Customer Reviews

Angelica's Grotto

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Fantastic, moving novel, from Hoban's increasingly fertile and prolific late period. You've read what it's about. Like all Hoban's novels, this is concerned with the relationship between reality and fantasy; and as with all his best (Riddley Walker, Turtle Diary, and the new one, Amaryllis Night and Day), the difference between these is rendered uncertain. Hoban's writing represents a gritty, everyday, totally honest species of Magic Realism which leaves out glamour and sfx to suggest that the way we all behave is deeply and inevitably conditioned by our fears, histories, hopes, dreams and desires; and ultimately that these get the upper hand over some objective idea of what the real world is or some standard of correct behaviour. Thus, 72-year-old Klein experiences a latelife Yeatsian erotic upsurge which leads him to do all sorts of weird, dangerous, and entertaining things beyond his own immediate comprehension. These things are logical and inevitable, like the mad things we all do are. Klein is a great character: old, cranky, bright, experimental, on-the-case, natural, honest - and lonely; Hoban's best creation since Riddley. The book has wise and empowering things to say about the importance of the internal in public life - as well as the challenges and dangers of trying to honour it. Plus, it is an extremely funny and constantly engaging insight into what it's like to be old but deeply clued-in, contemporary, and not yet sexually dormant. I hope I end up like Klein (but you can spare me the weird stuff). High art delivered in an easy package, Angelica's Grotto is a resonant, unforgettable, wise novel written in beautiful, spare, epigrammatic prose with great humour and concision. You can start and finish it on a local flight. Buy.

Vastly enjoyable for the linguistic acrobatics as for the sarcastic viewpoint of the central character, Klein. I found myself giggling particularly at his old-man impatience with others, including his comic psychiatrist, further humour value coming from outbursts worthy of a sufferer of Turet's Syndrome. And yet it is a very clever novel. As a reader, you travel with him as he becomes embroiled in a tale of his own dangerous indulgence and insiduously become an unwitting voyeur...

They all get around to it eventually. Updike gave his septuagenarian Bech a twenty-six-year-old grad-student assistant who improbably wanted his babies; Bellow had his young secretary-wife hold his desiccated body in the lapping waves and sing "Hap-py, happy Sol-o-mon;" and, most recently and most stingingly, Roth gave his Professor of Desire a graduate seminar in mortality as viewed through a plate of twenty-nothing puttanesca--a Cuban hottie whose bounteous breasts are a missile crisis of autumnal rot.

So why should not the British cult writer Russell Hoban get his turn? Like Kubrick in that double bill of yearning toward amniotic bliss, EYES WIDE SHUT and A.I., Hoban sees one brand of medication for the pain of failing daylight: the tender vent we all call home. In this hiccuppingly eccentric, deliberately minor-key novel, Hoban places his own alter ego, an impotent, diabetic, sclerotic art historian, at a worshipful stoop before a website called Angelica's Grotto. [....]Here, a feminist grad student lures potential wankers with homemade still-photo porn and 1-900-style storytelling. Hoban's aesthete, Harold Klein, is fascinated--and thus begins an improbable series of adventures that includes Angelica's accepting Klein's tongue into her grotto (out of "curiosity") and climaxes with an act of vengeance against a black stud that would make Norman Mailer and James Toback blush and hold hands.

Hey--if the Yanks can do it, let it all hang out, finally admit that they're doing it for the nookie, why can't a dotty, attention-deficited, crazy-quilt-headed old prof like Hoban drop trou too? His version certainly has more charm and gentleness, and is pointedly less misogynistic and more self-candid, than lusty-old-goat cannonades like Updike's ROGER'S VERSION or Roth's DYING ANIMAL. But like all contemporary British novelists who mark themselves as middle-class or above, Hoban is less a slave to the tang than to a public-school education. Hard, crumbly bits of German phraseology, twice-removed references to scenes from ORLANDO FURIOSO, a smug description of a dinner chat about "Klimt and Kieslowski," clot the soup and interrupt the tasty parts. Hoban still feels the urge to name-drop and to cerebralize--even though the drop-kick at the climax of the novel is that a horny old coot will literally drop a million bucks just to wet his whistle on a butchy grad student who doesn't always smell so good. [....] Like a milder, post-Zoloft Peter Greenaway, Hoban's hands flit through Jansen's History of Art and the O.E.D. while his eyes dart toward the busty sylph at the cappuccino cart.

Americans may just want him to get on with it--and get over it. Less rageful and accusatory than his American analogs, Hoban also commits a sin they don't--he puts on a slightly Mitteleuropa, who-little-old-me? act. The Angelica character calls him on it, but he keeps it up, as it were--making himself seem meek, mild, lamely inquisitive, prodding at his willingness to sacrifice all for sex as if it were a fancy, unfamiliar cushion that somehow wound up on a kitchen chair. The Americans plowing this terrain own up more freely to the bawl of their soon-to-be-terminal inner child. For their sourness, the Updike and Roth versions of the old-man-with-an-itch have a bitter grandeur, and an impressive surrender before the mysterious simplicity of our biological hardwiring. Hoban tries to stave off anxiety with art-review chatter and three-card-monte cultural crossreference. [...]

Unwittingly, ANGELICA'S GROTTO demonstrates a peculiar neurosis of the aging urban intelligentsia that is the only real drama the book permits: the arm-wrestle between "I wanna go out and live!" and "Eek--a germ!" [....] Some may find Hoban's avuncular, donnish treatment of this vacillation surprisingly warm and humane. Everyone else will find himself speeding through the pages, eager to get back to a world where Hoban's issues can be discussed without the mimeographed proprieties of a teacher-student conference.