Richard Burgin's "Rivers Last Longer'

The French philosopher Fontenelle, as he lay dying in his hundredth year in 1757, was asked to describe his symptoms. Nothing really seemed the matter, Fontenelle replied, except that he was experiencing "a little difficulty in being."

This malady has become more common, and it certainly afflicts the protagonists of Richard Burgin's fiction. Consider Barry Auer, the antihero of Burgin's new novel, Rivers Last Longer.

Auer, in his early 40s, is handsome, articulate and rich. He's had a first-rate education, and, having relocated from Philadelphia to New York, he's about to launch a literary review for which he has justifiably high hopes. He's charming enough to make the right connections; he knows how the literary game is played; and money is no object.

Barry's not a writer himself— a youthful ambition unfulfilled— but he seems a shrewd judge of talent, and with his old friend Elliot to share editorial duties and an adjoining apartment, he has the second ear he needs. So what's the problem?

Barry actually has no problems, or no more than any other neurotic New York literatus. But Gordon does. Gordon is the sexual predator who is Barry's schizophrenic alter ego, who carries around the ashes of Barry's mother, Psycho-style, wherever he goes, and whose encounters with the opposite sex, usually begun in bars or on the street, invariably end badly— very badly.

Barry/Gordon is careful about these. Gordon has his own apartment (in Exton, Pa.), his own ID, and to all intents and purposes his own life, albeit one limited to a single function.

What is "'normal'?

Bifurcated identities are a common theme in Burgin's fiction, because the idea of a single, integrated personality in 21st-Century America is the profoundest fiction of all. "Normal" people, Burgin suggests, are only pallid souls whose doubles are as yet latent or undeveloped. They serve as foils or victims, and their sense of ontological deficiency draws them toward those who, like Barry, glitter with the dark energy of the fully damned.

Such a one is Barry's colleague Elliot, who responds readily when Barry seeks to repair a mysterious estrangement of several years, and is soon pulled fully into his orbit.

We've all met Barrys— not necessarily monsters (though who really knows?), but egomaniacs who bend weaker wills to their own. Their charm is slightly wicked, which only adds to it. They are black holes who absorb all surrounding energy into themselves, and their perspective, their interests, slowly but purposefully usurp the world of anyone straying too close to them. Great political leaders possess this quality. So do great con men, and, on occasion, psychopaths.

Barry charms, but Gordon imposes: He reduces his victims to terror and helplessness, all the while insisting that they themselves are to blame for his behavior. Gordon, in other words, is Barry stripped of his veneer— distilled, immediate and intense.

The need to absorb

This is, in short, no Jekyll and Hyde character, in which opposed personalities inhabit the same psyche. Barry is the more socially adaptable version of Gordon, but they're not essentially different. This may be as good a modern definition of evil as any.

Barry's weakness is that he really does need his colleague Elliot to affirm himself, just as Gordon needs his victims to play out his psychodrama. It's not enough to absorb Elliot; Barry must also appropriate everything of value about Elliot, and win Elliot's assent to that too.

The special object in view is Elliot's girl, Cheri; the problem in pursuing her, however, is that Barry must step outside the persona of Gordon and reveal himself in his own right. This is a risk too far, and forms the climax of the novel.

Sexual entrapment

Rivers Last Longer is Richard Burgin's second novel but his tenth work of fiction. His story collections, notably The Spirit Returns, Fear of Blue Skies and The Identity Club, have been justly praised for their explorations of urban anomie and sexual entrapment. His prose is an open web that ensnares the reader, who finds himself caught up in an off-kilter world, plausible but dreamlike, in which anything is matter-of-factly possible.

This quality strongly resonates, for American society proposes itself above all as an open-faced dreaming, whose candor is its authenticity. The seams and undercurrents remain hidden. Burgin snags us on them, guiding us toward the treacherous shallows where, often enough, monstrosity lurks.

Here we encounter nervous laughter, too, which is often our response to the uncanny. Rivers Last Longer puts the reader in some dark and even terrifying places. But it's the virtue of Burgin's writing, of a rhythm unlike anyone else's, that it never loses a certain jauntiness, the tread of the absurd.

At a certain historical remove, and filtered through a thoroughly American sensibility, there is more than a suggestion of Kafka here. Gregor Samsa, you will recall, woke up one fine day as a loathsome insect. In Burgin's world, he is likely enough to prove your bed partner.