Dmitry Bavilsky. Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers

Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers


Dmitry Bavilsky

Publication date: April 24, 2001

Macho men don't cry. They don't even get upset anymore. They just get tired.

The plot of N. Mailer's novel is similar to the script of the recent film " Dude, Where's My Car? " An elderly writer, in a permanent binge (creative crisis, wife left, prison past is pressing), accidentally meets a couple, gets drunk with them and debauchs. And in the morning he doesn’t remember at all what happened the day before. Well, a new tattoo has been discovered. And then two severed female heads - his own wife and a random mistress. An anecdote turns into a drama, a drama into a thriller, and that into an action movie with an almost mystical background.

Because it’s not a matter of memory lapses, but of dark forces and evil spirits that live in the neighborhood, disturbing souls that are not solid in anything. For a good part of the novel, the reader solves the puzzle - who killed: the writer or what other protagonists of the plot? The author of "The American Dream" knows what he's doing: provincial America, the dust of sleepy and empty suburbs, promotes all kinds of irrationality. What rushes through the pores of a comfortable and packaged world. “ Winter loneliness dictates half of our actions.”

The genre-thematic prototype of "Tough Guys" comes to mind immediately: of course, a similar story happened already in the run-of-the-mill Twin Peaks , where the infernal Bob moved into innocent residents, until that moment infected only with kurnokopiya (this disease of the highest stage of development consumer society was invented and described in his time by Zbigniew Brzezinski ). The only difference is that from David Lynch’s series we will never find out who killed Laura Palmer, but Norman Mailer will definitely place all the plot accents in the finale. Already arranged.

Because “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” is a text from the early 80s, a pleasant and relatively understandable time. The era before the advent of AIDS and total postmodern deconstruction. That is why the dangers are speculative and still lurk within the person himself, and are not imposed from the outside. However, signs of the impending stratification of reality, its complete decomposition, are already shaking the insides of the novel with might and main.

The intrigue, straight as an arrow, gets bogged down in numerous digressions and reasoning from the very first page. I won't say it's bad. It is these canvas stitchings that are the main interest and charm of Tough Guys. Mailer is ready to distract himself from the plot at any opportunity, to talk about anything. About the dangers of smoking and the work of Updike, boxing and group sex, Wadley’s voice or the brutality of parents. Its main character, let us remember, is a writer. Therefore, one can speak and write, quote and send endlessly: mental chewing gum is inseparable from the consciousness corroded by everyday reflection. Even “adjectives call for a cruise.”

And it would be nice if only Mr. Writer had problems... Something apparently happened on the way to Paradise, because everyone around him, neighbors and sidekicks, exactly illustrate modern theories about the third sex, muscularity, the thinning of traditional anthropomorphic characteristics, and in general, maniacs, sadists, hidden homosexuals, etc. And the policeman, called upon to maintain order, is generally a fiend. “I’m used to considering myself a writer looking for a broader view of a person,” says the main character, who is unable to write even a line throughout the story. His task is different - to use the example of his own skin to record irreversible changes in the chemical composition of the male population of the planet. Thus, centuries ago, the feudal layer was probably decomposing and in its depths, painfully and incomprehensibly, some kind of capitalism was maturing.

In parallel with these fatal processes, the epic beginning is eroded, digressions multiply and fragment, life turns out to be folded and ambiguous. Now, the classic novel is no longer possible. And although everything is revealed and explained in the finale, the reader understands perfectly well: Mailer simply needs to bring the unnatural plot solitaire together. Traditional virtues are being replaced by "Elementary Particles". So Mailer embarks on a genre search: he writes a biography of Picasso , interviews Madonna .

Everything was mixed up in the house and in the volume. Chip and Dale are dead, completely and irrevocably. True, owls are again not what they seem. But the stained glass window in the form of an escape is broken, like the mirror in the poem about the “Black Man”.

Chelyabinsk