(3 of 4)
Anesthetized Society. Sex, of course, is one target black humorists never lose sight of, even wben their main concerns are elsewhere. Sex is the comic solvent that can melt racial barriers, snarl any institution, reduce the most brassbound boss to the ranks of men. Among the black humorists, the most trenchantly individual commentator on American sexual values and relations is James Purdy, 41. In Purdy's work, the black humorists' teeth-clenched grin of rage is muted to a kind of strangled giggle. Purdy is a subtle, idiosyncratic ex-teacher whose vision is apolitical, bizarre, and extremely private; the recurrent themes of his complex fiction are the destruction of innocence, the difficulty of genuine feeling, and above all, the individual's inability to respond to all the demands that society lays on him.
Purdy's Cabot Wright Begins, published last fall, is a weird, funny novel about a Wall Street rape artist who bags 366 women before he is caught. The book takes deadly deadpan aim at everything from Wall Street and the medical profession to the vulnerable industry of book publishing and reviewing. But finally, it is an exploration of psychological anesthesia, the inability to feel anything—sexually, sensually, emotionally, artistically or morally. Purdy believes such anesthesia grips the U.S. as it grips Rapist Wright, until at the book's end he is freed by learning, for the first time in his life, to laugh unrestrainedly.
Purdy has an uncanny ear for the American cliche, both the cliches of speech with which people eliminate the need for thinking and feeling and the equally standardized cliche roles in which people take refuge from their motives. He gets his effects by subtle dislocations and dizzying juxtapositions of these cliches, so that his characters talk past each other, and soon every human act seems equally aimless and unlikely. On the surface, Purdy's books seem simple, easy to read. In fact, they are only easy to misread, and when approached carefully they turn out to be the blackest of all.
Alternative World. A totally different kind of novelist is John Barth, 34, associate professor of English at Penn State. Uninterested in social satire, Barth is the most unrepentantly Rabelaisian of the new humorists, irrepressibly bawdy and elaborately inventive. "The trouble with God as the Great Novelist," Barth says, "is that he is such a realist." Not Barth. "There are other ways to do it," he says, and shows how in his handsomely written, widely praised but not widely read third novel, The Sot-weed Factor, which tells the remarkably complicated adventures in New World and Old of a young man in the 17th century who wants to be a poet and can't get rid of his sexual innocence.
The Sot-weed Factor is in no real sense a historical novel; instead it creates a ribald, fully elaborated alternative world. Barth experiments exuberantly with fanciful plots, high-flown coincidences, two-page set speeches, stories within stories, improbable journeys, and a full-blown, freewheeling rhetoric. The book is intellectual and ironic to the core, and immensely funny—if a joke can last for 806 densely set pages.