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Review Can we agree that the tale of the tenured writing professor suffering from terminal writer’s block has been terminally overdone? Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. Francine Prose’s Blue Angel. Richard Russo’s Straight Man. J. David Bell’s Keynote. With all these tenured writing professors unable to write, it’s astounding so many novels about them have gotten written. Plainly enough, these tenured writing professors have no trouble writing—if only about other tenured writing professors who do. And now along comes Maxwell Cage’s Review, a novel about—you guessed it—a tenured writing professor unable to write. But Cage, flaunting his trademark riffs on hoary fictional clichés, twists the metafictional screw one thread further: his protagonist, it emerges, is unable to write not a novel but a review of one. To review Review would thus seem to force the reviewer’s concession in Cage’s tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the form; indeed, even to wink at such postmodern self-reflexivity would seem to reduce the reviewer to the one who both gets and is the joke. Cage, one must grant, is nothing if not cagey. He has produced a book that is, if not review-proof, then at least review-consuming: any review of Review is bound to seem less a review of the book than a demonstration of it. But what use to carp? One might as well enjoy the fun. And fun Review is, a bubbly, overheated ragout of cartoon grotesques engaging in impossibly convoluted shenanigans. Consider the novel’s central quartet: the affable, hapless protagonist, tenured writing professor and serial adulterer Cagewell Max, whose semantic blockage is amply compensated by his prolific seminal discharge; his current love interest, the perhaps kleptomaniac assistant district attorney Lolita Stack, whom he first propositions while awaiting trial on charges of having garroted his despised department chair; the chair, Henry Chomley, an oily Iago who speaks with tongue not only forked but trifurcated; and Max’s estranged teenage daughter Slinky, who may herself be conducting a clandestine romance with Lolita, unless that’s all a function of Max’s mounting paranoia. Cage manipulates this cast of misfits with punchline wit and a cynic’s appetite for lampooning their foibles: Max is “sinner and sinned against, the sinner against himself”; his chair is “despotic by default, lacking only a ruthless superior to elicit his natural spinelessness”; Lolita is “heavy-handed in the courtroom, heavy-breasted in the bedroom”; Slinky, a neglected waif “eager for extra experience,” slinks about town “with the lascivious ineptitude of a house-trained panther.” Cage’s plot is too bizarre to summarize and too ingenious to divulge; suffice it to say that as in his previous titles, Gladsome Frolics on the Capricorn Beach (2005) and Dancing Plate (2007), he packs Review full of enough outrageous twists and turns, and leaves enough of them hanging in midair, to render the reader breathless, bothered and bewildered. The scene in which Max trails Slinky to uncover her supposed dalliance with Lolita, only to find himself shanghaied by a caravan of heaven’s-gate fundamentalists cloaked as a traveling circus troupe, is in itself practically worth the cover price. In paper, at least. And of course, running through the whole messy mélange are poor Max’s epic, comic attempts to piece together a review of the book he will refer to only as NiX, the bestseller that has gone into its third edition while Max’s muse dithers. Cage handles his protagonist’s pseudo-Shakespearean transports with rambling aplomb, as in the following: What light, what light! I ponder the monitor’s depthless, sleep-induced dark matter, I dally with keystrokes, find my fingers inflexible as a toilet-paper dispenser in a grade school boys room. The mockery! While sun streams and birds twitter, while moon blooms and wind whines, here I remain, palsied overachiever wilting before the blows of another’s tongue. Could I but summon the strength to couch his words in my own! Could I but invoke the spirits of Jonson, Bosworth, Dryden, Pope, fearless salliers upon the waves of other men’s wit! My editor, my scourge asks only 950 words. Why can I not deliver? For all their loopy humor, Max’s tongue-tied soliloquies raise intriguing questions. Why, indeed, does NiX flummox him so? How can it be that he remains so stymied on the page when he waxes so outrageously in the ether? How much of this soul-searching is his creator’s tongue-in-cheek confessional (or exorcism, or tirade)? And of course, to what extent does Max’s abortive review evoke a review of another sort: a review of his own life, with all its gaffes, raisin-in-the sun dreams, half-cocked crusades, and harrying regrets? It is to Cage’s credit that his two narrative strands, though never overtly joined, periodically entwine to paint an endearing (if not necessarily enduring) portrait of a life lived in both academic and interpersonal exile. At such moments, the book transcends its manic impulses and becomes less technical razzle-dazzle than dirge, less slapstick than lament. Yet this being a Maxwell Cage novel, such moments are rare and, in the end, largely redundant. Cage’s heart has always lain in poststructuralist parody: Janus-faced jester standing sentry at the portals of literary frivolity, he revels in spattering language across the page that simultaneously screams for attention and asks what all the fuss is about. Thus Review might be read as a review not only of its own genre but of its own form, a Chinese-box revelation of the emptiness at its core. For those bright enough to get the joke, the joke’s on them. One might ask, of course, whether Cage’s slight, good-natured spoof merits all the metafictional theatrics (or, conversely, whether the verbal pyrotechnics thwart the good-natured spoof straining to emerge). But as only a captious reviewer would register such an objection, I’ll beg to defer. Lew Caxmagel
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