Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

BE MINE -- A Valentine from the Heart of Richard Ford

 


Here is an unforgettable Valentine’s card of a novel, particularly affecting for those of us from the boomer years or earlier.  I suppose there are spoilers in what follows, but they wouldn’t deter me from reading this novel if I came across this personal analysis.  At least that is my hope in writing this.

 

Richard Ford does not tilt the windmill into fantasy, but into the realities of aging and dying, the father/son relationship, and the carnival of American culture in, yet, another novel whose main character is his alter ego, Frank Bascombe.  I originally thought his novel, Canada,  marked the passing of Frank Bascombe.  But Frank was not yet down and out.  He came back with Let Me Be Frank With You   so I thought the latter, four novellas, loosely held together by Hurricane Sandy and the theme of aging, might be the last we hear from Frank.  That was followed by his intimate memoir about his parents, Between Them;Remembering My Parents.  Surely that meant Ford was moving on to new pastures.

 

But, no, Frank had more to say through Ford, although Frank is now older, burdened by his own health issues.  More significantly, there is now the major health issue of his sole surviving son, Paul, who at 47 is suffering from ALS, and Frank has chosen to be his caretaker.  This is the same Frank as I described in Let Me Be Frank With You: “it is Frank’s voice, the way he thinks, that connects with me -- plaintive, sardonic, ironic, perplexed, now somewhat resigned, and with a wry wit.”

 

I say “tilting the windmill” into life purposely, as the novel has elements of Don Quixote.  The literary critic Harold Bloom says “Don Quixote is the first modern novel, and that the protagonist is at war with Freud's reality principle, which accepts the necessity of dying…. [A] recurring theme is the human need to withstand suffering.”

 

And there is abundant suffering in Be Mine.  Dostoevsky said once "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."  Frank and his son prove to be worthy.  Ford even indulges in a piece of metafiction to make his point; Dying makes the non-dying feel excluded and shabby, since dying’s struggle is like no other. Long ago, when I was a doomed-to-fail scribbler of mid-century American short stories of the sort that showed up in The New Yorker, written by John Cheever and John Updike (mine never did even once), I practiced the “rule” taught me in my writing course at Michigan, which stipulated that inserting a death into a fragile short story was never permitted, since death must have importance proportional to the life that’s ended, and short stories, my teacher believed, weren’t good at relating the vastness of human life.  (Ford, in my mind, belongs in the company of Cheever and Updike as being astute observers of American life.)

 

Imagine caring for a 47 year old son who has ALS.  Frank’s solution, with the help of Dr. Catherine Flaherty, who we meet at the beginning of the book and whose presence later provides a satisfying denouement, is to get his son into an experimental program at Mayo in Rochester MN.  She had recently stepped down as head of endocrinology at Scripps La Jolla.  Catherine. Light of my life, fire of my loins.  Here was a long story, as there is for everything if you survive.  Since 1983, Catherine (who’s 60) and I have never totally been out of touch.  And since Sally’s departure, she and I have spoken a time or two with a circling, half-suppressed fragrance of possibility scent-able down the cyberlines.  But Catherine had other suitors she never took seriously, a “big doctor” career, and a divorce.  And yet she has never left Frank’s psyche.

 

And so begins the journey, but most of the distance is covered between the 600 mile trek between Mayo and Mount Rushmore, culminating on Valentine’s Day.  Here is a canvas for Ford to paint his themes.

 

I must digress to what I wrote about his deeply affecting memoir Between Them; Remembering My Parents.  I quoted something which I think profoundly influences this novel:  But hardly an hour goes by on any day that I do not think something about my father. Much of these things I've written here. Some men have their fathers all their lives, grow up and become men within their fathers' orbit and sight. My father did not experience this. And I can imagine such a life, but only imagine it. The novelist Michael Ondaatje wrote about his father that ‘... my loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult.’ Mine is the same - and also different - inasmuch as had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become. And while not to have written anything would be a bearable loss - we must all make the most of the lives we find - there would, however, not now be this slender record of my father, of his otherwise invisible joys and travails and of his virtue - qualities that merit notice in us all. For his son, not to have left this record would be a sad loss indeed.

 

Be Mine fills in those emotional blanks.  The voice of Frank is clear; you could say being on a quixotic journey.  Paul could be a stand in for the author himself; “making the life” he is found.  I just had an aching feeling that in Be Mine Ford is working out the emotional pain of the absent father. And, as so much of the novel is about aging and dying, what does one value in the decreasing moments left in a long life? 

