‘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 21^st 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.

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.

 

Evoking John Updike and Philip Roth

I woke up this morning and had John Updike and Philip Roth on my mind.  They are the writers I grew up admiring the most and I’ve made a point of that repeatedly in these pages.  So why am I now dreaming of them in the half light of dawn, both now gone?  The answer came as I was exercising in our pool this morning (one of the few pluses of being self quarantined in Florida): the pandemic of course.

I’ve discussed their attitudes towards death in past entries, almost as if being a dress rehearsal, and aren’t we all more acutely aware of our own fragile existence during these times? Roth’s preoccupation with death gathers momentum in his later works while Updike’s is less transparent, although Rabbit at Rest is fairly unambiguous, not to mention poems like “Perfection Wasted.”

Their demise leaves a void in serious American fiction.  Imagine what they would have to write today.  I mostly read fiction to understand our world, not to hear a “swell” story. There are other forms of entertainment for that.   Navigating COVID-19 without those heartfelt companions is almost like performing on a tight-rope without a net, such as the image from Delmore Schwartz’s “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me:” the “bear” (the body) “howls in his sleep because the tight-rope / trembles and shows the darkness beneath.”

This sudden longing for Updike and Roth made me curious about the progress Blake Bailey has made with the biography Roth authorized before his death, giving Bailey extensive interviews and documents.   Updike’s workman like biography was written by Adam Begley and published some six years ago.

But alas, after Googling the matter, Bailey (who I thought would write the Updike biography after writing magnificent ones of John Cheever and Richard Yates) is still working on the Roth biography and it is tentatively scheduled for publication in April 2021.  

 

However, there was an unexpected bonus in doing this research and that is coming across an absolutely breathtaking article by Charles McGrath who, as a former writer and editor for The New Yorker, knew both Philip Roth and John Updike.  His article, succinctly entitled “Roth/Updike” and published in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Hudson Review sheds a floodlight on their commonalities and clandestine competitiveness.  An abstract of this well written and impassioned article cannot do it justice, so here is a link.  Suffice it to say these two leading American writers will be remembered and studied for centuries to come.  No wonder they are on my mind.

Redhead by the Side of the Road

Anne Tyler’s works could be described as being from the school of the comedy of manners, and I’ve made many comparisons in the past of her work to Jane Austen’s penchant for dissecting societal foibles.  Tyler’s writings also embody the mysterious, the light within her characters, very in keeping with her Quaker upbringing, and bringing in a touch of magical realism in the dreams of her characters, including daydreams.  Redhead by the Side of the Road has all those elements.   Here are people we all know and their quotidian lives are ones most of us share in some way.  Tyler knows how to engage us.

The life of the protagonist, Micah Mortimer, is yet another diorama in the Anne Tyler Museum of Damaged Men.  He’s an inherently good man but flawed, essentially a loner, a man of routine. Tyler establishes that right out of the gate: You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer.  He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone.

That routine involves his three jobs, his work as the super of a small apartment house for which he has living space in a basement with a few high windows, his work as the sole proprietor of a computer repair business, aptly named “Tech Hermit,” for which he has a magnet sign he slaps on his KIA, and his day to day “work” of living, provisioning, cleaning, dressing, eating, and a run in the morning. He has a system for every such task, even commenting out loud in a foreign accent on his housework and having a running dialogue as he drives with an imaginary “Traffic God” who normally will compliment him on his prudent driving.  Indeed, you “have to wonder.”

As a computer nerd, he gets business from Google searches and the notoriety of his one and only published book, First, Plug It In. It was one of Woolcott Publishing’s better-selling titles, but Woolcott was strictly local and he didn’t have a hope the book would ever make him rich.  Micah Mortimer is a variation on Aaron Woolcott of Tyler’s A Beginner’s Goodbye. 

It is Tyler’s hat tip to that antecedent novel and character who is the publisher of Woolcott Publishing.  By the way, the firm’s best seller is Why I Have Decided to Go On Living.  Indeed, the sort of book Micah might have read!

