Gilbert Sorrentino
The Clutter of the Vacuous World
Often enough a good way to get a quick introduction to an author’s work is to start with one or another collection of that writer’s short fiction. Frequently the short stories will provide a helpful if preliminary sense of the writer’s preoccupations, strategies, preferred subjects, stylistic tendencies, etc. If this writer is also a novelist, one can then decide whether to devote the greater time and commitment needed to tackle the longer works. Unfortunately, this does not really prove to be the case with Gilbert Sorrentino. Although Sorrentino is in my opinion among the most accomplished (and will, I believe, in the long run be among the most influential) post-WWII American novelists, The Moon In Its Flight, a more or less omnibus collection of his short fiction, does not present Sorrentino either at his best or his most representative.
The book does manage to hang together thematically as a portrait of American life in the twenty or so years following on the end of the second world war, or at least of a certain segment of American society characterized by its aspirations to a pseudo-bohemian way of life vaguely associated with art or writing or the academy. The portrait that emerges of this class of intellectual pretenders is a decidedly sour one, their lives notable mostly for their casual betrayals, petty spite, their lassitude and spiritual drift. Indeed, the overall view of human endeavor that seems to pervade The Moon in Its Flight is overwhelmingly pessimistic, even misanthropic. The narrator of “Decades” writes: “The fashionably grubby artistic circles in New York are filled with people like me, people who are kind enough to lie about one’s chances in the unmentioned certitude that one will lie to them about theirs. Indeed, if everyone told the truth, for just one day, in all these bars and lofts, at all these parties and openings, almost all of downtown Manhattan would disappear in a terrifying flash of hatred, revulsion, and self-loathing.” The narrator of “In Loveland” remarks on his own writing ambitions that “The desire to add some more stupid clutter to the clutter of the vacuous world is virtually unquenchable.”
Of course, one ought to hesitate in associating the comments of these first-person narrators with Sorrentino himself, but the world-weariness and sense of futility these characters express are reinforced in many of the other stories as well. The impression conveyed in such retrospective stories as the title story, “Facts and Their Manifestations,” “Life and Letters,” “Gorgias,” and “Things That Have Stopped Moving” is of failure, lost opportunities, not just regret for squandered lives but a feeling that such lives were always doomed to be squandered. This is one of the ways in which The Moon in Its Flight seems a departure from most of Sorrentino’s other work, which is marked, even when treating similarly disturbing material, by a sense of creative playfulness and an all-encompassing kind of comedy that is missing from most of these stories. But perhaps they are simply the flip-side of such comedy, the more sober depictions of the stupidity and folly that also fuels the comic novels.
Not all of the stories depart from the mode of all-out experimentation one expects from Sorrentino’s novels, however. “A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles,” written entirely in interrogative sentences, is the obvious precursor to the later Gold Fools (and, it must be said, the technique works better in the shorter form); of “Times Without Numbers” we are told in a concluding note that “the story comprises 177 sentences, 59 of which are taken from 59 separate works by 59 different authors. The remaining 118 sentences are from one of my own earlier stories.” “The Sea, Caught in Roses” seems to be built on some principle of repetition or accretion, taking the initial image named in the title and working it through a series of emendations and authorial comments. Or it may just be a spoof of romantic imagery and “picturesque” subjects.
Although most of the stories are metafictional in various fairly minimal ways—Sorrentino always reminds us that such stories have been subject to imaginative re-creation, are at least “twice-told” even when they seem to be sliced from life—few of them are as outrageously and systematically self-reflexive as his better-known novels. “Sample Writing Sample” is a story about making up stories, while several others are directly about writers, and examine the consequences and ramifications of what they’ve written. “It’s Time to Call It a Day” is a fairly thinly-disguised attack on the banalities of conventional fiction as well as current publishing practices, but a rather entertaining attack (and implicit statement of Sorrentino’s own principles) nevertheless:
This latest novel, created to satisfy the desires of an audience, as Clifford’s editor had characterized it, “too hip to actually read a lot,” educated, so to say, and busy, so, so busy, was, he hoped, the very thing to interest those readers among the favored “target group” who had progressed from slop-and-ramshackle best-sellers to the sort of fiction admired by professional reviewers—well-written, with fully developed character, a nicely turned plot, and something important to say. It was, that is to say, designed for a particular kind of success, a “literary” success, and one that was, God knows, long deserved. So Clifford thought in righteous irritation. His first three novels should have been better received than they were—as he often complained to his wife. She thought of him as “neglected,” not, as he was, ignored. The books had been painstakingly constructed, modern in their “sensibility,” whatever he meant by that, accessible and possessed of accessible, contemporary motifs, dialogue, and sex scenes. They were, to be blunt, absolute failures, and each got a handful of mostly snide, semi-literate reviews, featuring the self-satisfaction of the ignorant. These were, of course, the usual, but Clifford was astonished by their blithe savagery.
Not astonished enough, however, that he would want to stop trying to please them.
The two concluding stories in this volume, “In Loveland” and “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” in some ways sum up both the strategies and the themes of The Moon in Its Flight. “In Loveland” begins, “I have attempted to tell this story many times over the past years, the past decades, for that matter. I’ve not been able to bring it off, for I’ve never been able to invent—inhabit, perhaps—the proper narrational attitude. I begin to invent plausible situations that soon enough falsify everything, or unlikely situations that, just as soon, parody everything. I have even, at times, tried to tell the undecorated truth. . .” and goes on to tell a story of marital failure and self-disgust similar to a few of the earlier stories, but it is more amply told, with some compelling details. It concludes with these reflections, which add in a satisfying way to the story’s dramatic resonance and aesthetic implications: “Reality, or, if you will, that which we constrain ourselves to believe is, beyond all philosophies, also that which we make of what happened. Unexpected connections do, of course, sometimes make for unexpected forms. For instance, I see that this story is, essentially, about a set of disappearances. I had not intended that to be its burden, although any further attempt to say what I meant to say is out of the question.”
“Things That Have Stopped Moving” at first seems a retelling of the earlier story “Decades” (Ben and Clara Stern are the principals in the latter story, Ben and Clara Stein in the former), but manages to leaven its narrator’s account of the empty and adulterous sexual encounters between himself and Clara with some rather heart-felt reminiscences of his parents. It, too, comes with a metafictional conclusion:
This story is dotted with flaws and contradictions and riddled with inconsistencies, some of which even the inattentive reader will discover. Some of these gaffes may well be considered felicities of uncertainty and indeterminacy: such is prose. The tale also, it will have been clear, occasionally flaunts its triumphs, small though they may be. I am afraid that the final word about the gluey, tortuous, somehow glamorously perverse relationship that Ben and Clara and I constructed and sent shuffling into the world hasn’t been arrived at, but perhaps the unspeakable has had created some sad analogue of itself, if such is possible. Something has been spoken of, surely, but I can’t determine what or where it is.
Both of these stories seem to me to be successful demonstrations of the way in which self-reflexivity can actually contribute to the emotional impact of a work of fiction, while continuing to draw the reader’s attention to the artificial devices by which, unavoidably, aesthetically cogent fiction must be created.
Still, I do not think that, for readers mostly unfamiliar with Sorrentino’s work, The Moon in Its Flight would be a good place to start. It is a book that fans of Sorrentino’s fiction will want to read, but it is more interesting as a minor side attraction amid the greater pleasures of Sorrentino’s carnivalesque novels. Curious readers would be better off to start with Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a provocative but also compelling work of metafiction, perhaps then going on to what is in my view Sorrentino’s masterwork, the sui generis Mulligan Stew. Those interested in Sorrentino’s fictional depictions of Brooklyn (in which several of the stories in The Moon in Its Flight are set) might also try Crystal Vision. My most substantial reservation about recommending The Moon in Its Flight is that unwary readers might take some of the more tepid and unfocused stories in this book as representative of Gilbert Sorrentino’s achievements as a writer of fiction and might pass on the more important novels. If they did so, they would be missing out on the opportunity to read one of the most invigorating and audacious bodies of work in 20th century American fiction.
Reckonings
(This review was originally published in Jacket.)
In Barry Alpert’s 1974 interview with him, Gilbert Sorrentino declares that he is “an episodic and synthetic writer. . .I don’t like to take a subject and break it down into parts, I like to take disparate parts and put them all together and see what happens.” Sorrentino’s recent books, works like Little Casino, Lunar Follies, and now A Strange Commonplace, demonstrate that he continues to purse this “synthetic” approach to the writing of fiction, if anything to even more deliberate and concentrated effect. So dedicated are these books to the juxtaposing of “disparate parts,” they seem to have brought Sorrentino to a point where all conventional expectations of continuity and development in character or story are simply irrelevant, vestiges of a prior of conception of fiction that no longer has much force.
Readers whose assumptions about the novel still depend on notions of plot and character development are likely to have trouble identifying A Strange Commonplace as a novel at all. Some might think of it as a collection of sketches and short tales, but even if we were to take the “episodic” nature of the book as far as this, we would, of course, be privileging the “disparate parts” over the effort “to put them all together” and would be missing the aesthetic point altogether. This is a unified work of fiction, however much Sorrentino makes us participate in the act of synthesizing its elements so that, along with the author, we readers can “see what happens.”
The contents page of A Strange Commonplace signals immediately that the reader should be alert to the novel’s structural patterns, to whatever relationships might be revealed through the arrangement of its parts. “Book One” and “Book Two” each consist of twenty-six sections, the titles of which are identical across both books, although presented in a different order. Thus, we can read a pair of “chapters” called “In the Bedroom,” “Success,” “Born Again,” etc., although, as we discover, in the second set of episodes the cast of characters changes and the stories related are different — except insofar as all of the separate tales depict a post-World War II America of faded dreams, dysfunctional families, adultery-ridden marriages, and often wanton cruelty. Inevitably, this device tempts us actively to seek out correspondences between these episodes; perhaps such correspondences can indeed be found, but one suspects that Sorrentino himself would be less interested in leading his readers to the “meaning” that might be gleaned from this approach than in the process — unconventional and unorthodox — by which they are led there.
This process is intensified by Sorrentino’s use of a few recurring names for his characters and recurring images and motifs. Two stories are called “Claire,” but the characters involved are, for all we can tell, not the same Claire, and other characters in other stories also bear the name. The same is true of stories whose characters are named “Warren,” “Ray,” “Janet,” and “Inez.” A pearl gray homburg hat appears in numerous stories, frequently we find ourselves at Rockefeller Center, and Meryl Streep is the subject of several conversations. Surely at least here we might regard the homburg as a symbol of the recognizable sort, the other repeated elements similarly placed to provoke us into reflecting on the deeper meaning to which they point? Experienced readers of Sorrentino’s fiction know that such symbol-hunting leads us down a blind alley, that this approach to reading fiction is relentlessly mocked in many of his books, the very notion of “deeper meaning” made the subject of some of his best jokes.
So what does A Strange Commonplace have to offer the reader willing to allow it its strangeness, its determination to render the commonplace actions of its interchangeable characters in an uncommon way? Partly the same pleasures to be found in all of Sorrentino’s work: mordant humor (although rather less broad in this case), a delight in exploring formal conceits as far as they will go, a prose style that, although entirely free of affectation and ornamental flourishes, is both energetic and inventive, recognizably Sorrentinoesque. Here in its entirety is the first of the two sections called “Snow”:
The tunnel in the snow leads to a warm kitchen, vinegary salad, ham and baloney and American cheese, white bread from Bohack’s and tomato-rice soup and bottles of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce, coffee. It leads to heaven. Who is the strange and beautiful man at the far end of the tunnel he has just dug from the black Packard sedan to the white door of the little frame house? And who is the woman, who smells of winter and wool and perfume, of spearmint and whiskey and love? He gets out of the car and the woman holds his arm as he starts down the thrilling tunnel, through the snow banked above him on both sides, to the man in the navy blue overcoat and pearl gray homburg who waits, down on one knee, his arms held out to him. This will never happen again, nothing like it will ever happen again. The child begins to laugh joyously in the crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing in the middle of the knifing cold of the January day, laughing since he does not know, nor do his mother and father, in their youth and beauty and strength, that this will never happen again, and that the family is almost finished and done. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.
