Driving Through Diversity

My former high school teacher, a mentor to me at the time, Roger Brickner, took an ambitious trip this Spring, negotiating the old "Lincoln Highway" in his quest to discover the "real America."  This was our the first interstate highway system, fostered by the automobile industry before our entry into WWI.

Imagine making such a 3,000 mile journey back then in this powerful 66 HP 1911 Pierce-Arrow?  Not every part of the "highway" was paved.  Expect mud after a heavy rain.

Roger and friend, however, had a BMW which took them to many out of the way places.  I've been to some, especially along the iconic Route 66, but most were new to me and as a "member" of his email distribution list, I received reports along his journey, which began in Times Square, the official start of the Lincoln Highway, on March 16, but unfortunately abruptly ended on April 17 with the missive: "Just want to let all of you know that we had a crash with the BMW in Utah on Sunday.   Both Lou and I are fine... not even a scratch... but the BMW was totalled.  I am back in NYC.... All's well that ends well. Roger" 

But his final report on the trip shows his continuing deep love of this country, our political system, and our diversity -- just as I remembered his passion from my now very distant high school years. One gets a real sense of the nation just from his few paragraphs.   I asked him whether I might include in here as a "guest piece" and he replied affirmatively, adding, "my views of America have not changed in fifty years, but the party of my heritage has."

Friends:

    My final report on the trip.   We left NYC, the nation's largest, one of the most Democratic voting cities in the country, the safest among the fifty largest cities in the USA, and the most diversive city IN THE WORLD.  (name another more diverse in significant numbers, if you wish to disagree).  It is indeed a special place to start on our transcontinental trip.  New Jersey, with its large Italian, Black and Hispanic groups showed the decided end to our industrial era as we traveled down the old routes of the Lincoln Hwy.  We drove through areas of  derelict abandoned factories, deteriorating homes and could just feel the poverty of the minority inhabitants of this once blue collar prosperous area. In Philadelphia in the near inner neighborhoods as well as on the old west side the same minorities lived in poverty and bleakness where once factories  provided a good working class life.   More proof that America's old 19th century industrial epoch is behind us.  After leaving along the old MAIN  LINE we entered the western suburbs which is the start of the vast German swarth which reaches across the northern part of the country clear to the Pacific Coast. Beginning in 1682 the "Pennsylvania Dutch" (the translation of the English speakers of  Deutsch) came to this country.  Even today some of the Amish still speak a form of German within their own communities. Here they remain farmers, but as you cross Pennsylvania more "secular" Germans can be seen as far west as Pittsburgh along the Lincoln Hwy (Route 30).  These are the "Eastern" Germans, but after Pittsburgh you sense you are in the Mid West where after the Revolution these Germans kept moving west in their Conestoga Wagons.  Now, the landscape flattens out and so does the mind set and attitudes of the people.  Here there is cheerfulness, but less imagination, it seems.  It is a BURGER KING, MC DONALDS and MOTEL 6 world here. It is hamburgers and HUGE servings of everything.  Only in the urban areas is there much sophistication.  Chicago is the great  exception. Just out of Chicago and to perhaps 50 miles out of St. Louis we are back to the German Mid West.  Subtly we sense a change in the inhabitants.  More and more and then dominantly we enter the region of the migrating Appalachian Scots-Irish heritage. This is the area, just south of the German swarth, where the Appalachian folk moved west out of their mountain strongholds after the Revolutionary War ended. These folk are even more insular, but with greater Hoop De La in their attitudes than with the Germans.  Cowboy talk increases , but the food remains the same... too much for too little cost and too many calories.  The proportion of Obese people increases. By Oklahoma the Native Americans and Mexicans are seen in large numbers, Their influence is cultural, but surely not political in this state. Politically, from mid-Missouri to all of Oklahoma the white population is about 80% Republican.  My Obama car sticker was not approved of by many.

    By the time we crossed the New Mexico border, the Hispanic and Native American population was even greater.  In Tucumcari it was still dominated by "Anglos"  most Appalachia folk and some Germans.  But by Santa Rosa and Santa Fe it was decidedly more Mexican, Spanish (the earliest settlers on what is now American soil) and Native American.  Here there seems to be a guarded acceptance of each other's culture. This was especially true in the Santa Fe area. Here Caucasian non- Spanish seem still to be the intruders in this Spanish Missionary culture.  Here it is easy to understand the great diversity of the country and the challenge it poses for our future.  Once in Northern Arizona Native Americans take firm hold and are the Majority,  Here few "Anglos" live anywhere but in the larger towns.

