It’s a fine line between clever and stupid, as the musician and philosopher Nigel Tufnel says in “This Is Spinal Tap,” but sometimes a good writer strays so far on the other side of the line that it makes us wonder what he could possibly be thinking.
To recast the bloody and sordid story of the Manson Family as a Greek myth featuring Dionysus, the Maenads and Orpheus — as Madison Smartt Bell does in his maddening new novel “The Color of Night” — is to make a daring and unsettling choice. To throw in 9/11 and a bizarre climax at ground zero in which the heroine, a Manson hanger-on and semi-mythical huntress named Mae Chorea, breaks into the site and soaks in the accumulated suffering the way a gourmand savors the aromas of a bakery, is to err on the far side of tastelessness.
The massively talented Bell has had anything but a conventional career; his works include a biography of the chemist Lavoisier, a book-length account of a long stroll up Baltimore’s Charles Street; three volumes of fiction about the Haitian revolution; and his last novel, a not unadmiring fictionalization of the early career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Civil War’s most bloodthirsty general and the father of the Ku Klux Klan.
It’s not hard to see what drew Bell to the Manson story; he’s always had a keen interest in atmospheres of mayhem and anarchy and the predators who flourish within them. “All Souls Rising,” the first volume of the Haitian trilogy and a work of near-Tolstoyan sweep and comprehension, features many unforgettable scenes of sickening violence.
“The Color of Night” begins in Las Vegas in September 2001, where Mae (whose last name we don’t learn until late in the book) is a blackjack dealer who likes to stalk the desert at night. The World Trade Center attack occurs, and in the TV footage Mae sees a bloody kneeling Laurel.
She thinks back to her first meeting with Laurel, a fellow drifter at a party in ’60s Southern California thrown by the famous singer O____. Shortly thereafter she encounters the charismatic cult leader D____ at the La Brea Tar Pits. Together Laurel and Mae become involved in D____’s Family. Mae, who, unlike Laurel, is fascinated and energized by D____’s amorality and penchant for violence, sees in his piercing blue eyes “the living face of god, among us, empty eyeholes boring backward into the dark infinity of the universe beyond.”
Many of the events in the novel closely parallel the story of the Manson Family and will be familiar to anyone who remembers “Helter Skelter.” The Family “creepy-crawlies” through the houses of the rich, spying on them while they are sleeping and rearranging their belongings. O___, the singer, is a stand-in for Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who befriended Manson; instead of a Squeaky there is a Chunky and a Creamy. As in the Manson Family, there is much “free love,” most of it coerced.
It was a commonplace at the time that the Manson Family represented the dark side of the ’60s ideal of unlimited freedom. It is here that Bell finds a persuasive link between the bacchanalia, the orgiastic, female-led rites of the followers of Dionysus that often ended in savage violence, and this dark underside. In the ’60s, the cult of Dionysus was portrayed as something unequivocally positive and liberating. The Manson murders, whose enormous cultural impact at the time is hard to overemphasize today, put an end to that.
As the tale progresses, the characters shed their human faces and show the masks beneath. Bell has always had a deeply pessimistic view of what motivates humans. Love and compassion are weak; the desire to hurt, dominate and humiliate are paramount. The murders, when they do occur, are powerfully evoked because they are described in such an offhand, prehuman way: “the knife hammed in her fist like a long bloody tooth and the singleness of purpose of a hunting animal.” For the killers, there is nothing more than the relationship of the predators to their prey.
Linking the Manson murders and the 9/11 attacks may seem like the height of absurdity, not to mention exploitation and overreaching — unless you believe, as Bell fervently seems to, that all human acts of violence are connected in some deep, mythical way.
FICTION: MODERN MYTH
MODERN MYTH
The Color of Night
by Madison Smartt Bell (Vintage)
