Balls of Fire
By Lev Grossman
The most-hyped debut novel of 2008 begins well for us but badly for its hero: his car runs off a cliff, and he gets burned over most of his body. His face melts into a monstrous scar. He is in chronic pain. His penis has been amputated. His life is over. He is a "spent, struck match."
Before the accident, the nameless hero of Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle (Doubleday; 468 pages) was a freakishly handsome, drug-addicted porn star who was also, deep breath, an orphan and a misunderstood genius who secretly wrote poetry. This is what Brits call overegging the pudding. But in the burn ward, he becomes almost plausible. He banters bitterly with his doctors and plans an elaborate suicide. Davidson could have just stopped here and called it The American Patient.
But he didn't. Oh, ye publishing gods and goddesses, must it be the fate of every entertainingly hate-filled monster to be reduced to a lovable curmudgeon? Apparently it must. Our man is visited by a woman with angel wings tattooed on her back who believes that she and he were lovers in 14th century Germany. She is a psychiatric patient who is also a world-famous sculptor of gargoyles. I would very much like to stop summarizing the plot now. Instead, here is a quote from their inevitable love affair: "A cheese strand dangled from her mouth to the edge of her left nipple, and I wanted to rappel it like a mozzarella commando to storm her lovely breasts." Nurse, is it time for my shot?
You can't fault Davidson's energy. It doesn't even bother me, much, that his feel for medieval history is patchy. (Though as a former Dungeons & Dragons aficionado, I feel bound to point out that crossbows do not fire arrows; they fire bolts or quarrels.) What bothers me is that The Gargoyle is a hymn to the power of love to triumph over time. Love triumphs over time only in romance novels. In literature, as in life, it goes the other way around. As the poet Delmore Schwartz put it, Time is the fire in which we burn.