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epilogue, evoking, perhaps, Molly Bloom's final soliloquy, with a hint of affirmation that asks the reader to carry the existential banner through, and perhaps from, the ruins. The obvious temptation, of course (and this review has hardly avoided it) is to keep marrying Bernard's achievement to the modernist vocabulary that made it possible and that remains, to varying degrees, the aesthetic context for any attempt at literate experimentalism. But it's just as possible to connect a work as conceptually and verbally potent as A Spy in the Ruins to the quintessence of 19th-century American realism - specifically, to the meditative watershed that is Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle." Notwithstanding the paralleling titles of the two works, what links them is a more fundamental notion, that of a consciousness straining to 
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define itself as pure and self-validating amidst the structures of convention. In James' short story, the protagonist has lived with an intimation that an apocalyptic, life-altering event awaits him, coiled to spring like a jungle beast, though he has no idea when or what form it may take. Allied with a woman who agrees to "watch" with him, he does not live so much as marks time toward the great moment he believes sets him apart from the rest of society's somnam-bulists, and, of course - there's an obviousness to this that we, as jaundiced 21st-century readers, can't fail to pick up on - his existential realization comes too late. Bernard's novel likewise chides the civilized soul who struggles with a deterministic self-conscious- ness in a universe that is always, teasingly, beyond ultimate comprehension, as the small  |
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