THE GARGOYLE

Friday, October 10, 2008
The Gargoyle reviewed by Gary Carden

















The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
New York: Doubleday & Company
$25.95 – 468 pages – 2008

“You are mine; I am yours;
You can be sure of this.
You’ve been locked inside my heart,
The key has been thrown away,
Within it, you will always stay.”
Inscription, Gargoyle, p. 461

For the past month, the literary pundits and Internet bloggers have been all a-twitter about Andrew Davidson’s Gargoyle. Everyone from The New York Times (three weeks on the Best Seller List) to the Kirkus Reviews (with major writers like Peter Straub giving rave endorsements) - and all seem convinced that this is “the book of the year.” Is it? Well, gird your loins. This review will attempt to unravel a few strands of this Byzantine plot. Here we go!

In the first chapter, the unnamed narrator of The Gargoyle gives a vivid and darkly comical account of his self-immolation. While navigating a treacherous mountain road in his sports car, our protagonist attempts to snort a little coke and drink a little bourbon. In the subsequent wreck, the car burns, the bottle of whiskey (sitting in our hero’s lap) ignites and the hapless victim suffers massive third-degree burns to 90% of his body. When he regains consciousness in a medical “burn center,” he learns that he has a mangled arm, a disfigured face, and a host of malfunctioning body parts. In addition to having lost most of his fingers and toes, he finally discovers that he no longer has a penis.

Since our narrator earns his living as a filmmaker and a sexually adept porn star, this latter loss is devastating. In addition, the painful nature of his “reconditioning” reduces his life to an unending round of morphine comas and excruciating pain. After weighing his options, our anonymous narrator decides to commit suicide as soon as he can devise a means of accomplishing it. At this point, Marianne Engel arrives.

Marianne’s origin is uncertain. Did she simply wander down from the psychiatric ward upstairs, or is she a strange, 700-year-old woman searching for her lost lover?
She assures our astonished narrator that she will take care of his injuries, adding, “this is not the first time you have been badly burned.”

This is the beginning of an amazing journey. Each day, she comes to care for her lost lover. Gradually, she takes an active part in the treatment, employing skilled therapists, purchasing expensive equipment and cooking special foods. At one point, she disrobes to prove that she really does have “angel’s wings.” Through it all, she talks, telling her patient everything from urban myths to ancient tales of tragic lovers – yet the themes that bind them all together is always the same: the redemptive power of love.

In time we learn that Marianne speaks eight languages, has translated Dante’s Inferno into German and is an accomplished sculptress who specializes in gargoyles. According to Marianne, these surreal images “sleep” inside the huge slabs of stone in her basement and she “uncovers” them by sleeping naked on the stone and listening to the dreams of the creatures that beg her to free them. Her work sells well and pays for her luxurious life style.

In time, Marianne brings her recuperating patient home where she embarks on his final rehabilitation. Gradually, he regains the ability to walk and function while bound inside a complicated “suit” that presses his body into an “acceptable” shape. However, his most painful ordeal is “going cold turkey” for his morphine addiction. His withdrawal prompts a terrifying hallucinatory journey through Dante’s Hell, complete with demons, eternal torments, burning rivers and legions of the damned.

Woven through the tales of tragic lovers in The Gargoyle is a series of linked stories that Marianne insists are a true account of her former life with her “burned lover.” She gives a moving account of how she came to be a nun in a German monastery called “Engelthal” where she translated religious manuscripts. Here, she met and fell in love with an injured mercenary and finally fled with him. After becoming pregnant, she and her mercenary are hunted down by a band of ruthless soldiers. “You were that mercenary,” says Marianne, adding that she will prove it.

At times, The Gargoyle resembles an English version of A Thousand and One Nights, with Marianne Engel in the role of Scheherazade. Like Scheheralzade, Marianne has a talent for leaving a story “unfinished,” thereby forcing her listener to wait for the tantalizing completion.
The Gargoyle is replete with classical and literary references, and Davidson manages to combine an astonishing variety of fables and myths in this tale of “deathless love.”

Will The Gargoyle live up to the current enthusiastic (and somewhat shrill) endorsements? Yes, it will, even though at times I felt as though I were watching the “slick’ performance of a clever magician.
Posted by Gary Carden at 5:55 AM 0 comments

Nance Dude: a dramatic monologue

Eccentric Mountain Man Explains Bizzare Painting on his Barn

Immediately below this post is a cut-and-paste of an article that a friend sent me recently. Essentially, it is about Fox News and Bill O'Reilly. According to O'Reilly, Appalachia (that's me) is doomed. We are sunk in a quagmire of poverty and drunkeness. This is actually nothing new. Any of us who live here and are aware of the outside world's reaction to us have heard Bill's conclusions before. I remember the first time I told my grandfather that I had encountered some instructors in college who found my culture and my dialect distasteful. He nodded and gave his stock response to news from the loud, brash world that was moving closer every day: "Things have been bad," he said, " but they are going to get worse." My uncles who had gone to WWII agreed and told me that to the world beyond the mountains, we were dim-witted, violent and alcoholic. They all advised me to "adapt." They assured me that soon or later, if we wanted to survive, mountain folks were going to have to learn to speak, act and believe like the "outlanders."... or, at least, "pretend."

