Richard Powers
The Time of Our Singing
Formal patterning has always been a predominant feature of Richard Powers's fiction. Powers doesn't so much tell stories (although his fiction has plenty of narrative power) as allow them to emerge from the interplay of buried forces, illustrated most fundamentally, perhaps, by the DNA molecule, the quest for the stucture of which is dramatized in The Gold-Bug Variation (and in turn is associated with the formal patterning of music, represented by J.S. Bach's use of counterpoint.) Typically a Powers novel connects two narrative "strands" together in such a way that the result--the novel itself--exceeds the effects each story might have produced separately, creating something "new." (Gain, for example, poses the story of a woman fighting ovarian cancer against the history of the company that very likely produced the fertilizer that caused the cancer, offering up a more complex perspective on the depicted events in the process; Plowing the Dark accomplishes the same effect by juxtaposing the development of an advanced version of virtual reality with the plight of a man taken hostage in Lebanon, who has, of course, only the "virtual" reality he can summon up inside his head.)
The Time of Our Singing is every bit as ambitious as Powers's previous novels in its themes (history, the nature of time itself), but in this case his treatment of these themes is at least as heavy-handed as the themes are profound. It's not that Powers lacks insight or sensitivity in his approach to the novel's most incendiary theme--race--but his insights seem too explicitly telegraphed, the formal patterning and its suggestiveness too pat. I agree with Sven Birkerts: ". . .Powers also wants to fathom the root brutalities of race, and at this he is less successful. If he has always fallen short in the presentation of viscerally compelling characters (his are too often fleshed-out tendencies, personalities conveniently narrowed around their obsessions), he has generally compensated with the intricacy of his designs and with sentences rich in ideas. But his previous subjects. . .lent themselves more readily to his formalism." The Time of Our Singing either points up the limitations of Powers's kind of formalism, or it reveals Powers's ambitions in this instance to be leading him in a direction not well-suited to his strengths as a novelist. Or both.
To say that Powers "has always fallen short in the presentation of viscerally compelling characters" is to say only that he has attempted to exploit the possibilities of fiction in a way that doesn't rely on "viscerally compelling characters" to engage the reader's interest. He wants the reader to involve him/herself in the "intricacy" of design, to find in the tracing out of the incremental, spiraling pattern a source of interest at least as compelling as character identification, if not more so, since Powers's novels make it clear that the writer's job is not merely to tell stories and evoke characters, but to use such things as story and character to make something fresh from the form, to find the means to unite story, character, and theme with form in a way that is mutually reinforcing: character is tied to the evolving revelations of form, formal ingenuity itself embodies and discloses theme. It is said that Powers is a novelist interested in "ideas," especially scientific ideas, but even here Powers uses science--in The Time of Our Singing, quantum physics--to help construct formal patterns that, while illustrative of the ideas and their implications, are also themselves aesthetically provocative.
But in The Time of Our Singing, Powers seems to want his overlapping episodes and cross-narrative echoes to do more than reverberate with implied or suggestive meaning. He wants his complex construction to carry a heavy thematic load indeed, no less than the racial history of the United States in the twentieth century. He wants to sum up that history through his emblematic characters (a pair of biracial brothers attempting to make it the all-white world of classical music) and his narrative stops at key events in postwar history (the Emmett Till murder, the 60s riots, the Million Man March). He wants the novel to dramatize the intractability of racial attitudes, the consequences of struggling with those attitudes (or, in the case of one of the brothers, Jonah, depicted in the novel as a musical prodigy of gargantuan proportions, of attempting to avoid them), the fate of idealism in such a morally compromised country as the United States. These themes come off as, at best, obvious, if anything even more banal because of the elaborate structure supporting them; it's a needlessly labored way of proffering "ideas" that don't require such circuitous treatment.
In my opinion, the most intriguing theme Powers pursues in this novel is the putative conflict between high art (as represented by Western classical music) and folk or popular art (as represented by various forms of African-American music). Is Jonah guilty of betraying his race by attempting to distinguish himself as a singer of the white man's music, or is he demonstrating that serious art is beyond race? But I have to say that, at best, Powers equivocates on the matter. On the one hand, Jonah's musical performances are almost always described in a rapturous manner (over the course of a 630-page novel, this actually become rather tiresome), as if he had indeed found himself in a realm that denies cultural markers. On the other, Jonah acquires a tinge of moral dishonor that he never really loses. That he dies of injuries sustained during the Los Angeles riots unavoidably implies he only gets what is coming to him. There is finally a tone of political correctness in Powers's portrayal of these matters that sounds some disappointingly flat notes.
On the other hand, I cannot agree with Daniel Mendelsohn, who in his review of the novel writes that Powers's "weakness as a writer is the weakness of all conceptual artists: you may admire his elaborate installations, but you sometimes find yourself missing the simple pleasures of good old-fashioned painting. (Beautiful brushwork, for one: Powers has never been a writer of lovely sentences. . . ." If Mendelsohn means by "lovely sentences" the kind of safe, pseudo-poetic figurative language that passes for "good writing" in too much literary fiction, then I would agree that Powers's prose is not "lovely." But if Mendelsohn is suggesting that Powers has no prose style, that he sacrifices language to the contrivances of his "elaborate installations," then I have to say that Mendelsohn is not reading Richard Powers very attentively. Take, for instance this remarkable bit of Cubistic prose::
"My brother's face was a school of fishes. His grin was not one thing, but a hundred darting ones. I have a photograph--one of the few from my childhood that escaped incineration. In it, the two of us open Christmas presents on the nubby floral-print sofa that sat in our front room. His eyes look everywhere at once; at his own present, a three-segment expanding telescope; at mine, a metronome; at Rootie, who clutches his knee, wanting to see for herself; at our photographing father deep in his act of stopping time; at Mama, just past the picture's frame; at a future audience, looking, from a century on, at this sheltered Christmas creche, long after all of us are dead."
