BOOKS

YEARS IN THE DESERT

by Tad Friend
JANUARY 15, 2001
Print
More
Share
Close
Reddit
Linked In
Email
StumbleUpon
Subscribers can read the full version of this story by logging into our digital archive. Not a subscriber? Get
immediate access to this story, along with a one-month free trial, by subscribing now. Or find out about other
ways to read The New Yorker digitally.
Books: Years in the Desert : The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/01/15/2001_01_15...
1 of 4 6/11/14 6:16 PM
BOOKS about "The Sheltering Sky" (Ecco;
$25) by Paul Bowles. . . Submitting to "The
Sheltering Sky" is like having a heart transplant
without anesthesia: you have to be willing to
contemplate, for a moment, how it feels to have
no heart at all. . . Bowles wrote this novel, his
first, chiefly to get his collected stories
published. Nor was it propitious that he
reinforced each scene "with details reported
from life during the day of writing"he was
living in Fez"regardless of whether the
resulting juxtaposition was apposite or not." He
further bent the course of his composition by
ingesting heaps of majoun, a hallucinatory
cannabis jam. . . The resulting manuscript must
have made New Directions tiny print run (3500
copies) look optimistic. Celebratory of nothing
but its own precisions, the book felt cool,
distant, un-American; as Gore Vidal later observed, Bowles "writes as if Moby Dick had
never been written." Astonishingly, Bowless modernist icicle became a best-seller. It was on
the Times list for ten weeks and sold more than two hundred thousand copies in paperback
during its first year. . . Bowles was the Pied Piper of permission, and a band of sexually
offbeat Beat writers followed him out of the mainstream. Truman Capote, William
Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg led the flock of dropouts, rock stars, and other neer-
do-wells who made the pilgrimage to Tangier to consume majoun and misanthropy at the
feet of the Master. Bowles was less famous than many of his visitors. In group photos, he
was the gaunt figure at the edge of the frame, fingering a cigarette and looking on wanly. . .
A half century after "The Sheltering Sky" sketched a world of license for an avid but
untutored audienceshowing Hugh Hefner the waywe are inundated with images of sex
and corporate-sponsored hipness, and we probably need less rather than more of them. What
Bowles offers the modern reader is a vision not of an alternative life but of an escape from
life altogether. . . The novel is alive still. It is a cry for help that reverberates, sounding, in its
echoes, disturbingly like a shout of triumph.
Books: Years in the Desert : The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/01/15/2001_01_15...
2 of 4 6/11/14 6:16 PM

Tad Friend, Books, Years in the Desert, The New Yorker, January 15, 2001, p. 90
Print
More
Share
Close
Reddit
Linked In
Email
StumbleUpon
Books: Years in the Desert : The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/01/15/2001_01_15...
3 of 4 6/11/14 6:16 PM
It's never been easier to try The New Yorker - with a one-month FREE trial you have nothing to lose.
Subscribe now!
Subscribers have access to the current issue and the complete archive of The New Yorker, back to 1925.
Subscribers also can access the current issue on tablets and phones via our digital edition. If you subscribe to the
magazine, register now to get access. If you don't, subscribe now.
To search for New Yorker cartoons and covers, please visit our store.
Books: Years in the Desert : The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/01/15/2001_01_15...
4 of 4 6/11/14 6:16 PM