Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages is, like Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, developed almost entirely as a splintered colloquy between two unlikely companions. It is also, like the earlier novel, a structural failure, and for much the same reason: the conclusion, disastrously, comments on and "explains" an otherwise richly ambivalent and mysterious text. It is as if Puig lost his nerve and decided, for whatever reason, to serve that famous "general audience," an audience that is already grandly served by what Blanchot has called "the nonliterary book," the book that has, "before it is read by anyone … been read by everyone." Puig's natural readership, the readers of literary books, could comfortably fit into Madison Square Garden, but in this book he seems to be reaching out to snare the same people who think of, say, John Gardner as pretty complex. It's too bad, because Puig has something, most obviously a wonderful sense that the essential elements of life, life's serious "things," are precisely the elements of soap opera, sit-coms, and B-movies. Both Kiss of the Spider Woman and this new novel almost set these two planes one atop the other, so that they look like one plane. But both novels fail, and the failure is one of form; or, to be clearer, the novels fail because Puig holds his content to be somehow more than just materials, to be a set of ideas.
This novel's two characters are by turns (and turns!) dull, narrow, crude, envious, misinformed, and politically boring and ingenuous—and at times, disingenuous. Larry, the younger man, an American, even speaks of revolutionary "struggle"—here in the land of flabby unions, pots, and looms: the author's ironic sense of dopiness here is brilliant.
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