Conversations With Mr. Prain
by Joan Taylor
Melville House, 268 pp., $15 (paper)
Dubbed an “erotic mystery,” Conversations With Mr. Prain is neither erotic nor mysterious. It does, however, have many things to offer: an interminable conversation about art and capitalism that could easily be had between stoned college freshmen; an “eco-warrior” and “bohemian” heroine (Stella) who wears “unusual hairstyles” and “eco/animal-friendly mascara” and lives in a flat with musicians who “made sure their songs carried a message about the planet”; quoted excerpts of widely anthologized poems by widely anthologized poets that afflict Stella like heartburn or indigestion and lead her to beseech T.S. Eliot for deliverance (though, apparently not into the whole brevity thing, she calls him Thomas Stearns); a Wikipedia-like tangent on Jane Austen’s publishing history, followed by an imaginary conversation with Austen in which Stella asks her for romantic advice; long, bitter rails against the publishing industry’s failure to recognize true art … there’s more, much more, where this came from.What little mystery Prain offers is about as difficult to solve as a Highlights picture puzzle. It might be considered a spoiler, for instance, to mention that it takes Stella 30 pages to come to the shocking realization that a sculptor’s name she heard as “Empty” is actually simply the initials “M.T.,” a fact that no one has tried to conceal from her. The “clue,” as it were, leads only to a conclusion any half-conscious reader would have drawn from the get-go. Readers, unless they themselves are a bit daft, will forever remain several steps ahead of Stella, though we are meant to believe she is so brilliant a novelist that England’s most prestigious publisher is after her. When Stella observes that she is trapped “like the reader of a bad novel, who laments the time it takes to get to the end and cannot put the book down because the barbed bait of the promise of answers drags the reader on,” one cannot help but envy her position, as this book makes a pulpy cliffhanger sound heavenly.
This article appears in June 16 • 2006.