lass Soup, the new urban fantasy from Jonathan Carroll, has at its center Isabelle Neukor and Vincent Ettrich, two characters who appeared in his 2003 novel White Apples. In that novel, after Vincent's death, Isabelle succeeded in bringing him back to the world of the living. Now the two lovers are bound together by the child Isabelle is carrying, a child who is apparently a threat to Chaos, the malign force that seeks to disrupt all of the unique patterns of individual human lives.
As Glass Soup opens, the handsome but less-than-admirable Simon Haden is dispatched by a tiny man named Broximon on his latest job as a tour guide. Simon boards a bus driven by an octopus and carrying among its passengers several tourists, a few animals, a couple of cartoon characters, an exceptionally beautiful blind woman and an extremely large bag of caramels—in other words, as far as Simon is concerned, nothing unusual at all. What is unusual is for Simon to spot his former third-grade teacher, Mrs. Dugdale, leading a group of students across the street. He abandons his tour group, impelled to confront the woman who used to torment him and his classmates, and in the process of doing so discovers, much to his dismay, that he is dead. Even worse, it appears that he has created his own afterlife out of his own past dreams, and that what lies ahead of him amounts to an extremely unwelcome learning process.
Simon Haden, an incorrigible womanizer, had once longed for Isabelle Neukor. Not long before he died, he had made the mistake of taking her to a party, where she met and promptly fell in love with Vincent Ettrich. Since then, Isabelle and Vincent have been inseparable; even Vincent's death has not kept them apart for long, and Isabelle is pregnant with their child. But now Isabelle can, without warning, suddenly find herself in a strange place where she is able to fly, endures many unusual sensations and soon begins to realize that her encounters with the dead are not yet over. Chaos and its minions, among them an overweight man named John Flannery who vaguely resembles Ernest Hemingway and is usually accompanied by a gigantic Great Dane called Luba, are still trying to lure Isabelle into the realm of the dead permanently. In the meantime, Isabelle's close friend Leni Salomon has fallen madly in love with Flannery, who is also sleeping with Flora Vaughn, another friend of the two women.
The intertwined relationships of all of these characters eventually draw them toward Simon's afterworld, to encounters with God, who appears as a giant polar bear named Bob, to a literal "highway to hell" and to Petras Urbsys, an old man who has opened a store to sell everything he has owned and treasured during his life and who knows how to move between life and death. Isabelle, Vincent, Simon and all of those involved with them will find that the struggle against Chaos also involves their own internal battles against their personal fears and failures.
Insightful, amusing, original
Jonathan Carroll is one of those rare writers with an individuality and idiosyncrasy that have allowed him to create what amounts to his own genre. His books have been called urban fantasies, or fairy tales for adults, and the overused term of magical realism could probably be applied to his work, but his writing easily escapes the confines of such labels.
One of his narrative tricks is to take a reader into his confidence, almost as if he is a good friend relating a story, and then to tell a tale, filled with digressions, that is both fantastic and utterly lucid, worldly and yet sincere and deeply felt. The digressions aren't merely interesting asides, either, but are integral to his meticulously designed plots. Earlier details—the tale of the autographist Joseph Kyselak, a 19th-century clerk obsessed with signing his name in every place he could to make himself famous, Simon's reliving of a high-school sock hop, Leni's work as a maker of false teeth, what is revealed about the little man Broximon near the end of Glass Soup—are all crucial threads in the plot Carroll has woven, a story that ends with Vincent and Isabelle faced with the possibility of losing each other forever.
One of the most appealing parts of this novel, and much of Carroll's work, is its beautifully depicted characters, who remain attractive and appealing even with all of their faults, much like dear friends who are deeply cherished but sometimes exasperating. Readers will find themselves hoping that these fictional friends will be able to overcome the dangers that fate, and their own actions, have set in their paths, and should find themselves unable to resist following the people who inhabit this novel to a conclusion that seems inevitable, deeply moving and true.