Even this brief passage exhibits some of Sorrentino’s signature stylistic traits: the first sentence with its list, the exposition-through-questions, the mock lyricism, in this instance leading us to the sudden reckoning with reality — “. . .the family is almost finished and done with. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.”
As playful, even extravagant, as Sorrentino’s fiction can sometimes seem, his best work always represents a reckoning with reality. Books like Crystal Vision and Red the Fiend perhaps address hard-bitten realities somewhat more directly (but only somewhat) than books like Mulligan Stew and Blue Pastoral, but ultimately all of his books are aesthetically provocative efforts to get at the prevailing features of postwar American life, at what the title of one of his best books calls the “imaginative qualities of actual things.” A Strange Commonplace indeed. This new book will probably strike readers less familiar with Sorrentino’s work (for whom it would make a perfectly good introduction) as especially concerned with depicting these prevailing features, most of them disturbing if not actively repugnant, as well as the ways in which its characters attempt to cope with their circumstances. If the novel seems unfamiliar in its method of portraying these characters, their mostly unsuccessful strategies will undoubtedly seem very familiar, the kaleidoscopic picture of ourselves that emerges all too recognizable.
One for the Road
(This review was originally published in The Quarterly Conversation.)
In his last works of fiction, beginning with Little Casino (2002), Gilbert Sorrentino began composing slim, fragmented texts that he continued to identify with the designation “novel,” but that more or less dispensed completely with the elements usually associated with novels, especially narrative continuity and extended character development. Each of these works presents instead a series of episodes, anecdotes, memories, or observations—in Lunar Follies (2005) pieces of critical discourse about art—that are tenuously connected as narrative, although Little Casino ultimately does a provide a kaleidoscopic portrayal of a Brooklyn neighborhood and Lunar Follies unites its parodic discourse in a scathing satire of the “art world.” (A Strange Commonplace (2006) makes an ostensibly more direct effort to relate its narrative fragments through a Oulipian repetition of chapter headings and character names, but the connection is still more suggestive than definitive.) “Character” is equally, and literally, in name only, as individual figures, often anonymous, make brief appearances but refuse to “jump off the page,” as Sorrentino has previously and mockingly described the hallmark of “believable” characters in fiction.
In his now posthumously released (and presumably final) novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, Sorrentino again offers a relatively brief work (150 pages) built out of narrative fragments. As Christopher Sorrentino points out in his introductory note, the most obvious features of the novel’s formal structure are its division into fifty numbered sections that gradually increase in length, from sections comprised of only a paragraph or so to the final sections extending to three or four pages. The Abyss of Human Illusion also echoes Little Casino in its inclusion of textual notes, in this case labeled “commentaries” and appended to the “main” text.
Given Sorrentino’s longstanding predilection to formal experiment and manipulation, already it is tempting to look for clues to the novel’s formal patterning, which might ultimately provide the key to interpreting it, in these immediate characteristics of the text. Why fifty sections? Do the sections increase in length according to some identifiable principle governing the “rules and procedures” that Christopher Sorrentino reminds us have always been partly determinative of the formal qualities of his father’s fiction? If in Little Casino the notes discretely follow each section while in The Abyss of Human Illusion they are listed together at the end of the text, does this mean we should read the two novels differently, in the latter case first reading the main entries and then moving on to the commentaries as a whole? Would this make for a significantly different reading experience, adding or altering meaning in the process?
One is almost compelled as well to read each of the fifty sections looking for apparent correspondences between them, whether of character, setting, action, or image. And there are indeed correspondences—an orange glow in the first few sections, the perspective through a window in many of them, references to the Milano restaurant, characters who move to St. Louis, an aging writer figure who keeps writing because it’s all he can do. Most of these correspondences are probably either trivial or accidental, while others are simply consequences of the setting of many of the episodes in Brooklyn and of characters no doubt in one way or another created from the experiences of the author. Perhaps these motifs were conjured by Sorrentino to help him develop the book’s structure organically, from episode to episode, but one can also imagine Sorrentino taking delight in the possibility they would lead some readers on a hunt for “meaning” that would ultimately prove fruitless. Even so, following along through his formal and stylistic turns, even when they entangle us in their convolutions, has always been one of the pleasures of reading Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction, and so it is also in this novel.
The most consistently maintained correspondence linking the condensed stories related in The Abyss of Human Illusion is thematic. Each of the stories tells of characters caught in the “abyss” named in the book’s title. Some of the characters realize the depth of their illusions, while others remain possessed by them. Some are elderly, most often male, facing what now seems to them the emptiness of their lives, while others are still in the midst of carrying out their illusions. Infidelity, divorce, and general domestic unhappiness play prominent roles, resentment, envy, and an emotional numbness often the accompanying states of being. The overall tone conveyed by the stories is a fairly brutal frankness about the disappointments and futility that frequently enough define human existence.
While such a disabused portrayal of his characters’ motives and behavior is common in Sorrentino’s fiction, rarely is it made quite so relentlessly the focus of interest as it is in The Abyss of Human Illusion. Sorrentino’s view of the role of “theme” in fiction has always been that it undercuts the aesthetic integrity of the work when conceived as the act of “saying something” through the work rather than as simply “something said,” thematic implications that arise from the work as it pursues its own aesthetic logic. It is entirely possible that Sorrentino began this work with the brief image described in the first section—a young boy sitting at a kitchen table on top of which are placed a bottle of French dressing, a bowl of salad, and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce—and that all of the succeeding sections developed from this base and in imaginative interaction with each other, but the ultimate effect of the central conceit is to leave the impression the novel is a “commentary” of sorts on our capacity for self-delusion.
The coherence this conceit provides could make The Abyss of Human Illusion perhaps a more accessible work than some of Sorrentino’s other fiction, in which complexity is built out of simplicity. This last novel more nearly reverses that process, producing apparent simplicity from a deceptive complexity. Whether this inversion of his normal practice is a structural device Sorrentino intended us to notice probably cannot now be known, but it does draw our attention to structure in a way that is consistent with his distinctive brand of metafiction more generally and especially with the three novels preceding The Abyss of Human Illusion. Together, this quartet concludes Gilbert Sorrentino’s career by reinforcing that career’s implicit insistence that “fiction” identifies not a specifiable form but an opportunity for the resourceful writer to further specify through example its yet unexplored forms.
Thomas Pynchon
Mazes That Are Mazy
That Thomas Pynchon would come to draw on the resources of the detective novel is not really surprising. As many reviewers of Inherent Vice correctly pointed out, Pynchon's fiction has long incorporated the mystery plot as its essential narrative device, with characters such as Herbert Stencil, Oedipa Maas, and Tyrone Slothrop taking on the role of "detective." What Will Blythe says of Doc Sportello, private eye protagonist of Inherent Vice, is true of these other characters as well: "Doc attempts to solve a mystery that may or may not be solvable, so dense are the thickets of information through which he must hack, so opaque the motives of nearly everyone he comes across."
It might be said that this portrayal of Doc Sportello as a kind of perplexed if intrepid jungle explorer makes Inherent Vice a pastiche of the detective novel, or even a parody, an exercise in genre revisionism that takes the epistemological core of the detective narrative--the search for knowledge--and uses it to mock the the pretensions of such narratives to finally arrive at "truth" and to satirize the very notion that a "search for knowledge" in modern America is even possible. There is some truth to such an interpretation, of course, but I don't finally think that Pynchon's novel is a burlesque of the detective novel and nothing more. The touchstone for Inherent Vice is pretty clearly the fiction of Raymond Chandler in novels such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, and it could equally be said that Chandler's own work evinces a good deal of epistemological skepticism itself, and Philip Marlowe is frequently portrayed as attempting to hack his way through "thickets" of misdirection. Marlowe often seems just as confused by the opaque motives of those he encounters as Doc Sportello.
Inherent Vice is at least as much a homage to the radicalism of writers like Chandler and Ross McDonald, a testament to the adaptability of the detective novel to various settings, styles, and concerns, especially in contexts in which the very possibility of uncovering "truth" is or ought to be a lingering question. Doc Sportello may seem a sorry excuse for a private eye--a shambolic, laid-back stoner--but he's also dogged and perceptive, and he feels a sense of duty toward those he is enlisted to help. If he is led through some mazes that remain mazy and if the full import of what he discovers is not altogether assimilated, this is only par for the course in Pynchon's fiction, and having gone through the process of seeking the truth has been more enlightening than not, both for Doc and for the reader. Through Doc's peregrinations around Los Angeles, he and we become more fully aware of the historical and cultural forces at work that will transform the hippie haven of Gordita Beach into just a memory of personal and countercultural resistance to the encroaching power of new technologies and an unleashed capitalism that will shut down the brief emergence of a more humane way of life--the way of life associated with "the sixties"--before it could become more than a fragile utopian moment.
What ultimately makes Inherent Vice compelling is that in accepting the narrative protocols of the detective novel--which includes the obligatory visit of the femme fatale who initiates the action, an encounter with goons that leaves Doc unconscious, episodes of verbal sparring between Doc and a cop, etc.--Pynchon also manages to produce a novel that is recognizably Pynchonian. The detective novel is used to his purposes and is thus in this instance transformed into a comic picaresque in which, as with most picaresque narratives, characters are thinly developed beyond a few essential features, their adventures themselves of more importance than what these adventures might add to our sense of the characters as "rounded" individuals. (Thus the frequent enough criticism that Pynchon's characters are "cartoonish" is completely misconceived.) I think I agree with Thomas Jones that
the Anglophone novelist whom Pynchon most closely resembles – with his delight in silly names, scatological jokes, wild digressions and impromptu outbursts of song lyrics, his disregard for distinctions between fact and fiction, his scientific background, his belief in the randomness of the world and fascination with the patterns that appear in the chaos – is Tobias Smollett.
In such novels as The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker--even the names of the protagonists are appropriately Pynchonesque--Smollett helped establish the picaresque as a narrative strategy in the early English novel, but despite Smollett's influence on, for example, Charles Dickens, both he and the kind of picaresque narrative emphasizing "randomness" and digression was superseded by the post-Flaubert novel of realism and the "well-made story." Writers like Pynchon and John Barth partially revived the picaresque strategy in the 1960s, and surely both V and Gravity's Rainbow can usefully be read as picaresque accounts of randomness and incipient chaos.
What really unites Pynchon and Smollett is an essentially comic vision of the world, a world full of mishaps, bad luck, and evil portents, that presents itself not as an orderly arrangement of plot points but as an entirely contingent series of events--one thing leads to another. And it is a comic vision that at its best is also greatly entertaining. Pynchon's best work is above all funny, and the most unfortunate consequence of the scholarly attention Pynchon's fiction has gathered over the years is that too much emphasis has been put on "paranoia" and "entropy" and other weighty matters, obscuring the fundamental fact that Pynchon is in the line of great American literary comedians. His work is "postmodern" to the extent it is comic in a particularly thoroughgoing way, not because it invokes the second law of thermodynamics or posits the existence of global conspiracies. When his fiction becomes bloated and leaden, as I would argue it does in both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, it is because he has lost this comic facility, or is intentionally disregarding it.
Thus for me Inherent Vice marks a return to the approach he seemingly abandoned after Vineland. It takes us on a comic/picaresque journey around southern California at the turn of the seventies, playing much of what it records for laughs even as it exposes us to acts of murder, brutal violence, drug trafficking, sadism, and economic rapacity--all the "inherent vice" to which humanity inevitably succumbs. The detective novel conventions give the novel a structural spine that helps to focus the novel's comedic energies while also allowing Pynchon the flexibility of form that characterizes his best work. Some might say the kind of pothead humor that arises from his choice of milieu and protagonist sometimes descends to the level of Cheech and Chong, but this is arguably a necessary side effect of the aesthetic strategy Pynchon employs: the world in which Doc Sportello roams is comic precisely because of the perspective the dope-smoking detective provides.