    In California we return to the sophisticated areas of the East and some Mid Western urban areas.  It is a nation sharply divided, and yet, it is a nation which prospers because of its diversity since the idea of ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE is accepted by the vast majority.  Our nationalism is not, as in Europe and Asia, based on one ethnic group based on their own language, but a nation based on an idea not an ethnicity.

    Comments most welcome.  I hope I have not bored you with my thoughts

                                                                    Roger

Dramaworks 'A Raisin in the Sun' -- a Special Relevancy

Watching the first preview performance of Dramaworks' A Raisin in the Sun highlighted, for me, the genius of this theatre company.  By sticking with classics of contemporary theatre, the essence of Dramaworks' oeuvre is relevancy, to our times, and to the experiences of its audiences.  They tap into the Zeitgeist like no other theatre company we have known, and Ann and I have seen many.

Growing up and living in New York City and its environs, and frequently traveling to London where the West End beckoned, gave us the luxury in choosing what we wanted to see and, in effect, make our own "season" of the plays and musicals most worthy of the time we could devote to the theatre.  Living, now, in South Florida, we are more dependent on just a few theatre venues, and the confluence of our interests and the development of Dramaworks into a full-fledged leading regional theatre is providential.  They do the selection for us!

A Raisin in the Sun has a special relevancy as it is based on fact and portrays a time which is indelibly etched in my memory. Lorraine Hansberry's father bought a house in the Washington Park section on the South Side of Chicago and the Hansberry family became a victim of racially restrictive neighborhood covenants preventing Afro-Americans from renting or buying there.  The case ultimately went to the Supreme Court.  Meanwhile the young author later remembered the long fight that "required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house."  The emotional toll this took resulted in the first play by an Afro-American woman to open on Broadway -- a smash hit for two years, with a predominantly black cast, evidence in itself that change was already underway and gathering momentum.

It also has a special relevancy to me as I grew up in a neighborhood not unlike Clybourne Park, the lily-white middle class neighborhood the Younger family in the play plans to move into.  Richmond Hill, Queens, a suburb of NYC, could also be defined as Karl Linder (the one white character in the play) portrays Clybourne's residents, a community of people "who've worked hard as the dickens,....not rich or fancy people,...just hard-working, honest people who don't really have much but those little homes....[And] at the moment, the overwhelming majority of people out there feel that people get along better take more of a common interest in the life of the community when they share a common background." 

 

All of this of course is code for racism and I witnessed it first-hand when I was very young.  Our home was marginally on the "right side of the tracks," north of Atlantic Avenue but we moved north of Jamaica Avenue as minorities encroached.  I don't have a photo of the house when I lived there but, remarkably, Google street view shows it still looking pretty much the same (with the familiar telephone pole in front). 

Of course at the time I didn't understand any of this but I remember discussions, and "fear" expressed about the "Negroes" who were moving in.  It was so endemic in our middle class, mostly German, neighborhood (ironically, Karl Linder's probable ethnic background), it was simply the way things were.  You accepted it.  It took the Little Rock desegregation crisis to bring another take on "reality" for me, then the three freedom riders that were beaten and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, and finally seeing Malcolm X in college to raise my consciousness.  Amazing to think A Raison in the Sun debuted on Broadway in 1959!

But a great play does not merely recount historical facts, it is steeped in profound passion, character development, and universal themes which give meaning to what it is to be human and vulnerable. In "preparing" to see this production we had secured tickets last summer to see the Pulitzer and Tony award winning Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris in New York, which is both sort of a prequel and sequel to Hansberry’s groundbreaking work.  Norris' work is an exercise in cynical acerbity on the topic of racism.  Perhaps progress has been too glacial for Norris but I see it differently, and while Clybourne Park had its philosophical merits and some clever, even comic dialogue, it lacked the raw emotion of Raisin.

Hansberry writes about the Younger family, holed up in a small apartment in Chicago's Southside, but the matriarch of the family has inherited $10,000 from an insurance policy upon the death of her husband and she is intent on using the money for the betterment of her family, all of whom live with her in the apartment, her son, Walter Lee and his wife, Ruth, along with their child, Travis, and Walter's sister, Beneatha.

