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wrestle with the apocalyptic gesture that, when you think about it, only the novel can aspire to, free of the fixation on visual expression that continues to circumscribe all efforts at ultimatism in a hyper-visual society. In its way, Bernard's ambitiousness is Homeric - Iliadic and Odyssyean - in suggesting that only prose-poetry can fuse immediacy of mind to the structures of narrative, and so Bernard goes all out, with liberated prose that slithers and shape-shifts on the page like the staff of Moses set down to snake before Pharoah. Sentences writhe, unrestricted, yet the organic center holds, and the result is frequently radiant, resolving in metaphor and tragic epiphany that dare the reader not to share the rue ("He glows for days over the copy in curlicues of her phone number lying like an abandoned leaf on his desk.") 
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A Spy in the Ruins is all plot and no plot: a sleeper wakes to the world's seeming end, and touchstones of modern life ("the phone scattering over the rug CDs slipping from shelves as the kitchen rang with breakage") ground us in an interior journey that affirms the simultaneity of childhood, adolescence, old age, the before- and afterlife. Bernard's protagonist is Prufrockian, twisted with regret, lust, defined by unrequitedness, yet heroically surviving - if only in those chambers of the sea - while the worldly ruins that are every- thing and everywhere mock and conspire, blameless and indifferent. It's hard to imagine Bernard writing another novel, having crafted something of a Platonic ideal with this one, a mid-life manifesto that reinforces classical stances on its own 21st-century terms - that death and  |
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