He Is a Few of His Favorite Things
[In the following review, Nightingale offers a generally favorable assessment of Monster in a Box and Impossible Vacation.]
According to Monster in a Box, the author and performance artist Spalding Gray's mother lowered her Christian Science Monitor one morning and looked him in the eyes more clearly, steadily and uncrazily than she had for a long time. "How shall I do it, dear?" she asked. "How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?"
It is almost exactly the same question the fictional Brewster North's fictional mother directs at him in Impossible Vacation, and it turns out to be no less ominous. Spalding Gray's mother gassed herself with exhaust fumes while he was on holiday in Mexico. Brewster is in the same place when an identical suicide occurs. Each young man returns home to Rhode Island to find his mother's ashes in a cardboard box beside his father's bed. Clearly the relationship between Gray and North, book and book, is in some ways as close as that between two Siamese twins whose nervous systems have become symbiotically enmeshed.
Spalding Gray's admirers have been aware of Impossible Vacation since 1990, when he opened Monster in a Box, the 13th of his autobiographical pieces, at Lincoln Center (it was recently released as a film). As always, the reminiscences and ruminations drifted this way and that; but the monologue mainly concerned "a man who can't write a book about a man who can't take a vacation." By way of emphasizing the hopelessness of this enterprise, a mass of paper crammed into a large, corrugated carton remained on the table as Mr. Gray sat and confided his secrets in his wry, mournful way. It was the book-to-be in unfinished and seemingly unfinishable form, an organism whose pages would go on chaotically multiplying until they filled first the stage and then the theater, a proliferating monster from the outer spaces of Mr. Gray's mind.
Well, at long last the manuscript has been not merely finished but edited into a novel that may be more than usually quirky but is only averagely long. The "monster in a box" has become Impossible Vacation, a 228-page exercise in what might be called neurotic picaresque. It would be impudent, and possibly libelous, to assume that it is wholly autobiographical. Suffice it to say that its protagonist's sometimes anguished adventures have the rambling, confessional feel of the memoirs Mr. Gray has so often presented onstage.
"To my mother, the Creator and Destroyer," reads the novel's dedication; but the destruction is more evident than the creation. Brewster's conventionally happy New England childhood is ruined by the "mad bird" in his mother's mind; his first halting attempts to achieve an adult identity are ended by her suicide; and he is left to roam America and the globe in search of his self and sexuality. The novel variously finds him appearing in a pornographic movie being filmed on East 86th Street, getting flung into jail in Las Vegas, ecstatically joining a group orgy in India, having a brusque encounter with a German man in a bathhouse in Amsterdam, shouting crazily to himself as he walks up Broadway, and everywhere sharing his internal mayhem with his long-suffering mistress, who has the same name as his mother and looks rather like her, too.
To accuse Brewster's narrative of being self-absorbed is as helpful as accusing glue of being sticky. Yet his attempts to unravel his Oedipal fixations can become a bit wearisome, and at times perhaps specious as well. How seriously can we take his claim, on befriending a wild, beautiful young woman and her wild, handsome son in California, that "I wanted to be the mother of this child, and for a moment I was"? The hurried and highly personal style means that characters other than the protagonist and, to a lesser extent, his mad mother seem shadowy and elusive. The emotional inadequacy of Brewster's father, a doggedly unimaginative rationalist, is not very vividly shown, and the old man's "almost fascistic craving … for order and control at all costs" is not shown at all. Nevertheless, several episodes are quintessential Gray, unique in their rueful blend of curiosity, self-mockery and panic.
You can hear Mr. Gray's singsong New England voice as Brewster describes painstakingly rescuing drowning bugs from his father's swimming pool, only to watch his stepmother slaughtering them with an antique fly gun; or desperately toiling with a woman named Janice and a man named Gray to insure that the pornographers do not have to wait all afternoon to film the scene they want; or being run out of St. Louis by a school principal shocked by the improvised tale of the Tower of Babel he and some equally earnest performers have brought from New York. Like Mr. Gray, Brewster is an aspiring actor and, like him, he first finds success by doing monologues in which, as someone says, his "subconscious is so close to the surface I can see its periscope."
Actually, the genesis of that remark is a psychiatrist to whom Mr. Gray introduces us in Monster in a Box, itself just published in book form and as hilariously glum as any of his previous monologues. He accompanies an American fact-finding team to Nicaragua and tries to get hold of that increasingly rare commodity, vodka, in the old Soviet Union; he interviews a woman who claims to have been kidnapped by spacemen, begins to brood that he might somehow have contracted AIDS, and is attacked by the New York critics when he plays the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. In the interstices of all this he struggles with Impossible Vacation, at one point deciding to throw the whole "so-lipsistic, narcissistic, self-indulgent pile of poop" off the Brooklyn Bridge.
The adjectives may be merited, but the nouns are not. This is the continuing paradox of Spalding Gray; the reason audiences, and now readers, should value him.
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A review of Monster in a Box and Impossible Vacation
The Art of Autobiography: An Interview with Spalding Gray