The British author/critic Anthony Burgess is best known for his classic novel A Clockwork Orange. Less well known is the fact Mr. Burgess was one of the 20th century's greatest literary critics. Here's a book review Mr. Burgess wrote for the NY TIMES that serves as a model for how to compose an exceptional book review.
PINOCCHIO IN VENICE By Robert Coover.
The Walt Disney film of "Pinocchio" -- so we're reminded here by Robert Coover -- appeared on the eve of World War II and was viewed as a Realpolitik fable. In the film all the fable's characters, Mr. Coover says, appeared to war-wary viewers to have Realpolitik roles, from the puppet-boy's "father," the doll maker Geppetto, who seemed "a kind of Swiss neutral," right through the whole cast, with "Stromboli as a bearded Mussolini, Foulfellow and Barker the Coachman as fifth columnists, Monstro the Whale as the German U-boat menace, the Miss America-like Blue Fairy representing the wished-for Yankee intervention with their magical know-how." As for the wooden hero turned boy, he was a type of the grotesquely oppressed, and yet Christlike, unvindictive. His nose sprouted branches in which birds nested, and these were singularized to an olive branch. When war came, those who knew the myth at all saw the phallic in the puppet's growing nose: "It appeared on condom packets sold in PXs and USO canteens."
These are the thoughts of Pinocchio himself in Mr. Coover's "Pinocchio in Venice" -- or rather those of his avatar in an emeritus professor from an American university, now a century old and a "world-renowned art historian and critic, social anthropologist, moral philosopher, and theological gadfly . . . galantuomo , and universally beloved exemplar of industry, veracity, and civility, not a child of his times, but the child of his times." This Professor Pinenut, as he calls himself, comes back to his Venetian roots to finish his magnum opus, on which he has worked all his life, "a vast autobiographical tapestry" the final chapter of which has always somehow eluded him. He arrives in the fantastic city known as the ultimate wet dream in filthy winter only to undergo hardships that abrade the flesh and reveal the wood underneath as he meets up with all the characters of the Pinocchio story, from the cat and the fox and the dogs to the blue-haired fairy who embodied virtue, and much more, for the wooden boy.
The fable recalled in Mr. Coover's novel is not the Disney vulgarization but "Le Avventura di Pinocchio, Storia di un Burattino," the original tale by Carlo Lorenzini, who took his pen name, Collodi, from his family's Tuscan village. Published in the 1880's, it is still a children's delight in Italy, and, when filmed by Radiotelevisione Italiana, treated lovingly and literally, though with Gina Lollobrigida as the Blue Fairy. The Coover version is not magical realism of the Latin American and Salman Rushdie type but Rabelaisian fantasy, with no child readers allowed.
This means, as far as the language is concerned, a fine mixture of filth and higher learning. The New York Times being a family newspaper, little is quotable. The tradition is European, and only noses on the wrong track will smell William Burroughs. Those who are looking for a parallel in a more realistic tradition will find it in the story of a professor of philology dragged down to the underworld in "Auto-da-Fe" by Elias Canetti, the 1981 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. But, with Robert Coover, the overworld is underworld enough, though nobody really gets hurt.
Mr. Coover knows his Venice, the non-touristic one of a hard winter, in which everybody is drunk. He even knows his Venetian, with his ribaldries spiked by the characteristic "X" of the Venetian dialect. If he knows his "Pinocchio" too, it is mainly to deform it or to disappoint expectations. The grillo parlante, Jiminy Cricket in Disney, is promised in the chapter heading "The Talking Cricket" but makes no appearance. The police dog Lido recognizes Professor Pinenut and reveals himself as the Alidoro of the fable, but in a context of very Italian police brutality, and leads him to the lair of the bad dog Melampo, now a bitch and a foulmouth. "Pinocchio" is traduced, its innocent characters drawn into a world of besmirched monkish erudition, and one wants to know why.
Mr. Coover evidently has things to say about Venice as a great decayed work of art. Professor Pinenut has taught art appreciation and now confronts a mere "decorated fossil." If it is all right for him to think that, it is probably out of order for one of his former, gum-popping students ("Call me Bluebell," she says -- "dumb as they come and gobsa fun!") to appear in an ancient church, where an exhausted Pinenut has taken refuge, and cry out: "Lookit this! Brrr! What a creepshow, man! Everybody's dead in here!" She then greets him with "Gee-whillikers, prof, I feel really flattered to -- pffft! POP! -- be able to talk with you all alone like this about art and life and beauty and all that great stuff."
Choose between American vulgarity and the foul decay of Europe. But there's no real moral. The picaresque adventures go on and on -- Venetian carnival, Mangiafoco's puppet theater, the paese (not, as Mr. Coover has it, Palazzo ) where bad boys turn into donkeys, an oven where a pasta-loaded Pinocchio is roasted. But the adventures have to move in some sort of direction, and here that is toward "mamma," who was to feature in the elusive last chapter of the professor's magnum opus (confined in his word processor, which, this being Venice, has naturally been stolen). Mamma is the Blue Fairy but also the Blessed Virgin, with a touch of the Egyptian Astarte-Isis. Das Ewig-Weibliche, the eternal feminine, if you like, but with no whiff of Goethe.
Probably Mr. Coover has heard the Italian story of Christ wishing to return to earth for a visit, seeing a light in a window, approaching the door of a hut, opening it to find a carpenter's shop and hearing the loving voice of St. Joseph, Giuseppe -- or Geppetto -- crying, "Pinocchio!" Here, in the Santuario di Santa Maria dei Miracoli, a quattrocento Madonna and Child come to life, and the Child is a "long-nosed deadpan creature," a burattino, a puppet whom the mother's hands deftly work. The Madonna is also the Blue Fairy, the maternal force who brought Christ-Pinenut-Pinocchio to life. After a riotous scene staged by puppets in the old sanctuary, the ancient Professor Pinenut strikes a bargain with his Blue Fairy: he will let her end his suffering forever only if all the honors, all the scholarship and learning go with him, leaving behind in the world's memory only the Collodi puppet.
As his passage out of the world begins, she enfolds the professor, ministering "kisses, nibbles, soft caresses. 'You've been well plucked, my son,' she murmurs. 'There's not enough left here for a sandwich and a cigar box. You're not even worth burning. I'm afraid there's nothing left to do but send you to the pulping mills to help ease the world paper shortage.' She leans down, little more than a loving shadow to him now, to kiss his eyes closed, whispering down the long receding tunnel of his earhole: 'We'll make a book out of you!'
" 'Ah!' he replies with his vanishing voice, grateful for the line she has, in her wisdom, thrown him. 'But a talking book, mamma! A talking book. . .!' "
This is one of those books that, like Thomas Pynchon's "V.," will not yield to the Reader's Digest peptic juices. The tradition whereby the content of a novel could be inscribed on a postage stamp (Jane Austen's "Emma" is about Emma, and "Pride and Prejudice" is about prejudice and pride) does not apply to a work whose content is its form and, above all, its language. Mr. Coover is one of America's quirkiest writers, if by "quirky" we mean an unwillingness to abide by ordinary fictional rules and a conviction that a novel is primarily a verbal artifact unconvertible to other media. This book is about Venice and Pinocchio (the title does not lie), but only if those are taken as themes for fantastic variations. This book is about itself just as -- despite the visions of Venice it might have given Robert Browning -- a toccata of Galuppi's is about itself.
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