People Who Need People

“And the Story, Full of Longing and Intrigue, Began”: Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

“The raspberry bushes that hung over the garden had been cut so the branches lay with their crushed fruit on the ground.  The smell was of wet dirt and sweet berries and green leaves and rot.  Valentine sat among the ruined heads of lettuce, and her mother lay down with a little moan and rested her head on Valentine’s knee.” – in the wake of a boyfriend’s destructive exit, “Nine”

In Maile Meloy’s short story, “Nine,” a nine-year-old named Valentine is caught in the undercurrents of her mother’s emotional life after her parents’ divorce.  The story’s locale is a mystery – a college town, presumably somewhere out West, somewhere not California.  California is where her father has gone.  Valentine’s landmarks, the way she knows the place she lives from anywhere and everywhere else, are the people who inhabit her home: her mother’s boyfriend, Carlo, an Italian professor at the local college, his son Jake, a mercurial 10-year-old, and, of course, her mother, whose grasping for adult intimacy veers unsettlingly toward her daughter.

“He said I have wonderful cleavage,” Valentine’s mother tells her after a night with Carlo. “Do you know what that is?” When Valentine responds that she doesn’t, her mother explains, “It’s the space between your breasts.” “Your breasts”: Meloy’s compression of telling detail speaks volumes.  We can at once feel the mother’s exultation, her childlike seeking of affirmation, the way her ego has blurred with her daughter’s, and, finally, how that blurring can only enthrall Valentine, while alienating her from the reverie of being nine years old.  A violation that isn’t quite.  The story’s title stands there itself, opaque and monolithic, outside the time of the narrative proper: half, indictment for a felt transgression, half, willful claim to pride.  Thoroughly, irrevocably, in between.

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We Gotta Get Out of This Place

“GLORY! FREAKIN! ROAD!”: The Instructions by Adam Levin

“If I knew that I could never see her again, I would have to go crazy.  Time would pass and June would become like Hashem’s revelation at Sinai, like manna, like the parting of the sea, and I’d have to suspect that maybe there never really was a June I knew, let alone a June I loved, that she was only a person I once longed to believe and failed to fully believe had ever existed. I’d tell myself lies and believe my own lies, or else I’d have to go an even worse kind of crazy.” – 10-year-old Gurion Maccabee contemplating a future without June Watermark, his girlfriend of a few days’ time

Rachel Aviv’s deft article “Which Way Madness Lies” in the December 2010 issue of Harper’s investigates the growing debate over Psychosis Risk Syndrome, a diagnosis proposed for inclusion in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the Bible of psychiatry.  Aviv solicits extremely precise soul-searching from young people who have sought clinical help for early symptoms of schizophrenia, symptoms which in their earliest stages, unfortunately, can never be as clear as day or as rigidly classifiable as the diagnosis many doctors would level.  One young woman, called Anna in the article, suggests that her feelings regarding her affliction are complicated by a sense that she as an intensely self-reflective person is “somehow actively engaged in creating it.” Writes Aviv: “By naming these experiences, she worried she had brought them into being.”

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Father Time, Lady Present

“I’m the Tympanum”: The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

“This story is no good, I’m beginning almost to believe it.” – The unnamed narrator of The Unnamable

Samuel Beckett appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show is a play that hasn’t been written yet, but should be.  It is likely because, in his prose, Beckett is so terrifyingly and comically himself – or absence of self – that writers of more recent times must seek the mediated consolations and endorsements of not standing a chance alongside his work.  As entertainment, yes, definitely; there are many things more entertaining than one hundred plus pages of unbroken text, the most basic possible description of the 1950s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.  But as serious endeavor, plea made before Father Time and his inscrutable glare, there are not many 20th century novels that can stand next to it without weeping, ‘No Fair.’

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Your Own Personal Jesus

“Playing the Saint Is Bad for One’s Health”: The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

“A small, plain-looking man, in the grip of something stronger than himself, was speaking as though he were strangling himself.  He stood there like a damned soul.  A torch was wavering at a crossroads.  He had to choose…  During those moments he became alienated from himself, and that which took hold of him was simply something alien.  But at other times he thought that it was his own self.  Then he felt himself as great and strong and irresistible as a river.  He began to urge, to scream, and to rave.  He could not contain himself, he burst his banks.  But he did not understand what he was doing.  To me he sounded like a drowning man who was screaming for help.” – The narrator of The Death of the Adversary on Hitler

Among other things, Adolf Hitler was a failed artist.  Whatever it was that denied him advancement as a painter along the artistic strata of Weimar Republic Germany—insufficiently fine technique, lack of original vision, shortage of commitment or an underlying character flaw (‘and… how,’ says History)—he was able, as firebrand and chief of the Nazi state, to pillage galleries across the country, to decree what was and was not fit for German citizens’ aesthetic appreciation.  For lack of precise criticism, brute force made for an obvious answer.  As portrayed in the 2004 German film Downfall, Hitler resembles at his end nothing so much as a megalomaniacal magazine editor, unable to grasp the fact of collapsing advertising revenue and terrified to allow crass foreigners, the invasive other, to compromise his dream of an immortal Berlin.  Alone with Nazi architect Albert Speer in a massive room where the city has been modeled in white plaster at reduced dimension, Hitler takes one last longing look, a boy forced to quit his toys forever and confront in life what it is he has done.

The name of the adversary in Hans Keilson’s WWII novel, first published in Germany of 1959 and recently re-released in the U.S. as a paperback, is never stated, a single initial serving to identify the man.  In complement, the specific identity of the narrator and his people is not made overt, only the fact that they have been singled out.  What The Death of the Adversary directly addresses is the intellectual conception of a Hitler-like figure in the mind of one of the persecuted. “In compensation for having to play the role of the vanquished,” thinks the narrator, “I conceived the intoxicating fantasy of being in an unassailably superior position, so that finally I succumbed to the idea that the way towards him and through him was the way to my own self.”

With a manuscript secreted into the hands of a stranger, Keilson’s novel begins; that stranger, a lawyer, having buried it until the war is over, subsequently presents the pages to a literary personage, to hear his estimation of their content.  This framing device encloses the novel proper, the first-person account of a man delineating his relationship, largely imagined, with an adversarial figure whose deathly ire is first petty, then pitiable, then consuming, then terrifying, then something else entirely, as it takes root in a stricken republic.

Through a sort of titanic idiocy the narrator self-identifies with his sworn enemy.  But that self-identification is no simple delusion, even if not a shred of it is present in the head of his other.  Advises a friend of the narrator, “What are you after?  You’re dissatisfied with the whole creation and rack your brains about your enemy.  You brood.  Do you think he broods over you?  He acts.”

That Dostoevskian labor of self-identification with an enemy, no matter how remote—in this case, literally, Hitler—figures, at last, as an act of heroism, a vote for humanity, no matter how doomed or prone to contradiction the effort.  Though the novel effectively ends with a joke, the breadth of its content defies any punch line.  Driven from his home, the persecuted keens:

Even if you should think—but it is not true—that you are fighting me not because I hold different opinions or have differently colored hair, or because my nose has a different shape from yours, all that you are fighting against is your own; and the more you try to keep it from yourself and do not want it to be true and cannot accept it and start cheating, the more furious becomes your fight against it in me, carried on with a hatred that is no longer on the side of life.  But there, where you are struggling with yourself, in that primal place, I want to take hold of you and be held by you; there, in that place, I stand beside you.

