BREAKFAST EGG, SLICE OF DREAM: PAUL ABLEMAN & I HEAR VOICES

Paul Ableman, an esteemed British playwright and critic, originally published this travesty thirty years ago. His first novel (Ableman has published four more since¹), I Hear Voices, originally appeared on the list of the Olympia Press, the Paris house that first brought out Lolita and Naked Lunch. American publication, late but welcome, is thanks to McPherson & Co., another small house of gumption and discernment.

Brief as it is, the novel’s one long wake-up call—the protagonist never entirely makes it out of bed. The delivery of his breakfast egg, a recurrent set piece, would be a symbol in a less explosive exercise. But Mr. Ableman must constantly break his eggs, fragment his abbreviated roundabout world. His unnamed narrator (some variety of schizophrenic, perhaps?) may never get out from under his bed-tray, but the cryptic types who drop by to talk (nobody’s idea of “characters,” certainly) carry him further than many of us go in a lifetime.

Arthur, who seems to be the protagonist’s brother, takes him into the world of affairs. Our eggman-narrator tumbles through elliptical factory visits and business meetings that turn into streamlined psychotherapy. “When the doctors arrive,” Arthur advises him at one point, “I wouldn’t be quite so—so articulate. One doesn’t say everything one perceives.” As for Maria, sometimes a nurse and sometimes a maid, she offers affairs of another kind. She and Egg, now smitten with each other and now dying of embarrassment over some ludicrous faux pas, stumble through shopping trips that brim with erotic possibility. The brother and the lover by no means exhaust Ableman’s catalogues of witty facsimiles. Whoever’s along for company, the narrator’s shifts from breakfast to weirdness and back provide the same effect as chapter breaks, and offer breathers in the onrushing slice of dream.

Anonymous commuter encounters will flare with offhand intensity. Party scenes prove sharply knowing about social give and take, even as they introduce such impossible figures as Cortex the Statue. The parties best embody the text’s essential dialectic: breathtaking precision about states of mind played off against a hilarious vagueness about physical reality. Along the way, poetic tangents fly off in every direction: “There were far reports and others that leapt from brain to brain so that the sunset was pricked with doubt and signaled a spectrum of confused acknowledgement.”

Is this in fact the mind of a madman? Is Arthur a doctor, a brother, or a business partner at wit’s end and trying to close a deal? Wrong questions. I Hear Voices trembles at times on the verge of familiarity, in exchanges that suggest counseling or confession, but whatever grasp on the world they might offer is laughingly undone by the narrator’s phantoms and leitmotifs. Ableman prefers the unexplained, the visionary; a number of passages recall Donald Barthelme in how they resist ossification into one thing or another. His novel stands as another example of the wild freedoms embraced by European fiction since 1945, freedoms still only fitfully understood on this side of the Atlantic.

—New York Times Book Review, 1990
—Willamette Week, 1990

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1. True in 1990 and at Ableman’s death in 2006. He remains unclassifiable: now working in avant-garde fiction, now in journalism, now in TV and radio.