Friday Book

I was unfairly suspicious of this book the way I'm unfairly suspicious of musicians who mostly sing other people's songs - chalk it up to my adolescent and more than just slightly Puritanical obsession with originality. But of course that's all bullshit. Friday gains a lot from being a story whose plot we already know; to put this graphically, we might say that its horizontal axis shrinks while its vertical one elongates. We've been to this island before, we know the drama of use that Defoe managed somehow to put together out of banana leaves and coconut shells; but what we don't (or didn't) know is what would happen if the entire drama took place within the playful and exorbitant mind of a contemporary French philosopher. What's that you say? You'd rather be stuck in a tank of pissed-off cobras than trapped in the mind of a French philosopher for two hundred pages? But before you dismiss this book out of hand as an exercise or circle of hell, know that Tournier, like his master Bachelard, puts the philo back in philosophy. The drama may be interior, but it is rich and, on almost every page, incredibly beautiful. Tournier has mystified many contemporary critics with the way he's managed to fill unwaveringly conventional narrative forms with intensely original experiences (sorry to echo the "old bottle, new wine" metaphor that at least three different reviewers used about this book. I am VERY susceptible to back matter); but reading a book like this, you come to realize how incredibly effective an investigational tool narrative can be. And, to top it all off, you get to return to that strange and mystically boring little island again, if only for a few hundred more pages.