Cracked
Lyricism
Manuel Puig, the Argentine author
best known for "Kiss of the Spider
Woman,” writes novels that con
t rast the cramped lives people lead wit h the
ext ravagant worlds they fantasize. A bitter
romantic, he’s a fan of classic Hollywood
schlock, and his theme is the att raction and
impossibility of romance. He can't get ideal
loveoutofhis head,and he can’t forget that
it doesn’t really exist. When he recounts a
character’s movie-fed memory or dream,
his words seem to issue from an ecstatic
trance. He takes off from kitsch into
something almost visionary, and makes us
understand the lure of Dream Factory illu
sions. When Puig is at his peak—in "Kiss,”
"Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” and "Heart
break Tango,” and in sections of his newly
translated Publ* Angelical (250 paxes. Vin
tage. Paper $6.95>—his cracked, intense
lyricism is in a class with that of F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Tennessee Williams.
Pubis Angelical is like a jangled par
ody of a Hollywood weepie. A young woman
being treated for a tumor awaits her doc
tor’s verdict and contends with a lover who
wants her to participate in a kidnapping
scheme. Sedated against pain, she slips into
comalike states. The narrative alternates
between her lucid periods and two ongoing
reveries—one starring Hedy Lamarr, the
other a sex surrogate. Puig tells the "real"
story in a bare-bones style and recounts the
hallucinations—in which his heroine’s
deepest feelings play themselves out on a
grand scale—in breathless, purple prose.
The lush, piled-on sentences seem to
change shape and take on their own life,
like dream images: he describes "columns
which widened little by little as they rose,
suddenly to be transformed into the folds of
the golden fabric wrapped around hips that
continued into torsos of smiling women of
gold, which, with extravagant humor, held
up a golden ceiling with their coiffures of
infinite curls.”
The novel has more intellectual machin
ery than it can support, and the framing
sto is dramatically immobile. But some
oft' ■■ episodes that take place in the hero
in. head can affect you as directly as mu
sii And Puig’s whipped-cream prose in
th* passages has an absurd, touching
ovt peness that may remind you of the
in s of gaudy movie palaces. Puig can
m the pull of the ideal so hard to resist
th ■ e gets you wondering if the cliches of
old lollywood might really be the lan
gu of pure feeling.
Kav Sawhill
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