The title of the play comes from Langston Hughes' poem A Dream Deferred.  But it is not only that line from the poem that enters the play, it is about "what happens to a dream deferred."  Does it "fester," "stink," "become crusty and sugary," "sag," "or does it just explode?" The play is all of these, gathering energy that leads to an explosive climax.

The classic American dream theme that is part of the collective consciousness of the American theatre, and literature as well, the illusion that wealth in itself is the dream, is evident here too, with Walter scheming to use some of his mother's insurance money to buy into a liquor store:

Mama: “Son, how come you talk so much ‘bout money?”

Walter: “Because, it is life, Mama!”

Mama: “Oh—so now its life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom use to be life—now its money. I guess the world really do change…”

Walter: “No—it was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know about it.”

But all the characters are dealing with their own dreams.  Mama wants a house and a garden, a better life for her children, and her son to measure up to her dead husband who was honorable and worked all the days of his life : “I seen…him…night after night…come in …and look at that rug…and then look at me…the red showing in his eyes…the veins moving in his head…I seen him grow thin and old before he was forty…working and working and working like somebody’s old horse…killing himself…and you—you give it all away in a day.”

Mama's dream of a better place to live is shared by Walter's wife, Ruth, for themselves, and their child, Travis. And she shares in the hope that Walter will do the right thing, quit drinking, but Walter disappoints more often than not: “Oh let him go on out and drink himself to death! He makes me sick to my stomach!”

And Walter's sister, Beneatha, has dreams about becoming a Doctor.  Some of Mama's insurance money is earmarked for medical school. She is also seeking out her identity as an Afro-American through her Nigerian friend, Asagai.  

Even Karl Lindner, the spokesperson for the Clybourne Park Association lives in his own dream world, thinking his is a "rational argument" for the Youngers not to move into the community, that "Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities." And he personifies so much of the problem of racism, believing his own delusions, even thinking he is doing a kindly favor for them.

Hansberry weaves these counterpoint dreams together in an intense drama which Dramaworks brings to life. It is a beautifully written play, gut retching at times, and this I know from the number of Kleenexes Ann went through during the performance.  (Actually, me too.)

Before last night's preview performance we had an opportunity to meet the actors and the Director, Seret Scott.  The normally invisible hand of the Director was laid bare in this pre-preview gathering of the cast and crew.  In less than a month of, first, readings, and then blocking, and then rehearsals, Ms. Scott had successfully developed a special cohesiveness of the actors, most of whom had never met each other before, that carried over into the production.  The voices she needed to present the many tiered themes in the play had become bonded to the extent that we felt like we were witnessing a real family on stage.  Their joy of working together clearly came through in the preview performance last night. It was a wonderful experience to be able to hear about the process and to see the results.

Casting is one of Dramaworks' strong points (among many) and again Dramaworks' Producing Artistic Director Bill Hayes' tireless quest to find the right actor for each part of the plays he selects for the season shines. This is a large cast, all terrific, but it is the four leading roles that carry much of the play, and their performances were extraordinary.

Ethan Henry who plays Walter Lee Younger carries much of the heavy emotional weight of the play.  Walter lives in the shadow of his father but he is a father himself as well as an Afro-American man who, working as a chauffeur, has been exposed to the privileged white man's world, and the consequent humiliation he feels returning each night to his mother's apartment, and to his wife, son and sister.  He wants to be a man, the man and his scheme to make a fast bundle with part of his father's insurance money turns bad and just reinforces the humiliation he has carried all his life.  Ethan Henry plays this role with such force and physical presence, it seemed to suck all the air out of the theatre and silence a normally fidgeting audience.  I don't like to make comparisons, but he reminded me so much of one of my favorite actors, Denzel Washington.  It is no easy feat to pull off this role to such an extent that one does not need to compare his performance to Sidney Poitier's.  Ethan Henry establishes his own vision of Walter Lee Younger.

