THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507130592
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE EDELMAN
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
LYING IN BED, J.D. Landis, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 283 pp. $19.95
SOLITUDE can do some strange things to a person, but John Chambers is perhaps a bit stranger than most.
Chambers' father, a respectable criminal-court judge, calls him ``utterly worthless and. . . abjectly murcid,'' although he leaves his son enough of his hard-earned cash to live a languid life of intellectual introspection in a New York penthouse apartment. Chambers begins describing himself as a rhetorician (``someone who studies the power of language''), eventually loses himself in his subject and ceases speaking for a year.
Then he meets his ideological complement, a quilt saleswoman named Clara Bell who's as immersed in popular culture as Chambers is withdrawn from it. Their love seemed perfect until now, four years later, when Clara goes out one night on a mysterious errand and John realizes that even the perfect romance occasionally needs reinvention.
Author J.D. Landis (actually Jim Landis, former publisher and editor in chief of William Morrow) sketches Lying in Bed in two distinct voices: John Chambers' absurdly erudite narrative of his night of doubt, sprinkled with dozens of arcane words and references to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein; and Clara Bell's spare, often poetic diary entries, wherein she reveals some peculiar secrets about her past.
The result is one of the most curious and thought-provoking pieces of literary erotica to come round the bend in some time. Yes, erotica: Fans of John Updike or Nicholson Baker might find the frank discussions of bourgeois lust familiar territory, but surely nobody has written a scene quite like the one in which Clara shows John her favorite masturbatory technique. (The first step is to sit on your fingers until they're completely numb and feel like they belong to someone else.) Nor, I imagine, has anyone else found an occasion to use words like ``musteline'' or ``pinguid'' or ``cucullated'' to describe an act that's usually restricted to a single crude syllable.
Yet the stimulations that Lying in Bed provides aren't so much below the belt as they are above the neck. This allows for some extraordinary insight into the power of language, and a unique way of connecting to the main character. I spent so much time in a quiet, enclosed room zipping through the dictionary (an unabridged one is necessary, unless yours contains words like ``diaskueast'' and ``opsigamous'') that I began to feel a little like John Chambers myself. There is, however, a limit on how much empathy one can have with a man who, on learning that his lover was born on Nov. 22, 1963, exclaims in shock that that was the day Aldous Huxley died.
Lying in Bed is a literary Rubik's Cube that reveals more with each subsequent perusal. The question is, how inclined will one be to pursue it? And exactly how many readings will it take before some of the book's more obscure moments, such as the sudden dip into ``Friday the 13th'' territory with a Chinese-food delivery boy, click into focus?
Lying in Bed is a challenge, but for the hungry imagination it's well worth the struggle. MEMO: Dave Edelman is a book critic who lives in Gaithersburg, Md. by CNB