Misfortune
To this point Stace’s writing is so casually virtuosic that it’s breathtaking when the novel abruptly switches to the first-person voice of the foundling who, though born a boy, is being raised by Lord Geoffroy Loveall as his daughter and heir, “Rose.” She even points out the switch, mocking herself for using a fake omniscient voice to tell the story of her birth, and just like everything else in this novel, Stace overworks the joke until it screams, which is itself part of the joke.
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The story is shot through with references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Anonyma reads to Rose and which Rose, unsurprisingly, takes to heart. “Metamorphoses” is also the title of the section in which Rose’s childhood idyll begins to crumble with puberty, the sad lingering death of Geoffroy, and the increasing inability of literature to protect her from sweat, facial hair, and grotesqueries like the groping uncle who discovers her secret and drops dead on the spot. All the obvious Freudianisms here are played for comedy and tragedy at once, and magnified by Rose’s failure to discover her true identity until she is a horny teenager. With the arrival of a DeMille-size cast of covetous and loathsome relatives, the plot grows increasingly picaresque and fanciful and Rose becomes ever more cynical and defiant until, in the emotional climax of the story, the invocations of Metamorphoses and the gnostic allusions to magical hermaphroditism and veiled identities prove not to be literary fripperies at all, but rather the keys to Rose’s journey.
More: John Wesley Harding plays 4/13 at the Hideout; see Section 3.