And while Claudia McNeil might be considered the gold standard for playing the role of Lena Younger, the matriarch of the family, Dramaworks' Pat Bowie plays it with such quiet, sometimes agonizing, dignity, her performance will be the one I remember going forward. Her love of her family, her final forgiveness of her son which paves the way for his redemption, is the rock on which the family ultimately builds its future.  Ms. Bowie expressed her own feelings about what makes this play so great at the pre-preview gathering, saying essentially that it is a play about people, universal in its themes and she quoted one of the lines she says to her daughter in the play: "Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When he's done good and made things easy for everybody? That ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest......and he can't believe in himself because the world's whipped him so!."  I held my hand to my chest, looking at her and she looked back and smiled.  It is that kind of connection that carried over into her performance.

Lena is convinced that by buying a house for her family, it will restore their disintegrating lives to a level of dignity -- especially her son who she no longer understands: “It’s just a plain little old house—but it’s made good and solid—and it will be ours. Walter Lee—it makes a difference in a man when he can walk on floors that belong to him…”  Indeed.

Walter's wife, Ruth, is played by an experienced Shakespearian actor, Shirine Babb.  She shares in the horror of witnessing the downfall of Walter, and she fears for her family, her son Travis, as well as her unborn child.  Ms. Babb suppresses that horror to a level of stoicism at times which quickly rises to exuberant expectations in anticipation of moving and what that will mean for her family.  She sheds tears at one moment, sometimes on the other side of the stage seeing Walter's rage (mostly directed at himself), and then joy as Lena talks about the future and what the house will mean. Ms. Babb was a delight to watch walk that difficult line on stage.

Beneatha is played by Joniece Abbott Pratt who carries the role of the emerging educated generation -- seeking to become a Doctor on the one hand and on the other trying to understand her African roots.  She is conflicted as her boyfriend George (played admirably by the New York based actor Jordan Tisdale) is an educated, even wealthy black, but one who is trying to distance himself from his heritage.  On the other hand, she has another suitor, Joseph Asagai (sensitively played by Marckenson Charles) who is a student from Nigeria, wanting to go back to his country and take Beneatha, introducing her to African culture, bringing her recordings of native African drums (to which Beneatha dances in her African dress also given to her by Asagai). He even convinces Beneatha to change her hair to Afro-natural, which shocks George, but Beneatha finally wears with pride.

He is the one who speaks the truth to Beneatha when she is at her nadir after Walter has squandered the money, giving her another perspective, "There's something wrong when all the dreams in this house......depended on something that might never have happened......if a man had not died. We used to say back home......'Accident was at the first and will be at the last......but a poor tree from which the fruits of life may bloom.'....I see only that you, with all of your keen mind......cannot understand the greatness of what your mother tried to do. You're not too young to understand. For all of her backwardness......she still acts, she still believes that she can change things. So she is more of the future than you are."

So Ms. Pratt has to walk a thin line as part of the family and as a symbol of striving and of the future which she does with aplomb.

David A. Hyland plays the mild mannered Karl Lindner, the representative from the Clybourne Park Association, who has the task of buying off the Youngers so they don't move into his frightened community.  It's a difficult role to play as he is not a mean racist, but merely a product of his times, and Hyland makes it look easy.

In this particular production, Travis was played by Mekiel Benjamin, a local 8th grader, wide-eyed with wonderment during the pre-preview get-together, but as he has already had some acting experience, he proved that he was just perfect for the part last night.

And finally, not a character, but a symbol, is Lena's plant, a fragile thing that she has nurtured in the mostly sunless apartment, but she is determined to carry with her to her new home.  Beneatha asks her what she's doing with that old withering plant and Mama says “Fixing my plant so it won’t get hurt none on the way…”  Incredulously Beneatha says: "Mama, you going to take that to the new house?” “Un-huh“ “That raggedy-looking old thing?” To which Mama replies, "It expresses ME!”

Originally a three act play, Dramaworks has opted to change it to two acts, the first running about 1 hour 20 minutes, but that time passed quickly.  The explosive second act's denouement is one of redemption, not tragedy, and one gets the sense that the future will be better, that progress is being made.  Bill Hayes said he wanted to produce more plays that make statements about racism and he could not have found one that puts a very human face on the topic, or improve upon this production.  Congratulations to Dramaworks, the cast, and crew for their dedication that resulted in this outstanding production.

A brief word, about the carefully crafted set design by Paul DePoo, the excellent period costume designs by Brian O'Keefe, the lighting designs by Joseph P. Oshry that enhanced the set, and the sound design by Rich Szczublewski which included some very appropriate jazz interludes.  As usual, stage management by James Danford was flawless.