“A Tricky Guy”: God Says No by James Hannaham

“Disney World was the only thing I believed in as much as God.” – Gary Gray

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Only One Rule That I Know Of, Babies

“The Song of the Cerulean Warbler”: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

“Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.” – an excerpt from the autobiography of Patty Berglund, Mistakes Were Made

“She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life” runs the closing sentence of Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 breakthrough novel The Corrections. The spirit of that frangible wish for radical reinvention in any sense possible—of self, of a relationship, of the environment—holds at center his latest endeavor Freedom. A monument to a contemporary America tangled up and blue at home and abroad, Freedom teems with cultural wherewithal and satiric edge, narrative drawn in thick strokes on a broad canvas. The novel has got scope: parents and children, left and right, New York City and West Virginia, conservation and mountain top removal, Protestant work ethic and masturbation, Bob Dylan and Paul Wolfowitz, rescued songbirds and captured housecats.

A married couple washed up on the shores of middle age, Patty and Walter Berglund harbor deep uncertainties as to whether they are happy with what they have found. She is from Westchester, NY, relocated to the Midwest; he, a Minnesota native. Having been the first white couple to reclaim a Victorian on Barrier Street, the St. Paulites are thrown back on themselves when their two grown children set off to make their own way in the world. And what do Patty and Walter find? That they must also make their own way in the world: Patty absorbed by an autobiographical writing project premised on her helpless attachment to her son Joey and her nagging attraction to Walter’s best friend, a musician named Richard Katz; Walter, a risky environmental gambit funded by a Texas billionaire whereby miles on miles of untouched land in West Virginia will be stripped of mountaintops and coal and then set aside as a natural preserve for migrating cerulean warblers.

It is only around the rock ‘n roller Richard that Patty feels she can be “her unpretended true self.” And as Walter says to his assistant on the cerulean warbler initiative, a beautiful young woman of Indian descent: “I’m sorry… I’m still trying to figure out how to live.” How likely, then, that things will turn out okay?

Can there ever even be an okay in a world where, as Walter puts it to Richard, curiously echoing the late, great David Foster Wallace:

… there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.

As with The Corrections, Franzen again affirms what the novel is capable of affirming. No, really: it’s not just his media narrative. Like the underwater city of luminous beings in the finale of James Cameron’s The Abyss, only without the tens of millions of dollars in special effects and flagrant deus ex machina—special effects as deus ex machina—Freedom lifts survivors from the last ten years’ corporately published fiction to the surface. Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony, Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, Jonathan Lethem’s New Yorker story “Lucky Alan”: they’re all there, with however many others, boundaries blown outward. In even-handed, unshowy prose, Franzen channels his inner C. Wright Mills, the personal and political collapsing in to one another, along with the mulm of polite opinion, niceness and its perils, denial and its undying champions dreaming of a world transfigured.

At last, Richard knocks on the bedroom door of the woman who married his best friend: “He listened carefully, enveloped in tinnitus. ‘Patty?’ he said again.”

Courage Is Love: War by Sebastian Junger


“The glory heaped upon heroes in almost all societies might explain why young men are so eager to send themselves to war—or, if sent, to fight bravely. That would only work in a species that is capable of language, however… once our ancestors escaped the eternal present by learning to speak, they could repeat stories that would make individuals accountable for their actions—or rewarded for them.” – Sebastian Junger

American combat operations in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, “the Afghanistan of Afghanistan,” as Sebastian Junger puts it, “too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off,” began and ended with a Medal of Honor. The first went posthumously to Lt. Michael P. Murphy, a Navy SEAL who placed himself in the line of fire to radio in reinforcements for his badly outnumbered team. Those four were among the first Americans to enter the valley, on a mission to eliminate a Taliban leader. They found themselves surrounded by a force of over one hundred after allowing shepherds who had stumbled on their position to walk away; the team had put to vote whether or not to kill them and decided against it. The second was awarded just about a week ago to Sergeant Salvatore A. Giunta of Battle Company, 503rd Infantry Regiment. He is the only living recipient of the medal since the Vietnam War.

Battle Company’s service in Korengal (“about half the size of Staten Island”) is the subject of Sebastian Junger’s intimate nonfiction document War, and the accompanying film, Restrepo, which he shot and directed with photographer Tim Hetherington. Author of commercial smash The Perfect Storm, Junger was embedded with Battle Company for five months over the course of a year, June 2007 to June 2008 (American forces withdrew from the valley in April of 2010). During that time he got to know a few of the soldiers well, in particular a commando named Brendan O’Byrne. Junger’s life depended on those bonds: he accompanied Second Platoon on numerous patrols and even a few missions behind enemy lines. The experience of coming under fire he examines in great detail, describing the body’s reaction to stress as measured by heart-rate:

Complex motor skills start to diminish at 145 beats per minute, which wouldn’t matter much in a swordfight but could definitely ruin your aim with a rifle. At 170 beats per minute you start to experience tunnel vision, loss of depth perception, and restricted hearing. And at 180 beats per minute you enter a netherworld where rational thought decays…

Battle Company, Junger notes, was taking “the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion… the most contact—by far—of any in the U.S. military.”

Most of the author’s time was spent on the mountain outpost named for Second Platoon’s guitar-playing medic Juan Restrepo who died in the first few months of deployment. The improvised base overlooks the valley below, “a miraculous kind of antiparadise… heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait.” As Jonathan Franzen writes of the fictional Midwesterner Walter Berglund’s family history: “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

It is that dream of limitless freedom and the potential for its souring that Junger watches hang in balance in the minds of the men-boys around him, their humor, horseplay, boredom and belief. After not being washed for thirty-eight days uniforms “are so impregnated with salt that they can stand up by themselves.” During one of many slow moments in the cold winter months, O’Byrne states what could be the opening line of a short story: “I used to live a thousand feet above sea level, and we’d find seashells in the rocks along the side of the road.” No one has any kind of response for that, the way a mind can occupy two places at once just as geological traces of another lifetime mark a familiar landscape.

“The moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers much,” Junger writes, “and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero.” What drives them, instead: “These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive—that you can get skydiving—but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t.”

Thom Shanker of The New York Times detailed the awarding of the most recent Medal of Honor as follows:

“President Obama said ‘thank you’ for what I did,” Sergeant Giunta said in an interview from his current post in Vicenza, Italy, after getting a call from the president. “My heart was pounding out of my chest, so much that my ears almost stopped hearing. I had my wife by my side. She was holding my hand. When she heard me say, ‘Mr. President,’ she gave me a squeeze.”

–Jeff Price is a Brooklyn-based editor and writer.

“Love For Being Itself”: Marina Abramović, Di Fara Pizza and Chatroulette

On the final day of Marina Abramović’s performance at MoMA, “The Artist Is Present,” somebody tossed a manuscript from an upper balcony. Its pages peeled apart in falling, fluttering to the floor like so much confetti. One Memorial Day attendee called the sight beautiful. Inspection of a fallen page revealed font too small for ready understanding. Maybe the pages didn’t want to be understood, the spectacle of their descent their raison d’etre. While gathering them up, a guard asked the crowd to please not read the words. Nothing to see here, folks, he might have added. It was The Artist we were meant to feast our eyes on: New York City to the exhibition’s gathered United States.

Sitting opposite the temporal stream of her fifteen hundred plus guests, Serbian-born Abramović appeared massive, her red, white, and blue robes (a color per month) augmenting the size of her body. Her breathing was plainly visible, a single braid lying across her left shoulder, her posture canting to the right. Like a Central Park mime or a guard at Buckingham Palace, she held her place with seeming Zen, blinking and blinking and blinking again, face waxy with moisturizing balm. And what could we, the gathered, possibly have had to show her; what energies might we have silently transmitted?

“I wonder what she’s thinking,” a viewer mused.