Or this passage, evoking the narrator's struggle to understand his own musical experience:
"The game was leverage, control. Speed and span, how to crack open the intervals, widen them from on high, raise the body's focus from finger into arm, lengthen the arm like a hawk on the wing. I'd coat the line in rubato, or tie every note into a legato flow. I'd round the phrase or clip it, then pedal the envelope and let it ring. I'd turn the baby grand into a two-manual harpsichord. Play, stop, lift, rewind, repeat, stop, lift, back a line, back a phrase, back two bars, half a bar, the turn, the transition, the note, the thinnest edge of attack. My brain sank into states of perfect tedium laced with intense thrill. I was a plant extracting petals from sunlight, water wearing away a continent's coast."
Powers's prose style may not be conventionally "lovely," but its rough spots are part of what makes it compelling. It has an exuberance, a headlong rush of energy, of determination to describe as vividly as possible the phenomena under scrutiny, that makes most workshop-derived "loveliness" seem desiccated in comparison. Powers provides plenty of arresting images--"My brother's face was a school of fishes," "a plant extracting petals from sunlight"--but his prose is distinctive for its stop-start rhythm, its unrestrained alliteration, its use of lists and various kinds of cumulative phrasing.
It is precisely his style, his immersion in language, combined with his formal imagination, that has made me an admirer of Richard Powers's fiction. Unfortunately, in The Time of Our Singing (as he also did in Operation Wandering Soul), Powers too tightly harnesses both style and form to the exposition of "theme" in a manner that is much too earnest for my taste.
The Echo Maker
In his review of Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, William Deresiewicz exclaims that Powers "has been called an experimental novelist for some reason, but aside from a predilection for double plots, his approach to narrative is quite conventional, even naïve."
On the other hand, "The Echo Maker will tell you a great deal about neuroscience, environmental degradation and the migratory patterns of the sandhill crane, but like Powers's other novels, it won't tell you much about what its laboriously accumulated information and elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like," which, pronounces Deresiewicz, "is what novels are for."
Thus Deresiewicz the narrative theorist finds Powers insufficiently attuned to the possibilities of formal experiment, while Deresiewicz the "naive" thematic critic, preoccupied with "content," faults him for not focusing on "what it means to be alive at a particular time and place." It's a pretty good critical trick, to censure a novelist both for overemphasizing his "elaborately constructed concepts" and not emphasizing them enough. Powers excessively stresses "head" and "heart," all at the same time!
Always beware of literary critics who come to inform us what novels really "are for." It's the act of someone who usually doesn't much care about the artistic possibilities of literary forms at all but has decided that some works pass muster according to the critic's own selective criteria. More often than not, we're told that fiction ought to perform the function Deresiewicz appears to favor (we'll assume he's really more a partisan of the heart), that it reveal something about what it means "to be human," but whether the mold to which novels should conform is formal or thematic, a conventionalizing of manner or matter, the effect is to reinforce the notion that "the novel" is a single entity, a fixed form, something that can produce either genuine copies of itself or else some aberrational version, a mere literary pretender in prose.
The processes of self-replication are, of course, at the heart of what I think is still Powers's best novel, The Gold Bug Variations, embedded in its very formal/narrative arrangement as it tells, in part, the story of the uncovering of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. But what the novel suggests, in the intertwining of this story with the present-day story of the uncovering of a now-forgotten scientist's role in the earlier uncovering, etc. is that the meeting-up of a few basic, fairly simple parts (the DNA proteins) can result in continually new, potentially infinite combinations, resulting in both varied human organisms and, as applied analogically and metaphorically to the writing of fiction, fresh and surprising formal compositions. ("Composition" being further implicated in the aesthetic design of The Gold Bug Variations through the associations the scientist, Stuart Ressler, himself makes between the DNA strand and the musicals scores of J.S. Bach.) For the most part, Powers's subsequent books have attempted to explore the possibilities of this alernative view of "storytelling," through which stories are linked to other stories, all such stories themselves composed of the additional, previous stories making them what they are.
I actually agree with Deresiewicz that The Time of Our Singing, Powers's last novel, "represented something of a departure" from his established practice (and he surely ought not to be criticized simply for attempting something different, at least in the context of his own developing career). I also agree that it suffers from didacticism and sentimentality, although one would think that Deresiewicz would acknowledge that these flaws mostly originate from the effort to fill the prescription he himself is issuing, to depict "what it feels like" to "be alive at a particular time and place," but he instead only affirms what we long-term Powers readers already know: that his talent does not lend itself to the conventional tasks of "fleshing out" his characters in a manner acceptable to the critic looking for "real people" in fiction rather than formal ingenuity or stylistic brilliance. Since Deresiewicz concludes that the moralizing of The Time of Our Singing "make[s] you feel as if you were being jabbed in the chest by someone on the verge of bursting into tears," it would seem only logical to allow that Powers might perhaps better serve his talent by sticking to those "elaborately constructed concepts" featured in his other novels.
How surprising, then, that after correctly pointing out the weaknesses of The Time of Our Singing, Deresiewicz tells us that "The Echo Maker marks. . .a further departure in promising directions," even if it does ultimately signal "the return of old problems." Ultimately, Deresiewicz's principal criticism of Powers's work is the same criticism that has periodically been made since the publication of his first book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. It's too cerebral, too interested in "ideas" at the expense of characters and plots, too "cold." That Powers has now chosen to tell stories that hew "closer than before to the emotional bone" would seem to take care of most of these problems, but no, the ideas still "bury the story that's meant to bear them." As it happens, I share the view that The Echo Maker continues the "departure" begun by The Time of Our Singing, but I think it's a lamentable development and that, far from weighing down "the story" in The Echo Maker, the ideas are borne much too lightly, are too facilely incorporated into a story that otherwise doesn't really convey much interest.
Part of the problem with The Echo Maker flows from the narrative technique Powers employs, quite consciously, as it turns out: ". . .my technique was what some scholars of narrative have called double voicing. Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process: the world is nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority." In other words, Powers has chosen a more or less conventional version of "psuchological realism." Everything that happens is filtered through the consciousness and understanding of one of the three characters; their world is presented to us as they perceive it through their ongoing experiences.