 

Yet how we chose to deal with our suffering is book-ended by two chapters with the same title: “Happiness.”  Thus, purely on average, I would say I’ve been happy. Happy enough, at least, to be Frank Bascombe and not someone else.  Ford’s acerbic sense of humor comes through: It’s widely acknowledged that people live longer and stay happier the more stuff they can forget or ignore.  That was at the start of the emotional and literal journey with his son.   

 

And “happiness” at end is another piece of metafiction:  I’d once read in a book about writing that in good novels, anything can follow anything, and nothing ever necessarily follows anything else. To me this was an invaluable revelation and relief, as it is precisely like life—ants scrabbling on a cupcake. I didn’t see I had to speculate about what caused what. And truthfully, I believe it to this day. Witness my son’s relentless assault by ALS, which as far as the best medical science understands, poses a near complete mystery. Yes, we see it happening. But nothing specifically causes it or specifically doesn’t cause it. It just happens.  Happiness = Acceptance.  We are dealt the cards; how we play them is more important that what we are dealt.

 

The journey itself and his observations about the America we are left with is reminiscent of another novel I read which is even more transparently modeled after Don Quixote, Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 

 

A key issue in my reading of that book was the following: “There are pastiches of popular culture the sum of which point the way to the vapid disintegration of values and truth, making it a hallmark work of dystopian literature…. As a picaresque novel it savagely satires the entire America of now, a society gone wild with the self indulgent consumption of popular culture, conspiracy theories, xenophobia, opioid addition, and political polarization. 

 

Ford’s observations go further into the funhouse of today’s eerie reality; a cartoonish view of what this nation has become, but in black humor lays the truth.

 

While Paul is at the Mayo clinic, Frank has sought out the services of Betty Tran, a Vietnamese masseuse in one of those shopping centers.  He thinks he’s in love with her. Diminutive, smiling, cheerful, with bobbed hair and darkly alert eyes. 4 feet, 10 inches, not a centimeter taller, with pert, friendly gestures that were welcoming yet confident, happy to look me in the eye and give me a slightly unsettling wink. …But sitting, talking two hours with pretty, exciting, vivid, immensely likeable Betty was like a fantasy (I’m told) men my age frequently indulge: the high school girl you should’ve loved but for a thousand reasons didn’t, yet dream you could still love.

 

Apparently she gave “happy endings.” As Frank arrives to give her a “Be Mine on Valentine’s Day” card she is being hauled off by the police, smiling, waving a dainty hand, her slender arm bare, bobbling her head of bright yellow hair in a gesture she’s performed for me other times. “Good-bye, good-bye. Come back, come back,” words I “hear” as if they were booming through a PA. “Good-bye, good-bye. Come back, come back.”

 

Paul wants to rent an RV and travel all over the southwest which given his condition would be challenging for them both.  Frank comes up with the idea of a shorter road trip to Mount Rushmore but rent the RV at the place he wants—A Fool’s Paradise—a roadside emporium we’ve visited once and where one finds for-sale-or-rent golf carts, septic tanks, porta-potties, snowmobiles, cherry pickers, enormous American flags, blank grave monuments, waterslide parts and an array of 25 used RVs set out in rows in the frozen snow. Paul can choose whichever RV rig he wants. And the minute his Medical Pioneer event’s over, we can load up and set off for Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, making stops at whatever loony sights we find.  The only one available is an old Dodge Windbreaker Camper, not really suitable to be lived in during the cold nights, obligating them to stay in hotels along the way.

 

I had to laugh as their first stop is at a Hilton Garden Inn, where we usually stay when traveling along the spider web of the Interstates and, as Frank, specifying a double not by the elevator, the ice machine or the pool, two free bottles of…Dasani water.

 

Then on to the “World’s Only Corn Palace” in Mitchell, SD, where my parents stopped off in our sole transcontinental junket in 1954… which is billed as “Everything in your wildest dreams made out of corn.”  This has elements up Paul’s alley—self-conscious inanity, latent juvenile sexual content and a “life in these United States” down-home garishness. Again, he is hard to predict—which can be good.

 

Frank has hit pay dirt with his son.  Like me, there’s nothing my son thrills to more than the anomalies of commerce….The “Place Corn Boutique” spreads over the entire arena/performance venue/polling place; a Macy’s of corn-themed crapola….All of it precisely what Paul Bascombe is put on the earth to seek, be deeply interested in and mesmerized by. I could not have been more prescient.

