MARY LAMB AND MR. WRONG
By EVAN HUNTER
OTHER PEOPLE A Mystery Story. By Martin Amis. 224
pp. New York: The Viking Press. $12.95.
IDO not appreciate an
obscure novel. The only clear signal such a book transmits to me is that a
writer was either too lazy or too cowardly to reveal completely his mind or his
heart. To me obscurity presumes the need for an academic middleman, an eager
translator who will explain all to the sluggard reader and thereby become a
collaborator in the act of creation. This should not be the role of a critic.
Martin Amis's fourth novel
is titled ''Other People: A Mystery Story.'' There are mysteries galore in its
pages, but the book faces no danger of being lost in a bookshop's genre
section. Mr. Amis has more ''serious'' matters on his mind, it would appear,
and he sets about exploring them by presenting us with an amnesia victim who
awakens in what seems to be a hospital and does not know who, where, or even
what she is. Barefoot, bewildered and released onto the street by what is
surely the world's most irresponsible hospital (if it is a hospital), she
wanders out into what we later learn is London and begins to discover a strange
new universe.
Is this to be a novel of
identity, common in the 60's,
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Evan Hunter, whose most
recent novel is ''Love, Dad,'' uses the pseudonym Ed McBain for his novels
about crime and punishment, the latest of which is ''Rumpelstiltskin. ''when so
many people were trying to ''find'' themselves through psychoanalysis or drugs?
Or is it to be a satiric glimpse of human foibles as seen through the eyes of
an innocent like Oliver Goldsmith's Chinese Traveler in the London of 1762? Are
we meant to recognize the ''other people'' of the title as representing only
our poor, pitiable selves, seen clearly and penetratingly by a childwoman who
sometimes resembles the peculiarly naive hero of Jerzy Kosinski's ''Being
There''? What, exactly, is expected of us here, and how does Mr. Amis propose
to elicit whatever response he is seeking?
The book details the
adventures and misadventures of our heroine abroad, who takes the name of
''Mary Lamb'' from the snatches of the nursery rhyme she hears recited by one
of a group of drunks in her first encounter with the wide, wide world of
crazies at large. In succeeding chapters, she is transported from the bowels of
London to its esophagus, so to speak, in stages of upward mobility that bring
her ever closer to discovering her real self, the ''Amy Hide'' (Amis Hiding?)
who may or may not have been the acquiescent victim of a would-be murderer. We
never learn who this murderer was or is. He is identified throughout as ''Mr.
Wrong,'' but in an anticlimactic confrontation scene, he remains faceless, and
we never quite understand whether his final embrace is intended as a kiss of
death or of resuscitation, even though Mary ends up with a mouth ''full of
stars.'' Since this scene is followed by a reprise of the awakening at the
beginning of the novel, are we to believe that Mary/Amy is in a fugue state
some amnesiacs suffer?
And who is this other
person in the book, a voice that erupts interminably, sharing supposedly pithy
thoughts on life and death? The very last passage would lead us to believe he
is only the inept murderer coming back to do the job good and proper this time.
But there are clues all along that he is none other than the godlike author
himself, periodically and irritatingly intruding, commenting on action we have
already seen or are about to see, and making of himself a general nuisance, as
for example: ''I'm forever having to cope with these rather puzzling and
regrettable people. You'll be running into a few more of them too. But all
under my control, of course, all under my protection and control.'' Or again:
'' 'Well at least Alan will be all right for a while,' I hear you murmur. But
he won't be. Alan thinks that other stuff was bad. He thinks that other stuff
was as bad as stuff could get. He's wrong. You wait.' ''
This other person - this
sometimes smugly omniscient, sometimes sophomorically philosophical, always
disembodied voice that speaks directly to the reader - is only one of the many
dismaying ''other people'' (two words that appear like a litany on virtually
every other page) in this short, bitter book. Mr. Amis would seem far too young
to have acquired such a dismal view of the world. Perhaps the sun will break
through in London one day.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/books/mary-lamb-and-mr-wrong.html?pagewanted=print
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