If finally Inherent Vice is somewhat less satisfying than Pynchon's other two California novels, Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, not to mention V and Gravity's Rainbow, I would identify its most serious flaw as a kind of sentimentality about the vanished hippie world it evokes. It's a sentimentality only reinforced by the novel's conclusion--Doc driving in the inland fog, clearly enough symbolic of the coming cultural fog of the 1970s--although the novel's strongly sympathetic portrayal of the hippie scene has by then long since itself settled in. Perhaps it has been lurking in Pynchon's work all along, but the wistful tone of innocence lost pervades this novel, and a little too obviously for my taste. The characters in Inherent Vice, including Doc Sportello, are subject to a mild degree of comic mockery, but not enough to deprive them of their status as heroes of naivete.
Simulacrum
(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)
Surely if 9/11 conspiracy theories had not already arisen, like the dust plumes from the Twin Towers, Thomas Pynchon would have invented some. As it is, those existing theories seem to have been propounded by readers of The Crying of Lot 49 or V, novels whose plots imply endlessly ramifying connections, always complex, if ultimately mystifying, alternatives to simpler explanations, and leave the impression that if no final explanation is really satisfying, that’s because the actions to be explained are so puzzling, the conspiracies so potentially vast. Certainly the world evoked by 9/11 conspiracy theories seems very much a Pynchonian kind of world.
The same thing could be said about the Internet. With its origins in the U.S. Defense department, the “world-wide-web” is in some ways a predictable phenomenon emerging from the corporate-military structure whose power and potential reach are depicted in Gravity’s Rainbow. Given the pervasive “connectivity” made possible by the Internet, the mischief such connectivity enables, and the existence of the “Deep Web,” lurking beyond the “surface” web accessible to ordinary searches, it would probably seem odd if Pynchon never did address the development of the web as an all-encompassing presence in American life. Although much of Pynchon’s fiction employs a historical setting, works such as Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and parts of V examine the present circumstances (at the time) of American society. Even the historical novels are not really concerned with history per se but with the ongoing continuities between past and present, the portents in the past of what in the present has become only more ominous.
Thus Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge, comes to us so instantly recognizable as a work by Thomas Pynchon that after we have read even the jacket copy (or any of the publicity materials), we might feel we have read this novel already. It does indeed tell a story set in New York City immediately prior to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and the story does traverse some of the darker regions of the Internet, which in 2001 was a more mysterious, if less enormous, place than it is today. And, as we likely suspect, the attack is surrounded by its share of possible shadowy participants, making it even more nefarious and frightening than the official version would have it. The Internet, particularly in the environs of the Deep Web, is a zone of unreality whose best and worst qualities are that it reinforces the unreality of the “real” world. The cyber reality in which Pynchon’s protagonist, Maxine Tarnow (a “fraud investigator”), finds herself enmeshed focuses her attention on the sheer lunacy of the reality we Americans have created for ourselves at the same time it promises to intensify that lunacy.
Maxine handles the paranoia-inducing discoveries she makes about the lengthening tentacles of oligarchical control and an underworld of secretive cyberspace with rather more equanimity than do most of Pynchon’s previous protagonists, who of course inhabit similarly paranoia-soaked worlds. As with many of these characters, following Maxine through such a world reveals why paranoia is a justified response to modern experience, and through her Pynchon works to give shape to the paranoid outlook. Considering that she is also struggling with professional setbacks (her Certified Fraud Examiner license has been revoked and she is now working freelance) and family problems (she is separated from her husband and raising two children on her own), Maxine steadfastly maintains her purpose in investigating the affairs of Gabriel Ice, a financial wheeler-dealer whose activities lead Maxine to websites involved in abetting his fraudulent financial transactions but that also lead her to other denizens of the Web, some clearly sinister in their intentions, others more benign, technogeeks motivated by the sort of idealism that seemed to accompany the early days of the Internet. In part, Bleeding Edge shows how that idealism was inevitably going to be submerged by the overwhelming force of American profit-making, destined to be the handmaiden of oligarchs like Gabriel Ice. The initial dot com boom and bust, the immediate precursor to the events in Bleeding Edge, was just the presage to the complete commodification of the Web.
Not only is Maxine Tarnow impressively reliable as our guide through this cyber underworld, as well as pre- and post-9/11 New York, she is probably the most compelling, fully-developed female character in all of Pynchon’s fiction. She plays the same role as P.I. Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice — both novels could be seen as variations on the detective novel — and she is at least as tenacious as he is, her efforts as effectual in “getting to the bottom” of the situation she confronts — although finally in neither novel is there really a “bottom” to the possible depths of contingency and corruption they otherwise do make visible. Certainly both of these characters are more effectual than Pynchon’s schlemiel characters such as Benny Profane and Tyrone Slothrop, although in some ways it is the latter two’s slacker-like qualities that make them as appealing as they are. Maxine Tarnow has her undignified moments (especially where sex is concerned), treated with the usual Pynchonian slapstick comedy, but finally she seems perhaps the most self-possessed adult character Pynchon has created.
Still, it may be Maxine’s strengths as a character that make the familiarity of Bleeding Edge’s narrative less a sign of the continuity in Pynchon’s work than of lagging inspiration, a willingness to go with the expected plot devices. If Maxine is a more rounded character than we have come to expect from a Thomas Pynchon novel (to say that for the most part he has relied on caricature and other forms of comic flattening is not a criticism), the story for which she provides the focus seems curiously less interesting than she is. Pynchon has given us this different kind of character only to involve her in the same kind of paranoia narrative experienced by Oedipa Maas or Tyrone Slothrop, but since Maxine has a different relationship to this narrative, the effect is to make it almost perfunctory, simply the sort of thing a Pynchon character must undergo.
Oedipa and Slothrop are subjected to the forces prompting the paranoid response in a much more threatening way (especially Slothrop, who at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow almost literally falls apart), threatening both physically and psychologically. Both are profoundly affected by what they discover and by the events unfolding around them. It could be said their whole way of being in the world is altered, as is, potentially, the reader’s as well as a result of witnessing these events (or at least their impact on the characters). Maxine is certainly affected by what she discovers, but she seems to find her experiences less personally unsettling, less likely to force an existential crisis, however extreme they may be. Often Maxine acts more as an observer of the spooky world she encounters than as someone irredeemably spooked by it. The ultimate effect is that, on the one hand, Maxine consistently proves a steady navigator through this world, but, on the other, her stability of perception also makes the novel something closer to straight satire or even a kind of journalistic expose than one would expect from the author of Gravity’s Rainbow.
475 pages worth of cultural satire can come to seem a bit excessive, although not in the sense that the novel goes too far but in the sense that it attempts too little beyond drawing our attention to cultural folly. Portraying the deeper dangers of such folly while also suggesting it is quite likely to persist has always given Pynchon’s more satirical impulses an extra edge, taking his fiction beyond conventional satire into what in the 1960s was called “black humor” but in Pynchon’s case encompassed a more distinctive kind of comic vision that combined low-brow, farcical humor and existential dread. In Bleeding Edge the danger seems muted because it doesn’t fully extend to Maxine herself, who is too intrepid to succumb to terminal angst. The humor is still here, but it is more diffuse and sporadic, manifested in wiseacre dialogue and the narrator’s sarcastic asides (usually reflecting Maxine’s sarcastic attitude) rather than through such extended set pieces as, for example, the “Byron the Bulb” episode in Gravity’s Rainbow.
Bleeding Edge is in general a much more dialogue-dependent novel than Gravity’s Rainbow or V. Indeed, much of the novel’s “action” is related not through its direct depiction but by reports conveyed through the dialogue, to the point that this can seem less a novel concerning the events to which it mostly alludes (including the 9/11 attacks) than talk about these events. Some of the talk is mordant and witty in the usual Pynchon fashion, but much of it is surprisingly routine, an impression left only more insistently by the novel’s formal arrangement as essentially a series of scenes organized around verbal exchanges between the characters. Those of us who admire the stylistic audacity and rhetorical power of Pynchon’s prose in previous novels get very little of either in Bleeding Edge, simply because it relies so heavily on dialogue.
Bleeding Edge is a book worth reading simply because it’s by Thomas Pynchon, although anyone contemplating it as an introduction to Pynchon’s work should instead go immediately to V or Gravity’s Rainbow or even The Crying of Lot 49, which, although now apparently somewhat disdained by Pynchon, has long served as a more accessibly condensed example of Pynchon’s literary strategies and worldview. Ultimately, however, Bleeding Edge is not so much “minor” Pynchon as it is a kind of synthetic replica of a Thomas Pynchon novel, all the more disappointing because it was written by Pynchon himself.
John Barth
So:
At this late stage in his career, John Barth is probably in a kind of no-win situation. Those who identify him as a first-generation postmodernist, and have probably never had much admiration for postmodern fiction, anyway, will see every new work as an example of postmodernism's obsolescence. Thus Gregory Leon Miller proclaims that in Barth's most recent book, The Development, "Emotional moments - mortality is a major theme of the book - are undercut by narrative games that have become cliché, as narrators reveal themselves to be someone other than we were led to believe, and then someone else altogether. . .The tedium of these gestures strongly suggests that it is such postmodern fiction itself - at least in its purest, initially conceived form - that has run its course."
On the other hand, those who do consider themselves admirers of Barth's work are more likely to find a book like The Development, which undeniably is more accessible to the non pomo-inclined, disappointingly ordinary. Thus Christopher Sorrentino concludes that "Barth once talked about embracing 'another order of risk,' in which one would test one’s ability to hold an audience with narrative complexity. Here, though, we have stories about community that, while not without their appeal, are as bland as the homespun Americana of Garrison Keillor."
Although I am more inclined to agree with Sorrentino in his judgment that The Development is "a modest addition to [Barth's] oeuvre," I can't quite agree that the portrayal of the gated community on Maryland's Eastern Shore that is the focus of the nine stories comprising The Development bears comparison to Keillor-type sentimentality. Indeed, to the extent that Miller's criticism has validity--and only here does it have validity--it is true that Barth's fiction rarely lingers over "emotional moments" without resorting to distancing effects such as verbal irony or authorial self-reflexivity. While it might seem "conventional" for John Barth to write a sequence of stories about elderly couples trying to cope with the fact that the horizon line of their lives has come much closer, I don't think either the subject or the setting is inherently "hokum."
Indeed, the most emotionally unsettling moment in The Development occurs at the conclusion of "Toga Party," in which the story's husband and wife protagonists decide to gas themselves in their garage rather than continue on their life's "crappy last lap," as the husband puts it. The story is unsettling precisely because there really has been no emotional preparation for this almost spontaneous decision and because it is carried out with little emotional display:
. . .Already they could smell exhaust fumes. "I love you, Dick."
"I love you. And okay, so we're dumping on the kids, leaving them to take the hit and clean up the mess. So what?"
"They'll never forgive us. But you're right. So what?"
"We'll each be presumed to have survived the other, as the saying goes, and neither of us'll be around to know it."
The car engine quietly idled on.
"Shouldn't we at least leave them a note, send them an e-mail, something?"
"So go do that if you want to. Me, I'm staying put."
He heard her exhale. "Me, too, I guess." Then inhale, deeply.
It is true that this event has emotional resonance throughout the rest of the book--other characters refer to it, its possibility as the final act for these characters as well can't be dismissed--but I don't see how it can be taken as "a virtual Hallmark card for suicide." That people like the Fentons might indeed resort to this kind of clear-eyed suicide in the midst of modern "retirement" only seems to me an equally clear-eyed indictment of the very middle-class lifestyle to which almost all of the characters in the book have readily acceded, to one degree or another. There is a repressed but still palpable disappointment with the outcome of American "success" permeating The Development, not an affirmation of it.
Some of the characters are more resistant to the illusions of the American Way than others. At the end of "Progressive Dinner," about the annual Heron Bay Estates social, we are left with Peter Simpson, an associate dean at the local college:
From the porch Chuck Becker adds loudly, "God bless us all! And God Bless America!"
Several voices murmur "Amen." Looking up and away with a sigh of mild annoyance, Peter Simpson happens at just that moment to see a meteor streak left to right across the moonless, brightly constellated eastern sky.
So what? he asks himself.
So nothing.
Most of the characters are presented as financially comfortable and as having accomplished career success, but many of them don't seem to regard their careers as achieving anything very important. Some are outright failures, as for example George Newett, a creative writing professor at the same local college, who confesses to having published little and who settles for "trying to help others do better" than he did, although "as of this writing no Stratford alum has managed that not-so-difficult achievement." None of them are held up as especially insightful, morally or intellectually. They may indeed be "bland," but this seems to me at least the natural outcome of their author's vision of Heron Bay Estates, the small but representative world John Barth wants to invoke.