If Lorraine Hansberry had not died so young, in her mid thirties, who knows what other masterpieces she would have written. Let us be thankful for this one great work and for a local theatre company up to producing it at such a high standard. Prediction: a standing ovation after each performance as there was last night.

A Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

 

PS  A brief follow-up.  The Feb. 8 Wall Street Journal had a great review of the play!

Summer Reading (Continued)

While living on the boat, we are able to catch up on our reading.  As I haven’t made the transition to the Kindle yet, we ship up a box of books for the summer and they sit on our little bookshelf on the boat, awaiting their turn.  Part of the fun is looking through them, deciding upon the next read.  I selected a number of novels, some recommended by our son, Jonathan.

When John Updike died, I mourned not only his passing, but also what his loss would now mean to the current state of American Literature. 

It took a younger generation, Jonathan to be precise, to introduce me to some fresh, intelligent and extremely moving literature, not only Eric Puchner's Model Home which I thought was a fabulous first novel, and now his second recommendation, another first novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall which was published in 2001 (Puchner’s novel is more recent, 2010). 

These are extraordinary first novels, major literary talent.  Udall has published his follow up, widely praised as well, The Lonely Polygamist which I have yet to read.  Interestingly, both the Puchner and Udall novels are set in the west and southwest (when I think of that area, I think of the photograph below I took somewhere in the southwest years ago), perhaps the new home of the American dream or the American nightmare.  However, the two novels differ greatly in their perspectives and voice, Puchner reminding me somewhat of Updike, Cheever, and Yates, while Udall’s The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a little Huck Finn, Oliver Twist, Rule of the Bone and The Book of Mormon –  oh, and throw in the Paul Newman film, Hombre, about a half breed Apache.

Udall writes a genuine Bildungsroman, our lovable but struggling protagonist Edgar Mint living out an upside down life (“In many ways, it occurs to me now, I have lived my life in reverse.  In the first half of my life I had to make all the hard choices and ride out the consequences, while in the second half I have lived the sheltered and uncluttered life of a child.”)  He is an orphan but like Oliver Twist has to go through a horrific childhood before emerging into the sunshine of a loving caretaker.

Along the way we meet his friends and his Fagins, the story gathering force and momentum as it unfolds, beginning with his self-assessment: “If my life could be contained in a word it would be this one: accident.”  From there it is one finely written calamity to the next culminating in a complete circle, Edgar achieving peace and a kind of maturity that only hardship can teach.

He is a half breed, part white (a “cowboy” father from Connecticut of all places!) and an Apache mother who becomes an alcoholic and deserts Edgar, who ends up in an orphanage from hell, not unlike those in Dickens’ novels. (“For the seven years my mother and I were together, I was nothing but an inconvenience to her, a burden, a source of pain, and her pregnancy with me was no exception.”)

Like the last book I read, Richard Ford’s Canada,  its first paragraph is spellbinding: “If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this:  when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.  As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.”

He actually dies but a young doctor, Barry Pinkley (even the names give homage to Dickens) brings him back to life and Pinkley becomes obsessed with Edgar’s well being afterwards (“Everyone agreed that my survival was either an absolute miracle or a freak happenstance…but there was also general agreement that simple survival was as far as the miracle would go: there was no chance on earth I was going to be anything but a mental and physical equivalent of a turnip.”)  But Edgar befriends an older man in the hospital, Art, and when Edgar is diagnosed with “Dysgraphia,” the “inability to write,” Art insists that they get Edgar a typewriter.  Even though Edgar confesses: “I have to say it was not love at first sight,” when he was given a Hermes Jubilee 2000 typewriter. It becomes his salvation and he carries the albatross of his enormous output in a trunk wherever he moves: great comic fiction with lots of dark humor driving the story.

Out of the hospital he is sent to the William Tecumseh Sherman School (“My first day of school at Willie Sherman and I was about to realize that I was no longer Saint Edgar the miracle-boy, hospital sweetheart, beloved by all, but a walking target, a chicken among the foxes.  Not only was I the new kid…[and] not only was I a crossbreed.”)

