Difficulties & Ecstasy

IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT by Nicholas Mosley. 219 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

Cinema's nouvelle vague has washed over fiction, leaving on the beach a number of books that are full of non sequiturs and characters who are used as themes rather than as people. Above all, under the influence of Resnais and Godard, time and reality are cast adrift.

Nicholas Mosley, whose work has been adapted for films by Harold Pinter, is a case in point. His novels (Accident, Assassins) are explicitly cinematic. In Impossible Object, he begins with the appropriately open-ended notion that "society used to provide the difficulties that made love exciting and romantic. But in today's world, men and women must now create the difficulties in order to perpetuate love at the level of ecstasy." The trouble is that Mosley's characters, a nameless man and woman who are married to others at the opening, create the dreariest and most passive of difficulties. The book jumps back and forth in time, showing them at various stages of their affair. Their problems are scarcely the sort to elicit ecstasy--or belief: Where is her diaphragm? Is their love-making a hostile act? On her part or his? Shall she go to work that day? Shall he commit suicide if she does go to work? Or shall he write his novel?

None of it matters until the end of the book, when the lovers, having established their own household, contrive to act out all their negative impulses in one big destructive act: the drowning, through negligence, of their child. The novel, which is self-indulgent in the extreme, would not matter either except for the precision of Mosley's prose, the aphorisms with which he decorates it and the nagging feeling he gives the reader that perhaps he has, almost despite himself, hit on an authentic form of meaninglessness. Cut off from roots and skeptical of society, his characters believe in nothing, have no convictions and scarcely any individuality. No one can prosecute them for their baby's death, and the tragedy finally establishes a permanent bond between them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.