Given the extent to which in The Development Barth has trimmed back what Gregory Leon Miller calls the "meta-fictional [sic] flourishes" for which Barth has become, at least to critics like Miller, infamous, it is rather astonishing that Miller would insist on charging it with "excessive self-reflexivity." There are a couple of stories--in particular, "The Bard Award" and "Rebeginnings"--that feature Barth's trademark dual emphasis on telling the story and on relating the story of the storytelling, which makes some of his most notoriously postmodern novels and stories more like narrative puzzles than narratives per se. But for the most part, the stories in The Development are surprisingly straightforward suburban slices-of-life joined together to create a surprisingly earnest work of late-life realism. One suspects that for readers like Miller, Barth could never be less than "excessive" unless he were to stop writing altogether or start being an utterly different kind of writer than the one he's always been.
One "self-reflexive" feature of the book that even Miller does not bring forward for censure, and that might be considered an addition of "narrative complexity," can be found in its title. "The Development," it seems to me, does not refer merely to the housing development itself, nor to the "development" of the characters' lives so far, but to "the development" as one of the elements of narrative. Most of the stories (except, of course, for "Toga Party") consist mostly of "development," most of them beginning in no particularly urgent situation and trailing off before the "tale" could be said to have reached its dramatic apex. "The End," which ostensibly tells the story of HBE's destruction by tornado doesn't actually narrate that catastrophe and registers the deaths of two of the community's members in just a couple of sentences. But this seems to me to reinforce the book's portrayal of the characters' "last lap." As Paul Lafarge puts it in his review (B & N Review) of The Development, "The open-endedness of these stories is not mere trickiness. The tired reporters and washed-up teachers of creative writing in Heron Bay Estates are, like Barth himself, close enough to the end of their lives that the autobiographer's paradox is more than a theoretical worry. How do you tell the conclusion of your own story?. . .there is perhaps no better way to face the certainty that your own consciousness will cease, than with a defiant colon, so:"
Barth employs such a strategy of inconclusiveness, it seems to me, with particular skill in this book, so much so that its more subtle effects are apparently lost on his harsher critics who see only the more obvious "meta-fictional" touches.
The Story of a Storyteller
(This review originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)
The four books of short fiction that John Barth has published (all now reprinted by Dalkey Archive as Collected Stories) offer a usefully synoptic view of Barth’s signature moves as a writer of fiction—or at least those moves with which he is likely to remain most identified. Although Barth advises the reader in his brief introduction to Collected Stories that his “authorial inclination” has always been “toward books rather than discreet, stand-alone short stories,” the very ways in which he endeavors in each of these collected books to unify the series of “discreet” stories are revealing of Barth’s fundamental assumptions and ambitions. Thus, while it may be true that “short fiction is not my long suit,” as Barth puts it, these collected stories do illuminate the ultimate purposes of Barth’s literary art.
Clarity about Barth’s artistic principles is necessary because his fiction is often mischaracterized, sometimes deliberately caricatured, and readers are still likely to be familiar with his reputation as a “difficult” writer given to “playing games,” obsessed with his own narrative tricks rather than telling a story about “life.” Certainly books like Lost in the Funhouse and On With the Story, both appearing here in full, are among the most comprehensively self-reflexive works of fiction published by an American writer (or any writer). Both as individual stories and as a whole, such books readily acknowledge the artifice of their own making, but if this is to be regarded as playing a “game” with the reader, it is a game that transcends frivolity, serving aesthetically serious and thematically consequential goals. If the prevailing tone in these books is playfulness, this should not be mistaken for whimsicality, for arbitrary (or even contemptuous) humor to no justifiable artistic effect.
Barth’s earliest novels, The Floating Opera and End of the Road, offer a certain conviviality of tone (if more muted), but they are also fundamentally serious books. Both take on the weightiest of topics—the nature of human values, the meaning of existence itself—in a mode that critics at the time associated with the then-notorious existentialist philosophy proclaimed by Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, Barth himself has referred to the novels as explorations of nihilism, hardly a subject to be taken lightly, which Barth treats with all due sobriety and without resort to narrative “trickery” (although neither could really be called works of conventional realism of the kind that had come to dominate American fiction in the immediate postwar period).
The Sot-Weed Factor was intended to be the final installment of a “nihilist trilogy,” as Barth himself has called it, but while this novel does have some thematic affinities with The Floating Opera and End of the Road, it instead became the first of Barth’s truly “experimental” works, arguably the first recognizably “postmodern” novel by an American writer. (Barth would later duly cite the importance of such predecessors as Borges and Beckett in pushing him in this new direction.) A “self-conscious” novel, it doesn’t so much call attention to the process of its own creation as make the reader aware of its status as an anachronistic work, a pastiche of an 18th-century novel in the mold of Fielding and Smollett. It is as if Barth is attempting to move the novel as a form forward by taking it backward, reminding us of its roots. The 18th-century English novel is indeed notable for a high degree of authorial self-consciousness (Tristram Shandy being the most radical example), an additional sign that Barth is working toward a complete break with the conventional realist novel and its transparent narrative in favor of a kind of storytelling (Barth never abandons story) that is unafraid to acknowledge its inherent artifice.
Barth’s follow-up to The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, similarly foregrounds its artifice, but in this case it is not the artifice of storytelling that is most emphasized, although there is some metafictional maneuvering in the story’s setup. Barth creates an artificial, alternative reality, a fictional world depicted as a University Campus that marks the limit of the characters’ awareness. In this world, it is possible for a boy to grow up with goats only to discover he is a boy, then go on a heroic quest to free his world from an autocratic computer that rules the Campus and to achieve spiritual enlightenment. The novel’s allegory—essentially a restaging of the Cold War as a contest between “East Campus” and “West Campus”—is not subtle, and much of the novel’s humor comes from the overstated parallels between conditions on Campus and the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the modes and conventions of the mythic quest as described by Joseph Campbell and others.
Barth has judged Giles Goat-Boy his least favorite among his novels “because the overstatement is overdone—the novel itself is too long, the subject is inevitably dated, the setting borders on the jejune.” Whether or not Barth had reservations at the time about his turn, in both The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, to this large-canvas, Rabelaisian satire (what at the time was called “black humor”), his next book would nevertheless be very different, conspicuously reduced in size. Lost in the Funhouse distills the essential elements in Barth’s shift to more experimental work—heightened awareness of fiction as a literary form, preoccupation with the process of writing, an interest in the source and structure of storytelling—and refashions them as shorter, more concentrated stories that challenge the conventions of the short story as much as Sot-Weed and Giles challenge those of the novel. The result is a book that, more than any other, defines “metafiction” as a distinctive variant of literary postmodernism, a book that is certainly one of the most important of the 1960s, arguably one of the most important produced by a postwar American writer.
While numerous works prior to Lost in the Funhouse clearly enough now seem classifiable as postmodern (including Barth’s own previous two novels), it also now seems clear that this book is most responsible for clarifying (and raising) the stakes involved in what by the time it appeared was obviously among younger, more adventurous writers a rejection of the reigning practices of the immediate postwar years in favor of a more formally audacious kind of fiction. Barth, along with such generational colleagues as Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and William Gass, no longer took for granted a definition of fiction that ties it to traditional conceptions of narrative and its fixed elements (“character development,” “point of view,” etc.). Of course, most readers still take such a definition for granted, and so, although Giles Goat-Boy had achieved surprising popularity for a book of its heft and eccentricities, Barth’s reputation as a difficult writer whose work disrupts our customary reading habits would only expand after the publication of Lost in the Funhouse.
Here Barth challenges the reader to accept that ultimately fiction is something made, a construction of language. A “story” is just that, an ordered contrivance that is not a direct reflection of “reality” but an alteration of it, its transformation by art. By calling attention to his narrators narrating, to the “storyness” of stories, or to seemingly more straightforward narratives as allegories of storytelling (“Night-Sea Journey,” “Lost in the Funhouse”), Barth implicitly asks readers to reconsider their expectations of a work of fiction, to acknowledge that the writer might use the form in a different way, might in fact abandon the form in its traditional guise altogether. Does fiction as literary art consist only of the skill with which the writer carries out the familiar narrative strategies, or can the writer achieve other kinds of aesthetic effects, arising from alternative arrangements of form and language?
Lost in the Funhouse is anchored by three stories (including the title story) that feature the character named Ambrose Mensch, narratives that are actually somewhat conventional in that they tell discernible stories about a recognizable type of fictional character (a young boy on the verge of maturity), related more or less transparently from an unbroken point of view. Taken together, they make the book’s preoccupation with the nature of literary creation visible in the most accessible way, by making it the “theme” of the stories’ depiction of Ambrose’s realization that authoring fictions will be his ambition (“he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator”). On the other hand, stories like “Echo,” “Title,” “Life-Story,” and “Menelaiad” are the most explicitly self-reflexive, and can stand as the archetypal works of metafiction, a term first used in 1970 by William Gass (who mentions Barth specifically as an example). Although this term has come to designate any work of fiction that even vaguely calls attention to itself or the situation of the writer writing, Gass used it to draw an analogy between “meta” procedures in other disciplines, such as mathematics and ethics (as Gass puts it, “lingos to converse about lingos”), and the rise of self-aware, formally intricate fiction. In such fiction, “the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed” (“Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”).
The self-reflexivity of metafiction, in Gass’s conception, mirrors a previous act of reflection on the writer’s part, reflection about “the forms of fiction” and their suitability to the needs of the modern writer. Metafiction is not mere gesture, the superficial kind of game-playing for which too many works of pseudo-metafiction are indeed blameworthy. John Barth’s form of game-playing is more ambitious, and its ambition is ultimately quite considerable: to give fiction the same sort of grounding as these other disciplines. If abstraction in painting and serialism in music had freed those arts from rigid canons of practice, metafiction attempts the same sort of liberation for narrative practice, at once both exposing all fiction as the artificial ordering of language and making possible the further advancement of fiction through embracing this fact. Metafiction helps us see works of fiction not as a means of accessing reality, but, in Gass’s words as “additions to it.”
In his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Barth himself explains the motive of metafiction as the attempt to confront “the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” by turning this exhaustion “into material and means for [the writer’s] work.” As the narrator of “Title” puts it:
Plot and theme: notions vitiated by this hour of the world but as yet not successfully succeeded. Conflict, complication, no climax. The worst is to come. Everything leads to nothing: future tense, past tense, present tense. Perfect. The final question is, Can nothing be made meaningful?. . . .
The answer to the narrator’s question, which he asks as he is trying to write a story after realizing “everything’s been said already over and over,” is actually “yes,” if we accept that indeed “Everything leads to nothing.” A story doesn’t “lead” to anything beyond itself. To think otherwise is to believe that a work of fiction has value only in the external meaning to which it points us. The work itself—the work as embodied language—disappears, something that metafiction does not allow to happen. Nothing can indeed be made meaningful if what fiction does lead to—its own verbal texture, the formal structures language builds—is the “meaning.” As Barth puts it in the later Chimera, “the key to the treasure is the treasure.”
Not all of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse are as purely metafictional as “Title” or “Life-Story” but are more generally “experimental.” “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction” is a process-oriented story that narrates its own coming-into-being; it is most noteworthy for appropriating the tape recorder as a literary stratagem, presenting itself as the transcription of an audio recording. The story thus cleverly foregrounds the role of “voice” in fiction. “Glossolalia” is also meant to be heard aloud—only in this way can the underlying rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer that unite the six otherwise unrelated spoken fragments, including one literally spoken in tongues, really be detected. Perhaps the most infamous experimental “story” in the book (experimental in asking for the reader’s active participation and attempting to expand our conception of what properly constitutes “writing”) is the first one, “Frame-Tale,” in which the reader is instructed to take a pair of scissors to the page: “Cut on the dotted line. Twist end once and fasten AB to ab, CD to cd.” The result is a Mobius strip forming an endless loop of “Once upon a time there was a story that began.”
