Dennis Barone | Temple of the Rat / 2000

paranoia in the library stacks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dennis Barone Temple of the Rat (New York: Left Hand Books, 2000)

 

Over the past several years Dennis Barone has proven himself one of the more interesting—and adventuresome—of young American fiction writers. Particularly in his The Returns, published by my own Sun & Moon Press, and in Echoes (winner of the 1997 America Award for Fiction), Barone has charted a quirky territory of a fiction that is often a cross between a straight-faced and highly objectified realism and poetic fable.

         In Temple of the Rat he attempts something similar. A young graduate student of history moves into an apartment only to be faced with a rat. A neighbor, Michael De Cordova, runs to his rescue, evicting the rat. The author immediately makes clear the fable-like structure he has in store as the narrator announces: "The little rat willingly suffered Michael's shoves because Michael De Cordova was the biggest rat around."

    For the next several weeks, the narrator is forced to adjust to the ever-present existence of the De Cordovas: to the unannounced visits of Michael, who is both a brilliant cellist and a successful drug-dealer, and to the visages of Michael's younger and overweight brother, Clark, and mother, who spend most of their day on the stoop facing the narrator's window.

    The narrator complains of their intrusiveness, of their constant observations of his comings and goings, but we soon recognize that Barone's history student is one of the most unreliable narrators—because he is so utterly self-deluded—that we have encountered in American literature for a long while. As he burrows into his escape from the world—work on his dissertation—the whole world seems to be peering in on him—even while he is also observing it, and in the process slowly being drawn into its arms. Having been insulated from most of life's experiences, he is shocked to discover that Clark, also a talented musician, has been beaten up at school and his flute stolen. He is equally startled to hear of Michael's plans to escape to Bolivia, where he can play in the Bolivian National Symphony and simultaneously purchase large quantities of dope. He is scandalized by the fact that Michael has had sex with the previous tenant of his apartment—while forcing Clark to witness the event. Mrs. De Cordova's cryptic comments and her obvious preference of Clark over Michael further stir the narrator's indignation. In short, unable to face even the most banal of daily occurrences, the narrator nears the edge of a breakdown. Even the library becomes a terrifying place of possible destruction: while he puts his file cards in order, no writing takes place.

     It is the return of Michael from Bolivia, drugs and bride in hand, and his ultimate rise in the real estate market, where he has invested most of his drug profits, that takes the historian over the edge. As Michael invests heavily in his own, student-populated neighborhood, he becomes a brilliant slumlord; but when students rise up to protest, the world reels forward into utter absurdity for the narrator, as he accidentally triggers events leading to the younger brother's death.

     Barone has bet almost everything on the reader's perception of his narrator, but because he has so successfully grounded him in the realism of the situation—in the narrator's own context—it is often hard to know which world is more dangerous, that of the narrator or that of the De Cordovas. That tension is fine as long as it remains the impetus of events, but with the denouement, the tendons of the story snap and with them the possibility of a coherent meaning as the short novel flies off into the space of an almost cartoon-like fable and the reader has the strange sensation that he has been cheated, that this fiction has exploded before completing itself.

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2000