One of the ways in which war becomes palatable to those not in the fight is by cliché. Even Sherman’s impassioned plea that all glory in war is moonshine, that war is hell, has been rubbed smooth by the retelling. It has lost its humanity and its truth. As it must. Who would go to war if, in fact, he knew the true hell that it is?
All war—indeed, all kinds of extreme experience—may acquire this sheen, but the Civil War seems particularly vulnerable. The Lost Cause and the Union both have taken on a mantle of dignity and rectitude that no economically motivated clash could ever wear. Consider the term “civil war buff.” Although this doesn’t stand up etymologically—the term derives from a buff-colored uniform used by New York volunteer fire fighters in the 1920s, and, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, was “originally applied to an enthusiast of fires and firefighting”—I’ve always thought that the suggestion of polish was fitting. There is relish in the reenactments; there is a shine, too, to the grim instruments of amputation.
In the wake of poetry will come realism, efforts to re-assert the actuality of the thing, to bring back a focus on the true costs of war. Over time hell can be polished, and then someone comes along to put the hell back in. That’s what E. L. Doctorow has attempted in The March.[1] The year is 1864, and General William Tecumseh Sherman is on his way to take Savannah, to present it as a Christmas gift to Lincoln. From Savannah, he marches up through the Carolinas, burns most of Columbia to the ground, fights Joe Johnston at Bentonville. Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomatox on April 9th; Abraham Lincoln is assassinated on April 14th; Johnston surrenders to Sherman at Durham Station, North Carolina on April 26th. Most of the book retells Sherman’s march and describes his famously huge, scavenging horde of an army. The tactics he used on this march are said to have revolutionized warfare.
The H. G. Wellsian character Sartorius Wrede describes Sherman’s march thus:
But supposing we are more a nonhuman form of life. Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.
It is a hellish vision, a swirling hallucination. It is a Heironymous Bosch vision of hell, where technology, man, and animals have merged into one monster. And just as in a Bosch hell, there are many little scenes of suffering; terrors are glimpsed everywhere you look.
In Doctorow’s work, scenes shift constantly. Surely, the march is a subject well suited to such a style—made up as it was of doctors, freed slaves, and deserters from the Confederacy, newspapermen, cavalry officers, and infantry from all over the Union. Doctorow will record them all; he will push your eyes around the canvas, a glimpse here, a vignette there, now a short scene of violence, now another contemplative few paragraphs of interior monologue as one or another of his many, many characters considers life.
But a novel’s power lies in its accretive force, its building momentum. Every page should contribute to the thrust, so that when arriving at the end, it is as if by miracle that it holds together as art, and the only reason it doesn’t evaporate from the heat is that it is over—you’ve been shoved out the other side of the book.
This hash of stereotype—“They were both damned fine soldiers”; “You know music. You play music. Got a fine voice. I heard you. You made those people happy, picking on that banjo”; “Ifn you know yo Bible, Miss Pohl, you ’member ’bout dat Jezbel”—cannot build any momentum, because it is just that: a hash, a scrapbook of cliché. Occasional inaccuracies don’t help the matter. At one point, someone is riding “like a jockey,” leaning up over the saddle, although Todd Sloan didn’t inaugurate that riding style until a couple of decades after the Civil War. (I realize this is an error not many would notice, but I know about horseracing; I can only assume that if I knew about medicine or warfare, I would find similar errors there.)
A photographer’s assistant reflects: “Making photographs is sacred work. It is fixing time in its moments and making memory for the future… . There is no higher calling than to make pictures that show you the true world.” One suspects not only that this is a sentiment very close to Doctorow’s heart, but also that it is his own mission in writing.
But the “true world” as represented by books differs from the “true world” represented by photographs, because the former has depth—and its characters have depth. Doctorow’s characters are as flat as photographs, and a book made of snapshots is nothing. War is not just a scrapbook of atrocities and bad luck. It is not a series of alarming photographs. War is hell because it happens to people, and unfortunately there are no people in Doctorow’s book.
Early in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown I felt a sense of awe.[2] It wasn’t specific. It wasn’t tied to a single scene or a particular descriptive. It was as if the entire thing, the rhythm of the book, the pulse of the language was bigger than what I’d been reading. It was a change, there was more here. I felt as if I were a much younger man, or perhaps a child, flushed with the intensity of imagination in literature, cracking open Anna Karenina for the first time and being swept away. For now, we who read constantly find most of our pleasures in smaller ways, rereading a short shelf, or finding relatively small accomplishments in literature we like. Nothing seems comparable to the bedrock of one’s literary education, and it is a very rare reading experience that is remotely reminiscent of the Great Books of your private canon.
