QUENTIN Crisp once wrote something like this: “When you say things are better than they are, they call you a romanticist. When you say things are worse than they are, they call you a cynicist. But when you say things are exactly as they are, they call you a satirist.” George W. S. Trow’s wonderful volume of stories is a victory for things exactly as they are.
Terrible images conjured up in these stories seem bound to linger for a lifetime in one’s brain. Images of restaurants “that had to close because of the small green snails appearing suddenly everywhere.” Or this: “Like my ex-wife, my rug wants to exist in a nonjudgmental atmosphere.”
Part of the time, Mr. Trow writes in a terminal travel-brochure style, as when his prose attempts to transcend by cheeriness an intractable resort hotel called the Hotel Reine-American, which is located on a strip of lost-cause oceanfront property called Alani Beach. Of course, every so often, the hopelessness of Alani Beach leaks out, and we are given a slap in the face of what caused the hotel to fall apart in the first place: the “killing damp,” for example, or the “red stinging plants that have recently been afloat, clinging together in red clumps like coagulated blood.” But all the while, we’re brightly assured that “Alani Beach and the whole Alani area are more nearly alive than they’ve been for years.”
Other times, George W. S. Trow writes in an innocent style you usually see in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker. Only this time the bright and genial prose is out to make bearable not reptile exhibits or a certain special cheese importer—this time Mr. Trow’s friendly words are out to describe Mrs. Armand Reef (who “Likes to Entertain”). Mrs. Armand Reef, a divorcée who lives on the Upper East Side and endorses products like “Body Dew” and “Ultra Vodka,” discusses who is asked to her “little dinner parties”: “To be asked to one of my little dinner parties you must have great intelligence. And wit. I value wit. I love the clever thing—the thing that just glances off the truth and circles back to something topical.” She then goes on to say, “I find that high-powered dynamic men like to humiliate easy women and that makes a party go . . .”
There is a story called “At Lunch With the Rock Critic Establishment,” which to me—having spent my youth in the jaws of rock and roll, designing album covers and spending so much time with people like those he describes that I know he’s saying things are exactly as they are—is worth the price of the whole book. The sort of rock critics Mr. Trow describes are the ones who write three-page essays on the first four notes of the Eagles’ “Take It Easy,” showing these notes as proof that the Eagles are corrupt and Too L.A. and that nobody could possibly take them seriously but teenagers. One of the members of the Rock Critic Establishment, Lester Rax, has “always stood for complete integrity,” and when a publicist tries to fool him with a band called “Traitor,” he knows the band is only hype. “This kid Calvin,” Lester says, “wasn’t he . . . didn’t he . . . do backup for Donovan?”
“He was a child,” the publicist protests and says: “My God, you can’t hold that against him. And he was very disillusioned. He practically had a breakdown. It was very painful.”
To have to apologize to a member of the Rock Critic Establishment for a band member because he once played backup for Donovan is exactly how things are.
What happens when you read Trow’s stories is that you begin to see everything quite clearly. Suddenly, a fabulous place that boasts of “hotels with perfect security” becomes transparent.
And Trow, who is himself a master of style when he writes, seems to be using it to show that style, taste, those little refinements used in everyday life to separate the elegant and delightful from the rest of us, are nothing more than “specifics.” So that having the specifically right shoes, the right shirts, the right old furniture and new friends is nothing but a collection of specific details imposed by those in fashion. And those in fashion are nothing more than bullies. Yet those who are bullied seem so eager to soak up the specifics and details of what is in style and what isn’t, that unless they read Mr. Trow’s book, they may go on and on without ever stopping to think what fashion really means.
But once you’ve read these stories, it will seem that in fashion, bullies are all there are. Or ever will be.
The New York Times Book Review
April 20, 1980