 

The banter between Frank and his son is a balance between contentious and affection.  The dialogue is poignant.

 

From there they go to the Fawning Buffalo Casino, Golf and Deluxe Convention Hotel.  Something for everyone!  Ford’s description constitutes hilarious realism:  There’s a “Rolling Stones All-Native” cover band in the Circle-the-Wagons supper club. Exotic Entertainment in the Counting Coup Lounge. Ugly sweater, wet T-shirt and best-butt contests every weekend. A “gigantic” indoor waterslide. A “world famous” Tahitian Buffet. Plus, “Lifestyle Enrichment” classes, a writers workshop, a mortuary science job fair, Tai Chi instruction, and a “How to Live in the Present” seminar taught by Native psychologists with degrees from South Dakota State. Plus, “Loose Slots” and Valentine’s room rates for lovers—which my son and I are not but might pass for. There’s also a free shuttle to the “The Monuments” every two hours, which appeals to me, since I’m not sure the Windbreaker makes the climb if the weather turns against us, which it could.

 

But the Fawning Buffalo is not an inspired choice.  Paul is irate, wheelchair bound, feeling remote from the possibilities the carnival-like atmosphere offers, Frank pressing to get a room, thinking of the buffet and secretly maybe a lapdance when his son goes to bed.  They argue in front of the room clerk   “But we can still get the Valentine’s suite. I’ll order you up exotic room service. I’m sure it’s available.” I mean this. “You’re an asshole.” “Why am I an asshole? Life’s a journey, son. You’re on it.” I’m willing to piss him off if I can’t make him happy. Though I wish I could. He is quite a conventional, unadventurous man when you come down to it. Like me. “It’s not a journey to here,” he says savagely…. Fatherhood is a battle in any language.

 

They leave, but as Valentine’s Day is such a big holiday there, they try every hotel/motel after leaving.  They’re all full. If I’d prevailed at the Fawning Buffalo, I’d right now be in the Tahitian Buffet, a couple of free Stolis to the good. Never let your son decide things.

 

At another Hilton, the clerk knows an out of the way motel where they could stay.  They have to double back to get there.  It is a broken down mostly abandoned place, with aging down to earth proprietors, relics of the past.  In a dank room Frank sleeps in his clothes next to his son.  And Frank thinks.

 

I have said little on the subject; but I am moved by whatever it is my son is at this drastic intersection of life. There should be a word for that—I wish I knew it—for what he is, a word that can be inserted in all obituaries to help them speak truth about human existence. Though whatever that word is, “courage” isn’t it.

 

Finally, the big day, Mount Rushmore, another circus to end their journey, but this time, despite the artificiality of it all, those faces on the mountain, the oohing and aahing, the selfies, etc., Frank and Paul, reconcile a lifetime.

 

“This is great. I love this,” Paul Bascombe—the Paul Bascombe—says. He is craned forward in his chair, fingering his silver ear stud, eyes riveted with all the others of us, upon the four chiseled visages. I cannot completely believe I’ve brought this unlikeliest of moments about, and can be here standing where I’m standing—with my son. How often do anyone’s best-laid plans work out?....I am happy to have done one seemingly right thing for one seemingly not wrong reason. Any trip can be perilous once you commit to the destination, as we have….“Do you know why it’s so great…Why I’ll never be able to thank you enough?” “Tell me.” “It’s completely pointless and ridiculous, and it’s great.” I’m merely happy to believe we see the same thing the same way for once—more or less. It is pointless and it is stupid.  “We’re bonded,” Paul says slyly, “It’s not really like any place else, is it? It’s monumental without being majestic.” There is no trace of disappointment, double or triple meaning.

 

The last chapter, again, “Happiness,” is perhaps the best piece of writing I’ve read in a long time, languid and elegant (Cheeveresque), philosophical but, even what Frank has endured and at his age, hopeful.  Paul would approve.  Now that I’ve read the work, taking notes, I can now go back and reread it simply for pleasure and Ford’s exquisite writing.  Maybe before Valentine’s Day?

 

Friday, October 28, 2022

Franzen’s ‘Crossroads’ -- A Masterpiece of Contemporary American Literature


 

When Jonathan Franzen’s Purity was published some seven years ago, I expectantly looked forward to his next. Crossroads was well worth waiting for, Franzen moving beyond his usual cerebral examination of his characters finding heartrending and redeeming qualities in the Hildebrandt family, set mostly in the fictional town of New Prospect, Illinois during the early 1970’s Vietnam War era.