Rushdie is so sure of himself, such a strong man of letters, that his language can capture that feeling of fullness. I don’t think it is only in comparison to the dithering and hedging of our constantly self-effacing, self-deprecating contemporaries that Rushdie’s hand feels steady pushing the story forward.
I felt as if I were on my way to something good. And as soon as I felt it, it began to disintegrate.
When one reads something along the lines of “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” one is struck by the simplification. But there lie ahead of you many, many pages of book—you can safely assume that this simplification is a kind of a challenge, Tolstoy throwing this truism in your face and shouting: “Look at what I mean!” By the end of it, of course, things don’t fit into tidy boxes, but that doesn’t mean the boxes have been abandoned outright.
A writer must, upon introducing the reader to the novel, oversimplify. It’s an economy of necessity. Surely, by the time we’re done with Lolita, she’s more than the “light of my life, fire of my loins,” but what a way into the book! What a way to kick down the door!
When we meet India Ophuls in the opening pages of Shalimar, she is in bed. She’s muttering in some demonic language, but soon enough she is awake and lithe, arching her back in the California sun. She doesn’t believe in sin. “She presented herself as disciplined, groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious, understated, calm.” (It’s worth noting, as an aside, that not one of those adjectives could be applied to this writing style.) She’s a boxer, a martial artist, and an archer; her athleticism knows no bounds, and neither does Rushdie’s willingness to intoxicate the book’s atmosphere with overtly ritualized, sexualized imagery:
As she drew back her golden Olympic-standard bow, feeling the pressure of the bowstring against her lips, sometimes touching the bottom of the arrow with the tip of her tongue, she felt the arousal in herself, allowed herself to feel the heat rising in her while the seconds allotted to her for the shot ticked down toward zero, until at last she let fly, unleashing the silent venom of the arrow, reveling in the distant thud of her weapon hitting its target. The arrow was her weapon of choice.
Is it hot in here, or is it just this movie poster? Her father, Max Ophuls,
spent some years in Paris after graduating from the University of Strasbourg with brilliant degrees in economics and international relations, and had almost been seduced. In Paris, he added the law to his accomplishments, established a reputation as a dandy and a ladykiller, affected spats and carried a cane, and demonstrated an astonishing technical skill as a spare-time painter, making Dalís and Magrittes of such subtle brilliance that they fooled art dealers.
This is the kind of history that Tom Ripley would invent for himself.
Max escapes the Nazis undercover of the night in the fastest plane ever built, the Bugatti racer. The woman he marries “had escaped capture on skis, and by driving a car so fast that and skillfully that the airplane chasing her couldn’t stop her.”
International intrigue, impassable mountains, DeLoreans! The deeper into this book one goes, the more it seems like jacket copy for some crazed James Bond ripoff. Everywhere is needless exoticism. I don’t think there is a character in the book who is not unnecessarily talented. That goes even for objects of the reader’s derision—for instance, India’s next-door neighbor, who is supposed to be a kind of stupid puppy-boy, is an underwear model.
By now, of course, even Rushdie’s steady hand cannot guide one through this book. The descent is a heartbreak.
There is a lot of what would be called Magic Realism, although it is all magic and no realism. There is an intricate, international plot to fill in the backstory for a murder, though it’s a simple enough crime of passion. Rather than successfully melding deeply personal crimes with the world’s larger atrocities, however, Rushdie simply spins yarn after yarn, then switches gears and launches into a screed against the atrocities of Kashmir.
Of course, I wouldn’t imagine that a writer should be able to hold it together while documenting the wars in Kashmir. And some of Rushdie’s points are astonishing and eye-opening. There are passages in this book that describe the complicated mess of Afghanistan better than any pile of newspapers I’ve ever read, and make the idea of victory or peace in that part of the world seem like an insane and naive dream. Why these choice insights had to be sandwiched into the middle of a revenge novel, I don’t know. The two parts each weaken the other. Surely, by the end of the thing, with all the buildup of scenes, there is a lot riding on the final confrontation. But there have been so many missteps along the way, so many exotics and super spies, so many clichés that when India is put to the test, with bow and arrow (and night-vision goggles), one is simply glad to be out of it.
The surprise pleasure of the season is Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park.[3] The book is a ghost story with big ideas, but because it is a ghost story, those ideas are kept at bay. The result is more than mere pretension.
