Fly Melon

Took a break from 2666 to read The Mystery Guest: An Account, written by Grégoire Bouillier and translated by Lorin Stein, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  I came to it through a back issue of n+1.  Someone in my office mentioned a Paris Review article on watching for fire, but a previous article of his—“My Life and Times in American Journalism”—sounded more pertinent to my own life, so I borrowed the back issue of n+1 to take a look.  The piece itself was disappointing.  First off the writing wasn’t particularly good.  It was a straightforward confessional piece, whiney in the usual way.  Philip Connors, the author, assumes the reader’s on his side and, further, that the reader thinks he’s intelligent and worthy.  And at the end of it all, he leaves, walks out of a copy-editing job at the Wall Street Journal, and you share his disgust but you’re relieved to part ways.  I agree with the person who lent me the magazine—it’s the two excerpted Frederick Seidel poems, and the bit of the story on which they impinge, that make the piece worth reading.  Seidel’s poetry is dangerous and outrageous, but dapper.  I’m delighted to know that the WSJ published a Seidel poem every month for a year.  It is a good tonic.

Scanning the rest of the issue brought me to an excerpt of The Mystery Guest.  I remembered the title from Mark Sarvas’s blog, The Elegant Variation, on which he’d posted a very fetching picture of the cover—it was designed to conjure the label of an expensive bottle of wine, a Margaux, which makes an appearance in the story.  [And just to further complicate things, I’ll mention that the introduction to the excerpt prompted me to read my first Susan Sontag essay.  Because the first line of The Mystery Guest is, “It was the day Michel Leiris died,” and I hadn’t heard of Leiris.  The introduction helpfully made mention of the Sontag essay, so off I trundled to my well-stocked if disorganized book shelf to locate Against Interpretation.  I want to learn more about Leiris, but won’t go into that now.]

Bouillier-via-Stein has a masterful way of illuminating the little interior explosions that make up the day-to-day life of a truly neurotic person, and he makes them funny without downplaying their real impact.  Like this:

“Yes, despite my turtleneck-undershirts a woman had taken an interest in me of late.  And to my shock my turtlenecks didn’t put her off, even though most women feel an instinctive, to my mind legitimate, revulsion toward men in layered turtlenecks, unless they somehow find them attractive—but I gave those women a wide berth then and still do.  At any rate she wasn’t one of them; she just seemed not to notice my sartorial neurosis, for which I was profoundly grateful.  At the same time it frustrated me.  I was unnerved that my turtleneck-undershirts didn’t bother her, never even gave her pause, when it would have made me feel so much less burdened and alone, would have meant such a sharp rise in the value of her affections, if only I’d known that she loved me with open eyes.  But no, she saw no secret meaning in my layered look, so there I was, misunderstood at her side, furious, divided, unfairly and hatefully demanding that she adjust to my turtlenecks when it was exactly her easy acceptance of them that had brought us together in the first place, and everything about us is so twisted and convoluted, and isn’t every piece of luck that comes our way a trap in disguise?”

I suspect that many of the people who read this book and enjoyed were also neurotics, or normal people who have their moments of neurosis.  A blurb from GQ on the back cover of the paperback proclaims the reader will “see [her] own scaled-down reflection” in the book.  More like scaled up, though it may be more a matter of noticing and thoughtfully engaging with the mix of dire / decisive / delirious moments that occur when we, for example, pick up the phone and find ourselves suddenly speaking to the person who broke our heart years ago without a word of explanation.  This sort of scrupulous “accounting,” as Bouillier calls it, seems similar in a way to the life-blogging that we’re seeding so much of now, but exponentially better.