 

It is a multigenerational work, Franzen reaching back into the past of the two main characters, Russ Hildebrandt who is an associate pastor of the First Reformed Church, a liberal Protestant church probably not unlike the Congressional church in which Franzen was a youth and Union Congressional Church in which I was raised (although I long, long ago dissociated myself from that or any other religion).  His wife’s (Marion) past is also carefully scrutinized by Franzen, revealing secrets that rupture into the plot.  

 

Their children’s stories and their interaction between each other, their parents,  and “Crossroads” a church youth group first headed up by Russ, but later displaced by the more charismatic (and less religious) Rick Ambrose, are central to the novel. 

 

The oldest child, Clem, at first has a close relationship with his younger sister, Becky, but as the novel evolves, Clem is off to college, and his first intense sexual relationship with another student, Sharon. The consequences of that relationship have a lifelong impact on him.

 

Becky, in turn, becomes attracted to Tanner Evans, a young folk/rock singer whose group has a lead singer, Laura, perhaps modeled after Janis Joplin.  Becky is one of those young women considered cool and attractive, a cheerleader.  She joins Crossroads, as does her younger brother, Perry, brilliant but manipulative.  Rounding out the family is the youngest, Judson, who at this stage is the least examined character by Franzen (who envisions this novel as the first of a trilogy, so figure that Judson’s turn will come later).

 

His last novel was concerned with the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and this one is focused on the “nuclear” Hildebrandt family.  Franzen treats the family like a slow moving suspenseful but inevitable explosion, with religion being the main control rod in the nuclear family reactor. 

 

His ability to mix the psychological development of his characters with an element that has been dormant in my own life, religion, is striking.  This novel awakened those recollections of my own teenage religious training.  The confluence of religion, family scars, drugs, and sexual exigency move this novel into the pantheon of an American classic.

 

“Crossroads” goes beyond the usual youth church group, at least the one that existed in my time which was every Sunday night, a chaperoned social mixer (Coca Colas only), dancing to songs like “The Theme from Summer Place” and an occasional theatrical production in the Church’s auditorium (the only stage performance of my life besides playing the piano, “singing” Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” outlining a fence beginning with the second beat in the measure (imagine, remembering that moment from more than 60 years ago, probably a testament to the stage fright I experienced). 

 

When Russ was in charge of the youth group, it probably resembled more of the one I was a member of so, so many years ago, with the notable exception of a once a year trip Crossroads would go on for a week to a Navajo reservation in Arizona to do Christian good works, building or improving whatever facilities are needed.  There the kids would interact with the local cultures.

 

Russ named the group after Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” one of Russ’ favorite musical genres.  Later in the novel, as he pursues a widowed parishioner, one he has intense fantasies and feels guilt about, she plays the record at her house while they attempt to get it on with marijuana. He comes to the realization he’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it. Wherever Johnson was singing from, Russ could never hope to get there. He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he.  Social commentary is yet another dimension to the novel and his feeling as a fraud pervades the novel.

 

The reason for choosing the Navajos for such an annual project was Russ’ work there as a conscientious objector at the end of WW II.  There he made friends and his religious devotion was deepened by ties to that community.

 

Franzen’s dissection of Marion’s and Russ’ failing marriage is extraordinary, its rise, fall, and its resurrection.  His writing encapsulates the guilt which overhangs much of the action in the novel, leavened by religion.  Russ thinks about his now middle-aged wife: It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty.

 

But Marion, emboldened by her work with a therapist, Sophie (“the dumpling” as she thinks of the therapist in her mind, confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions), stuns her husband later in the novel about his affair: “It annoys me that you want to fuck her.” The kitchen seemed to spin beneath his feet. He’d never heard that word from her. “It’s really quite annoying, and if you think it’s because I’m jealous, that’s even more annoying. I mean, really—me? Jealous of that thing? Who do you think I am? Who do you think you married? I’ve seen the face of God.”

 

When Russ loses control of the Crossroads group to Rick Ambrose, that coincides with significant developments in the novel, both Russ and Marion having realized or fantasized affairs, and the cocaine addition of their son Perry erupting into a disaster on the Navajo reservation and his having to be institutionalized.

