Rick Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is a large-scale, digressive novel that is also quite formally meticulous. It could be called a historical saga, and it has some of the more leisurely pace we might expect of such a narrative, although the novel doesn't allow us to settle in for an "immersive" reading, since it doesn't develop through the forward momentum of a linear story. Still, once we grasp that the various characters are part of a unified narrative, being related to us in a disunified manner, the novel still has the appeal of a family saga that reflects the movement of history, although in this case that movement probably can't be called "progress".
But if Eddie Vegas is in part a historical novel, it is of the sort closer to Pynchon's V or Coover's The Public Burning, not a realistic narrative that attempts first of all to invoke "what it was like" at some point in history. to "recreate" history. Instead it defamiliarizes and dislocates the historical, making it sufficiently strange that we might recognize it as essentially alien territory rather than simply reflecting a fixed and already known order. In the work of these writers, history becomes a fictional world that is itself "real," not the attempted facsimile--with a few added flourishes of fancy--of the real world as it was once. Paradoxically, we wind up learning a great deal about history from such fiction--its carefully concealed secrets, not its acknowledged facts--even though achieving accuracy of historical detail is not an essential goal, as it seems to be in much conventional historical fiction,
The novel tells the multigenerational story of the Gravel family--although the original scion of the family is an early 19th century "mountain man" and fur trapper, Hector Robitaille, and the title character is also a Gravel, who has changed his name for reasons the novel eventually gets to. In the novel's initial chapters we meet Eddie Vegas (real name, Tom Gravel) and his son, Donnie. Soon enough, we are returned to the first episode in the family chronicle, Hector's encounter with a bear. It takes a while for the story focused on Donnie, who becomes friendly with a wealthy young man named Drake, to clarify its direction, but the story of Hector being mauled by the bear ("Old Ephraim"), surviving the attack, and crawling his way back to civilization (literally) compels attention on its own, simultaneously a riveting adventure narrative and a hilarious sendup of the American frontier ethos. This sets the tone for the rest of the novel, which often renders scenes of brutality and horror in a manner that is also caustically funny.
As we move back and forth from the exploits of Donnie and Drake to the development of the family line initiated by Hector and a Native American woman after he has recovered from his traumatic odyssey in the woods, both the structural and the thematic connections become more apparent, although the parallels and echoes that emerge are subtle and suggestive rather than insistent (Hector making his way through the wilds of the western American mountains vs. the story of Drake's father traversing the jungles of Vietnam, the father himself, a corrupt security specialist paired with Fitzpacker, the lawless frontier lawman and gold hunter who menaces both Hector and the first Tom Gravel). Card playing and gambling pervade the novel (Donnie and Drake meet during a game of poker), and it seems likely that the deck of cards plays a role in the the arrangement and development of episodes (the author, who makes appearances throughout the novel, dealing the cards). The author's presence, through the third-person narrator attempting to relate this unwieldy narrative, is also palpable in the novel's unconstrained, idiosyncratic language.
Perhaps what holds together the various episodes of the narrative most firmly is the continuity of its setting in the intermountain region of the western United States, especially Nevada but also including parts of California, Oregon, and Idaho. This is the general area in which we find Hector Robitaille at the commencement of the family saga, and the novel concludes with the last Tom Gravel and Donnie fleeing from Las Vegas through Death Valley. Throughout the novel the region is implacably present, the characters attempting to accommodate themselves to its extremes of topography and climate, when they aren't participating in the depletion of its resources. The latter is most directly evoked in the episodes taking place during the Gold Rush, including one depicting the mining of a canyon in Nevada, in which Fitzpacker and the first Tom Gravel have a showdown of sorts. Fitzpacker is surely the precursor to those interests that will later exploit the West for its minerals and other natural assets, the exploitation of nature having an even more horrific culmination in the development of the atomic bomb (with which a later Gravel is involved). The Gravel story's culminating scenes in Las Vegas show us the final tawdry embodiment of the values and attitudes underlying the "settlement" of the West: the casual corruption, the lurking violence, the aimless sprawl.
