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Finally available again in the United States, The Limits of Vision is Robert Irwin's irrepressibly entertaining and imaginative novel about a young housewife named Marcia and the war she wages against dirt. Set over the course of a single day as Marcia goes about her quotidian activities-having the girls over for coffee, tidying the house, making dinner-it becomes increasingly clear that her sanity is unraveling at an alarming rate. Irwin is at his creative best here, as he describes Marcia's conversations with Mucor, the "mouthpiece for the Dirt, the Empire of Decay and Ruin, the Principle of Evil," as well as such scientists and artists of the past as William Blake, Charles Dickens, Leonardo da Vinci, and Charles Darwin.
If a world can be seen in a grain of sand, then surely phobia can be found in a handful of dust, or so contends obsessed British housewife Marcia, as she does endless battle with dandruff, the carapaces of roaches, grease, rust, grit, the whole panoply of household detritus. Terrorized by the imminent arrival of her coffee-morning ladies, she vacuums the carpet, only to be bested by the spirit Mucor, whose Latin name embodies all elements of slime and grime and who tries to entice her into the kingdom of filth over which he rules. To avoid him she enters the dazzling cleanliness of the Pieter de Hooch canvas hanging on her wall, invoking de Hooch and a raft of other geniusesDarwin, Teilhard de Chardin, Leonardo, Blake, Dostoyevski, even Jesusto assist her. The coffee-morning ladies arrive; she half-listens to their prattle while impatiently waiting for them to leave so she can attack the dishes they have dirtied. Soon her husband, whom she suspects of having an affair with one of the ladies, will come home; how can she defeat Mucor before that moment? The solution is in perfect harmony with this astonishing work of imagination and erudition by a former professor of medieval history. (August 4)
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| $99.99 | Digital |
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Barbara Tuck
reviewed Limits of Vision on May 29, 2011
Limits of Vision
The narrator of this short novel is very intellectual and very well-read. I can't help relating to that (although I'm not familiar with some of the topics discussed, particularly semiotics). Her head is full of interesting ideas, drawing from anthropology, art history, evolutionary theory, the memoirs of explorers and generals, and much much more; and integrating them into her own unique perspective. She has a great ability with words, a rich vocabulary, and an overflowing imagination; in particular, she has an ability to find rich visual patterns and put them into words.
The tragedy, unfortunately, is that these abilities serve an existence dominated by enormous anxiety. Dirt and decay are an overwhelming obsession -- one that is by no means unknown in psychiatric annals, but here put into very personal terms. As always, the emotions (fear and disgust) are universal, their interpretation is up to each person, shaped by cultural background and life experiences.
It is an essentially gendered anxiety. She has placed herself in a role she wholeheartedly believes in, that of HOUSEWIFE, and firmly identifies it as female. She has ideas of heroes, and I couldn't help noticing that every one of them is male. She does conceive of herself as fighting a battle; perhaps that's why she insists, to her coffee circle companions, that she wants to talk about housework. She cannot be male, she cannot participate in any activity she's read about, she wants to carve out a unique type of heroism. Or am I totally off track?
But when she experiences sexual attraction, it is not Levi-Strauss or Foucault that come to mind, but From Here to Eternity! Inevitably, however, sex brings her back to ideas of dirt and fungus, and back to detailed (though not expert) discussions of fungal reproduction. (The bathtub scene with Leonardo of Vinci is a tour-de-force, in my opinion.)
It is the triumph of both the author and his main character to turn everyday horrors into a rich field of imagination.
It's worth noting that Irwin was himself a househusband, staying home, writing, and doing housework while his wife was a member of Parliament.
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