I've been meaning for a week at least to share with you the charm of Stephen Dobyns' The Wrestler's Cruel Study. You may remember my comments on Dobyns two weeks ago. Well, forget those. TWCS is a comic novel about how a group of heretics, and I mean ALL the heretics, Albigensians, Valentinian gnostics, montanists, donatists, and several non-Christian groups as well, try to formulate or explicate the struggle between good and evil by scripting professional wrestling events. This does not become completely clear til halfway through the book, so I hope you don't mind me giving that much away.

The central theme is somewhat obscured by a number of elements, many of which are entertaining enough on their own. First is the "plot" which involves the fiancee of a pro wrestler being kidnapped by a couple of gorillas. The attempts to find said fiancee provide a convenient thread to hold the rest of the novel's activities together.

The second distraction is the wrestling manager and gym owner, Primus Muldoon. Mr Muldoon has read far too much Nietzsche and tells his portions of the story in essay form in chapters throughout the book. I wish I could quote you everything he says, but I would violate the copyright, plus my fingers would get tired. I'l lhave to content myself with one paragraph from the second chapter. He has been talking about the nature of wholeness, forms and masks:

So form equals substance: the mask is the face, the layers of onion are the onion, the bandage becomes the wound. What name do we give to this mask? I call it Gimmick. And what do I do that makes me a manager, a manipulator of men? I train them in the perfection of the Gimmick. And who are these men? I call them grapplers with the chimaera, strugglers against desolation, contenders with the mystery. You might call them charlatans. You might call them bogus. Together it is possible to call them wrestlers. I direct a school. You would say I run a gym. I call it Pforta after the school near Naumber which Nietzsche entered in 1858 ten days before his fourteenth birthday. You would read the name over the door and call my gym the Meat Market. I say that I teach Sparta in the morning and Athens in the afternoon. You would say that before lunch we engage in the tricks and subterfuges of fraudulent wrestling and after lunch we work on our Gimmicks, which you consider little more than stage names, cartoon titles. But didn't Nietzsche argue that one should always live in disguise? After all, if form is substance, then one exists as one's disguise: to be is to be the Gimmick. You would call this illusion. But didn't Nietzsche also say that truths are illusions whose illusoriness has been overlooked?

In any event, Muldoon is unaware of the religious purposes to which his wrestlers are being put.

The last distraction I will mention is that many of the characters in the story have steppes straight out of Grimm's Fairy Tales, which, fortunately for me, I had just read. The story of The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage, is converted into three deconstructionist English professors(or, as they would have it, "theorists in textual studies"), Maus, Vogel and Sosage. If you are fmiliar with the origianal tale, this actually works quite well.

I hope that from what I've said so far that those who might like such a thing would be hooked. Not a book for everyone, for sure, but terrific for those with that sort of taste. He who has an ear, let him hear.