Elliot Perlman
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
Picador, $35pb, 609pp, 0 330 36423 5

ELLIOT PERLMAN MADE a bit of a splash a few years ago with Three Dollars (1998). Parts of the novel were underfictionalised in the most blatant way, parts of it seemed to represent nothing more than the fervencies of what Perlman thought (most of it staunch stuff agin globalisation), but it seemed undeniable that the life and times of these south suburban Melburnian wine and cheesers represented, in Australian terms, a piece of subject matter worth biting off.

It was a bit ridiculous that a book of fiction of rather manifestly modest literary ambitions should be published as the crême de la crême of literary fiction and then pretty much accepted as such. Perlman's new book confounds the pretension and makes it well and truly the author's own by purloining the title of one of the twentieth century's greatest works of literary criticism and adding insult to injury by calling the protagonist's dog Empson. One of the only times I have been cut by the The Age on the basis of something other than length was when I wrote about William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) - because of the obvious topic-ality, given the barbarous appropriation - and concluded: 'So in future, Elliot Perlman, call your dogs something else.' But then, we live at a time when the latest wannabe fiction is more likely to command reverence than the work of a notable critic and poet. Not the least paradox, though, is that Perlman would be likely to agree.

So is his new novel a dog? Well, as ever, it depends who's barking. The first forty or so pages of the book represent the most inflated, maddeningly inept and monstrously bombastic writing I have encountered in years, a kind of cartoon of novelistic ambition so wildly in excess of novelistic talent that the upshot makes you want to weep and scream and scratch yourself convulsively. It is not just like a little boy in a bathtub trying to imitate, say, Laurence Olivier; it is like the imitation going for the length of an uncut performance of Hamlet.

In fact, as befits a novelist with immature aspirations to greatness, the model seems to be Tolstoy. Perlman is in the process of delineating the woes of a young Simon Heywood (now there's a made-up name that would have caused a stir in literary and English Department circles a few years back) from the perspective of his Czech Jewish psychiatrist (Klima, wouldn't you know?). Everything seems to be issuing into the kind of varnished, quasi-epigrammatic sentences that aspire to the condition of wisdom: 'All happy families … ' and that kind of thing. Except that, in Perlman's case, they don't. They're callow, they're silly, they have no generalising power of application and they seem to testify to nothing but the author's ignorance of life.

Perlman's style filled me with such torpor that for many weeks I could not read on. When I was forced to, I discovered that there was a slightly different novel lurking inside the husk of bombast and grandeur that Perlman had erected for himself.

Seven Types is a novel about a kidnapping, and it is told, like Ulysses, Wuthering Heights and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, by a series of narrators, that most seductive (because most variegated) form of storytelling. The hero, who seems to be the object of the novelist's capacity for both infatuation and self-portraiture, is a depressed former schoolteacher who has never got over the girl he went out with at university years before. He is devoted to reading poetry and getting drunk. He communes with a sympathetic prostitute and is haunted by the fact that a primary school child once disappeared when he was looking after him. He kidnaps the child of the former flame in the hope that this will provoke her into saying he is her lover in order to save him from prison. In fact, the prostitute freaks out immediately, the cops kick down the door and the rest of the action is dominated by the suspense of what is going to happen to the seriously upset arty hero when he is tried for the crime.

If it's read as a multiple point of view page-turner about a group of people who conglomerate to form a kind of higher soap, Seven Types does take on its fascinations, even though the book can only be apprehended in this way if the reader goes out of her way not to savour the prose: that is, if she reads at breakneck speed for the story, ignoring or skimming over the fact that the novelist says everything at three times the length it requires.

What emerges is a tolerable depiction of human life, conventionally conceived in the light of standard sophistications, and thrown into an improbable cluster of intrigue that will divert the mind, even if it can't stand too much logical scrutiny. There's the intelligent, heart-of-gold girl who has to work as a prostitute but ministers to men body and soul. Not only does she love the hero but she relieves the needs of his former girlfriend's husband, a rough-and-tough stockbroker who furthers the cause of heartless (globalised) Mammon. He, in turn, is inclined to the belief that wifey is the kidnapper's lover. She, of course, can't believe anybody, and the cross-coloured narrative is also enlivened by the presence of a business analyst, a female barrister, the psychiatrist, the daughter and the wife herself.

The Sound and the Fury it is not, though it's diverting enough to have the action cut up like confetti and then arranged as so many slightly different collages with a family resemblance to one another.

Just as Vikram Seth dignified a soapy storyline by putting it in a fancy verse form, so Perlman takes a corny set of incidents and an essentially popular (and conventional) approach to fiction, middlebrow and two-dimensional, and gives it an edge of mystery and enshroudment by the way his narrative curve withholds information.

Even though the technique is maddeningly wordy, there is a cunning in the essence of the telling. It works partly to disguise how conventional the conception is. These characters do their best to come good (even when they're crass and unlikeable, ending up as used car salesmen). But although there's the frisson of outré action, as when the husband tries to stuff money up the bottom of the prostitute, the character-isation doesn't admit of light and dark, only the melodramatic contrasts of black and white, with a bland grey thrown in as a kind of token 'complexity'. But at the level of psychology, this novel by a self-consciously intelligent chap reaches the heights only of cultivated trash.

It is full of a nominal sense of mercy, which stops it from being repellent, but the characterisation is on the side of the moralised conventions it springs from. The hero, who is manifestly a prat, is also the novelist's prince of the morning. He is also the fount of wisdom on a range of subjects: each of Empson's types of ambiguity, separately delineated; the history of the Ern Malley affair, laid forth in a thousand words or so; why American-style 'managed' medical care is a denial of human life and its responsibilities; why the market (and the skunk-like human faces that maintain it) is an absurd value to believe in; the splendours and miseries of the life and art of Billie Holiday; even - and this is a good one - how the novel is a work of art, not a repository of opinions.

It's not enough of a subtlety to save this book as the grand kind of thing it aspires to be, nor from the opinionation of its own representation. I agree with Perlman about deconstruction and globalisation, so I shudder to think how this book would read to someone who doesn't. I suspect they would react to it as what it is: a kind of period piece tricked out with sophistications that are extrinsic to its literary quality.

We now seem to be producing large-scale, popular books that are not in themselves literary fiction, though they aspire to be and represent the efforts of people who care about literature. If you accept Seven Types as an overblown example of popular fiction that would like to be something else, then it may take on its full glamour, as a form of popular writing disguised as something else. It's a kind of McDonald's banquet of a book, a form of virtual nourishment so extensive it substitutes for the real thing.

In one way, it's a bit like the sections of a Scott Turow or a John Grisham novel that don't appertain to the main plot but just form, sometimes gargantuanly, the putty that keeps it together. Sometimes the dialogue or the narrative is like the principles of logorrhoea at work in a David Mamet play applied to cardboard cut-out sensibilities derived from contemporary liberal journalism. The upshot will keep you going as pseudo-style and pseudo-thought, but don't be surprised that its upshot is no better than it should be. This is a novel so modest that it wants to conquer the world. With a few murders and car chases (as well as courtroom surprises), it might have a better chance. It would also, in its way, be a better book.