To the extent that the novel is focused thematically on the way in which "reality" is affected if not determined by our own brain states, this strategy makes perfect sense, but it does make it necessary that the ideas of neuroscience, which Powers certainly does seem interested in explicating, are offered up in a version of the "infodump," scattered around as lumps of Gerald Weber's "cognitive process." To me, the conceit of "misrecognition," or other potential tropes derived from neuroanalysis, are never really integrated into the novel's narrative scheme, made into a complementary formal device in the way The Gold Bug Variation or Gain uses the double helix. The ideas are talked about, reflected upon, but never really transformed into aesthetic effects that make the novel interesting as something other than a forum for discussion of the fragility of neural networks.
A secondary consequence of this is that The Echo Maker abandons Powers's previous strategy of transposing events in time and space, hitching together seemingly unrelated stories (as in Plowing the Dark, say), to produce unanticipated correspondences. Paradoxically, The Echo Maker lacks this "echoing" effect. I could only read it as a disappointingly orthodox psychological study of three characters confronting crisis and emerging changed but more or less intact. The characters themselves are not really interesting enough to carry the weight of a 450-page narrative, and the occasional lyric interludes (some of which are nevertheless very impressive, especially those devoted to the sandhill cranes and their own environmental crisis) cannot make up for the novel's overall aesthetic lassitude. I found myself struggling to get through some of this book, which has never before happened in my reading of Richard Powers.
In his conclusion, Deresiewicz asserts that "Instead of letting the story speak, [Powers] is the only one who speaks. Instead of locating meaning in experience, he locates it in ideas. But novels should test ideas, not surrender to them." On the one hand, this only demonstrates that Deresiewicz is unable to make even the most basic kind of distinction between author and character, between characters who "speak" and authors who merely allow them to do so. He is unable to appreciate the aesthetic choice Powers has made to evoke a world that is "nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority." If the characters in a novel discuss "ideas," by Deresiewicz's reckoning those ideas are perforce the author's ideas. On the other hand, he apparently doesn't recognize that in The Echo Maker Powers is precisely "testing ideas," and that this is the reason it ultimately fails to satisfy. Powers is engaged in "locating meaning in experience," it's just that the experiences being rendered are litterred with unprocessed ideas, leaving both the experiences and the ideas inadequately shaped into a compelling aesthetic whole.
It seems to me that in both of his last two books Powers shows signs of listening to the criticisms of his work that have been made by the likes of William Deresiewicz, that he is too enthralled with scientific ideas and his characters are insufficiently "human." He has tried to write novels more obviously rooted in character and emotion, but if Deresiewicz's response is any indication, trying to satisfy his critics is a losing propostion. He'll never be accepted as a writer who tells us "what it feels like." Although I fear that, having been rewarded for this latest effort with a National Book Award, Powers will conclude that his "departure" toward more conventional literary terrain has been rewarded, and he will stay for a while on this misguided path.
Lost in the Woods: Richard Powers, The Overstory
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.
Denis Johnson
Safely Familiar
Perhaps what made Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move (2009), an exercise in “noir” crime fiction, so disappointing was not that it was formulaic or derivative, but that finally it failed to be as “noir” as Johnson’s own non-genre fiction, which habitually casts human endeavors in the darkest light without resorting to contrived plot machinations. Johnson’s fiction generally features morally compromised protagonists, or protagonists who find themselves in morally ambiguous circumstances, circumstances that at any moment might erupt into violence, that imperfectly conceal implicit danger, both physical and existential.
If Nobody Move too explicitly literalizes the violence and moral confusion inherent in Johnson’s fiction by embodying them in a genre in which such elements are simply conventions, Johnson’s best work conveys a sense of unease or dread that the dangers lurking beneath the surface will become manifestly real, not the assumption they will become “real” as part of the plot that the genre conventions require. These books, in fact, are finally more about character and atmosphere than plot, even though they are certainly punctuated by episodes of intensified narrative action. Johnson’s most well known and arguably best book, Jesus’ Son, is a collection of stories linked through their narrator, whose role telling several eventful stories is finally secondary to the character portrait of himself that emerges, not least from the manner of his telling, which can be quite lyrical. The best of the novels, such as Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, similarly emphasize character even while relating stories that also include much consequential and often dramatic action.
Although it cannot be called one of Johnson’s best novels, The Laughing Monsters returns to the strategies employed in his most characteristic work. In relating his adventures (misadventures, more accurately), the novel’s morally dubious protagonist, who is vaguely engaged in Intelligence work, evokes an atmosphere of equal parts menace and slapstick comedy and reveals himself to be in his own sort of existential crisis. Perhaps it could loosely be called a spy novel, but The Laughing Monsters is more of a piece with Johnson’s earlier, geopolitically-themed novels The Stars at Noon and Tree of Smoke. Each of these novels is set during a period of American military involvement — the first Nicaragua, the second Vietnam, and in The Laughing Monsters, the post 9/11 “war on terror” — and depicts a protagonist ultimately witnessing the damage and degradation these interventions inflict, on him/herself, on the countries targeted, and ultimately on the United States as well. Tree of Smoke, a 700-page saga of the Vietnam War and its immediate aftermath, is the most elaborately developed of these novels, but in some ways both The Stars at Noon and The Laughing Monsters in their narrower scope more effectively evoke the palpable sense of corruption and looming defeat that emanate from the misguided enterprises portrayed.
The Laughing Monsters is narrated by Roland Nair, a man of murky loyalties who may be an Intelligence operative (via NATO) or a rogue agent, or both, and who travels on a Danish passport but is (probably) American. Nair is in Africa to meet up with Michael Adriko, an old friend/co-conspirator with whom Nair is going to embark on a new money-making scheme or on whom he is going to report, or both. Adriko has a new fiancé in tow (an American woman), and the narrative leads Nair into dangerous territory, both literally as he finds himself in a remote African village where the constraints of law have entirely broken down (helped along by American foreign policy), and figuratively when he discovers Adriko’s scheme involves the sale of Uranium and when he discovers himself falling in love with Adriko’s fiancé. The illegal transaction and the love affair fail, but at the end of the novel Nair reasserts his solidarity with Adriko, seemingly no longer willing to participate in the dirty business assigned to him by the powers that be in charge of the “global” war on terror.