“She’s writing a book,” went the earnest reply.

However true, it spoke to something: as art, only books carry the kind of monumental silence and stillness that a woman (Artist) seated in the center of the room, day after day, for months on end, brings to bear. As the program notes relayed, Abramović’s quadrant was a space where “nothing, and possibly everything” happened.

Art, it could be said, is true to everyone and faithful to no one: two thousand years ago a statue of a Roman soldier signified to its viewer a set of meanings (an ideal of manhood, the thrill of weaponry, the power of the state) that today have been reconfigured for most onlookers (a model physique, a quaint notion of violence, the ruin of empire in time). Ozymandias, and all that.

To create art is one thing; to confuse yourself with art—as only a human being after all—another: confusion at its most turbulent. And that is exactly the sort of confusion “The Artist Is Present” tempted. In this age of the watching eye, Marina Abramović invited us to share the mantle of her artistry in the most open and transparent manner possible.

Was that, in the end, truly to share at all? What would repeat sitter, Paco Blancas, say? How about “the streaker” who pulled her dress over her head before being immediately escorted from the premises by security? What of that critic who rained his pages from the upper balcony? Gathered there, what did we expect to receive? Or was it just a beautiful sort of relinquishing that her presence solicited, willingly surrendered by those who sat?

I was standing on the perimeter. Notepad in hand, like many others with notepads in hand. Or sketchpads. Or cameras. Something was happening there, and I was determined to know it by its name. Over the course of my three brief visits, one in March, one in April, and once more, on the show’s last day (“The Artist Is Leaving” they might have called it), I wrestled with the question of what to write, and how I would relate it to my passion for fiction.

Would I include an “I” in my essay, or go for more straight reportage; set ink on the Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe side of the line? And if I did include an I, would that “I” be me, purely mine and mine alone? Or a quality of self I owe in part to Marina Abramović having been present before me?

***

Considering these questions, I caught a train out to Midwood, Brooklyn, home of Di Fara Pizza. People bring their cameras, and notepads, to Di Fara too. As has been well documented, the guys know pizza. Their works of culinary genius are born in the most open and transparent manner possible. In fact, as I approached, with maybe something like a twinkle of anticipation in my eye, owner Domenico DeMarco, in apron and striped, short-sleeved button-down glanced out the sliding window at the front of the store. As if I were about to sit with him.

Or stand, as it happens. With a number of other patrons. The worn brass bulk of the cash register sports a set of ‘I Like The Pope’ stickers and a statuette of the white-robed Virgin Mary in prayer. A guy in ball-cap and apron took orders at random, as a star athlete signs autographs (who do I make it out to?), the three-tiered double ovens emitting their formative heat off to his left.

The interior walls wear the character of years, making no effort to hide their age and grit. Alongside the many, many mounted newspaper clippings heralding Di Fara Pizza’s pitch-perfect textures and flavors, a sign advises: “A group of 10 to 30 in the store can result in a delay, even of an hour or two. Yes, it may be frustrating, but perhaps the anticipation can enhance your appetite.”

Watching your pizza take shape comes with the ticket price (or if you can stand not having a slice, you’re free to stand and watch without paying a cent). Father, daughter, and sons perform—with support from others—behind a counter allowing full view of their preparations. Red tins of Salerno tomatoes are stacked behind the wooden balustrade lining the upper wall. Canisters of Vantia Olive Oil sit side-by-side above the flat expanse where dough is kneaded and spun.

It’s more often than not Dom DeMarco himself who dribbles the oil from a thin copper watering can, cuts shoots of home-grown basil with quick, sure strokes, and sprinkles the shredded parmesan before a pie in its box is released. Spinning the cheese grater, working the dough, rotating pies from counter to oven, oven to counter, then sectioning a finished pie, too hot yet for a patron to taste, into eight slices: these same motions DeMarco, his children and employees, have been practicing for decades on end, a version of perfect stillness—their perpetual motion notwithstanding. All toward the end of that most mythic phenomenon: the cross-generational, family-owned business.

Greatness is this: one grown man (like me, say) looking into the eyes of another, eyes that anywhere else would be guarded with un-recognition, to find shared ground, openness, wonder, the fact of Di Fara Pizza and an awaiting meal. Community. We arrive in Midwood, streaming desire, faces in a continuum. Most walk away ready to describe the experience in tones of amazement: you, too, should have the good fortune of knowing what I have known.

***

If knowing Di Fara Pizza is generally chalked up to good fortune, knowing Chatroulette, and what it holds in store, is more fraught. The very fires of hell, a more strictly religious guy than me might say. Some kind of fun, the shameless and sporting. An outlet, the isolated and lonely. The truth our parents hide, the young and wondering. Criminal behavior, the bearers of civic standards. Life, the tech-savvy, before hitting ‘Next.’

It is difficult to offer any single experience as representative of the Chatroulette universe, and yet that is all that Chatroulette is made of: once-in-a-lifetime meetings—here, then gone. Existentialism for dummies. These virtual interactions, cued by a mysterious algorithm—the genius of a Russian youth—take place in the blink of an eye: snap-snap-snap. The Artist is you, the space you and your webcam inhabit the context, the parade of strangers your fellow sitters. Think Reality TV confessional, the uncensored version: instead of London or Boston or San Francisco, the destination locale is your head. The narrative is post-modern in the extreme. There is someone, a person or people, on the other side, strangers in strange lands: do we need fiction no longer to help us visualize the other?

Perhaps it is no surprise, given the tempo at which most interactions occur and the freedom of apparent anonymity (and apparent safety of being a virtual being, not an accountable one, not a known entity) that many choose to let their genitals do the talking. These are the early days of the site, so a lot will change: already there is a ‘report’ button, which holds out at least the possibility of some future of regulation and pursuant shaming.

At present, though, Chatroulette is the revolution in cross-section, the anti-Facebook, a subversion of social-networking tribes, an altar to the god of chance (who may, it turns out, be nothing but a masturbating dude… not that there aren’t women out there, too). The thumbs up, the raised middle finger, the two-pronged peace symbol serve as pidgin language for some emerging universal consciousness; while this may have been the case for years, it is only now that anybody with internet access and a webcam can see that it is so.

Nouveau Edward Hopper, in close up: no more or less obscene than consuming a solitary fast-food meal separated from a city street by only a pane of glass. These are the molten edges around the plates of community, always the stuff of artistic obsession, where any given interaction can be creepy or thrilling, vacuous or revelatory, brutish or sweet.

On Chatroulette, not only do you see a stranger, you also see yourself. I am an image, you might think, and that is all: what vanity drove me to gather these herring fish words in my net? What good are they? Why not cut loose my shame, slip out of everyday masks?

In contrast, for those who decide, however reluctantly, to keep their clothes on—how much more clothed clothed people look in contrast to the others—naming is all. Pleasure lies in finding words to describe the succession of images, of people, of signifiers.

***

Unlike Marina Abramović’s recent performance (the mantle of artist so nearly tangible!), the launching pad for these stray reflections on the sunny enterprise of Di Fara pizza pies and Chatroulette’s shadow world, literary fiction—that which aspires to Literature with a capital ‘L’—is prefaced on absence. That the author is not there with you, and yet is, is exactly the fact of authorship.

Writers create a bridge that, once crossed, reveals the far to be near, the other to be self. Say Hemingway, and it is as if he is there, sitting opposite you. An idea of him persists, rooted in the continued life of his fiction. Say Tolstoy. Say Woolf.

In Charles Baxter’s short story, “Reincarnation” from the collection Believers, a tenuous community takes hold between three couples in a rural backyard one summer evening. The couples trade stories, over drink, as their faces recede in darkness. This continues in leisure until one of those present rejects the bond the gathered have carved out.

