In My Parents’ Bedroom

“The meaningless may have a scope, a structure, a beauty and a purpose no less than the meaningful.”

When Olympia Press is mentioned, you can’t help but reflect on the life of its notorious publisher, Maurice Girodias. Rarely in history has there been such a man so uniquely positioned for a film biopic (Jesse Livermore deserves honorable mention here), but alas, no such thing exists. Girodias survived bankruptcies like Rasputin dodged assassination attempts. When he was inevitably short on cash yet again, Maurice would sit in his office and draft imaginary titles for the most debased novels he could conjure. Once his customers footed the bill, he’d reach out to pseudonymous writers looking for a quick paycheck.

One of those writers was Barry Malzberg, who wrote Oracle of the Thousand Hands in a “dead fever” of February 1968 trying to figure out what would impress Girodias, who had famously published Nabokov’s Lolita. The novel was accepted for a $2,000 contract, which led to further commissions including Screen (which Girodias considered a masterpiece) and the novel I’m writing about today, In My Parents’ Bedroom.

The story follows Michael Westfield, who is a typical Malzbergian protagonist, an entirely unreliable amnesiac whom we find standing next to his girlfriend, although he cannot place her name. Michael is about to tour his childhood home, which has been converted to a museum with federal funding for its historical and cultural significance. The guided tour will commence in the living room where a history of the Westfield family will be assembled. As the tour moves from room to room, culminating, disastrously, in a gift shop and restaurant serving “authentic Westfield cooking,” we gradually unfold the importance behind this quintessentially American family.

Imagine yourself in the scenario: you’re on a tour of your childhood home and everyone is discussing the oddities and unexceptional nature of your existence. It’s really an excavation of the American “un-dream.” Here in these walls lie the dissatisfied, the overworked, the mundane, and infinitely complex. The tour group is trying to understand it intellectually, to use it as reference, but Michael can only stand aghast as his memories start to unfurl into a series of tragic realizations. The novel’s structure creates an impossible trap: you can’t tour your past as a museum because you’re in it, you are it. The attempt to externalize and examine becomes recursive, and there is no escape.

As usual, most attempts at metaphorical rendering collapse under Malzberg’s characteristic postmodern sleight-of-hand that unmoors the story from an obvious didactic conclusion. This isn’t to say those qualities are absent. On the contrary, to understand his metaphors, his view of the world, you need to read a handful of his novels. Only then will you grasp the grand edifice on which he was painting the same thing over and over from different angles.

I’ll say this: I enjoyed this novel but that does not mean it’s good. Even in the confines of sleaze, he still kept his singular existential tone, and any reader of Barry’s will know that the sex to be found here is not going to grace the halls of a romance section in this life or the next. I expect these Olympia entries are for his utmost fans, and if, like me, you are one of those fans, I’m happy to report that you’ll find more of what you love here.