His girlfriend, if you want to call her that as we’re talking about people in their 40’s, Cass, is an elementary school teacher, and they’ve lived together on and off for more than three years.  One can understand that a person such as Micah Mortimer is comfortable with an arrangement that seems to be going nowhere, but Cass? As Tyler comments, they had reached the stage where things had more or less solidified:  compromises arrive at, incompatibilities adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked.  They had it down to a system, you could say.

Part of his routine is a run in the morning.  All of the action in the novel is in the familiar territory of most of Tyler’s novels, Baltimore, although I have come to call her sense of place, ”Tylerville.” He follows the same path on those runs, out so early in the morning that there is no one around.  He likes it like that and finally people begin to emerge by the time he’s heading home.  It is on such a run, early in the novel, that Tyler departs into the realm of magic realism, from which the novel derives its title and thus endemic to the theme.  His vision is not very good so things take on different appearances: On the homeward stretch this morning, he made his usual mistake of imagining for a second that a certain fire hydrant, faded to the pinkish color of an aged clay flowerpot, was a child or a very short grown-up.  There was something about the rounded top of it, emerging bit by bit as he descended a slope toward an intersection. Why! He always thought to himself.  What was that little redhead doing by the side of the road? Because even though he knew by now that it was only a hydrant, still, for one fleeting instant he had the same delusion all over again, every single morning.

Indeed, why that vision, and why does he have dreams while he sleeps of a baby beckoning to him in supermarket?

Suddenly, the first complication in the novel arises, Micah finding a young man sitting on his step, Brink Adams.  He is the son of a former girlfriend, Lorna Bartell, from college.  He thinks Micah might be his father.  Seeing Brink, who is really not his son, he remembers that dream:  The image rose up in his mind of the baby in the supermarket, watching him so expectantly. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight. 

He feels, however, a certain responsibility towards Brink and allows him to stay overnight, Micah urging him to call his mother.  He does not.  So Micah says call or leave and leave he does..  Micah immediately suffers regret:  He had handled this all wrong, he realized.  But even given a second chance, he wasn’t sure what he’d do differently.  Tyler cuts her protagonist some slack.  She does love her characters, even those who might not act on a second chance.

Allowing Brink to stay over, while Cass was having apartment house difficulties, creates the next complication, her sudden decision to break up with Micah.  Cass calls and drops that bombshell because he didn’t offer for her to move in with him while she was having those apartment issues, and instead, briefly took in this stranger, Brink, in the office bedroom.  This stuns him, never associating the two. “That never even crossed my mind! I didn’t even know you were willing to move in!  Is that what this is about?  You all at once think we ought to change the rules?” “No, Micah,” she said. “I know that you are you.” Indeed, a revelatory statement by Cass. He meekly accepts this judgement putting his phone into his pocket and staring out into space.  He confesses to himself though that he hated it when women expected you to read their minds.

He remembers when he first met Cass.  He was making a tech call at an elementary school where Cass taught.  The class was not happy that they had to go to a retirement home to Christmas carol, objecting that the residents “smell bad and the old ladies keep reaching out to us with their clutchy, grabby hands.”  And here Tyler shines in her narrative, showing her increasing sensitivity to the matter of aging as she has in her last few novels, as Cass says: "I'd like you to look at this from another angle. Some of those people get to see children only once a year at Christmas, when our school comes to carol. And even the grown-ups they knew are mostly gone. Their parents are gone, their friends are gone, their husbands or wives gone-whole worlds gone. Even their brothers and sisters, often. They remember something that happened when they were, say, nine years old-same age as you all are now-but nobody else alive remembers it too. You don't think that's hard? You'll be singing to a roomful of broken hearts, I tell you. Try thinking of that when you decide you don't want to bother doing it." Ridiculously, Micah had felt touched, although in his own experience most old people were relentlessly cheery.

On the spot he asks her out to the movies.   She searched his face for a moment.  She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about him…”And I do like going to the movies,” she said. ..”Well, then,” he told her. And he couldn’t keep from grinning.  It was her speech to the children that had won him. “A roomful of broken hearts”! He liked that phrase.  And so does the reader.

