This Is Real Serious Talk
[In the following review, Montrose offers an unfavorable assessment of Impossible Vacation.]
Introducing his autobiographical monologue, Monster in a Box (1991), Spalding Gray mentions how, at the age of eighteen, inspired by Thomas Wolfe, he vowed to become a writer. More than thirty years later, he came up with a truly Wolfean manuscript: 1,900 handwritten pages, the aforesaid "monster". Assuming the Max Perkins role, Gray's American editors have helped to cut and adjust "that sprawling mess" into the relative dwarf now published. Although primarily an account of the interruptions which beset Impossible Vacation, Monster in a Box does provide a synopsis of the original text. From this, it is apparent that the ending has been substantially truncated; a sudden jump earlier in the narrative—from 1968 to 1976—is also presumably the result of editing.
Although commissioned to write a novel, Gray was careful, in the monologue, always to call Impossible Vacation a book: "I don't know how to make anything up." (Wolfe, similarly, refused to call Look Homeward, Angel a novel.) It began as a "simple travelogue" about Gray's inability "to take pleasure when in very pleasurable places". But, partway through, he realized that his first foreign vacation, in Mexico during 1967, coincided with his mother's suicide. This illumination made him realize that he was "working with very classical themes": how every boy, to achieve manhood, "must first … kill his mother off." To emphasize this big subject, Gray dedicates the book "To my Mother, Creator and Destroyer" and appends a portentous epigraph. What subsequently meets the eye, however, primarily bears the marks of travelogue.
The book's opening sections are the most effective, dealing with the New England childhood and youth of Gray's narrating alter ego, Brewster North, with particular regard to beach summers and Mom, a progressively deranged Christian Scientist, to whom he was so attached that, at twenty-two, while yearning to "hang out" in Provincetown, he found himself unable to leave her: every day, he would drive a few miles down the road and then turn back. Despite oedipal hints, the attachment appears to spring from emotional affinity: she was his best friend; they would watch Bergman films together and, afterwards, "stay up late talking all of this real serious talk about loss of faith…." Sensing that their relationship is "too sticky and warm to be right," Brewster blames Mom: his failure to "fly the nest" proves she is not "a good mother." Later, after he has flown—to New York, Texas, Mexico—she is held responsible for his fear of intimacy with others: "Because Mom … couldn't get enough intimacy from her family," she ensured, albeit unconsciously, that they could never find it elsewhere. Brewster's attachment—which survives Mom's suicide—is largely asserted, rarely exhibited, and proves correspondingly unpersuasive. The same applies to Mom's culpability, although the point here may be that it exists mainly in Brewster's imagination; certainly his two brothers seem unaffected.
From childhood, too, date Brewster's fantasies about visiting Bali. The adult Brewster promises himself a "perfect vacation" there; first, however, he must find a life—free of the past, of Mom—from which to take that vacation. The remainder of the book follows his spiritual and geographical wanderings in pursuit of meaningful existence: Theatre, drugs, Zen, sex (especially), pornography, the Bhagwan, psychotherapy, Amsterdam, India, the Himalayas, California, and Grand Canyon (finally), where, in a moment of satori, he determines to write his "true story": "I would dare to remember my ghosts. Then maybe, after I captured them, I could take that vacation…."
Gray's reminiscing style, in which telling prevails over showing, narrative over dialogue, has worked admirably in his published monologues (snippets of which reappear here). Impossible Vacation has little of their artistry, however, being carelessly and dully written, a series—the early episodes aside—of inconsequential tales without Gray's usual humour and charm: a section dealing with America's Bicentennial, for example, is both querulous and snooty. Gray's ostensible themes, meanwhile, are generally submerged; references to Mom provide the only evidence that Brewster is not a mixed-up Way-seeking butterfly, but the victim of a more profound wound. The consolation is that Gray should be able, if he wishes, to rescue some fine monologues from this still raw material.
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