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decay are indeed the mothers of beauty, that love/sex is the lingua franca of human experience, that loss and longing are what spur our will to live. Bernard's alter ego, the wandering Everyman who journeys farther within, always, than without, is the perfect anti-hero for this anti-novel: scarred by parentage, initiated into worldly cruelty by the unworldly cruelties of the schoolyard, keen to the tyrannies and rejections of female beauty, set spinning by literature's promises of revelation and foiled by its subjectivity, renewing his determination in aphoristic meditation ("the absolute impotence of absolute awareness," ".a rebellious voice in the back of his own mind rose in revolt exacting its own obedience demanding that he take reality into his own hands insisting that reality was not to be accepted but changed 
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that reality was the clay with which one built a life."). Around him, the world in spasms stages its wars, its revolutions, and so he enters it as an "agent of chaos," thrilling to the anarchic freedom yet circumscribed by the civilizing impulse long since drilled into him. At a certain point, the raging subjectivity of ex-perience gives way, as if after a cleansing rain, to the objectivity of a screenplay ("Exterior. Day. Sun. Autumn. Sound of trees in a mild wind."). The characters, a He and a She on some university campus, verbally spar - politics, love: it's all the same, a straining for connection that the world resists. The "unhinged romantic" keeps setting forth, while the friends, acquaintances, lovers that mark his generational passage find and lose themselves in art, religion, more politics, or not at all. The novel concludes with a tenth chapter and  |
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