The African setting invites comparison with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and indeed not only Johnson’s novels that explore American colonialist ventures but his fiction in general, depicting characters confronting the corruptions and existential horrors of the world and forced to accommodate themselves to it, sometimes successfully but most often not, seems indebted to the vision of human folly found in Conrad’s work. Those characters in Conrad’s fiction who believe themselves in control of their own fates only to be painfully disabused of the notion certainly parallel the narrative dilemmas faced by Roland Nair and Tree of Smoke’s Skip Sands as well. Johnson’s “international” novels additionally recall Graham Greene, and not just in their examination of the clash between indigenous cultures and Western political expediencies. Johnson’s fiction also resembles Greene’s in its expression of an inherently religious sensibility, both explicitly through characters representing religion (in The Laughing Monsters a Buddhist priest, for example) and implicitly through the possibility of something like salvation or redemption that Johnson’s narratives offer his protagonists.
In their encounters with what can finally only be called evil, both the evil manifested in the world and their own capacity to accept or even conspire with that evil, Johnson’s characters are usually given a chance at redemption. In Tree of Smoke, Skip Sands is unable to withstand the moral disillusionment he undergoes as a consequence of his experience during the Vietnam era. The Laughing Monster’s Roland Nair, on the other hand, is one of the most perspicuous examples of a Johnson protagonist who achieves redemption of sorts, or at least emerges from his nearly calamitous experience with an altered perspective that leads him to affirm his friendship with Adriko even as he also risks prison or worse through his outright defiance of American Intelligence. Nair flees with rather than betraying Adriko to save himself: “We don’t have to put down roots. Maybe we’ll keep moving. Michael and I both liked Uganda. Why not? The climate’s pleasant.” Although it will now be Nair’s fate to “keep moving,” he seems at the end of the novel to accept that fate, which surely will require of him no more moral compromise than his part in guarding the world from terrorism has required, and in considering a return to Uganda he is embracing the African heart of darkness as the less debased alternative.
While The Laughing Monsters thus may be especially describable in its narrative structure as a kind of spiritual allegory, at its core most of Johnson’s fiction depicts an underlying allegorical conflict between human recognition of the morally good and the human inclination to negate that recognition by making poor moral choices, usually in explicitly religious language and iconography. By now, in fact, this narrative mode is so familiar as a core feature of Denis Johnson’s books that it has become something of a formula. Tree of Smoke attempts to expand the formula by uniting it with a historical saga that examines American sins on a larger scale, although arguably this expansion results primarily in bloat. Nobody Move settles entirely for formula, as Johnson presumably finds the crime novel a suitable vehicle for invoking the moral corruption within the context of which his stories otherwise must proceed. The Laughing Monsters perhaps surprises somewhat in granting its protagonist such a clear opportunity for grace, but Roland Nair seems such a recognizable Johnson character that the predominant experience of reading the novel is the expectation that he is certainly heading for his moment of reckoning.
The Laughing Monsters is not an altogether tedious read. Its origins in Johnson’s own reporting on the situation in Africa gives its rendering of character and setting a tacit authenticity. The plot has its moments of high tension, and the narration by Nair succeeds in immersing us in the story. The prose Nair employs is nimble enough to accomplish these larger purposes, although there are few of the kind of stylistic flourishes for which Johnson became much admired in his earlier books. In The Laughing Monsters Johnson seems content to produce an “entertainment” of the kind Graham Greene claimed to periodically write, a novel that engages the author’s characteristic themes, but in a manner that seems safely familiar.
Kent Haruf
Getting at The Thing Itself
Established readers of Kent Haruf’s fiction would surely find Benediction familiar enough: a work of austere realism, weaving together several separate but related narratives, set in rural Holt county on the high plains of northeastern Colorado. They would not be surprised to find the novel to be written in a very plain, direct style, avoiding obvious “literary” ornamentation, nor that its characters are ordinary citizens of Holt county, the men rather hard-bitten and the women long-suffering, although not necessarily either unsympathetic or less believable for that. Finally, they would recognize the spare and often desolate setting of the American plains serving as an ever-looming backdrop, which, combined with the religious overtones suggested by Haruf’s titles (“Benediction,” “Eventide,” “Plainsong”) gives the characters and their actions a kind of elemental aura that is almost Biblical in its implications.
Benediction meets readers’ expectations powerfully enough that it prompts additional reflection on the assumptions about fiction underlying Haruf’s work, as well as the strategies he favors in realizing those assumptions in his novels. Haruf has been compared to Faulkner in the way he has focused on a particular place, each novel adding to a cumulative chronicle of that place and its inhabitants, the setting also providing a distinctive regional flavor and cultural milieu. However, these similarities are ultimately superficial, since both character and setting are evoked by these two writers in quite different, even radically incommensurate, ways. Indeed, in style and in the narrative perspective he habitually employs, Haruf seems more like the anti-Faulkner.
While both Faulkner and Haruf could both plausibly be called realists, this really only illustrates that “realism” is a hopelessly elastic term that finally just signifies a broadly conceived goal — to represent something “true” about human experience — but tells us little about how any particular writer will proceed to accomplish that goal. Faulkner seldom directly sets scenes or emphasizes descriptive details in a “realistic” way; rather, the realism of setting is a kind of secondary effect of Faulkner’s approach to character and, at times, plot. Furthermore, the realism of character in Faulkner comes not from behavior or appearance as observed externally, but from the focus on subjective states, the portrayal of the world as perceived from the inside. One could label Faulkner’s realism “psychological realism,” although Faulkner does not settle for the use of “free indirect” discourse in any ordinary way (which as described by someone like James Wood has become a more or less default mode of narration in much “literary fiction”) but rather pursues a radical stream-of-consciousness strategy, as in the Benjy sections of The Sound and the Fury, or greatly amplifies the character’s internal perspective through rhetorically charged language.
