THE PAPER MEN

by William Golding ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1984

It's likely that this short, fierce, uneven novel was completed before Gelding received 1983's Nobel Prize for Literature. Nonetheless, it comes as if in scowling, self-deprecating response to the Prize--lampooning the literary/academic ""paper men"" while presenting a portrait of the Celebrated Writer as a selfish, alcoholic, pathetic clown. The sardonic narrator, aging through year-hopping chapters from 50 to 60+, is white-bearded English novelist Wilfred Barclay. And, in a dazzlingly compact opening scene, Wilf is immediately a victim of ""what I sometimes thought to be my personal nemesis, the spirit of farce"": huge American grad-student Rick L. Tucker, visiting Will's country home, goes burrowing into the garbage for literary paper--but produces an old love letter that promptly destroys Wilf's somewhat shaky marriage to tart-tongued Liz. In the decade that follows, then, Wilf will travel restlessly, alone, around Europe. He stays in hotels, drinks, writes occasionally in bursts, dreams, dwells on guilty memories. In constant, reappearing pursuit, moreover, is Rick L. Tucker--who begs to be named Wilf's Official Biographer, who contrives to save Wilf's life on an Alp, who even uses his comely, air-headed bride Mary Leu as sexual bait in the paper-game. (The would-be carnal bribe fizzles: 'Pimp, client and whore, all we three needed the assistance of a professional."") And eventually Wilf will take ugly revenge on the pursuing academic hulk, with teasing and humiliation. But, in the novel's almost-disorienting second half, the focus is more and more on Wilf's escalating breakdown--which is only incidentally related to the paper-duel with Tucker. He slides into paranoid fantasies. He has a quasi-epiphany in an Italian church. He later has another, more holistic sort of awakening--after which he gives up drink, hoping for a reconciliation with Liz. . .whose bitter, isolated cancer-death hardly dents Wilf's new-found happiness. Golding tries to weave two very different stands here: absurdist satire (reminiscent of prime Thomas Berger); and a spiritual, primal, death-haunted character study. The resulting combination is uneasy in tone, uncertainly paced, and slippery in apparent intent. But there's a strange, disconcerting energy throughout, comic brilliance and riveting despair in flashes--with extra, undeniable grab from the autobiographical echoes.

Pub Date: April 1, 1984

ISBN: 0374526397

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION