Off the Wall the Building

By R.Z. Sheppard

Meet the neighbors: a pair of muggers named Visa and MasterCharge, a misplaced Mormon, an abandoned rabbi, an African dictator, a welfare mother in double- digit pregnancies, a sniper, a man assembling a Chevy Nova in his living room, a 400-lb. dope dealer with an M.B.A., a family of Cambodians trying to farm their floorboards, mythic creatures known as the Nordic Ice Queen and the Madonna of Heat, and two ex-dancers who sell Tupperware.

Plausible by New York City standards, these and other characters in Thomas Glynn's second novel (his first, Temporary Sanity, was published in 1976) live in the Building, a decaying apartment house somewhere in ungentrified Brooklyn. It is a timely setting for this unruly comic fantasy about the failure of social engineering. Condomania has yet to reach this frontier of violence and depravity, and the Building's activities are too strong for the local evening news. In the bloodstained lobby, the old joke that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged would not be funny.

Unless, of course, Glynn is telling the gag as a shaggy-building story. He floods the eye and ear with bizarre images and improvised prose. It is as if the plumbing in a conventional novel had burst, swirling the styles of Gunter Grass, Nathanael West, William Burroughs, Stanley Elkin, John Irving and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (without the enchantment of a safe distance and exotic folklore).

Yet Glynn is no imitator. He aggressively establishes his own voice and rhythms: "A musty, greasy fog hung in the air, and the lights of the evening looked blunted and strangely hairy . . . He watched people through the scope of the rifle. He traced the progress of heavy women with rolled-down stockings and battered shoes that barely contained the fat of their feet. He followed small children as they hopped over stoops and banged on garbage cans. He zeroed in on the eyeballs of men coming home from work. He knew someone across the street had seen him on the roof with the rifle, probably saw him now, aiming it, checking the lever action, and adjusting the crosshairs on the scope. He didn't care. Apparently they didn't either."

Glynn's technique is freewheeling and effective. As all successful developers of surreal estate know, the best investment is in facts, details, odds and ends of the real world. There is little doubt that most of the + brutal and absurd acts that the author embellishes can be documented in newspapers and police blotters. If you think it is impossible to steal a roof, check it out. Is Glynn exaggerating when he writes headlines like LANDLORD TOSSES OUT EPILEPTIC AND DEAF-MUTE . . . SHE SHAKES, HE CAN'T HEAR, THEY GET BOOT? Only slightly.

This is the humor of an outraged moralist, a writer who takes his corruption and evil seriously. Much contemporary satire gets by on contrived conspiracies, abstract villainy and stock victims. The Building offers an older and more enduring view of human nature. Its characters get no points for race, religion, origin, social position or physical condition. Sin is apportioned without prejudice. The only salvation is madness or art, which may be the same thing. One tenant lectures to cockroaches; a painter cannot turn off his vision: "If he stops it will continue to come, escaping through his head into the air."

The most hapless figure in the book is a muscle-bound liberal who wants to save the property. He fails. Too many tenants prefer their own chaos to someone else's order, in this case the Gorilla Management Co.'s. Glynn concludes with an inevitable apocalypse, and none too soon. By the time the Nordic Ice Queen and the Madonna of Heat wrestle for the soul of the building, the author's inspired riffs on urban rot have been overworked as allegory. But not before a strong and exuberant talent has shown his stuff.