Daventry, whose glance is angelically mild, tolerates Garnet’s monstrosity (‘all my veins and arteries have moved from the inside where they belong to the outside’): at the onset of rigor he rubs and warms Garnet back to life, and he acts as messenger. Garnet is looking for someone to watch over him and attend in particular to two tasks the text establishes as interrelated: when Garnet is seized by the strange rigor or fit of coldness which periodically strikes him, to rub his feet and ‘the area above his heart’ and to deliver love letters to a woman known as the Widow Rance, centre of Garnet’s erotic and necessarily hopeless imaginings (the first reaction of most people who clap eyes on Garnet is to vomit). He is taken in by one Garnet Montrose, veteran of the American war in Indo-China, and sole survivor of a massacre which has left him hideously disfigured. He claims to be on the run for murder, though this information – all he supplies about his past – may be unreliable. Daventry, a young boy who seems to embody some sort of rare beauty, a ‘spring zephyr’, almost literally materializes outside a homestead in Virginia. Where Pynchon blocks summary by impossible excess ( V, Gravity’s Rainbow), Purdy actively solicits readerly focus on a plot in which he simulates a diegetic orderliness, classically familiar as a variant on a known figure: the ambiguous and irresistible outsider who suddenly appears in a stable community, obsesses and transforms it, and as suddenly disappears (Evangelists, Wuthering Heights, Pasolini’s Tearama). Rudimentary example: every novel knows that its plot is likely to be summarised, not only by the review, but by the reader using plot as a basic instrument of containment.
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The forms familiar to the antibody – like the Pynchon-strain, deadly to critics – are the very ones it mimics. The particular menace of this novel is that it knows about the emergency kit, as the sophisticated virus knows about penicillin.
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I think that Purdy’s novel is hostile and to convey my sense of its threat I am going to lay aside the usual tools of containment as inadequate: tools that include ‘Where In a Shallow Grave fits the pattern of Purdy’s Malcolm (1959) and Cabot Wright Begins (1965)’, ‘Where its interests coincide with those of the class, contemporary American fiction’, and the special kit of sharp-edged probes that begins with the words deconstruction, entropy, literarity, paranoia. And by the time they have finished their work most invaders are harmless enough, indeed rather familiar-looking creatures.
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After deliberation they agree to disperse and to circulate their findings to the awaiting organism, but what they got up to in their secret huddle, and what they saw, no one ever discovers, since the news they distribute is always the same and always good: no danger. At once a cluster of lesser language-particles rush to the site of intrusion, to surround, cordon off, and probe the mysterious molestation of the discourse. There appears, somewhere in the language-organism, an entity of unfamiliar contour and unknown purpose: it may be hostile.