But our hero survives and he is finally placed with a foster family in Utah, a Mormon family, the Madsens, as dysfunctional as any other American family, but at least a warm bed for Edgar, who thinks that this is the answer to his salvation, even receiving Baptismal and endeavoring to learn the Mormon religion.  That too is not the answer for him, but he thinks he has developed a calling in life and that is to find the mailman and to forgive him (Edgar knows that the mailman thinks he had killed him).

While Barry Pinkley and his foster mother Lara Madsen figure prominently near the novel’s conclusion, it is ultimately from this “calling” that the novel culminates into one of the finest written last chapters that I’ve read in years, gripping in its emotional power and a testimony to Udall’s writing gifts by constructing the perfect coda. 

As I am merely about ten years late in discovering this novel, there are plenty of other sources for more information, but both Udall and Puncher are on my radar screen for fine writing in the future.

Before posting this I also finished Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem, another recommendation made by my son.  I do not mean to diminish its importance by not covering this novel with its own entry, but mysteries are not my usual reading fare and I feel a little off base reviewing the book.  But while a mystery, this novel is a brilliant piece of writing, with the very clever conceit of the main character, Lionel Essrog, having Tourette's syndrome which gives Lethem a platform for demonstrating his writing skills.  I’m also partial to Motherless Brooklyn as it is set not far from where I lived for almost ten years and through Lethem I could almost feel the macadam of the setting, Court Street, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. 

It shares some of the themes of Udall’s novel as well, a novel about an orphan, Dickensian characters, a coming of age story but in the form of a detective novel, our erstwhile hero endeavoring to find the murderer of his mentor, an underworld character, Frank Minna, who has rounded up Lionel and other orphans from the “St. Vincent Home for Boys” to serve his nefarious ends, not unlike, again, Oliver Twist’s upbringing.

The “language” of  Tourette's is like a coiled spring throughout Lethem’s tour de force: “I’m tightly wound. I’m a loose cannon.  Both – I’m tightly wound loose cannon a tight loose.  My whole life exists in the space between those words, tight, loose, and there isn’t any space there – they should be one word, tightloose.  I’m an air bag in a dashboard, packed up layer upon layer in readiness for that moment when I get to explode, expand all over you, fill every available space.  Unlike an airbag, though, I’m repacked the moment I’ve exploded, am tensed and ready again to explode – like some safety-film footage cut into a loop, all I do is compress and release, over and over, never saving or satisfying anyone, least myself.  Yet the tape plays on pointlessly, obsessive air bag exploding again and again while life itself goes on elsewhere, outside the range of these antic expenditures.”

 There is one surprise after another in these pages, a labyrinth that the reader is compelled to negotiate to a fitting ending.  Simply put: I loved reading Motherless Brooklyn. One is always rooting for Lionel, his eccentricities giving him a special place in literature and, no doubt, the mystery genre.

"Even if the Dream Isn't Real, the Dreamers Are"

20th century American literature is awash in a particular version of the American Dream, the green light that always seems to be in grasp through the accumulation of wealth.  But as Balzac purportedly opined, "behind every great fortune there is a great crime", be it to society or one's family or both. It plays out in our literature and one only has to read a newspaper to see it in life.  Gatsby or Madoff, living the dream, for love or money or both, at least for a while.  

In the last thirty years we have had two real estate busts, people pinning their hopes of wealth by buying and selling, flipping,the greater fool theory at work in its purist form, like a game of musical chairs, until the music stopped.  And so it is for the protagonist in Eric Puchner's first novel, Model Home, as well as it was for the author's father.  While the novel is in some ways autobiographical, in subtle or more transparent ways, so are most novels.

For some time I've been "worrying" about who will carry on the tradition established by our great American novelists and short story writers, the most recent ones (in my opinion) being John Updike, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver and perhaps to that list I might add some of my other favorites, ones who could join the ranks of the big four, Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, John Irving, Russell Banks, E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, and Jonathan Franzen (merely on the merits of two novels).  Unfortunately, of the first four, only Roth is still alive, but anything he writes, and the others I mentioned, I will buy and read.  That goes for Pat Conroy, Anita Shreve, and Ethan Canin as well.

So it was a thunderclap when I read Eric Puchner's novel (hat tip to my son, Jonathan).  Here is a serious contemporary writer who knows how to tell a tale, paint a picture of American life through his characters, make us feel moved, walking the line through the comic-tragic, drawing us into something important about family relationships.  It remains to be seen whether his first novel will be his best, a literary catharsis of his own life experiences, or whether this is setting him up for a truly great literary career.  Puchner also has published a collection of short stories, Music Through the Floor, and although I have not yet read them (but will do so), I understand there are elements of Carver and Cheever in those stories.  I can't think of a higher praise than that.