Before that happens though, the topic of incarnation is discussed, a notion of unearned love: “Whitman’s poetry is about love you don’t have to earn. It’s about love that you have or that you don’t have or that you just get or you give but not the kind that you did something to earn… It’s love for being itself.”

Call it adoration. In the search, perhaps, of love for being itself, a belief that such a feeling should exist on earth—a person should receive love just for being!—we seek out The Artist and deliver to her that love as we conceive of it in ourselves. Everyone should be so fortunate.

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor.

Photos courtesy of VividRadicalMemory and UntitledBlog.

Creeps of the World, Unite!

“To Console The Hopeless Self”: Castle by J. Robert Lennon

“‘Out!’ I said.  I suppose I was shouting.  My sister stood up, trembling, and I must admit that I expected her familiar sneer to have taken its usual place on her face.  But all I could find there was unhappiness and fear.  Fear of my reaction, perhaps.  But when a person has lived a life like hers, a life of promiscuity, rootlessness, and substance abuse, resentment and fear tend to replace all reasonable and proper emotions, and the world becomes your enemy.” -Eric Loesch

An ex-soldier with a mysterious past.  A venture into the eerily silent forest flanking a house recently purchased outside “Gettysburg, New York, population 2,310 and falling.” An albino deer that leads the protagonist to a strange castle hidden among “tightly packed maples, birches, ashes, and pines.” A confrontation with the forgotten.

If these sound at all like tropes of a conventional thriller, it is because they are.  But in the fiction of J. Robert Lennon, whatever sort of genre costume the narrative might wear, there is always something more to be peeked at beneath the outer layers, sly hints of contradiction to the façade.  Lennon’s novels fulfill the role of cool older brother spotted in the banquet-hall of a formal affair, winking, ‘Hey, kid, it’s me.’ The Harrison Ford of literary fiction, if you will: reckless, ungainly, charming.

Castle, Lennon’s latest novel, is not so big on formality even if the aforementioned protagonist, Eric Loesch, practices its art where ever he goes, a self-protective mechanism: there are things that he would rather forget.

With a blend of solipsism, presumption, and unease, Eric rebuffs the everyday friendliness of the few people with whom he must interact in purchasing the plot of land and procuring the necessary supplies for his home renovation project. “Yalp,” a local electrician named Heph opines with respect to Eric’s labors, “it’s real nice to see a house come back from the dead, as it were.”  Thinks Eric: “His backwoods charm and colloquial speech did little to dispel my sense that he was observing and testing me, gauging my reactions to his supposedly innocent comments and questions.”

When a real estate agent named Jennifer thanks him for making her day with a big sale, Eric explains that he would “prefer to keep things between us on a professional level.” His implication is not well-met.

And yet, it isn’t that he doesn’t mean well.  A children’s book, discovered in the moldy basement of his new home, speaks to him: “The book offered a character with whom I was able to identify, and a portrayal of bravery and self-reliance that corresponded very closely to my own values.  I wished only I could send the book back in time, to my younger self, in his moments of greatest need.”  For Eric, his “younger self” continues to exist, marooned in time—surely a sympathetic trait.  He simply happens to be a guy grown accustomed to a hostile world.  The reasons for that lurk in the shadowy recesses of the house he has purchased and the castle deep in the silent woods and the unacknowledged confines of his own painful history.

Researching the identity of the house’s former owner, Eric converses with a professor at the local college, who is compelled to respond to his challenge in the following manner:

“All I meant,” she said slowly, “was that, in the wake of the sixties, and of our military adventures abroad, most intelligent people have absorbed the idea that none of us is ever very far from emotional collapse.” When I offered no reply, she went on.  “Our personalities are complex, but the animal instincts they conceal are stronger, and not very far below the surface.” She met my stare and said, “Don’t you agree, Mr. Loesch?”

Castle is a novel about shame, the inchoate and unnamed rearing up its ugly face, the best built defenses helpless to prevent it.  Eric has a passion for restoring the run-down and surveying the uncharted; other people, no matter what emotions might blip across the sonar of his self-perception, signal a threat: fear or disgust.  And yet… he knows… he knows… there is… someone… else… out there.  While harboring resentment, even rage, for his long estranged sister’s perceived lifestyle, Eric, an intelligent man, has managed to make a relative nullity of his life, lacking for nourishing social ties (akin to Marilynne Robinson’s Jack Boughton) and taking refuge in the creaking home whose former owner may well have been his one-time mentor.

“Did the family ever imagine, as they sat together around the table, that this room might someday be empty of everything but cobwebs and dust?”: In short, Eric is a creep, convinced, perhaps rightly, of a greater creepiness’s existence, itself a creepy thing to dwell on.  Lennon employs the means of thriller convention (“He was here—I knew it.  The moment had come”/ “At last, I faced my nemesis.”/ “I was, at last, inside the castle.”), the ends of which are sales and movie adaptations, to turn the story around, as it were, and cast a hard look at the face peering in.  Which is, of course, only the face that Lennon imagines.  Though, as anyone who has read Mailman knows, his imagination in regard to male creepiness is more than fertile.

“Surprises Are Good But Not When They Are Eternal”: The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter

“‘If you had disappeared, if you had died, we would have… we would have become you.  We would have taken you on.  We would have turned into you.’ He waits. ‘You would have lived in us.’” –Jerome Coolberg to Nathaniel Mason

“Everyone needs to be saved, right now, instantly saved from history itself, the factuality of it.”: For all the submerged horrors he has faced, one thing Eric Loesch can count himself fortunate never to have experienced is a roomful of partying grad students.  Now it is there that the unnerving truly underlies everything said and done, the amassed ambition, swirling anxiety, identities in seemingly permanent flux.  What type of grad students, you ask?  Well, their physical location is Buffalo, NY, but, more than that, Charles Baxter’s latest novel The Soul Thief does not state.  Something to do with art, suffice it to say; perhaps, music, or literature, or philosophy.  The exact subject of their studies rests beside the fact of their immersion in each other’s example, the figure each cuts.

Or figures, rather.  At least, when it comes to Jerome Coolberg, whose name, the narrator Nathaniel Mason acknowledges, “sounds fictional and implausible, a poor effort at whimsy.” While the shambolic factor is subtextual in Lennon’s Castle, here it occupies a position in the novel’s foreground, enacted through the shenanigans of Mr. Coolberg and ultimately driven by him to such lengths as to resemble nothing so much as art.

Says a partygoer of “whiz-kid sage” Coolberg at the grad school gathering where Nathaniel makes his acquaintance: “He’s the first person I’ve known who can be in two places at once.  He’s dislocated.  Not a joint or a knee—the whole person.” When Nathaniel and his impromptu date Theresa find Coolberg holding court in one corner of the old house, Nathaniel observes how his voice has “a pleading note, halfway between seduction and distress, and an intelligent gentleness that is all the more alarming for its measured calm, its burnt-over benumbed despair.” As well, Coolberg insists that he be called either “Jerome” or “Coolberg.” Never “Jerry.”

Another important question, though: who is Nathaniel?  An earnest observer, a good looking guy, a transplant from the Midwest (his father: “a patiently good man who seemed to relish his nonentity status, his lack of individuality”), Nathaniel also takes great satisfaction in volunteering at The People’s Kitchen, a local pantry founded to lend aid to those who cannot afford a warm meal.  When he returns to his apartment one night to find a burglar rooting through his shirt-closet, he decides to have a chat with the man, bidding him when he makes his belated exit: “Drop by again.  Just knock next time.” Every so often Nathaniel receives a phone call from his mute sister, Catherine, to whom he feels obligated to recount the events of his day, believing that “the stories keep her alive.”

