Waldo
will be called a surrealist novel. It is not one. It
is about nouns we know and see, not about nouns we
dream. Striped toothpaste vibrating on an electric
toothbrush, a fat lustful Mother of the Year, a
writer on display behind plate glass typing for
pleased onlookers, a biology teacher murmuring, “If
I were going to give God a grade on the Universe,
I’d give him a ... C-minus.” These are hilarious,
but disturbing because they are not surreal. They
are with us.
This is the story of Waldo, whom we first meet in
the glass-walled Booneville School for Delinquent
Boys, committed on charges of “truss burning, bank
screwing up, and oil pouring,” all of which outrages
were perpetrated on his hopeless father or his
pathetic mother. After taking part in a riot in the
prison cooking class, and being nearly roasted in
the oven in which he was hiding from the guards,
Waldo’s sentence is lengthened. Recuperating in
Booneville’s infirmary, he talks to Dr. Wasserman,
eye doctor and head-shrinker. Waldo’s trouble is
diagnosed as “nothing to do” in a world where to be
busy is to be sane.
Waldo stays poised at the edge of savagery. After
leaving Booneville he meets, in Dr. Wasserman’s
waiting room, the middle-aged ex-starlet Clovis
Techy, who becomes his mistress and patroness. She
sends him to Rugg College in order to give him
“something to do.” Waldo wants to become a writer
and more or less does so, in the process of which he
tries to shuck off his bewildered family but becomes
embroiled with far more bewildering groups of
students. He succeeds in becoming the hack writer of
“human interest” stories, front page grotesques
which cause critics to rave and hail him as a
“blazing new talent.” His duties as Clovis’ lover
are the price he has paid for his success. He is
left, aloft in his glass “writer’s cage” in a night
club, sparse-haired, scruffy, physically a bit
smaller, typing for a wildly applauding audience.
Dr. Wasserman’s advice “do something, anything”
is a cure as well as a malaise; from the glass
prison to the glass writer’s cage Waldo has suffered
the essence of laughter, which is pain. |
