The 14th novel from a veteran writers' writer, now in her 86th
year, who has for almost a half-century been lavishly praised for
her verbal ingenuity and peevishly damned for her baroque fiction's
frequent obscurity. The eponymous protagonist (and partial
narrator) here is a 40ish nomad, on her own in New York City 20
years after being imprisoned for her complicity in a lethal bombing
incident engineered by student revolutionaries. She has spent the
ensuing years in and out of drug therapy and psychiatric hospitals.
Almost immediately, Calisher ups the rhetorical ante, mingling
first-person and omniscient narration and juxtaposing Carol's
conversations with the exhausted "SW" (social worker) who visits
her cold-water flat against verbal sparring with her street-person
comrade Alphonse, an indigent actor. Her escape to a condemned
storefront populated by homeless dropouts suits Carol's need to
belong somewhere. Beyond this (early) point, little happens.
Memories of her student days and of her childhood in Dedham,
Massachusetts (raised by two aunts - one of whom, she guesses, was
her mother), jostle against her infatuation, friendship, and
disillusionment with a handsome South African actor who has his own
demons to confront, off in a far different world. This
inconclusive, almost inchoate novel lacks both development and
tension, but is worth reading nonetheless for its knowledgeability
(Calisher brilliantly describes the staging of a pompous piece of
theatrical agitprop), really rather remarkable empathy with the
city's festering downside, and the assured cadences of its precise,
witty prose ("The virtue of the street is that you do not expect")
One expects more from Calisher, but is grateful for even this
otherwise flawed display of her unique, often haunting mastery of
language. (Kirkus Reviews)
One afternoon in the early seventies Carol is sent out for Chinese
food, and, while she is away, the explosive device which her
revolutionary student friends are busy constructing, accidentally
goes off, causing enormous damage. Her friends get away - she is
incarcerated. Twenty years later, she has a small, unfurnished flat
in New York, a fridge stocked only with the pills supplied by her
social worker and an irresistible urge to slip away and live
somewhere unencumbered by memories, names and all of her other
false possessions. When she finally discovers that even her social
worker is taking pills in an attempt to cope with life, Carol
gathers a few essential belongings into her backpack and sets off
to sleep rough on the city's streets again. Turning away from her
dependence on drugs, Carol finds that memories, histories and
responsibilities slowly return to her. In the Slammer with Carol
Smith is a tough, hip novel by one of America's most outstanding
living authors. It has the steady rhythms of the street as well as
the haltings and hesitations experienced by the strong yet
vulnerable Carol as she rediscovers herself. In fits and starts,
the wild terrain of a life spent wandering under distant, unknown
stars is mapped out. Carol's journey is both a rediscovery of
emotional hiding-places and a search for the path that leads back
into a world of normality without illusions and of sanity devoid of
compromise.
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