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4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 A complex and subtle sweep through the terrains of western culture Apr 12, 2006
By Jennifer Armstrong
"Your skull looks tasty."
Peter Cowlam's Bruce, our leading protagonist and surveyor of English middle-class life, has everything a rising urbane professional college boy could ask for: a nutshell life, a ready-to-wear career path, and a position in haute bourgeois society, courtesy of his father, also named Bruce. Yet, something is missing: And it's not just the smile on his face, which Bruce, the son, first notices lacking in the collection of family photos which his father had gathered together at the point of dying. The particular lack of Bruce's (as it can be judged) is an unconscious one, engendered by his upbringing, and as such it is indicative of a deterministic source of absence.
It's not that Bruce isn't able to choose to go against his mother and father's will, in the sense that Edith Wharton reminds us in her novel, The Age of Innocence, whereby romantic loss can be an outcome of a good son's class loyalty. That is to say, for Bruce, it wasn't the will to make a decision which was missing, but lack of the associated underpinnings of passion which would solidify a romance into something more than just ephemeral upper-class dreaming, nightmare material or vainglorious gesture.
This story of Marisa is a modernist romantic tragedy, which tips its hat to Wyndham Lewis, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Henri Bergson and others. Yet Cowlam's novel has more to offer than this. It explores a broad range of intellectual themes, such as the psychological dynamic of left-wing and right-wing politics and their relation to art, male and female conceptions of love, our intuitive conceptions of time and the tragic nature of humour.
The rhetorically understated quality of this fascinating romantic tragedy is developed around an unbridgeable gulf which is not defined by overt cultural boundaries or moral `sin' - it is more peculiar or esoterically haunting than that. After all, Marisa and Bruce share much of the same cultural context, even though their values appear to differ more widely as the drama progresses.
There is a subtlety to Bruce's despair, since he longs for the intoxication of a powerful artistic effect which could deliver him the message for which he secretly longs: that, `the social mores we take for granted every day' might give us less than the full serve demanded of our human desires in this world. This intoxication is not to be imbibed in the form of seemingly lowbrow student confections, however. Form is not only as important as function - it is the fundamental key for Bruce, aiding him to determine his class function on the basis of certain straightforward and external social signs. Therefore, it must be via his own elitist social circle where he receives the artistic message which can reach him, the one whereby the `whole cosy notion of what civilisation is, is undermined.'
Yet, the ironic tragedy is that the corporate class to whom he owes his loyalty cannot deliver the level of passion and truth he craves. The only one who can do that is Marisa, and she belongs to a tribe, not of factual and hard-headed financiers but, of artists. There is a writerly turning of form and content reflective of the refractive psychology of Vorticist style, exemplified by the novel, Tarr, by Wyndham Lewis. Bruce appears to represent form seeking a content, whereas Marisa, his love interest, ever elusive of his knowledge and control, appears unable to reveal to him her suggestibly substantial but (from Bruce's perspective, at least) aesthetically and psychologically murky content.
The narrative of recollection is told in the form of reminiscences via Bruce. Through his darkened phenomenological lens, Marisa appears in various manifestations as a ghostly figure ministering to his needs, or as a highly abstractive and impractical person, unable to convey her intended artistic and personal meanings. Whereas the reader suspects that Marisa's character is in itself deep and complex, we only know to what she aspires via the selective memories and perceptions of Bruce whose eye for her left-wing tendencies is often patently and openly jaundiced.
Such a perceptual bias is a formula for failure to really engage on Bruce's part. This appears at least (for it is only his perspective that we know) to lead to events which can be interpreted as being sadistic or masochistic along gender lines. As Bruce becomes the domineering inheritor, and manipulator, of patriarchal power and finances, Marisa engages in a masochistic act, not entirely distinguishable in form if not intent, from the contemporary feminist statement of Annabel Chong. Furthermore, this act might have been judged to spite Bruce and not just an enactment of `feminist' artistic statement. What can this and other feminist performance mean for women? This is one of the subtle questions indirectly raised in this novel.
As I have suggested, there is a subtlety to the plot's telling, so that we are unsure what exactly is taking place within the psyches of Marisa and Bruce. The dynamic which resonates most clearly is that of British class social inflections of meaning and differing value systems. The plot's development is adeptly marked by Bruce's realisation of loss throughout the latter part of the novel.
The whole novel is logically and aesthetically completed by the protagonist's desperate attempt to remember details of what occurred between himself and Marisa, in order to recapture and retain a vestige of living passion. Indeed, a great deal of Bruce's ill-fated attempts to repossess the essence of Marisa in his life is represented by the trope of collecting: thus it is that Bruce peruses the memoirs he has stockpiled from Marisa's life, still perhaps not understanding the basis of many of the intentions underlying her artistic endeavours. The gender dichotomy delicately represented here: one of an objectifying male collector of Marisa-memoirs alongside an ephemeral and subjectively simplified, potential `collectee' reminds the reader of John Fowles' intriguing and gender-archetypical depiction of Clegg and Miranda in his novel, The Collector.
