GRASSE 3/23/66

There is an old saying that you go into a poem sober, but if you don't come out of it drunk it's no poem. Nicholas Delbanco has upped the ante. With his offering ("This is not a novel but an epi-tome; news, age".), one has to wade into it drunk, and if you don't come out of it crazy, you're lucky. This reviewer was lucky: he was just bored. Perhaps the best way of describing this peculiar product (the title refers to a place in France where Fragonard was born; while the date presumably memorializes the prolific day When the whole thing was conceived), is to regard it as a set of pensees composed in the Joycean mode with a flight nudge of inspiration by way of Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave Delbanco's penchant for word-play tosses up an armada of frisky phrases ("Physician, heal thigh, pelf") and a few champagne-tinged bubbles ("Law requires that seeing-eye dogs have access everywhere but to the cinema"). Unfortunately, it's a bit late in the day for experimental "fiction" or even anti anti-fiction (modern literature is really begging for a Samuel Johnson to lay down the old ground rules of rationalism again), and Delbanco's "wallow-swallow" verbal tit for tat, alliterative jeremiads, and prankish profundity usually wears as thin as Twiggy When it is not as hot as air (the procedure, alas, is just too catching for words). The narrator has a mournful-merry Voice (he would call it Orphic) and there seems to be a death-and-transfiguration theme to give a mythic glow and a failed marriage to make it autobiographically ashen. Strictly a private puzzle.