Barth would not return to the short story (at least in book form) until 1996’s On With the Story. In the meantime, he had written several very long novels demonstrating that, however much he calls into question many axiomatic storytelling conventions, Barth had by no means abandoned storytelling. These books are stuffed full of story, although they also concern themselves directly with the purpose and effects of stories, continuing in the metafictional mode introduced by Lost in the Funhouse but in a more fully elaborated, structurally consistent way. If Lost in the Funhouse is more purely experimental, the novels that follow it both further explore the use to which self-reflexivity might be put in replenishing the resources of narrative and establish a signature type of narrative practice that can be seen as identifiably “Barthian.”
This signature is fully evident in On With the Story, even if the book doesn’t have the heft of the novels preceding it. It most immediately differs from Lost in the Funhouse in being not merely a series of stories but an integrated series, a book in which the whole is meant to be more than the sum of its parts. On With the Story is unified in several ways, both formally and thematically, beginning with the frame-tale Barth has interpolated throughout the text: an unnamed man and woman, the former the teller of the tales, the latter their audience and critic, discuss the quality and implications of the tales, providing the book its self-reflexive commentary. Although the writer figure in these scenes is pretty clearly a version of John Barth (as are the protagonists of many of Barth’s later novels), he is presented as a character in the larger fiction that incorporates the individual fictions the character relates. We could call this larger fiction the story of a storyteller.
The narrative structure is metaphorically reinforced by a motif that recurs throughout the book, a motif drawn from quantum physics. It is made most explicit at the beginning of the story, “Waves, by Amien Richard,” one of whose characters asks, “Are we particles . . . or waves?” At first the preoccupation with the “particle wave duality”—whereby a particle of matter sometimes manifests as a wave, depending on how it is observed—might seem curious, but ultimately we can see it is a conceit that reflects the book’s own status: We could regard each story individually, as if it were a particle, or we can consider the book in its entirety, as a wave proceeding with its own forward momentum.
Barth further extends this metaphor to apply as well to another theme expressed in several of the stories, the relationship of “story” to “life,” a question, embodied in the title, first raised by “Life-Story,” one of the central stories in Lost in the Funhouse. If life is a wave, then a story is particle, momentarily anchoring the life in a “fixed position,” altering it in the process. The hyphen in the title “Life-Story” enforces a separation between the two, and in On With the Story Barth reaffirms that this separation is necessary if we are to properly take the measure of each. “Our lives are not our stories,” concludes one of the tales. “Life” may ultimately and inevitably retain dominion over “story,” but stories allow us to put life on pause, to arrest time in its onward course:
The middle of the story nears its end, but has not reached it, not yet. There’s time still, still world enough and time. There are narrative possibilities still unforeclosed. If our lives are stories, and if this story is three-fourths told, it is not yet four-fifths told; if four-fifths, not yet five-sixths, et cetera, et cetera. . . .
Indeed, the story in which this passage appears, “Ad Infinitum: A Short Story,” doesn’t quite come to narrative closure itself; its twin characters remain suspended between the wife’s task of informing the husband about a phone call that has clearly related bad news and its actual completion, the wife grimly advancing toward the husband blithely tending his garden, unaware of the probably life-changing information he’s about to receive. We may be tempted to conclude that we nevertheless “know” that the news will be delivered and the couple will endure their hour of suffering, except that this would be the case only if we were witnessing such a scene in life, or, as the narrator has it, “non-narrated life.” In a story, the dreaded moment doesn’t have to arrive. The narrative moment can be deferred, in effect, forever.
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004), like On With the Story, also acts as a kind of anatomy of storytelling, although in this case the self-reflexive gestures are more circumscribed, on display most prominently in the framing story with which Barth has again surrounded a collection of otherwise unconnected stories. Although the use of this device in both books is of course in homage to One Thousand and One Nights (one of Barth’s persistent influences), The Book of Ten Nights signals the allusion most explicitly. Barth’s frame tale reverses the situation we find in the narrative of Scheherazade regaling the King with stories: Barth (lightly fictionalized as “Graybard”) relates his stories to a nymph-like Muse with whom Graybard has “congress” during the interludes between the tales. All in all, the conceit is very similar to that used in the meta-narrative of On With the Story, and, by this stage in Barth’s career, the reiteration of his debt to the metafictional strategies of One Thousand and One Nights has perhaps begun to wear thin.
Not only is the device repetitious, but the interactions between writer and muse are extended (one might say labored) enough that they overwhelm what are finally rather marginal stories. Only “Click,” Barth’s first attempt to reckon with the online medium as competitor with print, could be considered a significant addition to Barth’s larger body of work. The author has further burdened Book of Ten Nights and a Night with the weight of topicality. A book that began as a more “sportive” affair, Graybard informs us in the “Invocation,” was altered when he realized that “for him to re-render now, in these so radically altered circumstances, Author’s eleven mostly Autumnal and impossibly innocent stories, strikes him as bizarre, to put it mildly indeed—as if Nine Eleven O One hadn’t changed the neighborhood.”
Barth seems to have bought into the notion, perpetrated by some after the events of 9/11/01 that this day entailed a loss of credibility for the sort of postmodern fiction Barth’s work prominently exemplified. But the charge made against postmodern irony was certainly not that it was “innocent”; rather, it was all too knowing, too detached and clever by half in its preference for stylistic and formal displays over engagement with reality. The call for writers to awaken from their postmodern-induced slumber and acknowledge that reality is itself actually a bid to return fiction to a state of literary innocence, to the belief that reality can be directly represented in a work of fiction that sticks to the narrative basics. Book of Ten Nights and a Night winds up mildly reaffirming the value of “irrelevant” stories in the face of real-world trouble, but a better way to assert that value may have been to present these stories according to the original, less fretfully earnest plan, the state of the “real world” outside the text notwithstanding.
The Development (2008) as well suggests a retreat from the most overt displays of postmodern artifice and metafictional trickery. The book can be read as a more or less conventional series of linked stories about a retirement community, Heron Bay Estates, that houses its share of “autumnal resignation and quiet turmoil,” although Heron Bay’s ultimate demise is far from quiet, as it is ravaged by a tornado spun off from a late-season tropical storm moving up Barth’s cherished Chesapeake Bay. While the stories are not completely free of passages meditating on the act of storytelling (it is still Barth, after all), The Development is otherwise entirely accessible to most readers as a kind of slice-of-life realism depicting American life as lived by those nearing its conclusion. Even the at times fustian mannerisms of Barth’s late style, which particularly encumber Book of Ten Nights and a Night, is here toned down to something closer to a conventional expository style.
The Development succeeds relatively well in what it sets out to do, although it is inevitably disappointing that it sets out to do so little. It is of course not surprising that a writer now in his mid-80s would turn to themes of aging and taking stock, but one might wish that Barth had done so without defaulting to such conventional methods of presenting these themes. (Barth’s follow-up to The Development, the novel Every Third Thought, is a return to the fustian style, but unfortunately it also doesn’t show him discovering freshly innovative strategies for realizing the themes.) Collected Stories thus allows us to see the arc of Barth’s career, from vanguard experimental writer to one less-inspired but still dedicated to his ideal of storytelling. Collected Stories provides valuable testimony to the shape of this career, but finally it will be most valuable if it brings new readers to Lost in the Funhouse and On With the Story.
Richard Powers
Forsaking Illusions
Richard Powers clearly signaled in his auspicious first novel, Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance (1985), that his fiction would not conform to the then-emerging conventions of literary minimalism or participate in the full-scale return to the values of traditional realism that would characterize much literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s. But neither would it share all of the assumptions nor necessarily employ the most ostentatious of the strategies associated with "postmodern " or "experimental" fiction of the 1960s and 1970s against which minimalism and neorealism were clearly, if quietly, a reaction. Although innovative in narrative structure, insistently self-reflexive, and often stylistically extravagant, Powers's novels nevertheless would hardly be inaccessible to readers who still expect fiction to foreground compellingly portrayed characters in habiting o world recognizably drown from the familiar world of ordinary experience.
One might presume that an approach neither wholly conventional nor radically experimental, with seeming allegiances to both camps, would risk being accused of splitting too many differences and thus would not be enthusiastically received either in mainstream literary circles or among the partisans of the offbeat and innovative in contemporary writing. Yet, by the end of the 1990's, Powers was being hailed by numerous reviewers as worthy of the designation "best living American writer." While this kind of attention from the popular press is no doubt gratifying to Richard Powers, and certainly seems entirely appropriate to those of us who admire his work, it is difficult not to suspect that such praise arises as much from a lack of understanding--in some cases, outright misunderstanding--of Powers's fiction as from real sympathy with his aims and methods. Indeed, it would not be surprising if his very strengths as a writer eventually come to be cited by many of those now warmly applauding as a source of discontent when they find themselves explaining their otherwise perplexing loss of enthusiasm for his work. At least one reviewer of Plowing the Dark, Michael Ravitch in the New Republic, does seem confused by his perception of difference-splitting, noting on the one hand that Powers's "linear associations and neat structures are reassuring to those seeking clarification and organization" and on the other that "too often his verbal associations run amok, without any purpose except self-display."
That Powers is an abundantly gifted stylist is undeniable—even Ravitch acknowledges that his “verbal fireworks can be delightful”—but as with other contemporary American writers who seem especially attuned to the figurative and rhetorical possibilities of language, such as John Hawkes and Stanley Elkin, style in Powers’s fiction counts for much more than the occasional ornamental flourish, nor can it be taken as merely the vehicle of poetic “insight.” For these writers, style is not something added to the work, or through which its implicit “subject” is expressed, but is itself inseparable from the work their texts literally enact and must in some fundamental way be acknowledged as the most compelling subject—certainly the most compelling for the authors—of those texts. Powers is thus a writer whose fiction is easy enough to admire as “well-written,” but such a locution doesn’t come close to describing either the ambitions animating his style or the formal effects it makes possible for the attentive reader, and in fact can just as easily be used, as we have seen, to belittle a writer otherwise judged by the inattentive reader to be too self-consciously literary for his own good.
Gain (1998) begins in this way:
Day had a way of shaking Lacewood awake. Slapping it lightly, like a newborn. Rubbing its wrists and reviving it. On warm mornings, you remembered: this is why we do things. Make hay, here, while the sun shines. Work, for the night is coming. Work now, for there is no work in the place where you are going.
May made it seem as if no one in this town had ever sinned. Spring unlocked the casements. Light cured the oaks of lingering winter doubt, lifting new growth from out of nothing, leaving you free again to earn your keep. When the sun came out in Lacewood, you could live.
Even the casual reader, of the sort most likely with any novel to be "reading for the plot," would probably find this an evocative passage, setting the scene for us (even if it will be the setting for only one strand of the novel' s twin plots) in an imaginative and energetic way and in images and phrases that signal an author able to use language with unusual skill and facility. It is indeed well-written. Perhaps the casual reader will also notice, although not necessarily in any direct way, the more subtle effects of such a passage: its insistent alliteration--"Slapping it lightly like a newborn. Rubbing its wrists and reviving it."--its immediate equally assertive assonance--"Day had a way of shaking Lacewood awake"--its ingenious tropes and overall euphony, both of which are manifestly appropriate to the phenomenon the passage essays to represent, as these paragraphs themselves mimic for the fiction they begin the process they simultaneously describe, a coming-into-being, of a spring day in Lacewood and of the novel Gain.
Yet this is precisely the kind of stylistic self-consciousness and hyperformalism attributed to postmodern fiction--at least with that version thought to be preoccupied with artifice and wordplay--that has gained notoriety for some American writers over the past forty years or so, and in a few cases a grudging respect if little enthusiasm, but has otherwise never led to any of these writers being recognized as one of "our" most important writers in publications not already well-known for their sympathetic consideration of this group of writers (journals such as Critique or The Review of Contemporary Fiction, for example.) Although Hawkes and Elkin, Barth, Gass, and Coover have by now garnered their share of attention from academic critics, and as a group certainly have produced the most accomplished body of work in postwar American fiction, they are not the writers most highly esteemed by the current arbiters of literary taste and reputation. And surely it will not escape them for long that as a stylist Powers belongs in their company rather than with those acceptably conventional but earnest writers usually associated with "fine writing."
