It is dangerous to read books that have certain moods – especially when they are well written. Your own mood distorts and shifts to match them....
Tom Disch's masterpiece is certainly 334, his intricate exploration of various denizens of an overcrowded, rather listless, declining but realistic New York in 2021-26. It's really a series of long portraits that are linked together behind the scenes, as it were – The Death of Socrates, about a young black guy who struggles to survive, including taking university courses, and finally gives up; Bodies, about hospital morgue orderlies with a sideline in supplying necrophiliacs; Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire, about a social worker trying to negotiate her structured and chemically supported fantasy life with her 'real' life; and, best of all, Angouleme, an utterly eerie picture of a handful of genius children who are going to a school for the gifted that is teaching them almost too much.
All capped by the extended hyperstructured second half, where a complex array of points of view around three women, four sets of concepts and numerous dates scattered across several years are enmeshed in an utterly urban picture of change. Of course it's all rather dark, rather cynical – this is not an end-of-the-world book, but it is about people trapped in the various levels of a dense but drifting culture, in fact the perfect image of a neo-Marxist 'administered society', where no one is really in charge, there are no actual oppressors as such, and yet everyone is oppressed.
Dangerous to read, of course. One starts to look around and see the same bleakness, the same disintegration, the same devolution... although I am always delighted by a favorite, wonderful paragraph from Angouleme, which functions as a sort of phantasmagorical 'false cadence' to a planned murder that never takes place. The gifted children, rather decadently calling themselves the Alexandrians, coming from their school (which has funding from the Balanchine Foundation and therefore teaches dance), take some of the pills that everyone hands around in this era and try to figure out, since their murder plot is now impossible, what to do on a lovely summer day by the docks:
Then, proving that when you're sailing the wind always blows from behind you, they found Terry Riley's day-long Orfeo at 99.5 on the FM dial. They'd studied Orfeo in mime class and now it was part of their muscle and nerve. As Orpheus descended into a hell that mushroomed from the size of a pea to the size of a planet, the Alexandrians metamorphosed into as credible a tribe of souls in torment as any since the days of Jacopo Peri. Throughout the afternoon little audiences collected and dispersed to flood the sidewalk with libations of adult attention. Expressively they surpassed themselves, both one by one and all together, and though they couldn't have held out till the apotheosis (at 9.30) without a stiff psychochemical wind in their sails, what they had danced was authentic and very much their own. When they left the Battery that night they felt better than they'd felt all summer long. In a sense they had been exorcised.
Rich, skilled artistry, a fictional minimalist masterpiece that resonates with a 1970s BAM-style New York, vast performances casually invoked in the midst of chaos, sinister boredom, a drugged left turn away from the everyday – a paragraph that has always startled and amazed me: and one that sums up the beauties and horrors of the artistic life, especially in a center like New York, London, Paris: where all things are possible, but, of course, have their consequences....
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