I tried to adjust, or maybe a better answer is, I learned to acquire "protective coloring." I became a teacher and, after a few false starts, learned to speak in a way that did not make
administrators, principals and fellow teacher nervous. There are thousands like me, of course.
We all "walk the walk and talk the talk," that allows us to "pass." This the probably the reason why I have been an addict about stories of secret agents, pod people and spies. Was I being paranoid? I don't think so. All I had to do was to become complacent and careless. Any time that I forgot and slipped into my mountain dialect, I immediately sensed that the attitude of my peers had changed.

Bill O'Reilly and Appalachia

News Hounds

We watch FOX so you don't have to.

Bill O'Reilly Attacks Appalachia

Reported by Ellen - February 14, 2009 - 93 comments

There's a new part of the country that “Pro-America” FOX News hates: Appalachia. On last night's (2/13/09) O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly pronounced the region, a swath through 13 states, a lost cause and an area full of drunks. In O'Reilly's mind Diane Sawyer's interest in improving the lives of Appalachian children, via an ABC documentary about their overwhelming challenges, was nothing less than a waste of time. O'Reilly dismissed the whole subject by calling Appalachia a "culture of poverty," characterizing the adults as a bunch of substance abusers and saying that the only thing kids growing up there should do to improve their lives is “get the heck out of there.” With video.

“There is a reason why some areas remain poor, generation after generation despite massive assistance,” O'Reilly announced at the beginning of the “Unresolved Problems” segment. “There are Rocky Mountains. They're not poor there. There are Sierras. They're not poor there.” Well, maybe not AS poor. But there is certainly poverty in both areas. Maybe it's just not enough to concern millionaire, “I'm looking out for you” O'Reilly. Apparently, to merit his attention, poverty has to fall into a certain proscribed parameter: Poorer than the Rockies, not as poor as Appalachia.

“I submit to you that the culture in Appalachia harms the children almost beyond repair... There's really nothing we can do about it,” O'Reilly told Sawyer.

She had a different view, of course. She said, “The great opportunity is the information economy... These kids are as smart as the kids in India.”

“Sure,” O'Reilly agreed. “But their parents are screwed up. That's the thing... Kids get married at 16 and 17. Their parents are drunks. I'm generalizing now. (Gee, ya think?) There's a lot of meth. There's a lot of irresponsibility. There's fear to go. Look, if I'm born in Appalachia, the first chance I get, I go to Miami. Because that's where the jobs are. But they stay there. And the cycle of poverty for 200 years – boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I don't want to sound hopeless about it but I think it IS hopeless.”

Evidently, one reason the kids should leave is so that it doesn't become too industrialized and thereby intrude on O'Reilly's sensitive sense of aesthetics. “I don't want to rebuild the infrastructure of Appalachia. I want to leave it pristine. It's beautiful,” O'Reilly said.

But, he added, “I gotta tell you, people have to help themselves, you know? They have to wise up and they have to see that there's a culture of poverty there, a culture of ignorance there. And you either leave or you try to improve it any way you can.”

Sawyer told him there are plenty of people fighting there.

O'Reilly said, “Americans should pull together. And I'm with you.”

Quite a display of Americans pulling together you just put on, Bill.

93 comments | Email this page to a friend

Mountain Voices Writers Group

My writers' group, "Mountain Voices" met last night at a little local cafe, Soul Infusion. Since we eat, the owner is happy to "host" our little gathering (six members) and has indicated that he might give us a room upstairs which would be quieter. I'm tickled. Last night, we had a reading of a piece that exuded atmosphere, a dream fantasy about Doc Holiday. Another piece, a chapter from a novel in progress, presented an encounter between a child and his parents and a group of behaviorist psychologists intent on cure the child of his "feminine traits." Nice orchestration of dialogue. A third reading is a sequence from a historical fiction novel (now completed but in need of editing) that deals with Scot-Irish settlers along the Tuckaseegee River in the 18th century. We ended up with a poem that dealt with Barbie dolls and serial murderers. One member had a collection of hiaku poems which we all took home, so we can read them at our leisure and send comments to the poet. I am very pleased with this group and I am looking forward to the next meeting.