THE VANDAL

by Tom Molloy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1990

This pretentious, smug second novel (The Green Line, 1982--not reviewed) is ostensibly about a mythic quest to discover America in urban Boston, but it's actually a conglomeration of street-philosopher rant and machismo. A Korean War vet, the Vandal, who lives in Maine, leaves his pregnant wife to wander Boston, remember DMZ dreams, and meet up with his mentor Puma: ""Poems still make you depressed?"" The ensuing tour by a self-styled postmodern historian is mostly sophomoric. The Vandal becomes a truckdriver, and we learn how he prefers city-dwellers to suburbanites; then he converses with an assortment of alley people, moves in with Frances Jean (the lonely secretary for the tracking firm), gets the word from a newspaper hawker (""That's the news. Trouble on the horizon, entropy . . .""), and listens to the diatribes of various street preachers of various persuasions (""Marx said, 'The capitalist will sell us the rope with which we hang them' ""). Meanwhile, Molloy peppers the text with Zen-like graffiti (""Peer Within,"" ""Beware Love,"" ""One and One is One,"" etc.). Though much of this harks back to Nelson Algren and other bleak-side-of-life social-consciousness fiction, the novel's assorted characters are seldom memorable, and the Vandal is far too pretentious a concoction to gain our sympathy, especially since the piece doesn't conclude so much as merely end--the Vandal returns to Maine, where his sweetly sleeping perfect wife greets him, once he rudely wakes her, with the physical satisfactions of marital bliss. A sentimental journey whose treatment of social injustice romanticizes poverty--as though to suggest the underbelly of life is a place of rough, Disneyland glory that exists so that superficial types like the Vandal can make their mythical way through it.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Permanent Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION