Sensation

June 20, 2011
Mamatas (Under My Roof) appears to be more interested in reasserting the primacy of Joyce, Pynchon, and Coover than establishing the voice of Mamatas in his self-consciously po-mo third novel. This accumulation of pop-culture babble, layered with thin insight and metatextual archness, is amusing enough in an epigrammatic way, but there's little attempt to communicate beyond the level of the individual sentences. There is Julia, the wife who walks out, unknowingly incubating wasp eggs in her arm. There is Raymond, the distraught husband who formulates a theory of penis panic to explain his wife's departure. And there are spiders, aka "a man of indeterminate ethnicity," a Borg-like "we" who narrate what ensues. The endless catalogue of modern annoyances, from attention-hogging real estate developers to Indian call-center workers, makes this novel not so much timely as instantly obsolete.