Madness by Morris Lurie

We meet Tannenbaum in his ‘cosy Anne Frankish semi-hidden nook’. These writerly Jewish recluses have very little else in common; Tannenbaum is separated from his wife and two children. His friend/lover Anise is trying to drink her way out of a nervous breakdown. For further solace he resorts to ‘horizontal unravelling’ or ‘psychiatric horizontality’. Tannenbaum also may or may not have met William Burroughs and S.J. Perelman. Each time he leaves his ‘post-marriage’ flat, Tannenbaum says goodbye to the two hundred copies of his novel Madness, which he had received in lieu of royalties. These Madnesses are the best friends he has. Madness is essentially a novel of performance. Lurie piles up words. He constructs sentences by trawling the ocean of language: You think this is a madness? A loopiness? A crazed limitation? A tell-tale fissure on the surface of an otherwise sane ordinariness foretelling the worst manner of chaos beneath? And you have to dig shallowly at the surfaces of this novel to find chaos not very far below. Words, people, events, things are eminently movable: But a good year, a fine year, in all manner of ways a marvellous year, not least the care of the growing brother, perhaps uppermost for that, certainly uppermost for that, the focus it provided, the responsibility of charge, no skip that, those words, those kinds of phrases entirely, because I don’t mean that, not only that, Tannenbaum is talking bonding here, for what else the jazz, the cauliflower, the fastidious ironing, the trimming of the nails on that awkward right hand? Tannenbaum is talking – oh yes – best love. It’s all here, the novel as talking head, the exuberant, spinning language, the refusal to be tied down to any one set of words. Lurie constantly reminds us that he is writing a novel, but that it’s his novel and he will shape it how he will. So too the jokes are his: ‘What a waste of money, his mother would have died. Well, she did anyhow.’ In his own version of Karenina, Tannenbaum has a serf pass on the last rail timetable. ‘Shucks, ma’am’, intones the Russian serf stationmaster, scratching with a long finger his woolly poll, ‘de milk train don’t stop here any mo’. And elsewhere: ‘Caterers Dostoyevsky! You know what they say! To buy it a crime, to eat it a punishment.’ The pace never slackens, Lurie is full of zest to the end and leaves very little untouched in his satiric view of the world. Most sacred cows do not escape a charge of buckshot and it is a pleasure for me to see the anti-smoking, jogging health freaks walking upright about the slug-holes in their designer tracksuits. Lurie is also full of good things to say about the role of the writer and how stories come to be. Quite a few writers get a guernsey in the course of the narrative but more significant is the way in which Tannenbaum carves his stories from life or his life from his stories. The novel reads like a Walt Disney version of Beckett’s Watt or Waiting for Godot. (Some of the chapters even begin the same way as earlier chapters.) The novel focuses almost entirely on Tannenbaum in his solipsistic state. Lurie’s street-spruiker sale of language gives colloquial force to the novel. Although Lurie speaks in a rolling, rich Jewish voice, a more assertive Woody Allen in an Akubra, I am not convinced that either the language or the character of Tannenbaum are strong enough or interesting enough to sustain a reasonably long novel. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Tannenbaum waits for his Godot. Lurie’s prose is a bit out of condition to make such a wait pleasurable except in short bursts. And neither as a symbol or a person does Tannenbaum offer a lot to sustain us. He is gifted with a proper Jewish angst and always sounds as if he is going to burst into that popular Jewish song, ‘Always look on the bright side’. But Madness ends up being a novel of which the central paradigms could be described as trampolining or synchronised swimming. Plenty of grace, energy and activity, but it takes you nowhere except up and down again. Sentences tend to look bereft if they do not begin with the subject ‘Tannenbaum’. I felt I could take only so much of ‘our hero Tannenbaum’. Lurie allows Tannenbaum free rein. He could have left out a lot more. ‘Tannenbaum, says Tannenbaum, I’m getting bored with you.’ Congratulations to our hero. He is no intellectual Jack the Giant killer. Indeed, he is a bit of a sap fresh from nursery garden. He is not big enough or strong enough or mad enough to bear the weight of a comic novel about madness and the writer. And yet when Tannenbaum roves across the surfaces of the city and suburbs (trying to catch a glimpse of himself) Lurie shows his true comic skills as he explores urban and literary madness. Like the illness, Madness offers many glimpses of brilliance and not a few surprises.

John Hanrahan

From the New Issue

No Church in the Wild by Murray Middleton

Three recent short story collections

Transgender Australia: A history since 1910 by Noah Riseman

Pursuit of the New: Louise Hanson-Dyer, publisher and collector edited by Kerry Murphy and Jennifer Hill

You May Also Like

What You Own by Thomas Shapcott

To Light Attained: A novel by Morris Lurie

Dog Fox Field by Les Murray & Blocks and Tackles by Les Murray

The Everlasting Secret Family by Frank Moorhouse