Playing Out the String

"Set against a convincingly portrayed backdrop of university life, and entertaining from start to finish, 'Playing Out the String' is a tricky, many paneled mind bender - a fine postmodern mystery." --Shannon Burke

If Alfred Hitchcock had lived to direct a movie about the abuse of political correctness, it would have been Playing Out the String. This is a frightening novel of rabid political correctness, mistaken identity, mounting circumstances, and the will to destroy a man. Robert McCabe is a professor of film at a Tennessee university. Until this semester he’s passed his time trading film quotes with another professor to make a game of current events. Then a woman accuses him of exposing himself over the summer in the university library, and the quotes take on a new seriousness, starting with Ernest Borgnine’s “playing out the string” from his movie The Wild Bunch. Borgnine says this directly to indicate a fatalistic will to continue despite overwhelming odds. And sure enough, he and his friends are killed by gunfire. Amid mounting accusations will McCabe end in a similar spiral? Especially after he refuses to hire a lawyer and contacts a local journalist to give his side of the story . . .

He traced its beginning more or less arbitrarily to a Saturday morning in October when he stopped at a liquor store on Kingston Pike and found that he was missing a credit card. The lost credit card was of little consequence—it had no real connection with what happened subsequently—but there was a link in his mind since it was in retrieving it he first realized he might have a problem.
Robert McCabe is a professor of modern literature and film. He is also a theorist, a fact not unrelated to what follows. He explained to me, innocent as I am of literary theory, that the concept of beginnings, like that of endings, is a fiction, an illusion of language. Behind every beginning is another beginning, behind every source another source, beyond every ending another ending. (This is a principle of what is now called post-structuralism, and it is derived from a Nietzschean concept that is said to have enormous consequences for Western thought, although I could not tell you what they are.) But even if beginnings are arbitrary, McCabe said, you have to begin somewhere, and he chose to begin with the Saturday morning when he stood at the counter of Sequoyah Liquors with a bottle of Bombay gin trying to remember when he had last used his Visa.
He was recounting the story as we sat at his kitchen table in a small rented apartment in Knoxville, Tennessee, not far from the campus of Western Appalachian University, where he teaches. He and his wife Catherine, a psychologist in private practice, were building a house that was several months behind schedule. The temporary apartment was dark and cramped, the rooms stacked with packing boxes.

Home