Generous and well-intentioned, perhaps to a fault, Nathaniel’s heart is divided between two women: Theresa, whom he meets in a rain-dappled park en route to that initial party—she is a Midwestern transplant much like himself, if also, like Coolberg, a student of the striking image—and Jamie Esterson, a sweet, mothering sculptor, who lives a solitary existence full of fleeting, all-consuming passions.  It also happens that she identifies as a lesbian.  No matter: a recovering Catholic, Jamie finds herself drawn to Nathaniel’s virtues, in the original sense of the term.  “You make me nervous,” she tells him.  “You’re too available.  You need to be more vigilant.  Close yourself down a little.  Men shouldn’t be like you.”

One of these entanglements quickly becomes more serious than the other, while, not to be forgotten, along totters Coolberg, trailing Nathaniel’s literal and figurative footsteps.  There is this novel he is working on, you see: “The strain of loving two women is one that few men can withstand,” the aspiring great professes to Nathaniel, “Even Ezra Pound lost his mind by loving two women.  This young man, this character named Ambrose, develops an antipathy to daylight because in his doubleness, his double-heartedness, he fears that he will meet himself on the sidewalk coming toward himself from the opposite direction.”

Steadily, the moment is forced toward its crisis.

When the smoke clears, decades have passed, Nathaniel having returned to the Midwest, a suburban home, two boys, a loving and “frighteningly guileless” wife.  Regularly at night, a show called “American Evenings” plays on the radio, one whose host happens to be that old classmate of Nathaniel’s, Jerome Coolberg.  It is a show Nathaniel has paid attention to from time to time, in spite of himself, marveling at Coolberg’s technique of making himself at once invisible and omnipresent.  All these years later, Nathaniel’s feelings for Jamie abide in his heart, memory of their relationship’s dissolution still fresh:

“This is desperation you’re witnessing,” he says, gripping her.  All at once, the thought occurs to him that what he’s expressing is not love but hysteria, rising out of his own emptiness.  He is in the grip of inflated speech, exaggeration, all the insincere locutions of opacity and self-deception.  He is becoming, he feels with sudden queasy recognition, like a character in a plot dreamed up by someone like Coolberg.

Nathaniel’s chance to address the unresolved arrives one evening in the form of a call from that very Coolberg, inviting his old acquaintance out to L.A., for a talk like those on the show he hosts.  But this one will transpire without the studio set.  Nathaniel accepts the invitation, once again, in spite of himself.  He meets with Coolberg at Chateau Marmont, or a scene very like it, and together, the two venture out toward Santa Monica.  Nathaniel waxes poetic: “Night dropped its black lace around us.” Time plays onward through drinks and rehashing of the past until Nathaniel finds himself in Coolberg’s apartment, its mystery at last revealed to him:

The rooms looked like the temporary unsupervised housing of someone with a ravening spiritual hunger, a grandiloquent vacancy that would consume anything to fill up the interior space where a soul should be.  Books were piled and stacked everywhere.  Behind this craving resided an urge as strong as love.

Baxter—yes, Baxter: where has he gone in this account?—has written a novel that ought to last for as much time as there is between here and forever.  The Soul Thief is the coolest book to have read, and never admit to having read.  Perhaps the creepiest two sentences of all fall in the novel’s final section, oddly resonating, as they do, with Lennon’s Castle: “Nathaniel Mason enters the silent house.  I can easily imagine it.”

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor.

Loss is a Many Splendored Thing

“Roisterous Calliope”: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

“I got an understanding of how terrible love can be.  You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself.  It’s crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it.  But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.”  – The narrator, a Viking, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”

Let’s say that there are two ways to read a work of fiction: to live a character’s experience as your own, or else, to view the character and his journey from the redoubt of your own identity, clear or unclear as it may be; that is, to fathom something deeper about the world, something that might otherwise be alien to your daily experience.  Dressing up on Halloween, we do the former; watching the news from our dens, the latter.  Call them the zombie versus the vampire attitudes toward a story: one always galumphing forward in pursuit of a live meal, the other, lurking in the confines of a shadowy castle, waiting for the arrival of fresh blood.

The characters, overwhelmingly male, who populate Wells Tower’s stories in the collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are zombie-like in their appetites, careening forward on a haphazard path, always open to contingency, never ending up quite where they—or we—expect.  Embodiments of a rollicking, if not often neat, zest for experience, most suggest personalities who read themselves into the shoes of the characters found in fiction, as they venture out beyond the safely delineated bounds of any prescribed identity.  And many, it happens, are individuals who have lost something dear.

Jacey, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of “Wild America,” has lost to divorce her father as a comforting presence in her life, and stands to lose much more in an encounter with a much older dude whom she finds ensconced on a flat rock in the middle of a stream.  She steps “with care across the algae-sueded rocks that [lead] out to the little island” where he is sunbathing.  A day that begins innocently enough as a date with an awkward classmate named Leander diverts to an impromptu walk through the forest near Jacey’s suburban Charlotte home at the behest of her pleasant-on-the-eyes cousin, Maya. (Maya earlier informs Jacey that she has tired of her relationship with a picture-perfect boy her own age and now plans to embark anew with an assistant director at the Governor’s School for the Performing Arts, where Maya is a student).

The kids share a joint—Maya’s, of course—while looking down the hill toward the stream, where the dude has just made himself at home in the sun with radio and beer.  When Maya begins to flaunt her allure by encouraging a flattered Leander to dance with her (she lowers him “in a competition-grade dip”), Jacey becomes enraged, calls Maya a slut, and storms down the hill toward her waiting corrupter.  The dude, Stewart Quick (at least that’s what he calls himself), has suffered a loss of his own: an arm, ripped off in an industrial washing machine and reattached only after his mother browbeat the doctors in the ER to salvage what they had deemed unsalvageable.  In her honor then, Quick’s damaged arm is covered in tattoos of his mother’s face.  Innocence and its perhaps inevitable endangerment is a recurring theme in Tower’s story collection.  This is an author who seems always ready to extend a little sympathy to the devil.

The language in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a delight, by turns uproariously comic and surprisingly deft, the dialogue mischievous, the trappings drawn mostly from what was once regarded the exclusive province of males (tensioners, pivot bolts, pulley grooves, scrollsaw work, Minwax sheets of bead-board wainscotting, carriage-welded class-four trailer hitches, moose-hunting, mountains in Maine).  A middle-aged son reflects on the cavortings of his increasingly senile father one afternoon in Washington Square Park: “A love of strangers, a fearlessness with them, had always been one of my father’s gifts.  A connoisseur of the chance encounter, he would have tried to speak the language of cockatoos if one touched down beside him.”  A boy, at odds with his domineering stepfather, reflects on the land surrounding his parents’ home after finding a flyer for an exotic lost pet: “With the leopard out there, the woods seem famous now.” A recent arrival in Florida admires his new acquaintance’s wife as she emerges from the sea: “She stopped and braceleted a dark thigh with her fingers, easing her hand down the length of her leg, stripping the water off in silver peels.”

A young runaway who finds work at a carnival (“You stand there and they pay you for it,” he thinks) finds his emotions stirred in favor of a girl who delights in the ride he must watch over:

She’s perpetually sucking the phosphorescent candy they sell at the fair.  Each time Jeff Park tugs her lap bar to be sure it’s locked down tight, he steals a glimpse of the pale green light glimmering behind her teeth, a light of both desolation and comfort, the light of a lone cottage window on an empty street.  He thinks it’s there for him.

