The Tent of Orange Mist (review)

Abstract

Longtime New Yorker Thomas describes the lives of four of the city's apartment dwellers in this collection of long short stories. Bunny, Edith, Walter, and Belle inhabit the same city block on the Upper West Side and live overlapping lives— walking by the same stores, talking to some of the same people—but never develop relationships with each other despite each person's need for companionship. Thomas' writing relies on small but telling details about each character : Bunny, a fifteen-year-old runaway , carries a small silver button in her pocket that she found on the ground and believes her missing sister left as a clue. Edith buys herself a piece of sexy lingerie, though she is fifty-three and has never seen a man naked. Walter takes comfort in the fact that he can walk through his apartment in the dark and never trip over a piece of furniture. And Belle makes her married lover put on her dead husband's pajamas before going out to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the night. All have lost someone close to them and are trying to fill the void in their own ways: Edith fantasizes about marriage, while Bunny denies her sister's death and mounts a search for her. Walter foolishly believes his wife will return home, and Belle settles for sleeping with a married man. Thomas makes it clear that despite the vast differences in age and background , her characters' experiences are remarkably similar. Despite loneliness , all four maintain upbeat and creative attitudes about their situations , and a wealth of humorous details keeps the stories light. While each story is engaging on its own, all are enhanced by being juxtaposed with the other three. Thomas is also the author of a novel, An Actual Life, and a collection of short stories, Getting Over Tom. Herb's Pajamas, not quite story collection , not quite novel, shares with those books a sense of empathy for the characters' predicaments, leavened with skillfully chosen comic detail. (MT) The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul West Scribner, 1995, 263 pp., $22 The art of decadence consists of the transformation of repellent matter into the very stuff of sophisticated pleasure. The pleasures of decadence, though artificial, may be exquisite, and in The Tent ofOrange Mist, his fifteenth novel, Paul West shows himself to be their ardent devotee. An ostensibly historical treatment of the horrors unleashed during the sack of Nanking by the Japanese army in the winter of 1937, the novel centers on its adolescent heroine, Scald Ibis, and the story of her transformation under the tutelage of Colonel Hayashi, her brothel master, from stunned sex slave into elegant geisha. West complicates this sadomasochistic pas de deux with the somewhat improbable introduction of Hong, Scald Ibis' father, who undergoes his own painful transformation : former enfant terrible of high society, he turns into his daughter's impotent familiar spirit, haunting their former home-turned-bordello. Against a grotesque background of luridly depicted atrocities, these three characters play out their game of 218 · The Missouri Review domination, subversion and mutation to its inevitably tragic end. Given that hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians met all manner of grisly deaths at the hands of the Japanese, the voice of realism combined with an epic narrative technique might seem the medium best suited to convey the enormity of the rape of Nanking and to evoke the reader's sense of outrage. But West rejects such an approach, instead imposing on his central characters a frame as tight in its way as any drawing room in Jane Austen. The result of this close-in view is a sense of intimacy with these extraordinarily artificial creatures. Outrage would be beside the point here, as Wesfs book is about the temptations of art and the seductive powers of artifice. After being gang-raped by Hayashi and his troops, Scald Ibis' first gesture is to compose a poem in elegant calligraphy to her new master . "Feeling she was dipping her brush into darkest midnight, she painted in that magical modicum of animal glue and pine soot a message as ancient as her writing tools: ? give myself to you.'" Hayashi, more...