Issue 3:1 | Review | Casey Clabough

Double Visions

Review of George Garrett’s Double Vision

Casey Clabough

The postmodernist literary landscape is littered with metanarratives, novels and stories that in their cute, self-absorbed manner celebrate the self-reflexive challenges and issues of the writer and his craft. Though often clever and dexterous, this kind of writing almost always fails to accomplish anything new–an irony since the writer usually believes she is involved in the latest, cutting-edge, literary fashion, pushing the boundaries through her own application of an “innovative” (in fact, it already seems tired and old) formula.

Double Vision, the ninth novel by award-winning novelist and Virginia Poet Laureate George Garrett, flirts with metafiction. However, there are a number of elements that make this book genuinely inventive and fresh. For starters, the novel is not so much a work of metafiction as meta-metafiction–that is, it is “about” metafiction, ambitiously questioning the form in a straightforward, even visceral, manner and tackling the big philosophical question of what is to be gained from it. Two epigraphs at the beginning (“Anything processed by memory is fiction” (Wright Morris) and “I would prefer fact” (V.S. Naipaul)) meet the issue head on. In this insinuated context, we initially encounter a fictional representation of a convalescing George Garrett (Garrett himself has battled a prolonged illness), who is attempting to flesh out a partially autobiographical character named Frank Toomer for a new novel. However, even as this Garrett figure cracks the door to the composition process and his own life, he issues interpretive warnings to the reader, characterizing, for example, a literary interview as “a couple of people kidding each other to the outer limits of probability and then joining together to kid the readers, if any” (11). If this is the attitude of Garrett/Frank and Double Vision, who/what in the book do we trust? Where do our sympathies lie? And what, if anything, is at stake?

Although such episodes and issues of interpretive ambiguity may frustrate some readers, they generate provocative questions and ultimately point to the heart of the book and its concern with the uneasy union of fact and fiction. Since the novel literally is preoccupied with doubling (characters and events), one must don a pair of funny glasses and read it from a kind of dual perspective, relegating certain phenomena to the arena of verisimilitude and others to the realm of joyous imaginative creativity. Indeed, one of the book’s most impressive achievements is that Garrett successfully performs these abstract exercises while, unlike so many postmodern novelists, also convincing us to care genuinely for his characters. Adding to the book’s immediacy is its subtle preoccupation with the decline and passing of the writers of Garrett’s generation: those who began their careers after World War II and lived to see the world and the literary scene change radically, sometimes to the point of passing them by. Garrett partially explores this theme through his moving portrayal of Aubrey Carver, who is based in part on the writer Peter Taylor, Garrett’s next-door neighbor in Charlottesville for many years. Charged with writing a review of a recent biography on Carver/Taylor, Frank/Garrett contemplates the life of his close contemporary in the context of his own mortality and literary legacy. Here again, we are not only charged with additional doubling, but also some dizzying and often dazzling interactions between fact and fiction (for example, the “real” Garrett really has published a review of Peter Taylor by Hubert McAlexander (a “real” biography and biographer), but Frank never reviews Carver’s biography).

The novel concludes with a chapter and postscript that center around a book (doubling again) Frank is writing in his head: part of a historical novel about Robert Greene, the Elizabethan writer who is remembered nowadays for having the audacity to criticize Shakespeare. And as Garrett describes Greene, one recognizes his comparative concerns with the literary careers of Peter Taylor and himself. Having written a contemporary narrative that meditates at times on the nature of literary legacies, Garrett tacks on a historical account of an Elizabethan writer at the end, as if to demonstrate and contextualize the timeless, universal quality of his own self-reflexive authorial concerns. It also works as a kind of symbolic promise to his readers: in spite of illness and everything he will/is continue(ing) to write.

People familiar with Garrett’s earlier work will recognize Double Vision as his most conceptually ambitious novel to date and humble many readers (such as myself) who believed they had developed a rough understanding of his fictional concerns. Complex, deep, and multi-mirrored like a funhouse, the book is not for everyone and likely will confuse a number of general readers. However, there are enough genuine hard-earned tears, suffering, and laughter here to make the novel a fine read for even the most literal-minded person. And for those interested in postmodern fiction and the literary life, Double Vision constitutes an indispensable text, generating a number of innovative assumptions about how writers live, perform their craft, and portray/manipulate their existence through the act of composition. The book’s concluding sentence speaks to these very concerns: a quote from Thomas Nash about Robert Greene that reads, “No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers” (175). Like Greene’s leaves, the pages of Garrett’s novel burn with a brilliance that blind and perplex but also enlighten and delight. A book that makes numerous demands, it is possessed of just as many rewards–all of which conspire to make Double Vision well worth the effort of reading.