Tower’s stories offer a vision of an America exuberant and all-embracing, if, maybe for that very reason, destined to folly, and sometimes something darker.  Folly which—dark or no—can prove its own end, and not an entirely unpleasurable one at that.

“Industry Is The Enemy of Melancholy”: Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley

“I rather like breathing.  Still, I wonder if our obsession with longevity is entirely… healthy. ‘Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death,’ wrote William Hazlitt, ‘is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.  There was a time when we were not; this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?’” – Christopher Buckley

And in that epigraph, perhaps, we have an explanation for conservative resistance to health care reform.  But, no, that is not a fair judgment of the work of a writer who famously threw his hat in the ring for Barack Obama—at the cost of his slot on the masthead of the publication his father founded (The National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr.).  And especially unfair in opening a review of an elegantly concise and revealing account of losing two parents in less than a year.  If it isn’t Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis then it is not wholly alien in breadth and scope: where Mr. Eggers’ book documents youthful flight from tragic circumstance, Christopher Buckley provides a seasoned and unflinching confrontation with the inevitable, where what is offered is nothing less than a literary representation of the last days of modern conservatism’s “founder and primum mobile,” a great writer of our time—say what you will about his politics, it’s hard to deny William F. Buckley, Jr. that.

“I’m not sure how this book will turn out,” runs the introduction to Losing Mum and Pup,  “I mostly write novels, and I’ve found, having written half a dozen, that if you’re lucky, the ending turns out a surprise and you wind up with something you hadn’t anticipated in the outline.”  While noting that he is at heart a satirist, Buckley begins his treatment of a most personal (and many might think unfunny) subject by dwelling on the theme of orphanhood, a major artery in the thoroughfare of American Literature.  Curious, as Buckley suggests, to be over fifty and still identify so strongly with a figure like Huckleberry Finn; no wonder that as bodies age most people do not find it easy to let go their attachment to figments of youth, an attachment that can well seem to signify life itself.

For it is only the great, the great will have you know, who can look back on a life lived and measure it in terms of their abiding works—and his father was such a great, Buckley avers in modest fashion, while not hesitating to depict the man in his failing hours (“Pup’s daily intake of pills would be enough to give Hunter Thompson pause”).  “Once they’re both gone, your parents’ house instantly turns into a museum,” he writes,  “Every trace of them you see, you imagine inside a glass display case, along with a plaque or caption.  This red pen was used by William F. Buckley Jr.  These sunglasses belonged to William F. Buckley Jr.”

Not solely a meditation on death, the manner in which flesh finally turns cold and immutable—so that viewing the body in its coffin Buckley is careful to touch only his father’s hair, which retains its living semblance—the memoir paints an adoring, if sometimes challenging, son’s portrait of his parents in life, a vision more powerful for the fact of their having departed this “vale of tears” (a favorite expression of WFB’s).

Buckley credits his mother’s ferocious wit as a chief spur to his own literary endeavors (“Her fluent mendacity, combined with adamantine confidence, made her truly indomitable… whatever talent I possess as a ‘humorist’—dreadful word—I owe to her”), and records his father’s various tried and true expressions with brief entries as to their meaning (I wouldn’t worry about it: “WFB speak for ‘The conversation is over’”).  In so far as he is willing to deny subscription to his father’s form of Catholicism (a belief which, likewise, Patricia Aldyen Austin Buckley, did not share), Buckley also renders a portrait of the man in his finest hours.

When the call from his wife came in early 2007 that his mother’s death was imminent, Buckley found himself in the state of Virginia at Washington and Lee University for a speaking engagement in his own honor (the novelist appreciates the praise of admirers since those closer to home were not always so generous; about his then most recent novel Boomsday, his father only emailed, “This one didn’t work for me.  Sorry.  xxB”).  Of his car ride through stormy weather back to Stamford, Connecticut, Buckley observes, true to English major form: “Rain on the way to mother’s deathbed: Right, I thought, the objective correlative: the outward aspect mirroring the inner aspect.”

Mrs. Buckley’s memorial service, which her son was entrusted to arrange, was held in the Temple of Dendur at the MET, where Mrs. Buckley was a leading patron.  Each program featured the eulogy written by his father, one that WFB “couldn’t bring himself to deliver a cappella in the shadow of the old Egyptian goddess.” The eulogy read, in part, “I offered to paint her fingernails, and she immediately extended her hand, using the other one on the telephone.” At the event, son depicts father thusly: “Poor Pup, poor desolate man—his face was flushed, livid, scarlet with grief.”

When, not very long after, his father’s time arrived (Buckley having spent months away from his own family to help attend to him), reactions varied.  W. called to say, “He was quite a guy.”  Gore Vidal, with whom the elder Buckley held a bitter public feud in decades past, labeled the deceased in print, with twisted passion, “a hysterical queen” and “a world-class American liar,” not failing to add “RIP WFB—in hell.” Far more numerous, though, were the plaudits.

Over the course of his final years, WFB took delight in Google Alerts of his name, often asking that his son read to him from each.  Once news of the great man’s death at his desk, surrounded by “an eagle’s nest of printed matter—newspapers, magazines, books—CDs, tissue boxes, and sundry detritus,” escaped into the world, Christopher Buckley could not help but marvel: “Boy, how he’d have loved this, the mother of all WFB Google news alerts.”

Near the end of his memoir, Buckley writes:

How did it turn out, Pup?  Were you right after all?  Is there a heaven?  Is Mum there with you?  (Grumbling, almost certainly, about the “inedible food.”) And if there is a heaven and you are in it, are you thinking, Poor Christo—he’s not going to make it. And is Mum saying, Bill, you have got to speak to that absurd creature at the Gates and tell him he’s got to admit Christopher.  It’s too ridiculous for words.

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor

On The Vanguard

All fiction was about the same thing to Frank Wilder: the crime of his never having been published. Once a reader advanced beyond the great divide of 1945 to enter the furious stew of the modern moment, any novel, Frank felt, was fair game to be scorned. He thought often on the direction of American Literature in the last half century, the opposing poles represented by Mailer and Salinger; the slow death of the important American novel through the 70s and early 80s, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan as president and, across the Atlantic, the ascendancy of Martin Amis; the recognition of the Academy Awards Ceremony in Los Angeles as a forum of the greatest artistic seriousness; the recent onslaught of poseurs with their image-driven facsimiles of literary gravity, all of whom Frank took the liberty of referring to as “that guy,” regardless of gender: Kerouac (too vacuous), Percy (too Christian), Capote (too jaded), Pynchon (too cartoony), Wolfe (too bombastic), Updike (too flighty), DeLillo (too male), Roth (too Roth), Morrison (too praised), McInerney (too clipped), Rushdie (too shallow), Coover (too madcap), Oates (too morbid), Wideman (too fevered), Moody (too threadbare), Moore (too much), Franzen (too withering), Homes (too demented), Lethem (too ridiculous), Hempel (too elusive), Johnson (too tangled), Munro (too perfect), Chabon (too indulgent), Lahiri (too successful); the list went on—not one of them like him, not one of them just so. On more gracious days he could admit to the merit of a global contemporary like Arundhati Roy for having written one good novel, and then quit—and, when inclined to reach further back into the past, Fyodor Dostoevsky, for the sheer breadth of his comedy and rage. In the end, Frank’s unsteady feelings before a fictive page amounted to one certainty: there had to be a place for him.

“A writer of considerable talent”: the words that had brought Frank to Brooklyn. It seemed like decades ago that someone, a high school teacher, inscribed them on a story he had written, and only Frank had not forgotten. He took the praise to heart, held it there and, upon graduating from college, moved with his girlfriend to Park Slope.

