First, This Word About Metaphors…
Nothing in this novel is conventional. Not the plot (because there is none.) Not the characters. Not the structure. Even the figurative language is a little out of whack. Metaphors are there. Similes can be found. But very often—probably more often than not, actually—they exist in relation to everything around them like the rest of the language which is to say not very much if, indeed, at all. Then again, sometimes the metaphor is carried through for another few lines. Even then, however, as in this example, the conceptual design of the metaphor is never mentioned again:
“My own mind is a tenement. Some elevators work. There are orange peels and muggings in the hall.”
Writing Advice
A friend of the protagonist carries around advice for writing. He’s a writer. His advice seems to bore her, but she repeats it anyway.
“The first sentence can be like the rapping of a gavel or it can sidle up to endear itself. It can thump you on the back with fraternal heartiness, or it can tap you for a loan.”
His name is Adam. He is not mentioned again.
“A house of another color”
As usual, the narrator is describing a TV show she is watching that is apropos of absolutely nothing going on around it. A Bulgarian movie star announces she is to begin selling her secret beauty cream formulate. A French film intellectual responds with the above. The funny part isn’t the response of the intellectual, which in a more conventional novel would be expected to have some alternative meaning making it appropriate. The funny part is that is how the inappropriateness is called on the intellectual by the nine-year-old TV commercial star. Just one word: “Horse.”
An Edith Piaf Anecdote
The humor of the simile that caps the anecdote is likely lost on readers not familiar with Piaf’s singularly idiosyncratic singing style. The narrator describes how Piaf would always end one particular number in her act by laughing insanely as the song trailed off. One night a member of the audience matches her laugh for laugh, insanity for insanity:
“…it was thought to be part of the performance. But when that insane laugh continued, bitter, chilling on Edith Piaf’s precise note, like one tuning fork of madness responding to another, three ushers and six audience members escorted the laughing lady, with infinite courtesy, to the street.”
"The wallflower sat reading in a Paris restaurant.”
Out of all the many instances of direct metaphor which arrive in a simple declarative fashion and sit there out of context like a notably deserted island, this is the one which captures the narrator’s fancy so much that she does something almost unprecedented in the rest of the book. She expends an entire page exploring first the history and typology of wallflowers in general before devoting an entire paragraph—and a fairly long one at that—to actually following up on the specific wallflower in question. The narrator slept with giver of writing advice, but he gets less attention than the unidentified female Parisian wallflower. Strangely unconventional book.
