7/30/2019 Wallace-Horror of Pretentiousness

1/1

THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW

By Clive BarkerHarper & Row. 550 pp. $19.95

by David Foster Wallace

Today less an art than an industry, a pop

genre like horror is nevertheless its ownliterary province with its own evaluativestandards. Good horror fiction knows its joband proceeds to do it efficiently. Aiming tostimulate pretty basic parts of the readerlypsyche-to titillate, shock, agitate, scare, toprovide both escape and reassurance-qualityhorror takes care to seem above all unpreten-tious: i.e., to keep its conceits simple and itssettings banal enough to be familiar. Bythese modern standards, the fictions of Steph-en King up through, say, "Cujo" representnearly perfect American pop horror: En-souled appliances run darkly amok in aworld of Fritos, flatulence and trailer-parkangst.

By the same standards, King's putativeheir, Clive Barker, has produced in "TheGreat and Secret Show" a really disappoint-ing novel. A Manichaean soap opera billedby the author as about "Hollywood, Sex andArmageddon," Barker's novel is really just aderivative mix of King's apocalyptic "TheStand," the hell-beneath-suburbia shticks of"Poltergeist" and "Blue Velvet," thecelebrity-bashing voyeurism of a JackieCollins or Sidney Sheldon, and the sophomor-ic metaphysics of undergrad fantasy. Plus it'spretentious beyond belief.

One R. Jaffe, an unhappy postal worker,happens on an ultra-secret cabal of crazies

who keep informing each other (through theU.S. mail!) that "America had a secret life ...the world was not as it seemed." Jaffe com-mits some murder, does some time-hitchhik-ing, makes the sort of windy proclamationsto the audience we associate with cartoon vil-lains, and before we know it has coerced abrilliant but fatally flawed all-purpose pro-fessor, one R. Fletcher, into developing amysterious alchemical cordial that seemsable to enhance evolution, alter body intospirit, induce psychosis, raise the dead orgive people nasty Christlike stigmata, depend-ing on authorial whim. This stuff transformsJaffe and Fletcher, now "Dynasty"-type

nemeses, into sort of odd archetypes ofReally Good and Really Bad. Jaffe is thebad one. He keeps announcing to whoeverwill listen that he wants to use "The Art" todraw aside "The Veil" to reveal "The Shoal,""The Ephemeris" and the oceanic "Quiddity"that separates "The Cosm" from "The Meta-cosm" and the latter's sinister residents, "TheIad Uroboros."

Few of these ponderous terms are even ex-plained, much less given referents, exceptvia pronouncements like: "Quiddity is thesea. And in it are islands, called the Ephemer-is"; and "This was an Art in defiance offlesh. All the profoundest certainties were for-feit in the face of it."

Amid all this forfeiture of profound cer-tainties, the superhuman but awfully randyJaffe and Fletcher are busily impregnating vir-gins in the small California town where theirbattle's brought them. The resultant hyper-evolved offspring grow up in a few pages,hate each other or fall desperately in love,and in The Present release the entombed spir-

its of their opposed fathers on the com-munity and the universe. The resultingmelodrama of sex, gore, celebrity, bad sci-ence and worse cosmology, drawn out to anexcruciating 500-plus pages, leads to a mys-terious Art-induced tear in reality's "screen,"the epiphany that "The whole ... world's amovie," an imminent invasion by meta-creatures who resemble mountains coveredwith fleas, some heroic mystical puzzle-solv-ing by a Hollywood screenwriter and aburned-out tabloid journalist, and salvationby atomic blast.

Lots of things make this novel too preten-tious to like. The misuse of scientific andphilosophic terms, for one thing. There's lotsof alarming prose, here, stuff like: "It wastwenty years since that life-shattering daywhen he'd found the symbol of The Shoal";"He wasn't the only one reeling before thisrevelation"; "Reason could be cruel; logiccould be lunacy."

But most of the pretension in this novelis a function of the fact that Clive Barker de-mands that the reader take him seriously butdeclines to do the artistic work necessary tomake his story believable or even coherent.A contempt for his characters-none of whomeven comes close to being 3-D-is matchedby an odd condescension toward the readerthat has Barker constantly telling you how to

think and feel about everything in the book-e.g., the evil characters "shamble" and"cackle"; the good guys "stride" and "laughheartily"-and playing fast and loose with thevery concepts and theories he litters thestory with. Physical laws are suspended andthen restored (a nuclear explosion can van-quish creatures and seal holes that are in defi-ance of all physics) as it suits the author.One minute people are reeling beforehideous revelations and shaking fists at thesky and declaring their shattered lives willnever again be the same, and the nextminute they're eating a bologna sandwichand negotiating with their editors about how

to write the world's end as an Enquirer ex-pose'.The novel is not without some cool sec-

tions: a parodic battle between the TV starswho represent human dreams and the ickycaterpillars that embody our fears; and a won-derful description of a talk-show comedian'splunge down a haunted hole would make agreat short story: "Johnny Carson in Hell."But, for the most part, the same dull dispir-itedness the British Barker so relentlessly at-tributes to his American characters pervadeshis own "The Great and Secret Show." Toolong by half, and basically just silly, it seemsthe work of one of those dreaded commer-cial successes who've become so impressed

with themselves they no longer think have to work at being interesting. Perhif this tome doesn't do well, Barker willturn to the gooey enthusiasm for strapop horror that made him an '80s staple.

The reviewer's books include Girl With Curio

Hairand, with Mark Costello, the forthcomingSignifying Rappers: Race and Pop in the Urba'80s.

Copyright The Washington PostCompany Feb 19, 1

The Horror of Pretentiousness