In the back of their narrow studio, across the open entrance to the kitchen, hung a tattered American flag a Republican uncle had given him when he turned nine. The flag had touched the ground many times since the days when he raised it at his father’s behest—up the fifteen-foot pole next to the pool in the backyard that rang out when the rope snapped against it. The colors on the flag were faded, but, aesthetically, it pleased him. With the lights in the kitchen on, and those in the foyer out, red and blue prisms fell across the weathered couch and framed photographs on the wall.

Sometimes, Frank reclined on the couch alone in his favorite trousers, slate grey and orange plaid, with forest green suspenders, frayed and faded from nearly a century’s wear. The attire had belonged to Frank’s grandfather, Irving Wilder, himself once an aspiring novelist. Other times Frank shared the couch with Lena, his girlfriend—also his best reader—and admired the aleatoric way that the flag’s color scheme embraced her angular bangs.

Their Park Slope apartment was located in the southern outskirts of the neighborhood. Frank bought a queen-sized mattress and scarlet sheeting and laid it right on the floor. Outside, men and women in seemingly identical striped, sleeveless shirts pressed down the block. From a window, Frank watched them go by. It was what he did instead of smoking cigarettes. An Off Track Betting depot around the corner attracted low-talking clusters of wishful thinkers. Cats peeked out from under the chassis of parked cars.

“My boss is the plague in human form,” Lena said one day over lunch, at a sidewalk café, “She’s like the human dating virus. Literally everyday, the woman has a new adventure to embarrass herself with. It’s just so—ugh. Incessant. She doesn’t know how to stop! She can’t!”

Lena worked as an editorial assistant at a widely purchased fashion mag; she harbored serious respect for ripening trends. Her boss and her father were two favorite topics of conversation. Seeing Frank chafe under the weight of his modestly paying job, a visible discomfort in letting her settle the bill, she often mentioned her father.

In the mornings, she began more and more frequently to allude to the pigeons outside on their kitchen windowsill. They clustered there and cooed, as light emerged on the earth from some unseen source. Frank could hear them as he turned again to face his Santa-beard of shaving cream in the bathroom mirror. His expression was serious.

During the week Frank earned pay as the guy at the information desk of the local branch of Burns & Porter, a corporate super-bookstore whose name possessed such currency in the modern era that to invent a fictional alternative for it seemed hysterically futile. In the stories Frank wrote about someone working for Burns & Porter, the store was always Burns & Porter, never something else. Both in his stories and real-life, people arrived after having seen mention of a particular novel’s title on daytime TV and ordered one or two of those to go, maybe grabbing the famous face magazine Lena worked for off the rack while waiting in line for check-out. Modern fiction gone bad, image reigning supreme, nobody knew anything anymore, thought Frank, coolly returning the look of another customer whose unconscious gaze had affixed on his vintage suspenders.

Work, such as it was at Burns & Porter, consisted mainly of learning to obey managers and the older hands. Another important facet of the job was feigning solicitousness toward every sort of idiot customer. It drove Frank nearly mad; on the page his characters courted ever deepening darkness.

**

This morning they are at the breakfast table that Lena insisted be placed in one corner of the narrow kitchen. Granola crunches between Frank’s teeth, the slices of banana soft and sweet on his tongue. Before breakfasting with Lena, Frank had never been a guy to include banana in his breakfast bowl. Seemed somehow too dainty. But with her around, things are different.

Lena is peering at him, or maybe past him, toward the grated window immediately behind him. She flutters the open section of the Sunday Times, then closes it, letting it rest atop the others in her lap. She takes a two-handed sip from her coffee mug, lowering her head to its steaming mouth.

Then she looks at Frank and asks, “Do you love me?”

Frank sets the spoon back in his breakfast bowl. Her eyes hold his for a moment, desperate with the question, then she seems to recede into herself, gone vague in some interior space.

Frank imagines how he will describe her in the novel he is writing; how her type will become the type that all the young seekers emulate; how his novel will be a smash, resurrecting the pursuit of serious fiction across the nation, undoing years of shame and neglect; how the two of them will jump together into a fountain, like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; how they will, in this manner, alter history’s irrevocable course; and how, finally, as figments on a page, be granted life eternal.

What Frank says to her now should resonate. He pictures the day awaiting him—the hours in the information booth, followed by a solitary lunch, then the evening before his keyboard, where he will catapult himself once more into empty space, beating back all doubt to bring home the future lives that he and Lena must share.

“Love is funny,” he listens to himself say, “Isn’t it? Just what two people make out of nothing.”

From the sill the pigeons coo.

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor.

Secular Exiles & Prodigal Returns

prodigal_son“One Groove’s Difference”: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

 

“Maybe the Golden Fang had sailed on to its fate, gathering those who hadn’t found their way to shore deeper into whatever complications of evil, indifference, abuse, despair they needed to become even more themselves.  Whoever they were.  Maybe Shasta had escaped all that.  Maybe she was safe.”  – Larry “Doc” Sportello, entertaining ‘maybes’

Practically speaking, the business of a private eye arises from the exercise of paranoia.  To see around appearances, you might entertain every manner of phantom notion, and it’s only as false leads drop away that the truth will become isolated, more often than not cloaked in silence.  Ain’t that just the way with evil?  Only in cartoon life would a Bernie Madoff, bound in rope, choose to fess up to Scooby and the gang: “Yes, I did it.  And here is how.  And here is why… woulda got away with it, too, if not for you rascally kids!” Cartoon life, or some kind of spiritual echo chamber, maybe.

The fiction of Thomas Pynchon has always enjoyed an easy relationship to paranoia and cartoons.  Evil, too.  Inherent Vice, then, his latest novel, a play on the hard-boiled—or seriously baked—detective tale is not such a departure from previous work, even if the edges appear rounded to the naked eye.

Principal in this “glittering mosaic of doubt” figures one Larry “Doc” Sportello, affable stoner and PI, whiteboy afro on his head, huaraches on his feet.  A hippie with a gun, he’s a denizen of surf village Gordita Beach, CA, a locale lost in time somewhere between the 60s and 70s.  Doc has love for old movies, particularly those starring John Garfield (a blacklisted movie star of the 40s and 50s), and hate for contemporary TV hit The Mod Squad, which he sees propagating the myth of Cop-as-Everyman, paving to the earth the part once played in popular consciousness by PIs.

No matter.  Even as a self-conscious member of an endangered species, Doc is more than happy to ask questions about a married real estate mogul named Mickey Wolfmann, who his “ex-old lady” Shasta Fay happens to be seeing.  Of course, the investigation begins at Shasta’s request (“You were always true,” she tells Doc).  And when these initial, nearly innocent questions lead to more vexed questions, and the vexed to the outright thorny, Doc doesn’t hesitate (too much) in keeping after the figurative ball, even if he’d rather be watching the Lakers play in the NBA Finals.  The trick being to talk to the right people, adopt the right guise, and not forget to pack a few joints.

It doesn’t take long before Mickey and Shasta both have disappeared.  So it is that Doc sets out, behind the manner of cool, to identify the agent(s) of evil pulling the strings at a classy outfit called Golden Fang Enterprises.  Beyond Gordita Beach and the flagging myth of the American West (the Manson trials provide backdrop to Doc’s pursuit and obsessive fodder for his imaginative life), the investigation comes to center on two persons: Coy Harlingen, revenant surf band sax soloist and Zelig-like chameleon, and Lt. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, investigating officer in the Mickey Wolfmann case and general pain in Doc’s ass.