But Powers is not a stylist for style's sake alone. Indeed, he has spoken in a recent interview (1998) of his essentially utilitarian view of style: "I've tried to approach each book as an experiment in finding the style that best supports and exemplifies a particular story's themes." If Powers's prose style is more than merely pretty, it, is also never less than functional, although to read his novels profitably it is necessary also to rethink the relationship between function and form that our ways of speaking about works of fiction generally assume to obtain but that Powers puts into question as keenly as any contemporary novelist. Which is not to say a novel like Gain cannot be read with a certain degree of pleasure even while remaining unaware of its formal innovations beyond its signature intertwining of related but separate narratives, only that, in keeping with the theme these narratives mutually reinforce, a gain in the direction of accessibility entails a loss in sensitivity to the full range of effects--to all of the potential sources of meaning--made available by a writer so thoroughly attuned to these possibilities. It is not so much that in novels like Gain and Plowing the Dark (2000) Powers privileges one over the other, settling either for an unqualified aestheticism or an untroubled rhetorical transparency, but that, like the braiding strands of DNA that provide the structural figure in The Gold Bug Variations, form and function are inextricably joined, their interaction producing the basic principle, simultaneously structural and thematic, by which each novel takes its shape.
The Gold Bug Variations (1991) makes most explicit a metaphorical linkage be tween the role played by the genetic code in organizing the processes of life and that played by language in organizing narrative, the latter in turn mediated in this novel by an even more explicit analogy between DNA sequencing and music. Gain is built in a perhaps even more thematically compelling way around this trope, as somewhere in the unfolding story of Clare International, a multinational chemical manufacturer, lies the innate defect responsible for the cancer affecting Laura Bodey, the protagonist of its parallel plot. The juxtaposition of the chronicle of Clare's ascendancy in the world of American business with the tale of Laura's ultimately unavailing struggle with her disease led numerous reviewers to highlight what they took to be the polemical implications of this dialectical pairing, thus reducing the novel to a rather obvious critique of capitalism run amok. But nothing in Powers's other novels suggests an interest in this kind of direct political commentary, and in fact an attentive reading of Gain could not find evidence that such crude didacticism is in any way one of its significant features. If anything, one is likely to find the history of Clare International to be related in a surprisingly dispassionate, even respectful, manner, an impression that, far from producing an easy outrage on behalf of Laura Bodey, only lends to her story a more genuine pathos. An unwitting victim of what begins as an exercise of initiative and ingenuity, she seems not a martyr to the American business ethic but an otherwise ordinary, though ultimately strong-willed, woman forced to confront the unintended consequences of such ingenuity, as Adie Klarpol will have to do in Plowing the Dark.
The dialectical relationship that truly structures Power's fiction can be seen, in fact, as precisely the perpetual conflict between the inescapable contingencies of existence and the apparent human need to resist, if not overcome, those contingencies. Since The Gold Bug Variations at least, the embodiment in Powers's fiction of this ingrained need has generally taken the form of technology--the potential applications to be derived from scientific research in genetics, medicine (Operation Wandering Soul), artificial intelligence (Galatea 2.2). While Powers has acquired a reputation as a writer conversant with science--a characteristic uncommon enough among writers of literary fiction to partly account for the heightened attention paid to his work by reviewers--his concern seems not to be with science per se, which Powers represents as an essentially esthetic endeavor, but with the place of technology in our lives--a place, on the one hand, taken up via an entirely natural human impulse that, on the other, licenses a technology the inner logic of which might only partially encompass other distinctive values. This clash of values, at work provocatively in both Galatea 2.2 and Gain, is highlighted perhaps most emphatically in Plowing the Dark.
If Gain reveals the unforeseen and intangible costs exacted by our long-term investment in "progress" (without suggesting we can merely renounce the idea, or that it can’t be harnessed for beneficent purposes), Plowing the Dark portrays the process of technological advancement much more directly, and as much more clearly sinister. Again a dual stranded narrative, it begins with the story of Adie Klarpol, a commercial artist prevailed upon by an old college friend to move to Seattle to work in "The Cavern," a virtual reality "immersion environment" operated by a high-tech company called TeraSys. Convinced the Cavern is a site for pure research--allowing her to indulge in a kind of free-form creativity--Adie joins the team being employed to explore the Cavern's possibilities, an effort that involves Adie in virtual recreations of Van Gogh's portrait of his room at Arles and of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople. To her horror, Adie ultimately discovers that the technology she's helping to develop is destined to be used by the U.S. military in the creation of ever more sophisticated smart weaponry.
The opposition between aesthetic sensibility--here shown to be possessed by almost everyone working on the Cavern project, all of whom seem to share a capacity to take delight in the sheer expressive possibilities of their chosen media--and mercantile expedience could not be more sharply drawn, and again one could easily enough settle for the obvious, but not for that reason trivial, political interpretation of Plowing the Dark. That Powers means to raise questions relevant to politics would seem to be confirmed by the second of the novel's narrative strands, which hearkens back to the era of hostage-taking by Lebanese militants and relates the grim particulars of the capture and captivity of Taimur Martin, an American teacher in Beirut. But this story only illustrates the perils and the ultimate futility of politics, as Taimur's ordeal can in no way be justified as a necessary consequence of political struggle, even if inflicting such suffering could be shown to further an otherwise worthy political cause. Although Adie Klarpol's resignation from TeraSys after discovering the ugly truth is likely to be a fruitless political gesture, it at least confirms Adie ' s own moral integrity. Such cannot be said for the acts of Taimur Martin 's abductors, who, of course, are just as little concerned with the human lives affected by their actions as the most mercenary purveyors of lethal technology.
What both Adie Klarpol and Taimur Martin learn about political conflict is that it is ubiquitous, potentially hazardous, and finally completely inadequate to the needs of a seriously considered, satisfying life. But this insight into the limitations of politics is by no means the only, and certainly not the most important, knowledge acquired by the twin protagonists of Plowing the Dark through the experiences the novel relates. And while it might seem to discount especially the sheer misery that is the essential quality of Taimur's time in captivity, it is nevertheless appropriate to focus on what--and how--these characters learn from their experiences, for it is the nature and provenance of knowledge itself that serves as both the novel's structuring conceit (reinforcing the underlying figurative translation of the double helix into a form of storytelling) and its overriding theme.
TeraSys’s "Cavern" is clearly enough a version of Plato's cave, a technologically updated representation of the potentially confounding interplay of reality and illusion, a place where, in Plato's allegory, a delineation of the boundary between what is real and what illusory is shown to be not only possible but objectively necessary if human beings are to liberate themselves from the tyranny of appearances. Adie Klarpol is thus in the position of the individual in Plato's cave who manages to free herself of the fetters restricting her attention to the shadows that pass for the real things, and to make her way out of the cave of projected phantasms to a clearer perception of the existential truth. However, where the truth for Plato lies outside ordinary human reality, for Adie Klarpol (and one presumes for Richard Powers) truth is to be sought within, through a more scrupulous understanding of what is most compellingly human about human reality. The knowledge she eventually embraces (and that in a sense embraces her in turn) is an aesthetic knowledge that the Cavern's virtual world can inspire only inadvertently, by reminding her of its source in an unconstrained openness to one's experience in the world, not in a flight from it.
Taimur Martin unfortunately finds himself confined to a cave of his own, a bare room in which his captors keep him literally in chains, releasing him only for the most necessary of natural functions and, eventually, a minimal amount of exercise. Unencumbered by the simulated illusions Adie Klarpol is forced to dispel, Taimur nevertheless is compelled by his circumstances to review the course his life has taken, to examine his assumptions and to test the limits of his own consciousness. Significantly, the act of reading comes to have special value for Taimur. Deprived of books, Taimur tries to recreate the now-precious experience of reading:
You reach the opening sentence, the fresh start of all things possible. Modestly boundless, it enters bowing, halfway down that first right-hand page. You lie back against your paradise wall, your pillow. You make yourself a passive instrument, a séance medium for these voices from beyond the grave. Politics has taught you how to read, how to wait motionless, without hope. To wait for some spirit that is not you to come fill you.
This emptying out of self that Taimur now realizes is the necessary condition in which to answer the claims of literature (Taimur tries to reproduce the experience of reading Great Expectations) is the more general state he is finally able to reach, an emptying-out of distractions that is paradoxically the most profound source of self-knowledge:
There is a truth only isolation reveals. An insight that action destroys, one scattered by the slightest worldly affair: the fact of our abandonment here, in a far corner of sketched space. This is the truth that enterprise would deny. How many years have you fought to hold at bay this hideous aloneness, only now discovering that it shelters the one fact of any value.
To abide "without hope"--to respect the integrity of experience in its own right—and to acknowledge the limitations of "enterprise"--before human actions transcend themselves to become fantasies of total control--are imperatives both Adie Klarpol and Taimur Martin come to affirm. That these imperatives can be realized most purely, although not exclusively, in the experience of art is provocatively suggested by the lone, and very surprising, encounter between Adie and Taimur in Plowing the Dark. Before leaving the Cavern for good, Adie steps one last time into the cyberspace cathedral (attempting to recreate the original has proven to be Adie's profoundest education in the sources and aspirations of art) and after a virtual ascent "all the way into the uppermost dome, now inscribed with its flowing surah from the Qur'an" she begins to fall back "like a startled fledgling, back into the world's snare."
. . .The mad thing swam into focus: a man, staring up at her fall, his face an awed bitmap no artist could have animated.
From his side, Taimur Martin has fallen into his own hallucinatory state, "soft-landed in o a measureless room . . .the dementia of four years solitary . . .where all your memorized Qur’an and Bible verses ran together jumbled."
Then you heard it, above your head: a noise that passed all understanding. You looked up at the sound, and saw the thing that would save you. A hundred feet above, in the awful dome, an angel dropped out of the air. An angel whose face filled not with good news but with all the horror of her coming impact. A creature dropping from out of the sky, its bewilderment outstripping your own. That angel terror lay beyond decoding. It left you no choice but to live long enough to learn what it needed from you.
If Taimur wants to know what the "angel" needs from him, it seems equally certain that she--Adie Klarpol, confronting Taimur in a kind of apotheosis of their mutual abandonment to the demands of living "without hope"--will require the kind of knowledge Taimur has so painfully obtained as well if she is to pick herself back up after her fall. Adie has come to recognize the illusory appeal of participation in "worldly affairs" (as opposed to an authentic engagement with the world), but perhaps she has not yet appreciated the "hideous aloneness" Taimur has discovered to be the only indispensable truth. That Taimur desires to bring this truth to bear on the affairs of a newly recovered world is understandable enough. In fidelity to Plato's allegory one can only question whether in the customary world neither Adie nor Taimur can ultimately avoid inhabiting very many of their fellows can adequately understand what both of them have truly learned.
Yet Powers' s title suggests a significant revision of Plato's tale. The process of acquiring true knowledge is portrayed in the novel not as something that culminates in a flash of insight, a coming-to-see- the-light, but as a long and arduous task of "plowing the dark." Powers's version ultimately subjects what has arguably been historically the most resonant philosophical account of the nature of knowledge--which continues to provide the conceptual paradigm for most of modern science--to an implicit critique through a counternarrative in which both the reality that human beings can only flourish in a social association with others and that they are capable individually of arriving at the profoundest kind of self -knowledge are vividly illustrated. If these twin truths are, after a fashion, inscribed in the genetic code, so too are they illuminated most brightly in the kind of narrative fiction Powers has devised to convey the experiences of Adie Klarpol and Taimur Martin. But this fiction, unlike Plato's, does not direct us to a world of aesthetic perfection outside the contingent human world; instead it leads us even more firmly back into the human world, exploring those possibilities of enhancing and clarifying experience that ought more properly to be attributed to the aesthetic. This fiction, although possessing its own sort of luminosity, ultimately shares in the labor of plowing the dark, inviting us to make our own way through the furrows created by Richard Powers's resourceful prose and probing intelligence.
