The Typewriter Satyr

In the opening pages of The Typewriter Satyr, the proprietor of a repair shop tells a woman that her typewriter is similar to one used by Hemingway, and the earth seems to move: The woman decides that she wants to explore the proprietor's disappointments and desires, and the proprietor decides that he wants to know all the things the woman knows. Some readers will admire the directness of this opening, but others will ask, as Edmund Wilson did with respect to A Farewell to Arms, whether the author of the work has any idea how to bring the reader into real intimacy with lovers or how to see lovers through a searching personal experience. Wilson concluded that Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms offered mere abstractions of a lyric emotion. In The Typewriter Satyr, Allen offers something even more arid: a love affair without emotion of any kind. But perhaps Allen knows exactly what he's doing. Shortly after meeting and feeling that they've fallen in love, 51-year-old Oliver and 31-year-old Annelise are told they don't know what love is, that love involves sacrifice. Despite this warning, Oliver leaves his four children and his wife of sixteen years, and Annelise leaves her existing partner. Within a span of little more than two years Oliver and Annelise marry, fail to find happiness, and then divorce. Neither of them develops a very good or even a faintly reasonable understanding of what has gone wrong. Annelise tells Oliver he's not responsible, and then implies that she's not responsible, either: "It's just time to pull the plug," she says. Oliver briefly renounces love and hope and wishing, but after Annelise reassures him that "there's someone out there for you," he finds himself drawn once again to his concept of the ideal: "fresh as a daisy, cool and beautiful, smart and sexy." The novel fights an uphill battle to win the reader's heart. Oliver and Annelise are simply too self-aborbed and too unenlightened by their experiences to seem worthy of sympathy or even interest. Allen has a larger purpose, however, and Oliver's friend Murray helps to convey it to the reader. A painter, Murray succeeds where Oliver fails. Being in a loving relationship frees him from the search for love and allows him to concentrate on all the paintings he wants to do before he dies. This is the prize that Allen seems to want us to keep our eyes on, and it is an interesting one. Alas, Murray's concept of love is nearly as self-absorbed and simplistic as Oliver's. Murray sees himself as a knight in shining armor and his lover as a helpless damsel. His lover needs someone to take her hand and walk her home through the heat; she needs someone to fetch her a fix of sugar. Murray's love consists of providing these services and congratulating himself for doing so. Allen is a writer of great skill and discipline. When he says something, he makes sure he has said it. His prose is unambiguous and often finely wrought, and many of his images are at once pleasing, precise,

This novel is full of rich images and funny, lovable characters. I did not want it to end. This novel is highly recommended.