Atchley

What grad student has not dreamed of turning his or her thesis into a novel? After spending weary hours explicating somebody else's texts, one longs to strike out on one's own, or even, this being the postmodernist age, to explicate a fictitious text. David Green has done just that in Atchley--demonstrating, unfortunately, why it is not always a good idea. The book begins as a thesis on the ontology of presence, retreading Derrida and his acolytes. But wait! This is a false thesis. It is centered on a man named Atchley, a philosopher and novelist. In the second section, we have an introduction, of sorts, to his novel, Landfall. One's radar blinks on when this novel is compared to Beckett's work. Then we have, in the third section, something that could be the text of Landfall. And, if you stripped Beckett of his sense of humor and his clean prose and added some rather tendentious allegorical touches, it would resemble Beckett. A nameless man wanders in a post-apocalyptic landscape among a people whose language he must guess at, and his adventures, such as they are, lapse into those of a man named David Green who uses grant money to go to Galicia, the site of Landfall, and basically mope about. The interesting thing about the book is not the conceit, qua device or metaphor, but the conceit, qua vanity, of the academic musings. The character ""Green"" at one point ponders ruefully that life is transitory, and that his words will outlast him. Judging from this book, he has little to worry about. (June)