Lost in the Woods
(This review originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)
The Overstory displays some of the formal and stylistic ingenuity we have come to expect from a Richard Powers novel, from his acoustically adventurous prose to his multiple, intertwined narratives (even more multiple in this novel), so characterizing it as purely “agitprop” would be neither fair nor accurate, although the novel is certainly transparent enough in its effort to promote environmental mindfulness. And since Powers has always been willing to take on the weightiest of subjects, generally treated in an earnestly sincere manner, it would go too far to call The Overstory sentimental, although the passages invoking its characters’ often rapturous appreciation of the trees that threaten to replace the characters themselves as the novel’s true dramatis personae are surely full of passionate intensity.
Still, if The Overstory doesn’t stake all of its possible interest to readers in a mawkish story that often veers into melodrama and that doesn’t bother to hide its didactic intent, it comes closer to doing so than I, for one, hope any future Powers novel ever comes. If Plowing the Dark and other early novels took on subjects that could suggest political and social critique but avoided crudely didactic gestures, the books Powers has published since then, beginning with the novel that appeared immediately after Plowing the Dark, 2003’s The Time of Our Singing, gradually began to seem less artful, designed more obviously to “say something.” I was concerned that the aesthetic formalism of Powers’s early fiction would wear out its welcome with readers more insistent that a novel provide direct emotional engagement; as it turns out, it is apparently to those very readers that Powers now most wants to appeal, as if he too has come to agree with the criticism of his early work as too emotionally detached.
As The Overstory continues to illustrate, it is not that Powers has abandoned his stylistic explorations or his intricate braiding of multiple narrative strands, both of which in his best work embody “theme” indirectly and suggestively through juxtaposition and implication rather directly communicate meaning through the usual symbolic devices supplied by a linear story. The Time of Our Singing shows Powers bringing this formalist approach together with a theme—the racial history of the United States in the 20th century—it complements only uneasily. However much Powers wants his unconventional structure to support and extend his kaleidoscopic survey of the struggle for civil rights, the theme itself inevitably overwhelms the structure, prompting us to wonder why this manifestly important subject should require such an overwrought design. Moreover, other themes that Powers has often provocatively treated, such as the nature of music and the place of “high art” in general, though present in The Time of Our Singing (its brother protagonists are both musicians), are ultimately overshadowed by the larger, more politically resonant subject.
In the immediate follow-up to The Time of Our Singing, 2007’s The Echo Maker, Powers more or less abandons both the synthesis of ideas and the multi-strand narrative strategy, except insofar as there are three main characters and one of them is a cognitive scientist. The story is essentially unitary, however, as the scientist is brought in by the ostensible protagonist’s sister to help diagnose her brother’s brain disorder. The third-person narrator employs conventional psychological realism to bring together the perspectives of these three characters as we learn that the brother’s disorder is Capgras Syndrome, the exposition of the nature and symptoms of which is the novel’s primary focus, supplemented by an accompanying mystery plot as the brother tries to recall the automobile accident that induced his disorder in the first place. Although the character’s dilemma allows Powers to raise interesting enough questions about the fragility of human perception, The Echo Maker is otherwise a disappointingly monophonic novel that seems to show Powers partially surrendering to those critics who have demanded he write novels with more readily apparent plots and more emotionally engaging characters.
Much the same could be said of Generosity (2009) as well, but in this case the characters do not as directly solicit our emotional response. Indeed, the main character is deliberately presented as an enigma, someone whose motivations are the object of analysis and debate among the other characters because her unremitting good nature otherwise seems so implausible. But ultimately the novel is an “examination” of its subject—human personality—in the same way The Echo Maker concertedly inquires into its protagonist’s medical condition, an approach we would not have expected of the author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance or Prisoner’s Dilemma. And while Orfeo is in many ways the most satisfying of Powers’s novels published in the 21st century, as the third of his books to take music as subject, it, too, is more conventionally structured—a present narrative with flashbacks—than those works that initially signaled Richard Powers might be an important successor to the initial generation of postmodern writers that rose to prominence in the 1960s and 70s.
Orfeo shows, like all of Powers’s best fiction, that the supposed divide between art and science is spurious, gainsaid not only by his own novels, which depict how the latter can creatively accommodate the former, but by the very convergences between the two his encyclopedic narratives reveal. Orfeo’s composer protagonist takes his explorations of the possibilities of musical expression to an extreme than lands him in very big trouble, but in sensing that music might be an emergent phenomenon at the microbiological sources of life, Peter Els follows up on the intimations first offered in The Gold-Bug Variations that life might be organized according to processes just as inherent to art (music being a particularly pure form of art) as to “science” narrowly understood as a collection of facts about the world. Powers’s most essential work is at least as much about art- and fiction-making (explicitly so in Galatea 2.2) as science or ideas or advanced technologies.
We might initially assume from its title that The Overstory could also be metafictional in this way, but while the novel does exploit the nomenclature that includes both “overstory” and “understory” as descriptions of forest growth, Powers uses them merely as an organizational conceit that works effectively enough to bring a broad order to a fragmented narrative that ranges widely in time and place and that includes an unusually large number of important characters (unusual for a Powers novel). Thus the “understory” introduces us to these characters—and to the obvious importance of trees in their stories—in a sequential fashion that at first almost conveys the impression we are reading a series of discrete short stories. Eventually these stories begin to link up, however (some more directly than others), and the remainder of the novel represents the “overstory,” relating the ways in which the characters in some instances literally join forces, in others intersect from a distance, in their actions and attitudes toward the novel’s encompassing subject (the splendor and importance of trees).
It might seem condescending or reductive to say that finally The Overstory is a novel about trees and the people who love them, but the novel does little to persuade us that such a description is inaccurate. Although subsidiary themes inevitably arise through the accounts of the characters’ various activities—the consequences of zealotry, for example, as one group of characters take their environmental activism too far—that the novel is ultimately conceived almost exclusively to evoke our current state of environmental degradation and make evident the need to halt and reverse it seems undeniable. Powers has been accused in the past of subordinating his characters to his formal devices and his big ideas. In The Overstory they have so plainly been subordinated to the novel’s polemical purpose that over the course of a 500 page narrative it becomes very difficult to find much interest in them beyond their roles in the author’s epic attempt to sanctify trees as symbols of the wonders of life beyond purely human enterprises, roles in which they function as humans able to come to some nascent awareness of the grandeur and resourcefulness of trees in their adaptations to circumstances.
Granted, the large cast of characters doesn’t really allow us to witness much development in them individually, which is not inherently a flaw in a work of fiction, but in this case it only exacerbates the novel’s most serious, ultimately debilitating, conceptual flaw. Aside from some perfunctory attempts to flesh out the characters through their personal relationships (love affairs and marriages), Powers so obsessively focuses on the characters’ raised environmental consciousness it often becomes difficult simply to sustain interest in the incessant expository passages and extended reveries. Passages that might otherwise remind us of the aural and rhythmic effects of Powers’s prose come to seem just more verbal underbrush in a novel-long thicket of exposition and rhetorical exaltation of trees:
There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spiky to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day. Bertholletia that grow piñata cannonballs filled with nails. Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather. Seeds in obscene shapes and colors. Pods like daggers and scimitars. Stilt roots and snaking roots and buttresses like sculpture and roots that breathe air. Solutions run amok. The biomass is mad. One swing of a net suffices to fill it with two dozen kinds of beetles. Thick mats of ant attack her for touching the trees that feed and shelter them.
This passage occurs on page 390, but by the time I had gotten to it (and other passages immediately following that depict one of the characters on an expedition to Brazil), the repetition of such wide-eyed evocations throughout the novel had already induced a state of sufficiently weary impatience that I wanted simply to skip over it. Suffice it to say that I have never before experienced such a reaction while reading a Richard Powers novel.
If this novel has a dramatic “arc,” it is in the movement toward the ill-fated act of sabotage carried out by five of the character once their lives begin to converge and they find themselves participating in Earth First!-like protest against clearcutting, its aftermath a denouement of sorts. One member of the group (its leader) is killed when an explosive device detonates accidentally, and after the four survivors scatter to face whatever fate awaits them (for a considerable period of time they appear to have escaped discovery), we follow them separately until one of them is revealed to the FBI through an unlucky encounter with a young woman who happens upon his diary of the events. He, in turn, is persuaded to identify one of the others, and so he chooses the one he perceives to have been the least committed to the cause and has gone on to have the most successful post-tragedy career. Powers attempts to bestow some belated dignity on this latter character through his refusal to snitch on anyone else, but since the character’s motivation to join the group in the first place was never made very clear, this seems an essentially empty gesture that only makes Powers seem to equivocate about whether we are to deplore the group’s act of violence or feel satisfaction that some of those involved got away with it.
Some of the characters exist outside the orbit of this band of militants who give the novel its most extended action: a forestry scientist who makes an important discovery about how trees communicate with one another, whose life is chronicled from her original research as a student (which is at first rejected, then celebrated) to her apparent suicide at the lectern while making a conference presentation; a lawyer and his wife, who, after the husband’s stroke, are ultimately reconciled to each other through a fascination with the trees in their own yard; a builder of video games, who suffers from a disabling injury after falling out of a tree as a teenager but who takes inspiration from the genetic code of trees in devising his own computer code.
All of these characters reinforce the central emphasis on the marvel of trees, but the computer scientist, Neejay, fits most uncomfortably in the novel’s overall scheme. Neejay’s circumstances and his idealist belief in computer programming arguably make him the most interesting and well-developed character in The Overstory, but his story seems largely detached from the others, as if it belonged to another novel on another subject. At the book’s conclusion, a force of inchoate “learners,” apparently self-organizing as emanations of the coding activities of people like Neejay, manifest themselves in what seems to be an evolutionary move away from human beings and their destructive habits. It is a peculiar device that seems intended to provide a happy (or at least hopeful) ending in circumstances that otherwise do not appear to permit one. It is not reassuring.
I share all of the concerns animating The Overstory and agree with its implicit arguments, as well as the explicit arguments Powers himself has made, often eloquently, in interviews regarding the subject of this book. But I do not read novels to have my already existing beliefs affirmed; if anything, I read fiction hoping to have my unexamined beliefs challenged, fiction that compels me to view those beliefs from a productively skeptical distance. Most essentially, I want to read works of fiction that offer an aesthetically abundant reading experience, that remind me there are still unfamiliar practices and undiscovered forms to encounter in fiction. Until recently, I was able to find all of these things in Richard Powers’s novels, and it is the greatest disappointment of The Overstory that it suggests they may no longer be available there.
Stephen Dixon
Two Talkers Talking
(This review originally appeared in Bookforum.)
Most attentive readers of contemporary American fiction are probably aware of Stephen Dixon and his voluminous body of work, his plain-spoken expository style complete with serial run-on sentences and with paragraphs that might take up pages, his apparent use of his own autobiographical circumstances to slice off a seemingly inexhaustible supply of real-life episodes. They may even have read one or more of his myriad short stories (collected in at least a dozen volumes) or tried one of the novels—themselves frequently constructed out of what seem separate and self-sufficient stories—perhaps Frog (1991) or Interstate (1995), probably the two most well-publicized of Dixon’s books.
Such readers may have felt somewhat at a loss. How exactly to approach a writer whose prose is so clearly distinctive yet finally almost not prose at all, so free does it seem of obvious signs of craft, of any recognizable evidence of being composed at all? What to make of a narrative strategy that seems to revel in discontinuity and to defy good order, that features long stretches of snowballing exposition and undifferentiated dialogue? Is this Dixon’s own kind of obsessive realism, or, given their frequent focus on writer protagonists and discussions of writing, are these stories and novels really a version of metafiction, and thus essentially to be considered postmodern‖?
Unfortunately, curious readers won’t find much guidance from the reviews Dixon’s books have received, since they have often been equivocal, even contradictory, in answering many of these very questions. Moreover, except for Frog and the next few books following on its publication, Dixon—whose first book appeared in 1976—hasn’t really been reviewed much at all, intermittently at best. Even academic critics have been almost entirely neglectful.
Happily, the reader who picks the short novel Old Friends will have the opportunity to sample Dixon at his sharpest and distilled best. Old Friends provides a more or less straightforward account of the friendship between two writers. It manages, in fact, to depict this thirty-year friendship in a fully satisfying way over the course of 220 pages, relating its history in a series of salient episodes that evoke the relationship between these writers, Irv and Leonard, quite convincingly, if not through entirely orthodox means. Much of the action in Old Friends occurs in the form of telephone calls between the two, later between Irv and Leonard’s second and much younger wife (and former student) when Leonard begins to suffer from species of dementia induced by Lyme disease. Along the way, Irv listens to Leonard describe the various irresponsible behaviors that lead to the dissolution of his first marriage, and in its wake he helps Leonard find the teaching job he needs to support himself.