The story itself, although set in the 1980s, is as relevant for today's economic times.  It is about a family, the Zillers, who have moved to California for the "good life" -- a family which was close when they lived with more modest expectations in the Midwest -- but now find themselves being pulled apart.  The father, Warren Ziller, hides his deteriorating economic circumstances from his family, which makes his wife, Camille, suspect him of having an affair.  No such luck -- that would have been an easier road to travel.

In an ironic twist, the real estate development that Warren had been hawking, in the middle of the desert, but portrayed by him as an upcoming idyllic community (with the promise of a major shopping center which is actually being constructed as a waste treatment plant that stinks up the neighborhood literally, and their lives figuratively), ultimately becomes their own home, the only such residents, when Warren's secret comes out and his older son, Dustin, suffers disfigurement from the explosion and fire of their former home before it was repossessed.  Meanwhile, his younger sister, Lyle, has had an affair with the security guard from their former community, Hector, who later becomes Dustin's caretaker (for reasons best explained by reading the novel). The younger child, Jonas, is neglected by his family, left to wander the desert outskirts. 

This is a family that has been incinerated by the American Dream, and after a metaphorical  climax, they are hurled in different directions.  Puchner draws heavily on his own family history to portray the heartbreak of this devolution. Some of the author's feelings about his own childhood are endowed in Jonas.

Most great writers have a strong sense of place.  Cheever had his NYC suburbs, Updike had New England and PA, Roth harkens back to Newark and its environs, Richard Ford's New Jersey, and Anne Tyler and Baltimore are peas in a pod.   Puchner has staked out California to explain his version of the American dream.  Ah, California, when as a publisher, I used to visit the American Film Institute and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, monuments to the documentation of the American dream itself.  I felt LA, or at least that part of it, was unreal.

Puchner's particular focus is not California's glamorous Hollywood, it is the underbelly of the American dream as played out in the California desert.  Remember Dreiser's lobster and squid in mortal combat, a scene from his The Financier?  As a child, Frank Cowperwood, the young financier, watches this battle in a fish tank, Dreiser writing: "It answered in a rough way that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: How is life organized? Things lived on each other – that was it…Sure, men lived on men.”

I couldn't help but think of that quote reading Puchner's description of Jonas' sojourns in the California desert: "Most days he spent roaming the desert. It was a relief to be free of school, that gloomy place where the teachers wore shorts and his locker was so hot he had to open it with a sock over his hand, where no one spoke to him except the garbled voice in his head and he'd somehow completed his transformation into a ghost. In the desert, at least, there were extraordinary things. There were scorpions eating each other. There were rats hopping around like kangaroos. There were wasps dragging tarantulas around by the leg. There were snake skins dried into paper, bird nests as small as contact lenses, lizard skeletons dangling from creosote bushes, delicate as ice. Once, not far from the house, he saw a roadrunner go after a rattlesnake, its right wing extended like a matador's cape, When the snake lunged, the roadrunner snapped up its tail and then cracked it like a whip, slamming its head against the ground - over and over - to bash its skull."

And when one pursues dreams of riches, or in its more sanitized version, the better life, there are winners and losers.  Even the material winners may find their dreams to be vapid.  Warren's fall from grace is even harder, a once happy family, now grappling with his mismanagement and unfortunate economic circumstances.  Like Madoff, Warren's life became one of lies and self deceit, convincing himself that even though they were rapidly running out of funds, the big payoff will come when he makes a success of his land development scheme (Auburn Fields, an ironic name for a place in the middle of the desert), all will be well: "He did not want to lie to her, but every time he considered telling her the truth-that he'd lost their retirement funds, the kids' college funds, and every fund in between-his tongue dried up like paper and he couldn't speak. When he managed to get Auburn Fields off the ground, he reminded himself, he'd be able to put the money back in." 

