A Nest of Empty Boxes

WITH SPIRITS as lush and sensuous as the costumes they wore, a troupe of actors known as the Glorious Ones played their hearts out to street audiences in 17th century Italy. Their improvisations were passionate and bawdy, but so charming that even Church-supported French nobility were seduced into laughter. Impresario Flaminio Scala concocted such a dynamic group by painstakingly typecasting each member perfectly. So all they needed to do--Armanda the grotesque but sharp-witted dwarf, Pantalone the cross miserly Jew, Dottore the pompous doctor of quackery, Brighella the spiteful gadfly, and the others--was get up on stage and play themselves to the hilt.

Using the same storytelling style that she developed in her first novel, Judah the Pious, Francine Prose '68 relates a fictionalized account of these actors' private lives. The book links together short memoirs written by each of them, centering around their loves and power struggles to control the troupe. Directed toward the reader as stage-whispered confessions of behind-the-scenes intrigues, these memoirs are at first appealing in their simplicity and gossipy perceptions, but soon melt into each other. Straightforward once-upon-a-time rhythms become monotonous, especially since Prose does not shift tones of voice. She introduces few variations--in speech patterns, humor, or sarcasm, for example--to distinguish the players' musings.

The action itself, although dramatic at times, is muffled by hazy memories, and by the fact that the actors speak from calm points of resolution. The reader must often settle with a single version of incidents that involve several of the other actors, a version which more often than not is exasperatingly broken by frequent explanatory comments. Isabella, for example, a beautiful alluring woman who always played the Beloved, writes her memoirs from what is an acceptable fairytale vantage point, heaven. Her happiness assured, the tale raises no great anxieties and the recounting of a gruesome and cruel death loses its cutting edge. She is the last to speak, pronouncing judgments on her fellow players which the reader must either accept or remain unsatisfied by denying. Isabella died in labor as the other Glorious Ones made reluctant half-hearted efforts to aid her. She explains that most of them wanted her to die because they envied her fertility. They themselves could only feel a love that was laden with hate and scorn; thus they were impotent or sterile. Her second pronouncement is harsher, but contained in an incongruously mild aside. Speaking of her husband Francesco, who by the end of the book had wrested command of the troupe from Flaminio Scala, she commented:

Francesco wanted the child, but he wanted the spectacle more. If he'd been given the choice, he'd surely have chosen the state funeral, financed by the king of France. A baby wasn't his ideal of immortality, it wasn't part of his plan. But the funeral oration was.

For all these intuitive and somewhat pat perceptions, nagging self-doubts dangle at the end of each memoir. But instead of developing their restive psyches, Prose disappointingly cuts the players short. Armanda the dwarf, for example, acknowledges the tension that arises from Flaminio's perfect typecasting, from his refusal to recognize her private soul. But the plot does not allow time for her to develop potential feelings of self-worth that can replace an identity culled from the glory of the stage. Instead, her memoir trails off in confusion, with a lame admission to Flamino that "I myself was never quite sure just when we were acting."

Isabella is the only one who comes close to self-fulfillment. She realizes that perhaps it is possible to infuse creativity into her roles, a creativity balanced between Flaminio's self-consuming and haphazard improvisation and Francesco's constricting memorization. She realizes that her talents have been developed as self-protection, not self-expression, as a shield against her naturally unbounded generosity, a self-destructive and explosive emotion which often vented itself in endless hours of duck-like squawking. But the best she can do, speaking from the wrong side of the heavenly gates, is whisper her confession into another actor's dreams, unnecessarily burdening him and remaining unfulfilled herself.

These stunted souls seem to be the result of Prose's limited vision: she ropes the characters too tightly into the storytale genre, smothering their powerful individualities under layers of allegories, parables, plays, anecdotes, and recollections in the form of scenarios and dreams. Allegories and suchlike have a strong appeal when they make morals easy to swallow, but the device loses its charm when used repeatedly. The form's vitality is diffused as it becomes clear that the players are just being put through their paces to provide Prose with the ingredients for her morals. These morals are not expecially complex or subtle, and by the middle of the book evoke the feeling of opening an endless nest of Chinese boxes, whose shape and size never vary.

The culminating moral of the book, drawing superficially on the age-old metaphor of the stage of life, throws Prose's sensibilities for her characters into sharp relief. Looking through a window onto the world's future, Isabella agrees with the angels: human life is "just a series of stories and plays, most of which are exactly the same!" There is no reason to regret a bad life if it is "all just a story." Although reluctantly, Prose does allot Isabella a two-sentence demurral to finish the book: she wonders how the Glorious Ones' yearnings for earthly fame fit into the picture.

IF PROSE had let individual voices emerge and develop organically, subtly weaving a plot around their self-conscious lives, they would have shown her that indeed the quality of story they lived affects and transforms human life, and that individuality can't be pressed into one single mold. If allowed full rein, her own characters would not proceed unchanged through story after inset story. A talent for vivid characterization to her credit, Prose should shake loose from the confines of this genre and stamp her own individual form on her writing. She should carve the story lines out of the characters' lives instead of inscribing them to fit well-worn and obtrusive speculations on the meaning of life. Then the glorious ones' real spirit would shine through the scrim of morals she has hung.