Kent Haruf is not a psychological realist. However much we might believe we get to “know” his characters, it is not because Haruf invites us to share their thoughts and subjective perceptions. Benediction focuses on the impending death of “Dad” Lewis and its impact on those around him, especially his wife, but we never get any deeper into Dad’s own internal processing and subjective experience of the fact he is dying than when, at the end of the first chapter, which otherwise simply narrates a brief initial scene in which Dad learns of his fatal diagnosis (from cancer) and the subsequent drive home by Dad and his wife, Mary, Dad drinks a beer on his front porch:
. . .So the truth was he was dying. That’s what they were saying. He would be dead before the end of summer. By the beginning of September the dirt would be piled over what was left of him out at the cemetery three miles east of town. Someone would cut his name into the face of a tombstone and it would be as if he never was.
The most that could be said of such a passage as an attempt at psychological realism is that it is a kind of summation of what’s going on in Dad’s conscious awareness of his situation, a brief inventory of the thoughts that understandably would be going through his mind at such a time. The exposition of these thoughts involves very little “deep” disclosure, and in fact helps the narrator provide additional expository “information” — Dad will be buried in “the cemetery three miles east of town.”
Although Mary perhaps suffers even more acutely through Dad’s final days than Dad himself, neither are we provided a direct depiction of her psychological pain. At the beginning of chapter two, Mary collapses due to the stress of confronting her husband’s death and attempting to care for him, but this incident comes as much of a surprise to us as it does to Dad, since again we are not given access to the inner turmoil she is clearly experiencing. Some readers might feel that the spareness of the psychological profile these characters are given is an appropriate reflection of their relative lack of self-consciousness about themselves (their spareness of ego possibly also reflective of the intimidating spareness of their physical surroundings), but it hardly seems likely that Haruf wants to suggest his characters are just not capable of sustained reflection or that their ways of thinking just aren’t worth exploring. Instead, Haruf’s preferred aesthetic strategy is simply to present his characters from the outside, as we follow what they do, what they say, and how they interact with others. To an extent, the inner lives of these characters remain something of a mystery to us, but this also seems to be an intentional effect — we must infer motive from a character’s actions and at times allow emotion to remain implicit.
Not only does Haruf hew pretty closely to the narrative surface of his stories, but he does so in a conspicuously “plain” style. As Haruf himself described the prose of Benediction in a recent interview, it includes “almost no metaphors or figurative language” because he is “trying to get at the thing itself without comparing it with something else.” Thus the narrative is characterized by passages such as this, describing the apartment of Dad’s son, Frank:
The street was dark with old tall wooden houses. One of the street lamps was broken out at the corner. They got out and Frank used his key and they climbed the stairs to the third floor, where there was a wide bare hallway with a single shared bathroom. Frank’s apartment was just one room looking out onto the dark street, with a narrow bed and a chest of drawers and a curtain hung across the corner for a closet, with an electric hot plate on a stand and a half-size refrigerator, a bare table and two chairs. A poster of the night lights of New York was taped on the wall. Opposite was a poster showing an Indian girl above a caption that said Better Red Than Dead.
What we learn from this scene about Frank’s life after leaving his parents (never to return) we learn from the “things” in his immediate environment, which the narrator merely names without rhetorical or figurative embellishment. Haruf’s linguistic parsimony, of course, is practically the antithesis of Faulkner’s immoderate, figuratively and rhetorically ornate style, making any resemblance between the two writers even more difficult to discern.
Kent Haruf is really a throwback to the “realism” that defined the original practice of 19th century realists such as William Dean Howells and the so-called “local colorists,” among the latter especially a writer such as Hamlin Garland, who in his best-known book Main-Travelled Roads and other works offered a similar regional portrayal of the plains states and the upper Midwest. Haruf has more subtlety than Garland, and is a more efficient stylist, but his fiction seems animated by the same impulse to represent the lives of “ordinary” people and the local circumstances in which they find themselves. Benediction ultimately presents a cast of characters who are all credibly human, exhibiting variable qualities both admirable and blameworthy. In most of Haruf’s books an unusual or uncommonly dramatic development brings the characters out of their quotidian reality, and their responses to such developments have led more than one reviewer to refer to some of these characters as “heroic” in affirming their sincerely-held, if simple, virtues; but this sort of easy valorization of such characters and their struggles seems to me both patronizing and inaccurate. It casually sentimentalizes both the characters and Haruf’s fiction as a whole by reducing it to an instrument of “affirmation” of the virtues his characters certainly do possess — perseverance, lack of pretension, etc. In my reading of Haruf’s novels, they set out to do what old-fashioned realism, at its best, took as its central ambition, to portray life as lived, without the kind of artificial distortions that would make it seem either better or worse than the actuality itself allows.
We might particularly be tempted to describe Dad Lewis’s story as the story of Dad’s heroic acceptance of his fate, or of Mary’s heroic endurance. However, while Dad does indeed accept his oncoming death (mostly) and Mary does indeed endure, it hardly seems necessary that we regard their actions as heroic in order to acknowledge them as facts of the narrative. The narrative itself, in concluding with the final fact of Dad’s passing, seems emphatically to avoid sentimentalizing it:
That was on a night in August. Dad Lewis died early that morning and the young girl Alice from next door got lost in the evening and then found her way home in the dark by the streetlights of town and so returned to the people who loved her.
And in the fall the days turned cold and the leaves dropped off the trees and in the winter the wind blew from the mountains and out on the high plains of Holt County there were overnight storms and three-day blizzards.
Perhaps these images of encroaching winter make for a poetically appropriate ending to a novel centering on death (with the young Alice serving as a reminder that life continues), but their almost literal chill also makes the ending a final reinforcement of Benediction’s realism: death is a part of life, to be described with fidelity to that reality.
If Benediction does seem “authentic” as a kind of slice-of-life account of the lives of people like those living in his fictional Holt County, we might nevertheless still ask whether, 150 years after its ascension, this sort of realism retains credibility as an aesthetic strategy in fiction. If we grant that Haruf employs the conventions associated with such realism very well, what do we find in a novel like this that we wouldn’t find in the fiction of those writers on whose work it is modeled? What do we find that is surprising, that takes not just realism but fiction as a literary form in a new or surprising direction? Certainly many of Haruf’s readers do not want or expect him to surprise them in this way, assuming instead that he will simply chronicle life in Holt County, Colorado. These readers no doubt value Haruf’s effort to “get at the thing itself,” resulting in fiction that is “true to life.”
