALE.”
Leah Rozen, PEOPLE
I
T’S part of Jonathan Carroll’s gift that his fictional
afterlife seems more natural, more logical than a
drearily nicey-nice place of
cherubs and pearly gates.
His is a Jungian dream world,
a customized purgatory populated by the people who loved or
humiliated us in life, a physical
place that surreally shifts to restage every childhood trauma
until each is happily resolved.
Death is “like school,” one
character learns to his dismay
when he realizes that he is deceased and doomed to relive
third grade. The trouble with
such a fabulist conceit: It takes
way too much explanation. Carroll does too much telling instead
of showing and has too many
characters sitting around jawing
about how weird a place death is
and what to make of it.
His character Vincent Ettrich, a reformed womanizer, has
been there before. Although
“Glass Soup” doesn’t read like a
sequel, it follows Carroll’s acclaimed “White Apples,” which is
about Vincent’s quest to figure
out what he learned — but can’t
remember — from his afterlife.
In this book, set in Vienna,
Vincent is alive and in love with
the woman who retrieved him
from the afterlife, the pregnant
Isabelle Neukor. The fetus is already sentient and prepared to
fight Chaos, a malevolent force
that at times takes human form.
Isabelle keeps shifting between
two realities but can’t afford to
be in the wrong place when the
baby arrives.
Surreal happenings and leaps
in logic crop up at every turn, but
without violating the rules of fantasy novels that plot devices
must be dangled prominently
and notice given when reality is
about to be bent or broken.
When, at a critical moment, Isabelle communicates with Vincent by making letters appear on
his hands, the reader has an
“aha” moment, as if to say that
now it all makes sense.
In this contemporary fantasy
too, there are no heavily armored
baddies. Chaos and his henchmen must rely on cunning rather
than force, and their psychological cheap tricks — turning up at
a New Age book signing to seduce one of Isabelle’s best
friends, for example — keep the
plot moving briskly and in unexpected, even humorous ways.
Carroll counts on readers to
recognize pop culture references
as part of some postmodern, collective unconscious. When a
slain character confronts her
“Highway to Hell,” you can practically hear AC/DC’s guitar riffs.
But the most effective scenes
are between Vincent and Isabelle, having just met: “Neither
had said anything for a while. It
was enough to be together alone
now, two people escaping into a
glittering city, into an adventure,
each of them nervously content,
expectant and deeply surprised.”
Although the narrative jumps
among different perspectives,
they form the spinning center of
the novel, keeping all the pieces
in place through the centrifugal
force of their ardor.
Now if only Carroll could jettison the windy passages, such as
when a talking polar bear describes the universe, minor characters announce why they’re
there or Isabelle and Vincent dissect every discovery. Carroll’s explanations can rob his fictional
world of some of its wonder, but
that may be a necessary flaw in a
dreamscape so heavily reliant on
symbols and made-up metaphysics.
After all, we’re just visitors
there. For now.
Anne Boles Levy, a reviewer
whose work has appeared in The
Times, writes a children’s book
blog at www.bookbuds.net.
“TWO
THUMBS UP.”®
EBERT & ROEPER
“ONE
FILM THAT HAS
OSCAR WRITTEN ALL OVER IT.”
Peter Travers
®
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