 

That incident – again God’s will – ironically brings Russ and Marion together in a competition of guilt: “I was committing adultery while our son tried to kill himself!” “Oh dear. I’m sorry.” “You’re sorry? What is wrong with you?” The ground beneath her was firm. She was secure in God’s punishment. “I’m just thinking how terrible that must feel. If the two things really did happen at the same time—that’s terrible luck. No one deserves that.” “Terrible?” He staggered to his feet. “It’s beyond terrible. It’s beyond redemption. There’s no use in praying—I’m a fraud.”

 

Meanwhile, Becky becomes estranged from her once close brother, Clem, and her parents as well as she become Tanner’s lover, and then wife.

 

Clem and his father Russ grow apart, Russ hardly realizing the extent of Clem’s contempt until they have a face to face confrontation, Clem saying “Because I’m so fucking sick of you.” “And I am sick of your disrespect.” “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son?” “I said that’s enough!” Clem would have welcomed a fight. He hadn’t thrown a punch since junior high. “You want to hit me? You want to try me?” “No, Clem.” “Mister Nonviolence?”

 

Clem has an epiphany, a moral, not a religious one, realizing that his college draft deferment and low draft number is the reason why a less advantaged young man is being sent to Vietnam.  This realization  is ironically prompted by his girlfriend Sharon who is devastated by Clem’s informing his draft board that he will not return to college and therefore can be reclassified 1-A, in his mind righting that wrong.  His parents in their deep religious state are similarly shocked.  Ultimately, he is not drafted but winds up in a long labyrinth to Peru as a laborer, an education which ironically turns him, the non believer, into a sort of a Christ figure, finally returning to the conundrum of his nuclear family, fittingly (and not fully conscious to him) at Easter.

 

The concepts of free will and determinism are constantly being tested in the novel, with the latter on the wings of religion generally winning out.  At one point in the novel Becky has a confrontation with Laura who had been Tanner’s girlfriend.  It becomes ugly, Becky pleading Laura to do one more performance with Tanner as a booking agent was there to see both in action.  At first Laura declines.  But the inevitability of her relenting is mired in a series of events as if, to Becky, they were directed by God…

 

The fact that Laura, after a moment, made a petulant, hand-flinging gesture of assent—the fact that she would never have done this if she hadn’t hit Becky, which wouldn’t have happened if Becky hadn’t fallen to her knees to pray, which wouldn’t have happened if the spirit of Christ hadn’t brought her to Laura’s apartment, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t found God in the sanctuary, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t smoked marijuana—seemed to Becky, as she followed Laura down the snowy stairs behind the drugstore, the most beautiful proof of God’s mysterious workings. She’d done bad things, she’d accepted her punishment, and now she had her reward. She could feel a whole new life, a life in faith, beginning.

His novel, Freedom, explored similar territory, sans religion.

Stylistically, Franzen weaves these interrelated stories back and forth, time periods as well, retrospective view or present, but at the heart of the writing is deep psychological insight and compassion.  Unlike his previous novels, I hardly met a character I couldn’t empathize with in some way.  His writing is a throwback to the American realism of a Sinclair Lewis or a Theodore Dreiser, but with deep psychological roots.  This is literature to think about, indeed a worthy successor to Updike and Roth.  Bring on the second of the trilogy!

 

Friday, July 22, 2022

‘A Calling for Charlie Barnes’ -- A Metafictional Masterpiece

 

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.

Thursday, September 3, 2020

Lake Success in Dystopia Land

I was in the mood for a new “Great American Novel” and although Lake Success is now two years old, it filled the bill, at least in its intent.  If you define that “dream” as being just that, an apparition that exists only in the American psyche, mostly a rags-to-riches delusion, this novel is that.  And as NYC is its broad canvas, it personally resonates, particularly as one of our publishing offices was in the Metro Life Building at Madison Square, the vicinity in which the protagonist has his multi-million dollar condo, with his wife Seema, a gorgeous Indian-American, and their autistic son, three year old, Shiva.

 

Gary Shteyngart’s tale is a Bildungsroman of sorts, tracing Barry Cohen’s success and failure and redemption as a NYC hedge fund manager, having pushed the envelope a bit too far in his quest for the golden ring.  His marriage and his business are disintegrating and so Barry takes a physical and spiritual journey in the America of Trump’s rise to power.  Poor Barry, he impulsively flees his tower in la la land with the illusion that he can be reunited with his ex-girlfriend from college.  But traveling by Greyhound bus is not exactly the homey experience he might have fantasized about in It Happened One Night, where down to earth country people traveled and entertained each other with a sense of camaraderie.  Barry interacts with today’s travelers from the lower rung of a fractured society.  Perhaps he was thinking of a journey more along the lines of a Simon and Garfunkel song, They've all come to look for America, even imagining he could write the next On The Road.