Is it no wonder they then get together? Cass “completes” him.  He just doesn’t really know it, yet.  But his family does, all his sisters wondering where Cass is at a family gathering, vintage Tyler, everyone talking over everyone else. Tumult, the opposite of Micah’s ordered life. They were really looking forward to Cass’ appearance as much if not more so than brother Micah.  They are incredulous that Micah doesn’t grasp the issue.  “So, Cass broke up with you because you gave your guest room to the son of an ex-girlfriend that you don’t even see anymore?”  This leave him with the thought: he liked his family a lot, but they made him crazy sometimes.

And now Tyler has Micah dancing to a cacophony of complications, guilt over throwing Brink out, guilt about not trying, yet, to find and contact Brink’s mother, Lorna, guilt about not being sensitive to Cass, and feeling berated by his family.  He starts first by trying to contact Lorna to let her know her son is safe, tracing her via the Internet and then emailing her. 

The next morning he’s out for his daily run, again noticing that that early no one is out, and daydreaming what if a neutron bomb made it permanent?  No one for him to deal with.  How idyllic that might be?  No complications.  No effort to live. He runs in a trance.  Until, once again, the hydrant which he mistakes for a redhead appears, his giving his usual shake of the shoulders at how repetitious this thought was, how repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and how his entire life ran in a rut, really.  And really they do.

Lorna does not email or call but arrives, finding his address by Googling “computer repair” in Baltimore and found “Tech Hermit…it was what the girls in my dorm used to call you.”…”I guess I’m pretty predictable.”  She didn’t disagree.

After discussing the matter of her son with Lorna, she leaves with her contact numbers if Brink shows up again. He goes out on a computer call, but returning to his apartment, the place gave off a kind of hollow sound, it seemed to him.  Nobody said “You’re home!” Or “Welcome Back.”  He finds some of Cass’ overnight clothes and goes into a reverie about her and her clothes: “The sweater matched her eyes exactly, but when he'd once  pointed that out she had said it was the other way around; her eyes matched the sweater. "Whatever color I wear, my eyes just go along with it," she'd told him, and then, nudging him playfully in the ribs, "You should see me when I wear red!" Remembering that now, he smiled.

Maybe red was a premonition all along?  Or the red fire hydrant?  And the baby dream?  Micah’s sister Ada has an opinion on that one: it’s a sign from your subconscious that you’re ready for the next stage of life. But, is he?

Brink indeed returns to Micah’s apartment, agrees to be picked up by his mom and step dad.  Micah has filled his obligation.  Good man. He and Lorna have a heart to heart about Micah’s opinion that he turns women off, “it’s like all at once they remember somewhere else they’d prefer to be. But in discussing this with his ex-girl friend from college, it begins to dawn on him that even their love was not the perfect one he imagined it to be, and Lorna delivers one of the themes of the novel: “Sometimess..you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time.”

With Cass, Lorna and her son gone, Micah is dreaming more, becoming more disheveled and Tyler moves into the novel’s denouement with a gathering momentum as Micah goes through the motions of his Tech Hermit calls, his apartment house responsibilities, with an inner dialog underway which is disturbed only by Tyler making a rare departure to the other reality as he listens to talk radio in the car discussing police violence.  It is a brief foray outside the terrarium of Micah’s world as he struggles with his very identity.  The last chapter inexorably, powerfully moves him towards a resolution, but is it one in which Tyler pushes him further into damnation or into the light of redemption?  As I was reading this suspenseful chapter, I thought it was going decidedly in one direction, and I’ll have to leave it there as it would be a spoiler to reveal my expectations or the reality. It is a remarkable piece of writing.

Tyler never fails to engage and delight.  As I said at the onset, she is our very own Jane Austen, but with a modern sensibility, and now that both John Updike (who admired her writing) and Philip Roth are gone she is indisputably one of our leading writers of fiction. Redhead by the Side of the Road is vintage Anne Tyler. Her, now, more than twenty novels a treasure trove of American life observed and deciphered.