The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

The Gargoyle

Andrew Davidson

Doubleday, 2008

There’s a rueful irony to the fact that two very old copies of Dante’s Inferno end up having a key significance in Andrew Davidson’s visceral and utterly unforgettable new novel The Gargoyle. The Inferno is only the first third of Dante’s great work, but it’s so violent and aggressive that many readers are repelled before they get very far into it, many more read just it and no more, and most of those few who read the whole of the Divine Comedy still end up remembering mostly that first ghastly segment.

So it is with The Gargoyle, which begins with its first-person narrator driving stoned on a country road at night, flipping his car into a deep ditch, and hanging suspended and helpless from his seatbelt as flames roar all over his body. He is ravaged with third-degree burns; he loses his fingers and toes; his penis is seared away. All this – and his subsequent treatment in the hospital’s burn unit – is brought mercilessly to life by Davidson’s powerfully sparse, completely unsentimental prose, as in the segment early on when the narrator undergoes debridement, the process of removing dead and damaged skin:

The orderly laid me out on a slanted steel table where warm water, with medical agents added to balance my body chemistry, flowed across the slick surface. Dr. Edwards removed my bandages to expose the bloody pulp of my body. They echoed with flat thuds as she dropped them into a metal bucket. As she washed me, there was disgust in the down-turned edges of her mouth and unhappiness in her fingertips. The water flowing over me swirled pink. Then dark pink, light red, dark red. The murky water eddied around the little chunks of my flesh like fish entrails on a cutting board.

Davidson makes no attempt to cozen us into liking his narrator, who’s a porn star before his accident and an unrepentant drug addict during his treatment and recovery. This makes his ultimate fate – something seven-tenths redemption and three-tenths damnation – all the more haunting. This fate is achieved through the intervention of a woman named Marianne Engel, and it’s not entirely possible to synopsize the effects she has on the narrator, nor to quantify the effects her stiff, strange grace will have on the reader.

Not entirely possible and, I fear, not all that necessary for most of Davidson’s readers, who, like Dante’s will turn back when assaulted (there is no other word) with the book’s hideous opening segment. Those who press on will find a story similar to that in Dante: a journey fraught with multiplicity, and a resolution both uplifting and heartbreaking. I hope many readers persevere; The Gargoyle is that rare novel which simply must not be missed.