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.
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.