There are portions of the novel that break away from the predominant regional setting, episodes that introduce us to and track the activities of Donnie and Drake and Donnie's father. (Donnie knows himself as Donnie Garvin, as his father, who is in fact the last Tom Gravel, had changed his named to Garvin after a term spent in prison as a younger man.) Donnie and Drake are initially presented to us as rather aimless young men, but Drake, whose father we learn is the shady owner of Blackguard, a private security company currently involved in the Iraq War, invites Donnie to accompany him on a trip to Belgium, where the two of them more or less continue their aimless ways, but also meet a barkeeper named Setif. They refer to her by the derogatory name "Picasso Tits," but eventually both young men fall in love with Setif. Their idyll in Belgium ends when Drake learns that both of his parents have been assassinated, and he and Donnie fly to Las Vegas (without Setif, who nevertheless joins them later).
Donnie has become estranged from his father, who has managed to establish himself as, of all things, a creative writing professor, married to a celebrity poet whom Tom Garvin/Gravel/Eddie Vegas has come to despise. This situation allows Harsch to interject into the novel some fairly broad academic satire--Tom gets into some trouble, abetted by the wife, for reputed acts of insensitivity toward his students--before Gravel leaves for Las Vegas in search of his son, who he has learned is there with Drake. While The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas might loosely be called satirical, the episodes devoted to the politics and personalities of academe seem more narrowly targeted (no doubt reflecting Harsch's time at the Iowa Writer's Workshop) than the mordantly dark humor of the rest of the novel. Among other thinks, it makes Gravel's wife (named "Languideia") a more cartoonish figure--we see little of her other than through Gravel's unfavorable ruminations about her--than Setif, who turns out to be one of the novel's most self-possessed characters and wisely frees herself from entanglement in Drake and Donnie's increasingly turbid affairs by story's end.
The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas has appeal as a demythologized comedy of American degradation, but ultimately this is a novel that makes its greatest impression through its verbal virtuosity. Harsch is a stylist, although in Eddie Vegas, it is a style based in verbal invention rather than through shapely sentences or figurative decoration. Sometimes it is as if Harsch's sentences can't be contained:
How horrible to report the return of Hector to the likely mortambulatories of the knuckle walker, a re-descent of a man who, upon determining to descend straight to the river he knew was there and would both nourish hum and lead him to westward succor, stepped north at too brisk a pace, gaining a false sense of strength of mine as well as speed, moving from step to stride to lope to leap to running loping leap from mound to rock to mound to rock to root to stone to mound to depression up root over ditch to mound, all in a a dementium of glee as if the river were but a ghostflight off and not perhaps two dozen miles. . . .
If at times the neologisms and runaway syntax threaten to overwhelm sense, the novel's prose has the effect of carrying the reader along on a dynamic current of language for which literal sense is less important than a certain breathless rhythm (although the story gets told, nevertheless). The reader's immersion in language is further sustained by the frequent use of long lists that conspicuously call attention to the artifice of the novel's narration, also further reinforcing its essentially carnivalesque comic vision (reviews refer to these lists as "Rabelaisian," but Gilbert Sorrentino seems to me a more immediate inspiration).
Perhaps we might find a convergence between Harsch's accentuation of language as medium and the historical material with which he is working in Eddie Vegas in the vernacular argot spoken by the frontier characters--"Drop the char erall drop ya raht thar, ya English fartpig mother of devilswine!"--which includes an Indian character who is able to communicate with a white man like Hector Robitaille in a polyglot Native/English/French/Spanish he has ingeniously put together from various encounters with the white interlopers: "Moi no belle sauvage, pero damn real grande. One tongue, many way. Ass felt. Beaverspelt," Such strategies mark The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas as a novel of farcical fantasy and ironic invention that nevertheless speaks something that seems like the truth about America.
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