But of course even the most earnest realism is created through artifice, although it is an artifice that tries to seem absent. Haruf might conceal his artifice especially well — through a style that pretends not to be one — but is it really any longer possible to accept the attempt at representational transparency with the innocence readers brought to it more than a century ago? Much traveling has been done down the road of literary history since Hamlin Garland ventured on it, after all.
Richard Ford
Endless Talk
The two primary modes or tendencies in Richard Ford's fiction are juxtaposed most prominently in The Sportswriter and Rock Springs, published in 1986 and 1987, respectively. Rock Springs is a collection of short stories set in the Western United States, in and around Great Falls, Montana in particular. The stories in the book evoke the relative desolation of this landscape where the prairie meets the mountains, reflecting the desolation in the lives of many of the characters. Although few of the stories rely heavily on plot in any melodramatic way, most of them do emphasize incident and event, related in a generally brisk, translucent prose. Early in his career, Ford was often linked to minimalism (he was friends with Carver and Tobias Wolff), and Rock Springs, which gathers together the short stories he wrote before publishing The Sportswriter, comes closer than any of other Ford's other books to showing why such a connection might have been made, even though his subsequent books reveal him to be a very different sort of writer.
That different sort of writer makes his presence felt in The Sportswriter. Here the subject and the manner ultimately most closely associated with Richard Ford's fiction appears for the first time, to be developed further and at great length in the two subsequent novels in what came to be (for now) a trilogy about the protagonist of The Sportswriter (Independence Day and The Lay of the Land). The setting of these novels is the American suburbs (specifically New Jersey, but each of them could easily take place in some other middle-class suburb), which is also evoked in its own contrasting particulars (whether the suburban environment reflects a desolation of its own sort is perhaps open to interpretation, although certainly narrator/protagonist Frank Bascombe would deny it). The greatest contrast between this writer and the writer who wrote the stories collected in Rock Springs is that in the Bascombe trilogy incident and event recede in importance, acting not as these novels' main focus of interest but instead as the occasional links between Frank Bascombe's rhetorical digressions, his choral commentary on events, as well as his frequent flashbacks, requiring our attention more than the plot itself.
Although both of these writers are realists, the first writer, whose work can also be found in the 1990 novel Wildlife, as well as, to a lesser extent, in Ford's first two novels, A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck, did seem to be participating in the revival of realism post-postmodernism that prominently included the minimalists, and if Rock Springs does not now seem appropriately categorized as minimalism, it still does share with the minimalism of such writers as Carver, Wolff, Bobbie Ann Mason, or Mary Robison the seemingly deliberate attempt not merely to return to realism after the anti-realism of postmodernism, but to fashion a particular sort of realism that responded to the perceived excesses of postmodern experimentation by evoking a new simplicity of form and style.
The stories in Rock Springs, like those of Carver or Robison, offer the reader a narrative, but not much dramatic action. Most of them are a kind of retrospective slice-of-life in which a first-person narrator recalls a signal moment from the past, one that represents a life-changing or -defining episode or in some cases perhaps even approaches being an emblematic moment in American life more generally. Often the story features an adult looking back on his youth (all of the narrators and protagonists are male), recounting a series of events in a more or less dispassionate manner, although the events seldom take on the burden of an imposed "plot." A man remembers going hunting with his mother's boyfriend ("Communist"). Another relates the experience of returning home with his father and encountering his mother's lover still in the house ("Great Falls"). In "Children," the narrator recalls going fishing with his Indian friend and a young prostitute.
Some of the stories certainly depict characters in extreme or unusual situations. In "Sweethearts," a man and his girlfriend drive her ex-husband to prison, where he will be serving time for robbery. In what may be the most conventionally "dramatic" story, "Optimists," again a man returns to his youth and tells us of the day his father killed a man, although this occurs halfway through the story, which concludes with a flash-forward to the present day and the narrator's chance encounter with his mother, whom he has not seen in fifteen years. This story also illustrates the way in which many of the stories come to a poetically pointed conclusion, giving them a sense of emotional completeness somewhat similar to the way Carver's stories work:
And she bent down and kissed my cheek through the open window and touched my face with both her hands, held me for a moment that seemed like a long time before she turned away, finally, and left me there alone.
The best-known story in the book, the title story, is justly esteemed as a representative example of the sort of neorealism that increasingly began to shift the paradigm away from literary postmodernism during the 1980s. It is a particularly skillful performance, and as the first story in the book it establishes the dominant tone sustained by the rest of the stories and as well introduces us to the prevailing strategies they employ. This story especially might have reminded readers of Carver, as its narrator is the sort of socially marginal male character featured in so many of his stories. The unnamed narrator begins as he and his daughter and his girlfriend are driving through Wyoming: "Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had friends from the old days who wouldn't turn me in to the police." The narrator is more a hapless figure than a dangerous fugitive, and the story really only reinforces his haplessness as Edna decides while they are stopping over in Rock Springs that she is going to leave him. The story concludes with the narrator wondering
what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the window of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn? Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared? Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him? Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you?
At this stage in Ford's career he seems most interested in characters waiting for trouble to come down, a condition that gains most resonance in these stories set in the American West. Although he will return to this setting in two subsequent novels, the disreputable outsider who may not be so different from us is replaced in The Sportswriter by Frank Bascombe, a putative Everyman character who may be representative of the American middle class in his obsession with the circumstances of his situation, but is surely unusual in his ability to dilate on them over the course of three long books. Many would no doubt consider the three books in the Bascombe trilogy to be "voice"-centered books, an impression created not just by Bascombe's role as first-person narrator but also by his remarkable passivity as a character. But what really most distinguishes Frank Bascombe is the sheer verbosity of his discourse, his inclination to explain and qualify, resulting in a prose that is indeed very far from the minimalism of Carver or Wolff.
