Reviews can be a little like antibodies. There appears, somewhere in the language-organism, an entity of unfamiliar contour and unknown purpose: it may be hostile. At once a cluster of lesser language-particles rush to the site of intrusion, to surround, cordon off, and probe the mysterious molestation of the discourse. After deliberation they agree to disperse and to circulate their findings to the awaiting organism, but what they got up to in their secret huddle, and what they saw, no one ever discovers, since the news they distribute is always the same and always good: no danger. And by the time they have finished their work most invaders are harmless enough, indeed rather familiar-looking creatures.

I think that Purdy’s novel is hostile and to convey my sense of its threat I am going to lay aside the usual tools of containment as inadequate: tools that include ‘Where In a Shallow Grave fits the pattern of Purdy’s Malcolm (1959) and Cabot Wright Begins (1965)’, ‘Where its interests coincide with those of the class, contemporary American fiction’, and the special kit of sharp-edged probes that begins with the words deconstruction, entropy, literarity, paranoia. The particular menace of this novel is that it knows about the emergency kit, as the sophisticated virus knows about penicillin. The forms familiar to the antibody – like the Pynchon-strain, deadly to critics – are the very ones it mimics. Rudimentary example: every novel knows that its plot is likely to be summarised, not only by the review, but by the reader using plot as a basic instrument of containment. Where Pynchon blocks summary by impossible excess (V, Gravity’s Rainbow), Purdy actively solicits readerly focus on a plot in which he simulates a diegetic orderliness, classically familiar as a variant on a known figure: the ambiguous and irresistible outsider who suddenly appears in a stable community, obsesses and transforms it, and as suddenly disappears (Evangelists, Wuthering Heights, Pasolini’s Tearama). Daventry, a young boy who seems to embody some sort of rare beauty, a ‘spring zephyr’, almost literally materializes outside a homestead in Virginia. He claims to be on the run for murder, though this information – all he supplies about his past – may be unreliable. He is taken in by one Garnet Montrose, veteran of the American war in Indo-China, and sole survivor of a massacre which has left him hideously disfigured. Garnet is looking for someone to watch over him and attend in particular to two tasks the text establishes as interrelated: when Garnet is seized by the strange rigor or fit of coldness which periodically strikes him, to rub his feet and ‘the area above his heart’; and to deliver love letters to a woman known as the Widow Rance, centre of Garnet’s erotic and necessarily hopeless imaginings (the first reaction of most people who clap eyes on Garnet is to vomit). Daventry, whose glance is angelically mild, tolerates Garnet’s monstrosity (‘all my veins and arteries have moved from the inside where they belong to the outside’): at the onset of rigor he rubs and warms Garnet back to life, and he acts as messenger. By another classically familiar narrative figure (The Mayor of Casterbridge, Maugham/Losey’s The Servant, Bergman’s Persona), the roles of dependence/ power invert, and Daventry comes gradually to possess everything that is Garnet’s: first his sexual self-expression, by taking over the task of writing the lover letters to the Widow Rance, dictating them aloud while Garnet transcribes his words; then Garnet’s ‘secret’ the one thing Garnet believes no one knows about him, namely that on certain nights he steals or lopes away from the house to a deserted, tumble-down dance hall, where until dawn he dances alone to imaginary music; and then Garnet’s beloved, the Widow herself, who, overcome by Daventry’s beauty forces him to make love to her, after an elaborate foreplay in which Daventry must submit to having his skin kissed all over (skin, and the cognate ideas of integument and boundary, come to be crucial in the book’s lyrical structure). Garnet is about to lose indeed everything when, by a deliberately improbable and virtually disowned plot motive, he is threatened with dispossession of his property. Daventry, who has by this time announced that Garnet is the one thing in this world he loves, offers to save the estate, but warns that ‘he may never be the same again’. A hurricane strikes the house, and at the height of the storm Daventry calls for a knife and removes his shirt; and slashes himself and catches the blood in a receptacle from which he forces Garnet to drink; the hurricane subsequently dies down, the estate is mysteriously saved from confiscation, and Daventry disappears. In the aftermath of the storm Garnet’s disfigurements begin to heal. Daventry is found to be living with the Widow Rance, until a second hurricane strikes, carries him off, and dashes him against a tree.

