Character Sketches from The Enormous Room

Why am I starting all these reviews with the caveat: "it's good, but it's not picaresque?" And so it goes with e.e. cummings' The Enormous Room, an autobiographical novel (in fact, his only novel) that captures the characters and insights from his time as a "prisoner" of the French government during World War 1. Cummings wants to convey the loose of all sense of time while imprisoned and so his chapters are structured around the other men who are arrested and sent to the triage center. Basically, he depicts them in a Hogans' Heroes type of tale. None of the men remain etched in the reader's mind: they are streaming humanity, as innocent as Cummings, just as noble and just as confused. The absurdity of their arrests is a highly satirized indictment on the paranoia of the French regime. Cummings works hard at not being defeated at his senseless, crime-less detention and only admits to any sign of nervous breakdown once his release is secured.

Towards the end of the book, at the conclusion of each chapter, the more familiar Cummings emerges. He digests the preceding events and summarizes them poetically, with the cadence and mixed images that later were his hallmark.

A value to read for history of authors perspective, but nothing to add to this year's resolution list.