All three of these books can give the impression they are about nothing in particular, but they are more like a collection of serial narratives interrupted for great periods of time by the narrator's need to enlarge upon context and motive and to offer his wisdom about living in the American suburbs. One can turn to almost any random page in any of the books and find such disquisitions, but early on in The Sportswriter this rhetorical tendency starts to assert itself. Bascombe tells us about a group he has joined called "the Divorced Men's Club," and before he can go on to relate the events of a recent meeting, he must provide us with some reflections on his membership in the group:
Though there's another reason I don't leave the club. And that is that none of the five of us is the type to be in a club for divorced men—none of us in act even seems to belong in a place like Haddam—given our particular circumstances. And yet we are there each time, as full of dread an timidness as conscripts to a firing squad, doing what we can to be as chatt6 and polite as Rotarians—ending nights, wherever we are, talking about life and sports and business, hunched over our solemn knees, some holding red-ended cigarettes as the boat heads into the lighted dock, or before last call at the Press Box Bar on Walnut Street, all doing our best for each other and for non-confessional personal experience. Actually we hardly know each other and sometimes can barely keep the ball moving before a drink arrives. Likewise there have been times when I couldn't wait to get away and promised myself never to come back. . . .
Bascombe is never content simply to narrate his experiences but seems compelled to explain himself. It's never made clear how exactly Bascombe has come to write the accounts we are reading, but he clearly enough takes the opportunity to chronicle his life more to ponder his actions and muse over their implications than to focus directly on these actions as story. That Bascombe is a sportswriter—at least in the first novel—perhaps explains his facility with language (as does his earlier, aborted career as a writer of fiction), but it is also otherwise at odds with the expository, highly discursive kind of narrative that dominates each of these novels. Here, the Richard Ford who created the relatively spare stories of Rock Springs has been replaced by one who at most embeds "story" in his character's extended monologue, which is so leisurely paced as to make the novels seem formless aside from the continuation of that monologue.
What makes Frank Bascombe's endless soliloquy even harder to take is that Frank is himself such a passive, indistinct character that ultimately he doesn't have much of a presence in these novels except through his inescapable narrative voice. He interacts with various other characters over the course of each novel—the members of the Divorced Men's Club, clients to whom he is trying to sell a home (after giving up sportswriting and becoming a real estate agent), his troubled son—but his own role is so severely circumscribed that he almost disappears as a participant in the events he relates. Perhaps this is the continued influence of the vocation of sportswriting, as Frank deliberately restricts himself to describing the actions of his "subjects" and in a sense interviewing them, recording their conversations with him. (At times Frank does indeed deflect questions about himself or his own views in order to elicit further talk from the subjects, as if he is taking on the role of psychoanalyst as well, prompting his patients to "dig deeper.") In many ways Frank Bascombe seems missing from his own life. One might argue that this is a condition to which the author wants explicitly to call our attention, but three novels' worth of absent protagonist would seem to be a little far to go in making such a point.
The combined effect of Frank Bascombe's blankness as a character and his prolixity as a narrator is that these three novels in which he is featured cumulatively leave the impression we are proceeding through a series of Scenes from Suburban Life, with Frank Bascombe as our guide, but it's never quite clear what is supposed to be holding these scenes together aside from the fact they ostensibly involve Frank Bascombe and he presumably finds them important. Individual episodes sometimes have dramatic interest and emotional resonance (Bascombe's trip with his son to the Baseball Hall of Fame, for example), but they are constantly muted by the return to Bascombe's discursive mode and the lack of any noticeable change in his impassive narrative manner as a consequence of the experiences these episodes represent. Bascombe frequently declares his allegiance to the suburbs, yet his account does little either to defend or critique suburban life, which is presented as a collection of mostly impersonal, undifferentiated activities.
The Bascombe trilogy is, of course, frequently compared to John Updike's Rabbit novels as a portrait of American life over the course of succeeding decades and of its male protagonist's advance into middle age. The comparison is not ultimately in Ford's favor, however, and not only because no one of the Bascombe books can match Rabbit, Run, or even Rabbit is Rich, in either its narrative power or the quality of its prose. Rabbit, Run was not conceived as the first installment of a series that would chronicle postwar American life and the changes in its culture but as the story of its protagonist's existential crisis, a crisis that is occurring, at least retrospectively, at a time when American middle-class values are about to be profoundly challenged and, ultimately, transformed. No doubt it seemed a potentially fruitful idea subsequently for Updike to take Rabbit Angstrom through those changes as they eventually announced themselves, and if not all of the books succeed equally well in balancing the continued focus on Rabbit as an emblematic figure and social observation, as a whole the series does offer both a compelling character and a convincing evocation of the American cultural milieu in the second half of the 20th century.
Taken together, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land really do neither. The portrayal of their main character is static and colorless, the setting perfunctory. Future readers of this trilogy will surely find neither a memorable character in conflict with himself or his surroundings nor an enlightening perspective on suburban culture in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. It's hard to imagine many would want to follow a narrator-protagonist such as Frank Bascombe, who has so little interest in examining his own inner life but also can't muster anything more than the most superficial examination of others and of their social context, through three novels, even if The Sportswriter presents some mild interest as a period piece. While one finds Bascombe "saying" a lot (indeed, going on and on and on in saying it), he can't be accused finally of "saying something" about suburbia as a significant feature of American civilization. Bascombe frequently avers that he is defending suburban life, but his account of it in these three novels neither champions nor attacks it. The suburb is just a place where some things happen in relation to Frank Bascombe.
Immediately after The Sportswriter, Ford seemed to return to the Western milieu and to the sort of characters found in Rock Springs in his 1990 novel, Wildlife. Indeed, this novel seems like an extended version of the stories from Rock Springs focusing on a troubled family, such as "Great Falls" or "Optimists." Wildlife, set in Great Falls in 1960, tells the story of the breakup of the Brinson family through the first-person account offered by the son and only child, Joe. During the few weeks in which the story takes place, Joe's mother takes up with another man, and his father, a golf pro, loses his job and then volunteers to help fight an out-of-control forest fire. Upon his return, he discovers his wife's liaison and half-heartedly attempts to burn down the other man's house. Despite these events, the narrator concludes his chronicle of them by informing us that his parents shortly afterward began living together again, something about which Joe concedes "there is still much to it that I myself, their only son, cannot fully claim to understand."
