THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504280682
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
R.H.W. DILLARD, senior professor of English, is a straight man with a kinky mind.
That description goes some distance in explaining how this graying chairman of the creative-writing program at Roanoke's Hollins College can evoke and animate the demons in possession of a self-destructive adolescent punk rocker:
They scrub you out
with a Brillo pad,
They wrap you up
in plastic Glad
you're alive, yes, glad
you're alive,
unwired, so tired,
so uninspired:
detox, detox,
DETOXIFICATION.
But lampooning the kid would be too easy for this author of two novels, five volumes of poetry and two critical works. Dillard does it with sympathy. He makes us watch, in sorrow and anger, a child - our child - damaged, dangerous; and suddenly Kurt Cobain makes an odd kind of sense.
It's not the only epiphany in Omniphobia (Louisiana State University Press, 186 pp., $22.95), Dillard's disturbing and, yes, powerfully twisted collection of four short stories and three novelettes.
Included here is a fragment from the diary of C. Cotswaldo, Ph.D., titled ``The Bog: A Naturalist's Notebook.'' Said ``bog'' could refer equally to the decaying marshland that is the field site for Cotswaldo's employer, the Institute of Theoretical Studies, or the diarist himself, a particularly stagnant biologist at fictive Albert University.
Albert is a college primarily renowned for its education department and its experimental use of candy as positive reinforcement, an incentive to learning in higher as well as lower education - ``the Butterfingers System.''
The satirical tale embroils Cotswaldo, author of Darwin's Bassoon, a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, with Sara Band, a feminist research associate whose mating habits resemble the cannibalistic male-consuming praying mantis. Her scholarship typically includes an article for Ms. magazine about the bagworm as a type of oppressed sisterhood.
Which brings us to ``The Death Eater,'' about a homicidal short-order cook in a greasy spoon called the Bright Spot who serves up botulism-riddled beans into the chili bowls of obese customers in orange jump suits:
``Good-bye, Fat Family, I say to myself.''
Not to mention ``Their Wedding Journey,'' concerning a husband and wife bound for somebody else's nuptials on a curving snowbound road like the unbroken surface of some great white confection. They have their cake and eat it, too. ``The dream had no plot nor even any distinct end.''
Like this story. Or ``That's What I Like (About the South),'' tweaking such traditional regional literary conventions as involvement in place, themes of racial guilt and a strong narrative voice. Among the supporting players are Roy (a girl), Dale (a guy) and Uncle Vivian (anybody's guess).
Omniphobia is an offbeat book. It's creative, diverting and, at times, repellent. It pushes readers over the edge of their expectations.
It is not in the mainstream.
University press publication of the collection was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington. This supplies literary outlaw Dillard with a certain corporate sanctity. He, most of all, would probably find irony in our cultural way of institutionalizing the outrageous.
That's the ultimate punk rocker's paradox: When protest succeeds commercially, it becomes the enemy. Bob Dylan at 20 shakes his fist at the Establishment. At 40, he is the Establishment.
And at 65, he's R.H.W. Dillard.
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB