The Review of Contemporary Fiction

D-Tours by Jonathan Baumbach
Steve Tomasula

Jonathan Baumbach. D-Tours. FC2, 1998. 172 pp. Paper: $12.95.

Jonathan Baumbach’s tenth work of fiction chronicles the Homeric detours of a Hollywood producer making his way back to the lover he left years ago at the Paradise Hotel. Each episode of this life, lived as a series of movies, is told via the topspin Baumbach puts on the cliches of movies. For example, accused of being a spy, the producer’s interrogators finally elicit his true story, a tale of alien abduction which blends The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T. and a dozen similar pictures and includes extraterrestrials landing at Disney World to return Judy Garland, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jimmy Hendrix, and other icons. Other chapters reference detective movies, movies about vampires, psychos, zombies, femme fatales, kung fu masters, huge apes, human experimentation on lost islands—all of Hollywood B-dom. In fact, the genius of the book is its ability to evoke precisely these stock films. It shares the logic of David Axel Baumbach’s photo series Stills from Imaginary Movies, which a dedication says inspired the novel: elements of a film genre are combined in such a way as to evoke its mythologies, if not any particular movie. Its weakness is that in episodically taking on all of these genres, the point to which the gags are put isn’t so much developed by the book as used as a framing device. Just as time has made these movies simultaneously cornball and arch (“I vant to drink your blood” evokes laughs of recognition), the novel reads like an extended comedy routine, one that might have worked better as a novella. When the story does come out the other end of its murders and chase scenes, though, it borders on the profound. A final narrative jujitsu flip forces the reader to reconsider the episodes as cultural consciousness, autobiography, shadow memory—the constituent components of self. [Steve Tomasula]