Dreams of Disorder

IT HAPPENED IN BOSTON? by Russell H. Greenan. 273 pages. Random House. $5.95.

"What kind of tale can possibly evolve from such a gallimaufry of trivia? A dreamer on a park bench, a dim-witted bird fancier, a dead cat, an eight-year-old boy, a picture dealer, a handful of pigeons and an insurance agent--hardly the cast of War and Peace, I must agree." So speaks the witty but slightly (?) deranged narrator, park-bench dreamer, master painter and hero (?) of this fantastical and compelling first novel. The unlikely tale that does evolve draws the unwitting narrator into a plot to palm off one of his works as a Leonardo da Vinci. Somewhat later he proceeds to poison no fewer than seven people in a visionary effort to meet and kill God.

The narrator's real name is never known, although he assumes names such as Lou Garrou, a play on the French word for werewolf. But beginning with his park-bench encounters and reveries --which are somewhat reminiscent of James Purdy's Malcolm--both narrator and reader are plunged into the dark underside of a surrealist life as lived by some decidedly improper Bostonians. Altogether betrayed by his faithless wife and conniving business agent who tricks him into painting the Da Vinci forgery, the narrator complains that he has been tipped into a "maelstrom of false marcheses, mercenary Bergamese whores, slippery Italian counts, witless German art experts, villainous Peruvian generals, paranoiac harpies, spiteful Russian cats, specious Polish wizards, spying pigeons, nosy janitors and ambitious Irish cops." He is also completely immersed in the unquestionably sprightly, if unusually perverse, world of three painters--Benjamin Littleboy, Leo Faber and himself --all three who are struggling haplessly to deal with the vagaries of their art and of their lives.

In the process, Littleboy is driven to hang himself. The narrator murders six Boston "innocents" and (accidentally) his friend Faber with strychnine. His wife runs off with his agent. His entire work is stolen. Reveries then turn into nightmares, and he goes completely mad. Summing up, he cries out, "I've been thwarted by an angel, duped by God and stalked by the Devil. Who would believe such things could happen in Boston?"

In this first novel Russell Greenan shows descriptive powers as impressive as his unsettling story is fanciful. He has an odd ear for uneven sounds. Describing a man's chuckle, for example, he writes: "It sounded as if someone down inside his throat was crumpling a paper bag." In real life, Greenan is a devoted student and connoisseur of art, which may partly explain his remarkable success at supporting raving fantasy and very real suspense in a single story. With painterly sleight of hand, he recreates the fabulous landscape of a deranged artist's mind. It is a terrain at once fearful and frolicsome--as if Bruegel's earthy dancing peasantry had been set down in a demon-filled scene by Hieronymus Bosch.

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