The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Johnny Critelli and The Knifemen by Frank Lentricchia
Irving Malin

Frank Lentricchia. Johnny Critelli and The Knifemen. Scribner, 1996. 268 pp. $22.00.

Although these two novels supposedly stand alone, they must be read as one. Each novel echoes the other—the principal images of mutilation, ejaculation, and conception recur. The novel, as I take it, concerns itself with the division of and the attempt to fuse body/language, son/father, high culture/pop culture, then/now, Italian/American. Perhaps the novel is, ultimately, a series of variations on Catholic transubstantiation, a belief that blood is wine, that body is bread. But the author understands that he cannot perform miracles. He is, after all, barely a “man.” The novel contains enigmatic events and odd sentences. We are never really sure who Critelli is—is fiction or nonfiction. The novel itself is a distorted arrangement of drama—Shakespeare is mentioned—and film—Raging Bull is mentioned. And the arrangement is a deliberate attempt to assault the reader, to “rape” him. The novel reaches out, therefore, to include the reader in the unholy text.

Here are a few examples of the violent conjunctions of language: “Give me your story or I’ll break your legs. I just need to disappear into a story, that’s all it is.” A slaughterhouse—isn’t the text itself a slaughterhouse/chapel?—is described in an “elevated” language: “Three knifemen stand at the station of evisceration, another curb-enclosed area, each working a calf with a maximum longitudinal rip, a couple of quick moves, a jank, and the guts just can’t wait to fall out.” The novel, finally, is an ambitious attempt to use language as matter to make it bleed. But language is not body. And thus the text is a scream of frustration, a cry for salvation, a knife to cut the author and reader. It is the “ultimate personal combat knife.” [Irving Malin]