The Empty Chair Paradox

— the more you sprawl in it!

 

My continued review today here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/697-2/ of THE EMPTY CHAIR by Roger Keen:

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“There was a light and jolly atmosphere, with a lot of sparkling banter, especially when everybody went outside to inspect the new sleek shiny black sports car with its sensuous curves, huge bulbous back windows and prominent spoiler.”

No secret that Steve is on a rising wave of professional success at the start of this chapter, including a new love actually in Katie, and a swanky sports car. Yet, indeed it would be a ‘prominent spoiler’ on my part to divulge the particular nature of one of what I shall call something I myself suffer from — a serendipity syndrome. A confirmation bias. Including primal revelations. But this example (“an encoded family pattern, like a genetic matrix”) following a meeting with his sister Anne, is significant as an evolving pattern or gestalt, if perhaps contrived in the sense that any filmic version of The Empty Chair based on this sprawling narrative mass of a novel’s template would be contrived — a novel creatively experimental in its own right, a twirling series of ‘meta-‘ sails to be tilted against, and thus immune against the flaying or flensing of editorial work to make it arguably more digestible or ludicrously mutated into a soap opera based on the backstories of those who attended Daniel’s group therapy sessions! Here I sense a potential imminent dramatic downward path built in for Steve, down from such swanky highs within the terms of this novel if not within its projected adaptation?

“The therapy and all the rest of it should be fashioned into a neat topiary that supported this climax of beauty.”

“the cheapest commodity was ideas, which couldn’t be protected in their own right.”

“….wasn’t special enough to be writ large in cinema.” — maybe, but this novel IS special enough … as an experimental novel that seems to be working better than any envisaged more digestible adaption of it in print let alone on screen. And the windmill I noticed earlier in its text but failed to mention in my review, because I forgot to do so (!), has now possibly turned up as a mighty avatar of its future success? All factored into by astute references to real writers and directors of the time interacting with its plot. Making the latter real, too. Sartre, notwithstanding.