And dreams are not only Warren's.  His wife, Camille, pursues approbation from her family and colleagues as a producer of educational films, without much success.  Ultimately she has to leave him:  "She could forgive him for moving them out to California, perhaps, for bankrupting them in pursuit of some fantasy of wealth, for falling victim to a malady of shame he could never pay off -- she could forgive Warren these things, but this was different from getting over them.  In the end it was her disappointment in him that had proved toxic.  He'd squandered the life they might have had together....Now that she'd left, she could see him more clearly: a broken man, well-meaning but not as brave as life required, who'd become something he'd never imagined."

Dustin, the older son, sees a fabulous career for himself as a rock musician but becomes a withdrawn malcontent after being disfigured in the explosion. Jonas who is mistakenly blamed (by himself as well) for Dustin's accident becomes the invisible child.  Lyle, the daughter, has dreams of attending Columbia, but is convinced that hope is remote: "Driving to work, Lyle tried not to let the monotonous brown vistas lull her into a coma. She distracted herself by touching the Columbia bumper sticker on the dashboard. She made an effort whenever she could, so that its Ivy League juju would enter her fingers and climb upward to her brain, transforming her into a perfect applicant. She liked to fantasize that she was the only one to get a sticker in the mail: so eager was Columbia to have her as a student, they'd slipped it into her application materials like Willy Wonka's golden ticket. Lyle had stuck it on the dashboard  to remind herself -while she was driving through the barren, dream-sucking desert - that she wouldn't be living out here forever."

Each family member feels like he/she is on the outside, looking in, dazed by the events that profoundly change their individual lives and drive them apart.  Puncher writes from Camille's perspective: "What had happened?  How had they unraveled again, worse than before?  The mystery of life was not how it started, Camille thought.  It was how people with every excuse to be close could grow distant as satellites."  Then, there is Warren's take on it: "What an odd thing a family was, Warren thought.  The permutations, like the patterns of a chess game, seemed endless."

In fact, the forty-nine chapters of the novel constantly switch back and forth between the main characters, almost like a series of tightly woven short stories with the commonality of the Ziller family experience.  And Puchner's writing can be quite moving and beautiful, such as when towards the end of the novel, Warren is trying to make a living and salvage some self respect working as a cutlery salesman, and while selling to a woman who has a son and a daughter, younger than his, Warren "pretends" that his own family is watching him in action: "He was making a pitch to them as well, the family he'd lost.  It was not the words themselves that mattered but the fact that he was making them.  He was doing something for a change.  In the end, if it was a good-enough pitch, his family might even buy what he had to offer.  They would say, It's not too late, you've actually learned something, your life hasn't been entirely hapless and for naught."  Knowing Warren's huge fall from grace, these words are heart-rendering.

A "must read" companion piece is GQ's March 2011 nonfiction piece by the author, Schemes of My Father; Like most California dreamers, my East Coast dadtried to relocate—and reinvent—himself in the land of red-hot cars and eternalsuntans. Too bad we all got burned   It explains much about the novel's autobiographical elements and passion, particularly the author's love for the "real California" which is not the beach life that we've all associated with the state.  As Puchner puts it: "It's this real California—and not the one my father invented for us—that I still call home, one that's closer to my heart than any place on earth. There's something about my father's love for the state, no matter how misdirected it was, that seems to have seeped into my blood. Or perhaps it's the love itself that I love. Which is to say: Even if the dream isn't real, the dreamers are. There's something about the struggling actors and screenwriters and immigrants who live here, the pioneer spirit that despite everything still brings people to the edge of America in search of success, that makes me feel at home."  Puchner writes with uncommon honesty.

The novel made me think of the "model homes" of my own life.  We bought our first home in Westport, CT in 1971, staying there for only three years.  Although a cottage, it was situated on two beautiful acres of pine forest.  We moved to Weston, CT where we lived for twenty two years, the home where we raised our family.  It too was secluded in the woods.  We constantly worked on the house, expanding it until it was truly a rambling ranch.  I wept the day we left that house, not only because of what we put into it, but for the symbolism of leaving it with our sons now grown.  Ironically, it was ripped down a few years after we moved to build one of those "McMansions," all that work, all those years, poof! --  vanished!  This was followed by four years in a home on the Norwalk River, perhaps the home that had the most spectacular views, as Oyster Boats went out each day or barges would move up the river.  Then finally our home of the last twelve years in Florida, again on the water, where one can always find that special sunset.  So, two homes in the woods and two homes on the water and none in the desert.  We've been lucky. 

I eagerly await Puchner's next work.