|
JEST THE FACTS 
The quality of minimalist fiction, like that of certain types of metal ore, must be judged by density. Eliminating the breadth of rhetorical strategies to one or two modes of expression requires the chosen modes to be thick enough with meaning to convey all that the excluded modes would otherwise provide. In The Session, Aaron Petrovich bravely puts all his rhetorical eggs in one basket, crafting a novella entirely in the mode of dialogue. (Petrovich, wisely, plays to his strengths here; a successful playwright, this is his first book of fiction.) This reduction accentuates our dependency on language for relaying the world to us, and as our trust in the characters falters, the precariousness of that dependency becomes disturbingly clear. Truth, finally, is in the mouth of the speaker. If the speaker happens to be a madman, then truth is a kind of insanity. I don't want to give too much away, for if the iconoclastic The Session adheres to the principles of any genre, they are those of the mystery, which demand the reader be held in suspense—very often this state of unknowing is the thematic anchor of such a work. So it is with The Session. Briefly, the story concerns Detectives Smith and Smith, who may or may not be two separate people, on the trail of a murder that may or may not implicate one or both of them, which leads them to an asylum in which they may or may not be incarcerated. Confusing? Yes, but indeterminacy is the name of the game here, and while the plot tosses up such juicy attractions as possibly cannibalistic religious cults and a disemboweled mathematician who has discovered the essence of existence, the real focus is on the thorny intellectual mysteries of identity, insanity, and the final incompatibility between words and the world they attempt to circumscribe. As Detective Smith says to Detective Smith at the start of the novel, stating a thesis that can only unravel, "What we're after here is the truth of the situation." |
| "If the speaker happens to be a madman, then truth is a kind of insanity." |
|
Much of the novella concerns itself with the elucidation of this dictum, and depending on your taste for abstract philosophical speculation, it is either smart and funny or slightly pretentious. Really, it's a bit of both: At his best, Petrovich approximates the absurdist wordplay of Beckett and Ionesco; at his worst, he reads like a gloss on Socratic dialogue. Luckily, the impulse toward wit dominates, and The Session's more ornate flights into metaphysics or the epistemological value of truth versus fact (yes, Petrovich's novel does go there) are always brought to ground by an impish, surrealist humor. One of the great pleasures of this book is the interplay between "serious" and "comic" language; the latter undercuts the former, exposing the essential instability of all modes of speech. Like Wittgenstein and Groucho Marx, he understands that language is a game, and very often a confidence game at that.
Still, one can't help wish there was something more at stake here. The Wildean posture of the detectives' dialogue wears thin halfway through, and with little else to occupy it, the reader's attention wanders. Smith and Smith share more than a name; they sound alike as well. This monotony is not helped by the fact that their dialogue is largely uninterrupted by any other voice (the Doctor, when he makes his brief appearance, sounds suspiciously like the other two). The effect is like watching a tennis set between equally matched opponents: There is great skill and flair, but not much drama. While Smith and Smith partially assume the classic dichotomy of straight man and buffoon, not much is done to subvert this relationship and the steadiness of it throughout leaves the novella turning its wheels. Here is the catch-22 that the novella-in-dialogue sets for itself: These characters are creations of pure language who exist only in the words they utter (silently, in our mind's ear). Like Beckett's Malone, they must live and die on the page and only on the page; to give them greater shape would falsify them—yet without a sense of their substantiality, the work risks dealing solely in abstractions. While the form allows Petrovich to effectively exploit this investigation of the linguistic construction of identity, it also constrains the work somewhat to the level of intellectual exercise even as it pushes to become something more. Towards the end, the language swells in crescendo-like monologues that reveal a surprising poetic sensibility. Here, speech becomes loose and supple, imagistic and associative, and we feel for the first time how deeply language really does direct experience. But the welcome lyricism of these bursts is not quite reconciled with the deliberateness of the rest of the piece, and the monologues float on top of the narrative, hinting at a solution to the dilemma of language that lies outside of the here at hand. The ending, though it sounds good, is unresolved; it doesn't respond to all that has built up to it. Part of the difficulty is that the "situation" under investigation is never quite clear enough to provide an effective disparity between "reality" (such as it is) and perception. True, the point here may be that perception is the whole of reality, but this still leaves one wondering why it should take this form over any other. The significance of Detectives Smith and Smith themselves is never made quite clear enough. Restricted to speech, they remain abstractions, voices without form or past, and as a result, it's too hard to care enough about them as characters to find meaning in their drama. But perhaps this reviewer is falling into the trap that Petrovich is loudly warning us away from. It would be a disservice to fault the author for failing to satisfy the kind of mainstream expectations his narrative never pretends to indulge. The Session is a provocative, clever speculation on the themes of persona and knowledge, with touches of real beauty in the writing. Whether such an offering is enough for art, readers must decide. |