I used to wonder whether I would ever meet another flawed but lovable fictional character such as Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom from John Updike’s monumental Rabbit Tetralogy, and one written by a novelist who can similarly capture the times in which we live. I have, and that protagonist is Charlie Barnes, known throughout A Calling for Charlie Barnes by his ironic moniker, “Steady Boy” and the author of this dazzling novel is Joshua Ferris.
This is not an Updike knock-off but Updikean nonetheless. Ferris gives more than a hat tip to his predecessor describing Charlie as "a fairly standard midcentury model, Updikean in his defects and indulgences." We feel for this Everyman, one who is caught up in the American dream of success, only to be kicked around by the times we live in, his addiction to get rich quick schemes, and the demands of his four children (one of whom is hardly mentioned and another is Ferris’ alter ego, a writer of course, but who came into the Barnes clan as a foster child). And finally, there are his four ex-wives and now his fifth, all with interesting names, just a hint of the black comedy that permeates the novel.
Sue Starter was naturally his first wife (“Sure, he’d married young. Nineteen years old – just ridiculous. The only way they could…you know. Although technically, little Jerry was along his way”). That was 1959. Divorced. Then in 1970 along came “the first of two Barbaras, Barbara Lefurst…the woman of his dreams, his life partner, his soul mate. Just kidding: his second marriage, forged over whiskeys…was a classic rebound and lasted all of six months.” By now we are getting the idea of the shifting narrative voice and its comic tone.
Amusingly, his third wife is named Charley Profitt. They become Charlie and Charley and it’s the only time in his life he is out of scheming and meaningless jobs, working in social services at “Old Poor Farm” and even moonlighting as the director of a community theatre. They have a daughter, Marcy, and take in foster children, including our narrator, Jake. Charley admires Charlie until he goes back to his “Steady Boy” ways. “Move in the direction of love and life gets harder.”
Number four is Evangeline, who takes Jake in, watches soap operas with him, a cozy time for Jake, and then comes the second Barbara, appropriately named Barbara Ledeux (who never acknowledges his marriage to Lefurst – Ledeux would prefer to be known at the first Barbara and as far as she’s concerned he was married “only” four times).
Ledeux is an ER nurse, a profession which aligns with Ferris’ central event for moving the plot along; Charlie has, then does not have, then has the "big kahuna" of cancers, pancreatic. I think this is the only novel I’ve read where I can actually laugh at anything remotely related to the disease that took my own father’s life and one of my best friends before he turned 60.
This peripatetic lover of women, and of failed entrepreneurial schemes (“Clown In Your Town” a franchise pursuit, and the “Doolander” a frisbee toupee are but two of those), normally plotting in his basement office for the next big idea, now holds what he thinks to be a trump card – the threat of pancreatic cancer – to harass his enemies (anyone he perceives as profiting from the 2008 financial debacle) and to bring his far flung family and tangential friends together and regain their respect. He leaves this message for his daughter with the receptionist where she works, “Can you tell Marcy that her father has pancreatic cancer, please? You might know something about pancreatic cancer, Bethany. I never like to presume… Well I can tell you this: it’s not good. People with pancreatic cancer go to their graves as a shot out of a cannon, okay? Hospital personnel can hardly collect a gurney quickly enough to send that particular patient off to hospice care before he keels over right there in the lobby of the hospital. Do you want to know what that’s like?...It’s like priority mail. It gets you where you were going faster than any other methods but you have to pay extra – in fear, I mean, and the surprise factor, and physical devastation. There is no time to make amends or settle your accounts. You just die.”
He comes to this realization:“Being alive was, as far as he could tell, an unrelieved nightmare of strange twinges and mysterious growths. The least a man might be allowed to do is share his fear with loved ones at a moment of uncertainty….”
As a work of metafiction, its structure can be a challenging to the reader. In effect Charlie has asked his son, Jake, who is a novelist (anyone we know connected with his novel who is also a writer?), to write the “facts” of his life. What are life stories other than those we tell ourselves and then others? How do we, as narrators of a father’s life, present ourselves? Ferris frequently takes the reader aside, like an actor would break the fourth wall, to explain more of the story or even its construction.
Remarkably, it all seems so natural, even the double ending of the novel. And the writing can be simply elegant. I think of Updike but one can say it’s Hemingwayesque (no coincidence that the narrator is named Jake Barnes). Consider this passage from early in the novel, and I choose this almost at random, having dog-eared so many pages: “He went outside to retrieve the morning paper. As he emerged from under the portico, the bright day bushwhacked him. The warmth percolated, pricking him. Steady Boy paused, lifted his face to the sun. He felt a little drunk. He was present in heat like that at the launch of Apollo 11. He felt the same heat 10 years later on a rare vacation under a Florida palm. He ran naked as a little boy. He shucked corn during an Illinois drought. He watched his pebbly foot prints evaporate behind him on the poolside concrete. He rode in a canoe under a canopy of trees as a trickle of sunlight danced over the water, as elsewhere a memory it did over old barnyards and forest floors. A thundering, brain-clearing sneeze, exquisite in every way, followed in the next instant and he opened his eyes and carried on in the shuttering aftermath to the curb and the Chicago Tribune.” A quotidian moment in an Everyman’s life, told, then, by the omniscient narrator, not the biographer, so finely and succinctly crafted.
Parallel to “Steady Boy’s” story is Ferris’ metafictional narrative: “I do not have a lock on the truth, provided there is such a thing, and that, in fact, when we consider the necessarily curated nature of any narrated life, it’s omissions as well as it’s trending hashtags, if you will, we are forced to conclude that every history, including our own first person accounts, is a fiction of a sword. Or as Wallace Stevens put it much more succinctly, ’the false and true are one.’”
Central to the tale is love and family, the relationship of fathers and sons, and when Jake arrives at the airport after hearing of the cancer diagnosis, Ferris’ strikes a dagger in my heart in a very personal way: “The child of divorce and the parent without primary custody know these interstitial places well: the curb, the corridor, the terminal parking lot. It is where you embrace, you shed tears, you thank God for reuniting you – or curse God for tearing you asunder once more.” Jake tries to bring the family together, usually culminating in ugly family pyrotechnics.
But then again, he teases the reader “Now, I know what you’re thinking. Jake Barnes has played his hand. He sides with Charlie and can’t be trusted. He’s unreliable. Yeah, right. Like reliability exists anywhere anymore, like that’s still a thing.”
Charlie has kept his shoulder to the wheel of the American Dream all his life and now, what does he have to show for it? Ferris has created a 21st century anti-hero to which “attention must be paid.” It is a work of heart and ingenuity, and Ferris’ self-referential approach to “Steady Boy’s” story never gets in the way, it paves it.
