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The Reluctant Hypnotist |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Janet Burroway |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2000 |
| Size: 2,192 Words, 13,697 Characters |
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PERLMAN'S ORDEAL
Brooks Hansen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999
329 pp., $24.00
It's not often that a novel of ideas is a good read, let alone a page-turner. You can think of a few:Crime and Punishment, The Name of the Rose, Possession. More often the ideas represent oratorical or meditative digression, an impediment to the story. But that combination of suspense and pensiveness was widely accorded Brooks Hansen's first solo novel, The Chess Garden (he earlier cowrote the satire Boone with Nick Davis), a tale of mystical adventure and Swendenborgian revelation. For Hansen's new novel, Perlman's Ordeal, narrative drive is a natural condition, since one of its central ideas is that, "in the end, that was what mattered most--the what-comes-next."
It is an article of faith with the eponymous protagonist--and indeed "the closest thing he knew to faith"--that the artist must "let the content ... dictate the form, and not vice versa." Perlman's Ordeal presents this value as a metaphor from music, the superiority of melody to motif, but it is clear from the mystery form of the plot, the skillful attention to foreshadowing and delay, the crescendoing repetitions and variations on the pattern of events, that Hansen has no patience for metafictional finger exercises or postmodern dissonance. He is a practitioner of plot. He has said so...
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...s made good stories from Bacchae to The X-Files. It is appropriate fare for a millennium, and Perlman's Ordeal adds significantly to the repertoire. Though Hansen may not have won any converts either to Atlantis or to mysticism, he has brilliantly created a world just before modernism, in which a staid and slightly smug rationalist must turn to confront the undercurrents of the new century. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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