Word: chatworth
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Transatlantic Blues is about a different purgatory: that clammy conscience-ridden cell between worldly success and a proud otherworldly tradition. Stylistically, the novel is the nonstop confession of Monty (né Pendrid) Chatworth, a British-born American TV interviewer. He is something of an Anglo-American Alexander Portnoy, but with a crucial difference. Portnoy, draped over a psychiatrist's couch, complained that his lust was repugnant to his stern Hebraic morality and that his morality was repugnant to his sexual nature. Chatworth, slumped in his seat high above the Atlantic, confesses to his tape recorder ("Father Sony") that...
...Chatworth's sanatorium ("For the busy man who doesn't have time for a midlife crisis"), where he can indulge himself as "a born-again atheist," a man torn between two continents, who should be buried in the Azores under a cruciform credit card. He sees himself as a fraud, "TV's Amazing Thinking Man who speaks in little bite-sized paragraphs...cursed with a special sound, which disappears in a twinkling if he listens to other people too long...