Both writers come off as prickly sorts, opinionated and not infrequently self-absorbed, which if anything makes the fact of their sustained friendship even more unlikely. Although the novel ultimately focuses on Irv’s attempt to deal with Leonard’s irreversible mental decline, Irv himself has his own problems: His wife is an invalid who requires his help to perform the most rudimentary daily activities. (This situation is common to many previous Dixon characters as well, suggesting it is a reflection of the author’s own circumstances, although it recurs so often one simply accepts it as an established feature of Dixon’s fictional world.) Their conversations suggest that Irv is a somewhat more successful writer than Leonard, but Irv also struggles with the various forces buffeting those who would take up the mostly thankless duties of the serious writer in America.
Ultimately, however, Dixon’s fidelity to what seems a kind of unstudied immediacy in the portrayal of character—unstudied, but surely not artless—serves him well indeed by the time we get to the novel’s final encounter between Irv and Leonard in the mental hospital to which Leonard’s wife, Tessie, has been forced to confine him. The man once possessed of nothing if not a clear sense of his own personality (flaws and all), the writer concerned most of all with the marshalling of language, can now summon up only a stream of unmoored words:
"Leonard," Irv says, going up to him after first approaching another patient in a chair he thought was Leonard, both of them pale and gaunt from not going out and just being sick, and that same loss of head hair, "how you doing?" and Leonard looks up, without seeming to recognize him, and then gives him a big smile and says "Hey, how are you, how’s it going, good to see you," and sticks out his hand and Irv shakes it. "Thanks for coming, but you didn’t have to, you know. I’ll be out of here before you leave yourself." "Very good; your humor, it never flags," and Leonard says "Oh, I’m a funny guy, all right. People always liked my jokes when I cracked them. They also liked to crack my nuts, but that’s a story we won’t go into. You’re a funny guy too, always funny, always cracking me up. But tell me, because I don’t want to be disrespectful to you or a fake, but what’s your name again?"
These final few pages of Old Friends are emotionally powerful in a way that is both well-earned and aesthetically convincing. The novel is a compelling and skillful, if idiosyncratic, work that should convince readers Dixon is a splendid literary artist. His deceptively transparent prose style and ingenuous manner ultimately reveal a writer examining the profound issues we all confront at some time in our own unavoidably prosaic lives.
Reinforcing Hard Reality
(This essay originally appeared in Full Stop.)
Reviewers of Stephen Dixon’s fiction often take note of the author’s continuing lack of widespread recognition, despite the high esteem for his work expressed by many writers and critics. By now it is no doubt unlikely that Dixon’s work will gain the kind of attention that would in any way equal its genuine achievement — and since Dixon is now 80, and has been forced to publish his most recent books with very small presses, there doesn’t seem much future opportunity for him to capture such attention. Dixon himself has long acknowledged this, telling interviewers — in the few he has given — that he writes for the sheer gratification of it, adhering to his own aesthetic standards and offering his stories and novels to available readers. Those of us who have accepted these offerings all along should ourselves be grateful he perseveres in spite of undeserved neglect and gives us his singular fiction with seemingly undiminished dedication.
On the other hand, it is certainly the case that new readers of Dixon’s fiction would find that his latest book, Late Stories, well-represents his most abiding strategies and assumptions and provides the kinds of satisfactions we can take from all of Dixon’s best work. They are satisfactions that are closely tied to the challenges and provocations of Dixon’s fiction, which on the one hand seems conspicuously unconventional, with its paragraphs that last for pages (sometimes the entire length of a story or even a novel), its run-on sentences that sweep in both exposition and dialogue in an undifferentiated rush, its narratives that seem to expand incrementally rather than develop; on the other hand, the ultimate effect of these initially disorienting devices is a very intense sort of realism — not the kind of unmediated, transparent realism produced by “normal” storytelling, but a kind of cumulative realism created by Dixon’s obsessive focusing and refocusing on specific events and details, often filtered through memory or alluded to in talk, sometimes through discursively drawn-out rumination.
In “The Vestry,” Philip Seidel, the writer protagonist of all of the stories in Late Stories, is contemplating going to a play being performed at a church in his neighborhood. Since his wife died, Seidel has rarely ventured out of his house, and surely nothing can be more convenient than an event held right across the street. Still, Seidel contemplates the prospect at length, first recalling his previous failed efforts to get out of the house and then attempting to fortify his resolve to make this one a success:
. . . Just try to get an aisle seat, if there’s a middle aisle, so he can see the stage better, though of course if nobody’s tall sitting in front of him. He doubts the seats are reserved, if they’re all the same price. And there’ll be refreshments there, he’s almost sure. In fact, he remembers now the sign saying so, the proceeds from it going to some medical research organization. No, a soup kitchen. But the point he’s making is he has to get out. He means, not doing just the same things every day. No, he doesn’t mean that. He means he has to stop giving himself excuses not to go to things. And the play’s right across the street. What could be more convenient? A two-minute walk. Doesn’t have to drive to it. No problem about coming home at night. And it’ll break the ice, sort of. If he goes to this, maybe he’ll go to other things like it . . . .
After Phil has made his way to the church vestry where the play is staged, he soon concludes the play is not worth his time and leaves after the first act. About the play and his response to it we learn only that “The play’s terrible. Everything about it: acting, writing, characterizations, laugh lines that aren’t funny, romantic and tender scenes and one tragic one . . . that are cloying, boring, totally unconvincing, something, but they’re awful. Fifteen minutes into the play, he wishes he hadn’t come to it.” That “something” may indicate Phil doesn’t have the right term to indicate his disdain, but it may also mean he’s searching for an excuse to leave, regardless of the play’s quality. The story is not about Phil Seidel’s trip to the theater but about his continuing inability to adjust to the death of his wife and resume something like a normal life without her, a state of affairs that Late Stories as a whole makes evident. Ultimately the book engages us precisely through its various inventive ways of reinforcing this hard reality.
Late Stories is obviously a book about the specter of old age and the shadows cast by declining vitality, but Dixon’s fiction has seemed autumnal for a while now. His last novel, (excluding the novella Beatrice and the uncharacteristic caprice, Letters to Kevin), His Wife Leaves Him (2012) dealt directly with the death of its protagonist’s wife, although in this case the writer’s name is Martin. Dixon has long drawn on what we must assume are the circumstances of his own life, although it would undoubtedly be a mistake to assume his fiction can be adequately labeled as autobiographical. (In his interviews, Dixon admits both grounding his work in his own life experiences and freely inventing when that seems necessary to the aesthetic integrity of the work.) Many of his stories and novels center around a writer character, presumably modeled on Dixon, whose wife is ill or disabled, as was Dixon’s own wife, Anne Frydman, who died of MS in 2007. His most recent fiction thus in a sense brings this broader story to a conclusion of sorts.
If Dixon’s subjects and situations usually remain familiar, each work a piece of what could finally be considered a single, expansive fictional canvas, both the stories and the novels can still surprise, especially in their formal strategies. The first story in Late Stories, “Wife in Reverse,” sounds its keynote by relating the story of Seidel and his wife’s lives together, in reverse order, beginning with her death — “His wife dies, mouth slightly parted and one eye open” is the first sentence — to their initial meeting at a party, all in slightly more than a page. Suggesting that his grief has severed Seidel’s ties with the ordinary course of events, the second story, “Another Sad Story,” finds Seidel in a gloom-fueled reverie in which one of his daughters has also died. Excursions into the explicitly dreamlike and fantastic are not unusual in Dixon’s fiction — Interstate, for example, recounts in multiple elaborated versions the story of the shooting of the protagonist’s daughter in a seemingly random event, unless it hasn’t, since in the end we can’t know what really happened, only that the father is clearly filled with dread at the prospect of losing his child. Similarly, what we take most forcefully from “Another Sad Story” is not the daughter’s death, which is just a waking nightmare, but Seidel’s emotional incapacitation: “I am a corpse,” he pronounces at the end of the story. “I can’t move.”
Other stories in the book depict Seidel imagining himself literally on his own deathbed, (one takes place in the aftermath of his imagined death), having conversations with the ghost of his wife (or dreaming about her), while others more straightforwardly portray him recalling the past or continuing to cope with his bereavement and what seems to him the impossibility of returning to a semblance of his previous life. In some he does attempt — or thinks about attempting — to begin a relationship with another woman. “Just What Is” shows the effort failing, while the follow-up story, “Just What Is Not,” show it apparently, if improbably, succeeding. “Remembering” is one of the more disturbing stories in Late Stories, as it relentlessly narrates a series of events clearly demonstrating that Phil’s short-term memory is failing, while “Feel Good” provides something of a breather from the prevailing atmosphere of melancholy and loss, as Phil experiences a day that seems to justify the story’s title. In “Therapy” he talks himself into consulting a therapist, again suggesting he might after all manage to persevere.
Perhaps the most affecting story in the book is “Missing Out,” a “what if” story in which Philip Seidel meets Abigail Berman at a party, but he is usurped in his attempt to ask her out by another man attending the party. Phil meets Abby a few additional times at the same annual party, where he learns that she married the man who had left with her at that first party. Years later he is told she has been diagnosed with MS, and eventually that she has succumbed to the disease, although her husband, unable to cope with her affliction, has treated her badly, divorcing her before the end. Phil expresses only regret that he missed his opportunity to become her husband instead, convinced as he is that he would have stuck by her through the bad years.
Seidel is clearly himself writing this story, although it is related more or less straightforwardly, without the sort of metafictional framing and interruption we often see in Dixon’s fiction. Perhaps Seidel is trying to assure himself through the telling of the story that ultimately he did do right by his wife, but the tone — and its ultimate effect — is wistful, as if the opportunity lost represents a profound impoverishment of Seidel’s life. None of the stories in this book really focus on the period of time in which Philip Seidel actually did care for his wife as her health declined, so we have no context, at least in this book, within which to judge the sincerity of the implicit declaration in “Missing Out” that Phil’s love for his wife eased the burden of caregiving. But in much of Dixon’s previous fiction, such caregiving, by characters generally similar to Philip Seidel, caring for wives very much in the same situation as Abby, is extensively depicted. Here the writer protagonist is sometimes prone to fits of anger and frustration at the tasks he is required to perform, although usually they are brief and do not lead him to abandon his responsibilities.
What is most notable, at least upon reflection, about Dixon’s collective portrayal of what we know must originate in the material circumstances of the author’s life is the disconcerting honesty of it. Even if we should remain cautious about attributing the characters and situations in the work to “real life” models, Dixon renders the Seidel-type fictional personae without flinching from their obvious flaws, at the very least taking the risk that readers will transfer their judgment of the characters to the author whose own behavior they presumably reflect. The impression of an autobiographical connection is perhaps reinforced by the habitual presentation of the characters as writers, although this feature of Dixon’s work actually introduces a destabilizing element into any final reckoning with both the formal and thematic implications of that work. The metafictional gestures are more than the perfunctory acknowledgement of the artifice of fiction but act to affirm such artifice as the means for getting a more truthful perspective on real life than can be provided by convention-bound realistic narratives, which in their way distort and reshape reality even as they ostensibly seek to faithfully reflect it.
While the life circumstances of characters such as Philip Seidel echo those of his creator, these characters themselves call attention to their acts of writing, so that we might say that writing stories is on one level just a character trait, their vocation. However, that the story we are reading is in the process of being composed is often made explicit through the activity of this character, who feels free to stop and start, to transform and transpose the details of the story being told — or just as often, not being told, due precisely to the fact that the narrative is in flux, subject to backtracking and revision. The act of processing experience, of attempting to bring to it a suitable form of aesthetic coherence, is Stephen Dixon’s most immediate subject. The myriad ways in which this might be done have been abundantly realized in Dixon’s fiction for over 40 years now, and Late Stories is an excellent illustration of this achievement. Through Dixon’s work we come to recognize what is most “real” about human experience: the effort to understand it.
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