Perhaps Joe's failure to "understand" his parent's actions explains why, unlike Frank Bascombe, he spends little time in purely expository rumination and instead focuses on simply relating what happened and reproducing conversations through dialogue. The story is in fact rather crisply told, and the narrator's broader uncertainty about the behavior of his parents, and the motives behind it, gives the novel a kind of elegiac tone, preserving a sense of mystery about that behavior that makes the family dysfunction portrayed in Wildlife seem a more perplexing, and thus even more disturbing, affliction. If all of Ford's fiction can broadly be categorized as "realism," only Rock Springs and Wildlife seem really to trust it as a self-sufficient mode of narrative construction, the realism of character and setting achieved through the unencumbered narration of events presented as of intrinsic interest, needing no rhetorical embellishment of the kind Frank Bascombe insists on providing. The realism of the Bascombe trilogy seems taken for granted, as if the setting and events are a mere convenience enabling Frank's digression-laden recitation of them.
Canada at first seems a return to the narrative-centered realism of Wildlife and Rock Springs. Set again on the Western plains in the early 1960s, and again narrated retrospectively by a man looking back at the dysfunction that tore apart his family, Part One tells the inherently dramatic story of how narrator Dell Parsons's parents became bank robbers, of their eventual capture after botching the one robbery they attempt (in North Dakota), and of Dell and his sister's meetings with their parents in prison after they have been arrested. This section of the book moves along reasonably well, but even it is interspersed with the narrator's reflections in a way that is uncomfortably reminiscent of Frank Bascombe:
I’ve always believed that how our mother looked must've played a part in the way she changed and became tranquil while we waited for my father to come home and take life where it would go. How she looked--her size (the same height as Shirley Temple when she was fifteen), her appearance (rarely smiling, bespectacled, her studious Jewish foreignness) her visible disposition (skeptical, sharp-witted, self-defending, frequently distant)--had always seemed to be involved in everything she thought or said, as if her appearance created her whole self. This may be true of anyone. But everything about her distinguished her in any of the places our family ever lived--which wouldn't have been true in Poland or Israel or even New York or Chicago, where plenty of people looked and acted like her. . . .
This tendency becomes even more pronounced in Part Two, in which, at his mother's request, Dell is driven by a friend of the family across the border into Saskatchewan, where he is to live for a while with the friend's brother. The brother turns out to be a rather sinister figure, apparently a murderer, although by the time this is established conclusively readers expecting Canada to sustain the dramatic momentum established, however inconsistently, in Part One have surely concluded at the least that the novel's second half will not follow up on the first half's emphasis on narrative. The revelations of Arthur Remlinger's true nature and nefarious deeds occur at such a glacial pace and amid such expository ramblings that it's hard to either be surprised or ultimately care very much when indeed it turns out he is a murderer. If this section is meant to build up suspense or a sense of foreboding on behalf of the already victimized Dell Parsons, it fails miserably. The two sections go together so badly, in fact, it's as if they cancel each other out: Part One makes Part Two seem aesthetically inert if not just redundant, while Part Two makes Part One seem an incomplete if extended fragment, or an already sufficiently realized work that has been yoked to another for reasons that remain unclear.
At best, the sojourn in Saskatchewan seems merely to reinforce the most obvious theme of the story of Dell's parents as bank robbers, as Dell grapples with the unpredictable, destructive behavior of those adults who are supposed to be looking out for him and becomes more aware of human weakness. At worst (at least for the reader), it allows Dell to indulge in such prolonged stretches of tedium as when he reproduces what Charley Quarters, who works for Remlinger, tells him is "the whole story of Arthur Remlinger." It turns out that Remlinger is indeed a bad man, but since we could know that without the benefit of this pace-killing flashback, and since Remlinger is neither "bad" in a particularly interesting way, nor is finally a very interesting character, this added-on piece of extended exposition only further diverts interest from a narrative that has already lost its way on the spacious prairies of Saskatchewan. It also further diverts interest from Dell himself as a character, here without the compensatory interest of the story of bankrobbing parents he tells in the novel's first half.
To be fair, none of the narrators in these Montana-based works really have interest as protagonists aside from their role as observer and passive participant in the story related. In this way they are indeed similar to Frank Bascombe, but in this case the narrator's penchant for the same kind of rhetorical excess as Bascombe makes him that much less dynamic once the family drama has concluded and his personal drama must serve as the focus of concern. It as if Bascombe himself has been transplanted into the persona of Dell Parsons. Although Dell's circumstances are more elemental, his story more metaphysically charged, he bears the same sort of dispassionate relationship to the world he observes, conveyed through the same sort of bloated discourse. His weakness as both character and narrative presence is exacerbated by the disappearance in the novel's second half of his sister, Berner, a fellow sufferer through the family trauma who has already taken off on her own when Dell is removed to Canada. She does return in the novel's final, very brief, section, where we learn that Dell subsequently had little contact with her and that she has suffered the consequences of her parents' acts more acutely than Dell. Somehow it seems likely that the story of how Berner's life was changed by the events chronicled in Canada would be more interesting than what Dell tells us of his encounter with Arthur Remlinger, but that story unfortunately remains out of frame, unnarrated.
In his review of the novel, Sean O'Hagan claimed that it "marks a distinct shift in style. . .from the dense, discursive sentences that characterize the Frank Bascombe trilogy," such that "the writing is leaner, tighter and less concerned with the inner significance of everyday things." This is a view that can be maintained only if one forgets Rock Springs (in which the writing really is "leaner") or ignores the "shift" in Canada itself from the ostensibly similar style of its first half to the more "discursive" second half. Andre Dubus III was certainly correct to note that in Canada, as well as the Bascombe books, "what actually happens in the story feels secondary," although when he further declares that plot is "at best equal. . .to the language itself," he is certainly implying that the language represents an aesthetic achievement making plot to a degree superfluous, a satisfactory substitute for plot. This is exactly where Ford goes wrong, in my opinion, both in the Bascombe trilogy and in Canada. Contrary to Dubus III, I find the loose, meandering language of these books only calls attention to the lack of plot (as well as character), which proves to be a deadly combination. Realism doesn't need plot to realize its ambition to plausibly represent reality, but it does need something beyond endless talk about reality.
Comments