 

His childhood dream was to lift himself out of Little Neck, LI and disassociate himself from being the son of a pool maintenance man, using his ability to think like a programmer of a Commodore computer to fill in responses when his peers questioned what he did over the weekend, such as having gone to the Lake Success mall.  Obviously, Barry is a genius, but much of it is of a savant nature, being able to think as a programmer, and that ability feeding his hedge fund success and his passion for collecting and knowing the nuances of the world’s most expensive watches.  In fact, his road trip is made with little cash but with a stash of watches in a rolleraboard.  He is a “Watch Idiot Savant.”

 

Still, it is on the bus trip, running away from his hedge fund world and Park Avenue life, with the perfect wife but with a damaged child to win back his college sweetheart, that he develops the thought of finding the son he thinks he’ll never have, even having fantasies of bringing a clever young inner city drug dealer, Javon, under his wing as a surrogate son.  It is a crossroads in the novel for Barry: So this was America.  A cruel place where a man could be thrown off the street because of the color of his skin, the cut of his watch.  It was disgraceful. He didn’t want any part of it.  Maybe it wasn’t too late to turn back.  He could picture it all.  His office.  Seema’s fine body, an endless stream of cacchiatos and uni rolls.  A Manhattan life for a Manhattan man.  He could rejoin the winner’s circle.  But he continues on. 

 

Ultimately, he latches on to the son (Jonah) of his ex-girlfriend, Layla, who reluctantly takes him in but none of his goals are realistic for a possible relationship.  Jonah is a different story.  He has his own obsession, cartography.  It is here that Barry can express his reverie for his own childhood and the significance of the place, Lake Success.  Jonah says: "I don't have any shared interests with my peers."  Barry laughed. … "I didn't either," he said. "You know what's right above Lake Success? Great Neck and Port Washington. One day when you're in high school you'll read a book called The Great Gatsby. There are these towns in the book called East Egg and West Egg, and that's them." …."That book The Great Gatsby is about a man who wanted to improve himself. And when I was your age I wanted to improve myself, too. So each day I'd practice my 'friend moves.' Like, what are ten things kids in school can ask me, and what are ten things I can say back? It's like drawing a map or knowing all the train systems in the world. Except instead of facts, you have to memorize what they call small talk. People who aren't smart like us, they love small talk. 'Did you hear about this?' 'Oh, what about that?' 'So-and-so got hurt in gym class.' 'That's cool.' So I worked my friend moves real hard, and then by the time I graduated from college, I was the friendliest guy in my profession. And it made me hundreds of millions of dollars."

 

His fascination with Fitzgerald (and his Alma Mater, Princeton) is highlighted in the names of his hedge funds, the first failed one being “This Side of Capital.”  Then another one , “Last Tycoon Capital” and ultimately, “Balance Wheel Capital,” ‘a reference to “the spinning part of a watch movement.”  In a sense, that is the conundrum of being Barry, a computer like mind who has a love of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  Shteyngart’s writing sometimes becomes as lyrical as Fitzgerald and is frequently hilarious but melancholy dealing with the reality of what America has become.

 

The climax of the novel is his trip to Juarez, Mexico (ironically where I got a divorce more than 50 years ago) with Lalya and her friends where he becomes completely disoriented, nearly losing himself there to eternity, but after finding his way back Lalya kicks him out, back on the road, and ultimately to face the music of his financial shenanigans.

 

Meanwhile Seema’s story is juxtaposed to Barry’s, her affair with the downstairs neighbor, a Guatemalan writer, who defines his own work as being basically the same (“American colonialism, crimes against the indigenous, yada yada yada”), her devotion to Shiva, and having to invite her parents back into her life. 

 

Barry’s story runs parallel to his young son’s autism.  He is similarly affected by an inability to establish a normal human relationship.  Instead he has his watch fetish.  And there are parallels in the maturation of each reaching the novel’s redemptive Kumbaya conclusion.  All of this is told in a land of such division between the upper 1 percent and the rest of us, and in the dystopian land of Trump.  It is compulsive reading, at least for me at this sad moment in time.