"Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

Thomas Disch

THE BUSINESSMAN
Flyleaf:

Murdering your wife might not sound all that difficult, and in the case of Bob Glandier it was dead
simple. Agenda: fly to Las Vegas, enter the Lady Luck Motor Lodge, strangle, get back on the plane to
Minnesota, and resume life as an upper-echelon executive. What came afterward was not so simple.

Still in the grave when the novel opens, and none too pleased, Bob's wife Giselle can foresee that she
will be obliged to haunt him. There isn't much else to think about in her situation. Quite inadventently Giselle's
mother, Joy-Ann, releases her daughter's spirit one day, the only casualty being that she loses her own life in
the process.

While Giselle is out discovering how unpleasant it is to haunt her husband, Joy-Ann arrives in
Paradise (not to be confused with "Heaven," which is the next stage along and designed along less mortal,
more "Looking-into-the-face-of-God" lines). Joy-Ann meets Paradise's coordinator, the famous
nineteenth-century actress Adah Menken, who explains the use of "Home Box Office," where events of your
own and your relatives' lives can be played in any order. Adah and Joy-Ann can see that they have a lot of
intervening to do to sort out the evil that began at the Lady Luck Motor Lodge.

The ghost of poet John Berryman plays a major - often heroic - role in this drama, which is just as
well because at the time he meets Giselle he has become thoroughly bored with suburban seances (his
dislexia making him particularly hopless at Ouija boards). Elaborate hauntings lie ahead for Berryman and
Giselle, transmogrifications and, above all, a battle agains the force which will turn a white Scottish terrier and
a heron into killers - not to mention a rather engaging little boy who will soon be known as "Charlie Manson
writ small."

How a novel can at once be so lighthearted and so utterly terrifying is something only Thomas M.
Disch can answer. _The Businessman_ is like _The Exorcist_ in a playful mood. The living, the dead and the
indeterminate form a cast of characters who interact in a fashion that is disarmingly logical. "Who would have
thought that the afterlife had so many rules?" asks Berryman. Many murders and unspeakable horrors later,
it seems oddly clear that terms could never have been struck with the businessman any other way.




Thomas Michael Disch became a freelance writer in 1964 after working in advertising. He was born in
Iowa in 1940 and educated at New York University. He now has a long list of books to his credit - poetry,
children's books, short story collections, and such notable novels as _334_, _Camp Concentration_, _Clara
Reeve_, _On Wings of Song_, and _Neighboring Lives_, which he coauthored with Charles Naylor. He lives in
New York City.




Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint:

Excerpt from "The Assault on Immortality Begins" from _Henry's Fate_ by John Berryman.
Copyright 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright 1975, 1976, 1977 by Kate Berryman. Reprinted by