There is a dry sardonic tone to Mr. Cowlam's Marisa. A soft sense of mirth flows through the narrative, as we learn to see how the eye that seems to see all, also fails to see aspects of meaning which could be directly relevant to his intimate interests. We are treated to an education concerning what it might be like to see the world through the eyes of an upper-middle-class English gentleman. Readers will experience the protagonist's repressed way of looking at the world, his reflexive dismissive propensities, his regularly intelligent but overdrawn artistic flourishes (a function of his self-appointed semi-aristocratic role as arbiter of taste) and yet often classically imbued turn of phrase, his interest in the material quality of good nourishment, preferably imbibed within tasteful interiors boasting thoughtfully chosen furnishings as well as his paradoxical interest in mysterious, elusive (because passionate) modern art forms.
Bruce has everything a British rising middle-class individual could ask for. Yet something tragic happened to Bruce at a crucial point around the middle of the book, whereabouts Bruce's ?lan vital underwent a transformation for the worst. Nobody knows it - except finally, perhaps Bruce himself. Whereas mechanistic, linear time appears to go on as before and his son, Bruce Three is born so as to continue on the line of Bruces, Bruce's own intuition of time has become radically transformed. Worse, he now knows something he didn't know before which he wishes he hadn't apprehended: that ghosts and murky lures of the imagination can no longer simply pass for fanciful left-wing tropes, but are finally to be taken as ... something all too real.
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Love and Possession Apr 12, 2006
By Michael T. Ballard
Bruce is born into and brought up in opulence. From childhood, he is groomed to take over his father's rather profitable business. As such, Bruce is accustomed to selecting, then buying, only the best from amongst the vast accumulation of commodities which surround him in the world.
His things of special focus are those located in London and New York. As a bourgeois gentleman, he learns early on how to differentiate between a good port and a cheap one and which cigar would go best with his aged brandy. Rolled in Habana?
Bruce is a connoisseur of things. And, he's no layabout, playboy either. He keeps his nose close to the financial wheels of his father's business. He is extremely competent when it comes to manipulating monetary data and managing his employees. Bruce has everything he wants, except Marisa. She has been for him a kind of Bu?uelesque "obscure object of desire" for decades.
Marisa is framed as Bruce's testimonial. As such, one only sees others in the story of his relationship with Marisa through his own mind's eye. From his point of view, his love affair with Marisa remains a bit of a romantic mystery, a bittersweet tragedy which has culminated in what he can only regretfully perceive as star-crossed love.
Marisa's social position has not been so filled with financial fortune as Bruce's has. Bruce assures the reader of that fact, right off the bat. Unlike Bruce's father, Marisa's had only his skills to develop and sell. He has been a teacher and an artist, but he has not found financial success or security in either. The marketplace shows no mercy. Marisa's father has become, what many would deem, "a loser". Nevertheless, Marisa loves her father, perhaps she even emulates him.
In ways which become apparent as Bruce's narration unfolds, Marisa attempts to become a success in the arts, the very area in which her father failed. But success in the marketplace will not come easily. She will stumble, like her father unless she gets some advice and help on the practical and financial matters. That's where the infatuated Bruce comes into her life.
But need is a two-way street. Marisa gives Bruce his first glimpse of real, sensuous human interaction. Bruce detects passion in his own subdued way, all through the fifty-odd years of his life. But, he never really drinks in what he begins intuiting. This is because Bruce is immune from the humanitarian appeal of the arts. To him, such business is silly. And it is this prideful shield which blocks even a basic understanding of what Marisa is trying to accomplish with her art. Bruce's boneheaded thoughts on a review of one of Marisa's plays is the proof of this pudding. Bruce just cannot make a human connection. He cannot love. He can only possess.
Bruce can recount the objects and abstractions of his encounters with Marisa. And, he does that quite well. Bruce is not stupid. His intellect is completely intact. His memory is close to photographic when it comes to the odd detail or accoutrement. But Bruce has a heart problem. His emotional arteries have been clogged during his upbringing and his subsequent life as a businessman. He cannot kick-start their re-connection, no matter how hard he reflects on inanimate objects and abstracted memories which concern his relationship with Marisa, not to speak of the other important humans in his life. Loss permeates his inner monologues, but even they are obscured by his obsessively jaded view of life outside his own emotionally insular world. Nothing is good enough for him, unless it has an a priori stamp of bourgeois approval. For Bruce is a man of wealth and taste, a hollow man, a stuffed man, a subject in constant search of verve.
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