Lock up your daughters, draw the blinds, and check your house for bugs and hidden cameras. George Garrett has put on his cap and bells again, and every page of his new book constitutes a thought crime against the stupid hypocrisies on which the current American regime is built. Part mystery novel, part social satire. The King of Babylon is more like Tristram Shandy than it is like the postmodern fictions that are set in a nowhere populated by nobodies. It is also that rarest of rare books: an American novel that actually takes a close look at America.

To get at his theme—the America of the 90’s that was forged in the late 1960’s—Garrett sends his hero (an investigative reporter) back to his hometown in Florida to research two bizarre murders and an apparent suicide that took place on the same day as the assassination of Martin Luther King. The town has changed almost beyond recognition, and the leader of the social and professional elite is a black attorney who inherited the estate of his rich white patron. (Is this old-fashioned paternalism or a symbol of affirmative action?)

Of course, Paradise Springs was no Eden in the 60’s: the Episcopalian priest was a drunkard and a womanizer; the intellectual professor, Moe Katz, is a sometimes brilliant fraud (some things have changed: Anglicans rarely chase women any more, and professors are never brilliant) . The rising generation in general gives us a hint of the future in store for us: the priest’s beautiful daughter—an amoral thrill-seeker who links up with a serial killer; Alpha Weatherby—a young religious fanatic who embezzles from the bank and ends up dead; her best friend Darlene, the town slut who later becomes a phony palmist but a genuine psychic; Alpha’s little brother Penrose (the future real estate magnate and New South business dynamo) is a vindictive little snot who would have leaped at the chance to join either the Mafia or the Gestapo.

Garrett’s fans will recognize the deliberate echoes of his earlier work: the sideshow midget preacher is almost a parody in miniature of the crooked evangelist of Do, Lord, Remember Me, while the investigative reporter—even by his name, Billy Tone—is obviously a cleaned-up version of John Towne, Garrett’s Mr. Hyde alter ego, the author of most of Poison Pen. Like Towne, Tone has written pornography and made a stab at scriptwriting, and also like Towne he (and George Garrett) is obsessed with the two-dimensional falseness of American life in the age of television, advertising, and—above all—celebrity.

As one of Garrett’s warmest admirers, I wondered, at various points of the book, if the author had made a mistake: Is it possible to sustain interest in a mystery plot, when so much of the book is devoted to satire? Technically, the trick is managed adroitly: the investigative reporter records a series of frank confessional statements that lay bare the vulgarities and dishonesty that we are generally not allowed to talk about. About halfway through I began to lose sight of the story, as one social freak after another gives his version, not just of the events of a quarter century ago, but of what’s wrong with American life. It was just at this point that the reins are picked up again and the story gallops to a conclusion that is both surprising and (with the benefit of hindsight) inevitable. In tightness of conception (if not of composition). The King of Babylon invites comparison with Sophocles’ Oedipus, and like the Oedipus, it is a tale of guilt and conscience, of a society losing its faith both in its gods and in itself.

The story is told with words, obviously, but the technique sometimes resembles a collage of commercial images from photographs, movies, TV shows. One of the main actors (kept deliberately offstage) is Martin Pressy, a spoiled effeminate rich kid who only discovered his métier—that of the highbrow pornophotographer—in 1968. The bizarre sequence of events ultimately turns on “Missy Prissy’s” strictly pure and two-dimensional interest in women and his projected volume of nude photographs.

Even the normal characters are stereotyped in celluloid imagery. Billy’s new girlfriend is Judy Davis in Barton Fink; the rich black attorney is a “lighter skinned version of Danny Glover”; Penrose has “Paul Newman eyes”; and the editor of the local newspaper is a “sawed off version of Jason Robards.” The allusions are not random: individually they constitute a set of shorthand references that elucidate the character, somewhat as Hitchcock liked to cast well-known stars (Gary Grant, Jimmy Stewart) whose characters had been established even before appearing in the new film. Collectively, however, these pop-culture allusions hint at Garrett’s almost obsessive interest in the attrition of American character under the millstones of mass culture. “For the first time,” says Billy Tone, “we can see ourselves . . . in the eyes of distant strangers. . . . We have become small and ridiculous, like the Lilliputians. We are, from this point of view, here to be managed, manipulated, exploited. We’re nothing more than the pitiful consumers of whatever they wish us to consume.”

The principal cause of our shrinking is television, which has displaced reality. As the newspaper editor explains:

The sixties, are when it all happened. When public figures began to get the hang of it, how to use it. They could see that in TV, image was far more important than “reality.” That shadow had more value than substance. They could understand that it’s all smoke and mirrors. What you see is what you get, and what isn’t there doesn’t exist. They could see—I’m thinking of Johnson, of the Kennedys, hell, everybody in the public light—that you either control it or it controls you. It can make anything happen. It can turn victory into defeat, vice into virtue, cowards into heroes, and most of all it has no memory at all. Now you see it and now you don’t. Yesterday’s heroes are today’s criminals [e.g., the leader of the Freemen] and vice versa.

The Kennedys did, however, achieve a kind of permanence through their martyrdom. What a blessing, in this age of images, is an early death. Contrast the posthumous reputation of JFK with that of more popular recent Presidents who had the misfortune to live to a ripe old age, of Elvis with Frank Sinatra, of John Lennon with Paul McCartney. Imagine how Bob Dylan would be worshiped, if he had been killed on his motorcycle back in 1966?

Abraham, Martin, and John were the pop political martyrs celebrated in Dion DiMucci’s 1968 one-hit comeback song (I wished at the time that Dion had stayed on drugs). There is, in fact, no pop idol more artificial—more “plastic,” as we used to say in the 60’s—than “Dr.” Martin Luther King, Jr., and Garrett has made King the pop cultural focal point of his photo-iconography. To figure out King’s character, the “Judy Davis” librarian looks through a series of photographs of King and observes that from his habit of never smiling, King turned his face into a mask (i.e., a cultural image, not reality). The really disturbing photograph is a shot of a warm and smiling King at the Nobel Prize ceremony, revealing—paradoxically—that he had spent his life holding his real self “in check.” In the end the camera would “eventually swallow him whole and leave only its multitude of fragmentary images behind.” Garrett, while drawing attention to King’s falseness—his adulteries and plagiarisms—does not see King either as evil or even essentially hypocritical. Instead, he prefers to take King’s call for a color-blind society at its face value as the last chance for the two races to understand each other.

In the book’s present tense (1994), relations between blacks and whites are summed up by the hypocrisy of Penrose Weatherby, getting rich from building low-cost homes for blacks. His father is more honest: an old-fashioned bigot who is open about his prejudices. But there is no place for candor in the 1990’s. Martin Pressy is coming out with a new book of photographs of fat people, with a hilariously pretentious introduction by his old friend Professor Moses Katz. (“After the experience of these photographs the world will look different and, perhaps, more wonderful.”) Billy Tone, discovering the truth about himself, goes off to make movies in Hollywood, “a place where everybody wants to be like Fellini only without doing a lick of work or taking any chances.”

America in the 90’s is as real as a Hollywood set or a Disney world recreation of Medieval Paris, without either the rats or the stink and, one might add, without either the heroism or the faith. “It’s all too beautiful,” as the 60’s drug pop song went, but in pasting pretty images over the reality of racial differences and racial bigotry, we have also stifled whatever small aptitude we had for telling the truth. George Garrett is our Diogenes, and his latest book, while shedding light all over this kingdom of lies, can still not reveal an honest man.

 

[The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You, by George Garrett (New York: Harcourt Brace) 336 pp., $24.00]