Dancing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

& still acts like a puppy.
    There is nothing sexually weird going on here. All the tragedy
    in the world is in New York City. They have a monopoly. This is
    like west Massachusetts. Sort of, as the garage mechanic says.
    The ½ ton pick-up has at least 80 or 90,000 kilometres left.
    Kilometres are Canadian miles. I laugh. We have tuna salad for supper
    & whole wheat bread.

WHAT IS SIGNIFICANT ABOUT THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL?
         “What is significant
    about the Contemporary Novel?”
     Those moments when we see
    one of the characters we met in Chapter 1 do something
    unusual,
      something that moves the character,
    let’s call him Tad,
                 & the novel as well for a few pages
    out of the general coherent OldAmericanNovel sludge
    of Dick worrying about his marriage
           & Caroline inviting people
    for dinner
       & Hal & Mark travelling to Thailand
    [which by itself sounds interesting, perhaps]
                        into
    a specific module of experience we can identify with
    as something interesting – Tom & the Bouncer at the Edgewater
    Hotel
     down by west Sunnyside; Whitney picking up the cowboy
    at Pearson Int’l Airport as she comes back from Germany;
    Carol destroying Frank’s total Mac filing system; Carter
    shooting his neighbour’s pitbull right through the head
    with one clean shot. Sort of like
Hamlet
, sort of like
Port
    of Saints
, sort of like
The Beggar’s Opera
. The rest is boring.

MOMENTS OF SUSPENDED BELIEF IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
         Novels like
The Great Gatsby
                  cf
    the life & times of Jay Gatsby
    in the context of American capitalism
             do give you
    a clear feeling of participating in a sincere & descriptive
    essay about financial blood stains on the white table
    cloth of our national lives;
                     but all these chic slim novels
    set over a weekend in Mexico
                         or 2 or 3 months
    in the south of France
                       or some indeterminate period of time
    in Berlin –
       Berlin without, as far as we can see,
    the almost dizzying hugeness, conflagration of odd scraps
    of diverse dispossessed humanity,
       the darkness of Berlin
    at night, the other-planet sense of far off lights red yellow
    white blue winking at you from different boundary lines. Other
    questions come up – is Sarah really a woman just because
    the novel is written by a woman? Is her husband Gerald an engineer
    or was this just a fancy on the part of the novelist. What most
    of these novelists are doing is merely suggestive. The blond
    husband with a large moustache
    who is supposed to be an engineer sounds like a carpenter
    or an office manager.
    The landscape of Mexico never appears.

BLUE SKIES, 78°
        When he was 12, Tomaszo Garrone, Tom, The Stick, because he is tall and thin with a big sad irregular face that breaks into unexpected smiles at the drop of a hat, had a bizarre encounter. It wasn’t his first bizarre incident, but perhaps the first involving extreme heights. The incident will mark him in various ways for the next 20 years of his life. Although later on, age 27, in Texas, where he has landed, his sexy, angsty friend Whitney, genus female, species angel, will suggest that there may be some relevance to this early experience; and Tom will get indignant, red-faced even, and deny her assertion outright. Almost as if she had criticized his intelligence, or suggested that he only loved her because she kept rejecting him, or she had said that he wanted sex with his mother. Surely for an Italian boy, or an American boy, probably the worst of calamitous venial sins.
    Toronto is different from the rest of Canada, something like a northern Chicago without as many steel mills. Tom is living on Grace Street with his parents in the large sprawling Italian sector of Toronto, and attending Michael Of All Angels