Not long after Shasta’s disappearance, Doc receives a call from Coy Harlingen’s would-be widow, Hope: she’s not sure that her husband’s really dead.  Married with a child, they were stuck in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of addiction and longing.  Heroin to her represented “freedom—from that endless middle-class cycle of choices that are no choices at all.” And when Doc catches up to him, Coy sees it nearly the same way: “We’d get fucked up and just sit there and go, ‘We’re draggin each other down, what’re we gonna do?’ and then end up doing nothing…” The answer, it seems, was provided by Golden Fang Enterprises: fake his own death, and Coy could become a well-paid counter-subversive.  “A spy… a snitch, a weasel,” is how Coy, in self-hatred, sees it.  “A very well-paid actor,” is what the guys in the suits call it, “and without groupies or paparazzi or know-nothing audiences to worry about.” When they sweetened the offer to include a set of false teeth, Coy, with his heroin-ravaged choppers, was sold.  Only now he finds himself cut off, adrift between feelings for his wife and child, and the duty he’s bound to fulfill:

Doc knew that tone of voice and hated it.  It reminded him of too many vomit-spattered toilets, freeway overpasses, edges of cliffs in Hawaii, always pleading with men younger than himself distraught with what they were so sure was love.  It was actually why he’d quit doing matrimonials.

On the other hand, there is Bigfoot Bjornsen.  In so far as a spouse can be seen as a constant companion who incessantly reminds you of your shortcomings, Doc’s might as well be his badge-toting doppelganger, “the LAPD’s own Charlie Manson,” as Doc puts it, “the screamin evil nutcase right at the heart of that li’l cop kingdom.” Everywhere Doc goes, Bigfoot seems to follow soon after, and soon enough, it becomes unclear whether Bigfoot is trailing Doc, or leading him.

Haunted by Hunter S. Thompson’s “high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back,” or lost idealism of the 60s, Inherent Vice culminates in meditation on the collective, more genuine life that once seemed close enough to touch, just a people’s movement away from realization.  A friend of Doc’s has arrived at the myth of a vanished civilization to represent something akin to this disappearing dream.  About the lost city, Lemuria, Doc later reflects:

People in this town saw only what they’d all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free.  What good would Lemuria do them?  Especially when it turned out to be a place they’d been exiled from too long ago to remember.

Which is a lot of weight for any hard-boiled—or seriously baked—detective tale to bear.

“The Ballad of Lost Children”: Home by Marilynne Robinson

“It is the desire of the tattered moth for the shining star that has brought me home, little sister.” – Jack

The prodigal observances run like this: “I’m sorry,” he says.  Followed shortly by the dissonant smile, or a surprised laugh (as if to ask: how did this happen?  Or, where did I go awry?).  Maybe even a hand raised to hide his face, touching “the nick of scar” beneath his eye.  An action taken time and again, with nearly the regularity of those sanctified by Sunday ritual.

His believing sister’s unvarying response: a generosity of tears.

In her most recent novel, Home, Marilynne Robinson has set herself the task of creating a work of lasting import that lives up to its title, a tall order if ever there was one.  After more than twenty years of waiting since the release of Housekeeping, we readers have been fortunate enough to receive in the past five years the critical and popular success Gilead and, now, as of fall 2008, its sister fiction, also set in Iowa of 1956.

It is almost beside the point to say that she succeeds.

Like a fissure running across the novel’s pages the prodigal observances appear with such regularity (“I’m sorry,” he says, with that smile or that laugh, that shame-covering hand, the finger raised to touch the nick of scar) that some readers—one fresh from the work of Thomas Pynchon, for example—may find their hearts thundering with impatience at the page’s staid serenity, burning with a desire to exclaim, ‘For crying out loud, man!  Stop it!’ But he can’t hear you, Robinson’s protagonist, and that is exactly the point.  Jack is alone, and deeply so.

More properly, Jack is John Ames Boughton, son of the reverend Robert Boughton, who for years has served as the Presbyterian minister in the small, middle-American (and fictional) town of Gilead.  The name “John Ames” comes from Boughton’s lifelong friend, the still active Congregationalist minister (whose memoirs to his young son comprise the full text of Gilead).  Ames, reinvigorated by a late marriage to a much younger woman named Lila (having lost his first wife in childbirth) and the arrival of a son, Robby (named after the elder Boughton), claims to be able to picture his ailing friend with “that lace bonnet sitting on the top of [his] head,” decked as he once was in the threads of infancy.  The two men meet on a near weekly basis, the ambulatory Ames arriving at Boughton’s house to discuss the concerns of his congregation, as well as the pressing matters of the day, at least as they register to the two old friends: “Eisenhower or Dulles or baseball or Egypt.”

“Egypt will have consequences,” Boughton declares.

On politics, Ames simply avers, “Stevenson is a very fine man, no doubt,” meaning that he will never vote for him.  Boughton, of course, sees it the other way.

Newly arrived on the scene is Boughton’s youngest child Glory (there are eight Boughton children in all). At thirty-eight, she has just returned from a protracted engagement that failed: the man was already married, a secret she keeps from her father; one night she deposited over four hundred of their letters in the sewer.  Glory is surprised by the transformation in her father, ambivalent about the role she is expected to play in his house (caretaker to both him and the family trappings, his expectation being that she will maintain it like a museum, with pieces that include: “the table and sideboard with their leonine legs and belligerently clawed feet, like some ill-considered, doily-infested species of which they were the last survivors”).  In Old Boughton the ravages of age are in plain view, and yet the sight of him is not without passing beauty: “His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.” Much of Glory’s father’s time is spent in agonizing on the well-being of Jack, whom neither he nor Glory has seen in twenty years.

Then he is there on the front porch, the handful of false cues that he might soon arrive instantly forgiven.  The well spoken son of a preacher man, Jack has been shedding skins now for years, most recently in the restorative embrace of a woman named Della, with whom he lived for some time in St. Louis.  This confession he makes to Glory.  Della, who is black, has recently been taken up by her father and brothers to return to the family home in Memphis; Jack’s only means of communicating his longing for her is through letters, which go unanswered.

Wearied and worn by the world, Jack remains adamant in his refusal to accept his father’s faith, “I wished very much at the time that I could have been, you know, a hypocrite.  But I just didn’t have it in me.  My one scruple.  And it has cost me dearly.” When Glory invests in a television for the three relative strangers to gather around, conversation runs like mercury from the tried and true to an underlying strife more difficult to address with politesse: for example, recent events in Montgomery, Alabama.  Or the murder of Emmett Till.  As father and son vie over social outrages that demand redress (the son’s cause) and the state of the younger’s soul (the father’s), Glory, in her abundance of empathy, seeks to ensure nothing more than peace of mind for them both.  This, in spite of her own lingering emotions, a feeling of unease at occupying her father’s house, of futility at expending further effort on Jack, who can be, to say the least, difficult.  “I really am nothing,” he tells her.  “Nothing, with a body.  I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble.” And, again and again, he makes the prodigal observances.

As students of American history, we know that Gilead—small town middle America—will soon change forever (on the light side, check out Bill Bryson’s “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,” on the dark, Nick Reding’s “Methland,” and somewhere in between, Ron Power’s “Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore”).  The fires that animate Jack’s passion will consume the town where he feels he cannot remain.  Old Boughton and Ames debate whether God’s existence in the universe allows for the possibility that a person might change (“A person can change,” Lila declares, “Everything can change”).  While, steadfastly, Glory keeps watch, making the gentlest observations of her wayward brother:

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us.  As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life.  In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored.  At home.  But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor. He held the position of Associate Editor at Electric Literature in 2009.  Find him here.