Besides this bare account of the book’s violent and mysterious plot, I want to mention certain details which, as the novel develops, come to establish a synchronic lyrical order that at times all but displaces the diachronic narrative order just outlined. Garnet frequently describes his disfigurement as a condition where his ‘insides’ have become ‘outsides’, where private and inward spaces have become public and exterior surfaces. Within this context, the long and painful act of self-revelation which constitutes his diary, that is this novel, is an attempt to overcome that inversion by establishing a place, the place of the text, where the display of inwardness is no longer an unwilled mutilation but a willed expression and creation. If the destructive tearings of the world have turned him inside out, like a glove, the restorations of the word promise a return to a normal alignment of outer and inner zones. Now, Garnet’s condition is symmetrically balanced by that of Daventry: where Garnet has ‘no skin’, Daventry is ‘all skin’, a creature who seems to exist exclusively as integument. After his blank and beautiful eyes, it is the unusual clarity of his complexion that is remarkable, not only to the avid Widow Rance, but to Garnet himself, who enters his homoerotic love for Daventry through contact by friction (where the healing rubbing of feet and ‘the area above his heart’ function, by transposition, as erotic metaphor). Garnet has only the bones left from his old, pre-massacre body, from the time before the ‘explosion’ (or implosion, from Garnet’s point of view): one of his sadder rituals is to examine his bone structure in a mirror by candlelight. Though his appearance is hideous, the intactness of bone gives Garnet a gravity and groundedness that Daventry lacks. A fairly stressed lyrical pattern connects ‘Garnet’ via ‘semi-precious stone’ to ‘granite’, and Daventry makes Garnet’s chthonic status clear by calling him ‘the underground river of life’. By contrast with this rock-like stability, Daventry himself is weightless: he may be a ‘spring zephyr’, but he is also terrified by the sound of the wind, and it is the force of the wind which brings about his death. The other cluster of details concerns fluid: since the explosion implosion Garnet has lost the use of his ‘lachrymal glands’ – ‘if I start to weep I feel a great pain in these said glands, like there were sharp rocks or millstones being drawn through raw nerves’. And since the same event, Garnet’s skin – hardly skin, since his whole body is an open wound or, to use his own word, an ‘abortion’ – has been ‘the colour of mulberry juice’, where that fluid is connected with death (‘mulberry night’) and with his own identity (Garnet Montrose, combining the dark and light aspects of red: blood and flesh). After the violent scene where Daventry slashes his veins, Garnet recovers the use of his atrophied glands, and his wounds slowly cicatrise. The connections between these lyrical patterns, of outer/inner and of blood/semen/tears begin to move towards a sexuality of penetration/being penetrated, but before examining that connection in more detail, and its place within a homoerotic discourse, some comments on the interpenetrating discourses of the text. At this point it is enough to observe that between them, Garnet and Daventry would compose a whole body, that the recognition of desire in this text is always accompanied by an awareness of mutilation, and that despite the highly polarised structure of the book’s lyricism, the utopian body the text alludes to by covert hints and feints is one where the fact of difference is denied by a vision of bodily holism.

Summary of the plot makes the novel sound much more bizarre and disconnected than it is because (the reader must at this point take the antibody’s word for it) the voice which narrates the text is one of such placid continuities and comforting pleasantries: a kind of Nelly Dean effect. Emergent lyrical patterns and allegorical transformations are kept at a distance from the text itself by a refusal on the part of this voice to attend to the implications of its own recit. The narrating voice speaks in heavy sociolect, a sort of lazy Virginian drawl which would be totally reassuring, as Nelly Dean’s Yorkshire would be reassuring, if it were not so blind to the irrationality of what is in fact going on. Speaking the language of a social group, it altogether avoids idiolect, where the use of idiolect would assume a personalised speaker, from whom individual reactions would be expected.