Islets in the Flood (ft. Rosie Gray)

Our Struggle

~~~LAUREN'S HOUSEKEEPING SECTION~~~

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~~~DREW'S VOLUMINOUS NOTES SECTION~~~

Updike’s spunkcrusted house is yet another paternal demesne Martin Anus, our anxious Bloomian fils, must scrub and bleach and empty. This Augean task (following Wood following Bellow) mandated, then, that Martin purchase Denis de Rougemont’s Love In The Western World, which comes adorned with a rather ejaculatory blurb from Updike himself. Martin finds the book immediately intoxicating--after all it’s from a time before jargon had colonized scholarship, when criticism was an enchanting expedition. It explores troubadours and heretical Catholic sects, there’s something about love itself being a cult of suffering and death, but Martin doesn’t trouble himself over abstractions and theories.

He reads with appetite, as though the book were a novel unfurling grandly before him. De Rougemont performs a wide-eyed reading through of the myth of Tristan and Isolde; so Martin goes to Dunkin Donuts and listens to Wagner in the drive-thru. Oh, right, the Tristan chord; slightly more intriguing in Radiohead’s iteration, perhaps. He loses interest, switches to Uncle Neil, beautiful bright eunuch sludge sounds: once there was a friend of mine who died a thousand deaths. He’s supposed to be thinking about that flat Nord again, though--it’s Sunday: time, as Lauren says, to get on the horn. Rosie Gray’s coming on, another supplicant, buzzing with ideas about My Struggle ˆvia Grey Gardens. Cathars and askesis are so much chatter right now. Myth, enchantment, wonder, spells--his iced coffee gives him this little litany.

Rosie and Lauren, it turns out, are ready for wonderment and mythos. They rhapsodize on Karl Ove’s diluvian fantasies and guillotine imaginings as they work their way towards the squalid paternal domain. Grandma’s delirious, the sofa’s caked with shit, this is almost a horror movie. Rosie delivers her thoughts on the rich decrepitude of Little Edie and Big Edie and helpfully reminds Martin Anus of Martin Amis’s hideous and excruciating orthodontia (as featured in Experience, the only book, we learn, that has induced tears in M. Anus). They realize that Karl Ove probably can’t tolerate the existence of Belgium. Lauren makes some perceptive connections between literary flaneurs and detective fiction. And Martin Anus tries to show that this episode’s passage traces a shift, in Karl Ove’s mind---a shift, perhaps, that’s also embodied in the novel form itself--from the mythically grand to the mundanely specific.