Port of Call

AS EVERY young art consumer worth knowing will tell you, there is no room for adventure in the modernist world. Action went out of style long ago. Smuggling, suspense, suitcases full of money, and tales of exotic islands don't make it anymore. It's kid's stuff, or worse, it's boor's stuff.

Yet here's a novel that functions both as serious art and as a compelling adventure story, and manages to pull it off with a lot of style. In Port Tropique Barry Gifford does what Hemingway did in To Have and Have Not and what Conrad did in Nostromo--he conveys a gripping story line and a distinctive aesthetic. With all the control of the masters, the 34-year-old Gifford has produced an intriguing literary experiment in the guise of a page-turnes complete with palm trees, speedboats and revolutionaries.

In fact, if one disregards all the obliquities and subtle strategies of presentation, Port Tropique reveals itself as essentially a novel of the basic high-tension, high-adventure mode, not really much different from those pharmacy book-racknumbers with titles like the Tortuga Transfer or Midnight in Morocco. It's the stuff of a million Paramount pictures--drop-points, bills in large denominations, an underworld contact nicknamed El Serpiente, a bartender named Alfonso. The protagonist, Franz Hall, like most heroes of pulp thrillers, has a past to undo. Attracted more by the suicidal romance of risk than by the money he stands to make, he has wandered to Port Tropique in an existential daze, and becomes a go-between for ivory smugglers in an unnamed Latin American country under revolutionary siege. It's classic stuff. He spends a lot of time hanging around in picturesque cafes drinking Superiors waiting for the next rendezvous. He's cool and lonely and death-fixated. He daydreams of The Maltese Falcon and Captain Blood. He picks up a couple of girls. Then, in an inexplicable error, he makes off with a suitcase of cash he was supposed to deliver to his associates and is on the lam. Gifford is a terrific storyteller, and his taut tale grips with all the intensity of the most unabashedly commercial thrillers.

But Port Tropique is a far cry from the conventional popular trash, for in it Gifford engages in a sophisticated formal and stylistic experiment that uses the elements of obviously commercial work to create a complex piece of serious art. The enigmatic construction and brilliant prose set the novel far above the grovelling, panting plague of stories for boys, housewives and subway-riders, up in the gallery we reserve for high art.

Not that it's a museum piece. Port Tropique remains an adventure story. But it is an adventure story stripped of almost everything but certain odd luminous moments and executed with such shrewd knowingness, such literary hipness that it becomes "experimental" and "artistic."

Using the photo-cinematic method, Gifford composes his novel as a carefully arranged series of short takes moving between past and present, memory and event, reality and hallucination. It's literary impressionism, splicing silent and often motionless pictures together into a frame containing only the essential, electric excerpts of life. These panels, the charged, memorable exposures of life in Franz Hall's mind, are rendered in 85 well-cropped and vivid chapters. Two whole adjoining chapters read as follows:

He had need to get away, though he'd never had any great love for the tropics. As a boy in New Orleans the heat seemed unbearable; he'd never gotten used to it, but now it soothed him, and he was beginning to like it.

Walking along the beach at Madruga the hour just before dawn, companion only to darting lizards and the waves, Franz awoke in a dream where everything was purple, gray, black, invisible.

GIFFORD MAKES the analogy many others have, that the mind's eye is a camera eye, but produces a more compelling work than most other practitioners of that method have managed. Mental stills and short scenes add up to a movie that is consciousness, one strangely edited into a million flashbacks and jump cuts that we hardly understand. And though the method and theory are elaborate, the editing remains extreme. Stripping down, distilling, cutting, Gifford leaves only the crucial frames, economizing to the point of crypticness.

This same minimalism characterizes the prose. Gifford has cleared away the fatuousness and swagger that disfigures the writing of most young writers, leaving a terse prose that is controlled and accurate and clean to a degree that rivals Hemingway and Camus. Gifford describes the world cooly, and precisely, yet always loads the prose with feeling. His lyrical economy haunts us like the voices of our dreams; somehow it all stands out. There is something undeniable about sentences like this:

From the porch of the bungalow Franz could watch the waves roll in. The palms were bending in the soft steady wind and the air was redolent with a sweet blend of fruit and sea. Franz felt as if he had been rescued from the real world.

The writing often is a kind of dream-work that can distill a sketch of a person or place down to a few quick words and turn it inward, making it a charged mental impression. It can be nightmarishly surreal:

The man reminded him of a snake, the way he twisted his neck and head around as he spoke, squirming his body and looping his arms through the spaces in the bench.

He and Marie had once spent a night in El Paso, a maddening, sprawling industrial town of perpetual flashing lights, sirens, and speeding cars and trucks.

Though Gifford works it all into a tense, private nightmare using a narration derived in part from Hemingway, the reader never feels that his fixed state and slightly withdrawn I've-been-through-hell voice are chic affectations adopted to suit the role of Tough Young American Novelist. He avoids the stylized macho disillusionment that characterizes much Hemingway imitation--and for that matter, much of Hemingway. His voice, with its tightlipped, overwrought intensity, is a voice terse enough for the end of the world. He and his characters, uptight and dream-ridden, have stared into the intolerable darkness and can hardly bear to speak anymore:

He sat in a window seat and did not speak to anyone. He felt ready to pass the rest of his life in silence.

Every clipped sentence Gifford gets out is noteworthy. Despite Port Tropique's out-of-the-ordinary double intent--to tell an adventure story while creating a work of art--it is a book capable of electrifying a much larger audience than its small press publication might indicate. Gifford will be a voice for the decade.