A character named Bret Easton Ellis swirls through a period of intense notoriety, and then begins to disintegrate more dramatically than the real Bret Easton Ellis. I assume it’s more dramatic; after all, it’d be difficult to live through the crack-up he describes. In a memo back to his publicist, his guardian writes:
E-mail memo #34: Miami Book Fair; writer locked himself in bookstore bathroom repeatedly yelling at certain employees to “Go away!” when writer emerged an hour later he started to “freak out” again. “I have a snake on me!” writer screamed. “It’s biting me! It’s IN MY MOUTH!” Writer was dragged to a waiting squad car while holding on to a bewildered young yeshiva student attending the reading— whom writer continuously fondled and groped—until ambulance arrived. Eyes rolling back into his head, writer’s last words—shouted—before being driven off were quote “I am keeping the Jew-boy” unquote.
What’s not to like?
Obviously, the proverbial Rock Bottom is not far away. And when he hits, his savior arrives in the form of a woman who will marry him, the mother of his now pre-teen son. He moves to the Northeast, into a suburban McMansion, and enters into family life with his stepdaughter, son, and a very intimidating (to Bret, anyway) dog.
At a Halloween party, Jay McInerney arrives and finds Bret Easton Ellis doing cocaine in the bathroom with a graduate student who is working on a thesis on Ellis, and also working on, or at least submitting to being worked on by, Ellis.
McInerney asks how married life is.
“Well, being married’s okay—but the dad thing’s a little tougher … ‘Daddy, can I have some juice?’ ‘How about some water, honey?’ ‘Daddy?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Can I have some juice?’ ‘How about some water instead, honey?’ ‘Daddy, can I have some juice?’ ‘Okay, honey, you want some juice?’ ‘No, it’s okay, I’ll just have some water.’ It’s like some fucking Beckett play that we’re rehearsing constantly.”
Ellis has found himself in a thoroughly modern household: “Jayne wanted to raise gifted, disciplined children, driven to succeed, but she was fearful of just about everything: the threat of pedophiles, bacteria, SUVs (we owned one), guns, pornography and rap music, refined sugar, ultraviolet rays, terrorists, ourselves.”
She should be frightened, too, of the furniture that rearranges itself, the lights that flicker and dim, and the black doll in the shape of a bird that bites, flies, and terrorizes Ellis. Not to mention that there is a killer recreating the murders described in Ellis’s American Psycho. (The detective reporting on those crimes reassures Ellis that the perpetrator is only interested in characters from the book: “You’re not a fictional character, are you, Mr. Ellis?”)
To make matters worse, Ellis’s dad’s car seems to be showing up everywhere. There have been a series of disappearances—boys about the age of Ellis’s son, Robby.
Ellis is haunted by his books, by himself, by his recently dead father, and the question becomes, Is he or is he not hallucinating all of this? In the end, there appears a voice in Ellis’s head, the only way he can make sense of the madness that has become his world. The writer in him can explicate what he cannot.
The whole book swirls, surreally, pushing the limits of tolerable confusion while sending up laughably familiar horror story shticks. For a while, it looks as if nothing will be resolved. It works precisely because it is a ghost story, replete with eviscerated livestock, freshly dug graves, and messages written in ash—and because everything, ultimately, is resolved.
Which is more than one can say for Rick Moody’s novel The Diviners.[4] Where Ellis’s pretensions are kept at bay, Moody lets his own have the run of the place. Where Ellis’s eye for detail and satire of contemporary life are spot on, Moody’s prose is vague, forced, and pompous.
Dickens began Bleak House by writing about the fog of London, and it was a masterful, evocative metaphor, painting the town in chiaroscuro.
Rick Moody’s Diviners begins (under a chapter heading “Opening Credits and Theme Music”): “The light that illuminates the world begins in Los Angeles.” It could have been a side-splitting opener, zapping as it does immediately to the supposed hegemony of California’s film industry—all that light pushing through all those cameras all over the world. But that joke is a reader’s pipe dream, for Moody is already on the move: “Begins in darkness, begins in mountains, begins in empty landscapes, in doubt and remorse.”
Is this some kind of wretched poetry?
The light goes for just over ten pages—Moody truly intends to show us the literal illumination of the world. “There is the sound of Kurdish epic poetry on the breeze, there are imaginary pistachio trees, with their delights. Up ahead on the rocks, an oasis, at least until the advent of further light …”
Why would anyone even bother to type the words “imaginary pistachio trees, with their delights”? Remembering Moody’s proclivity for (and past successes with) list-making, one hopes that this is just that, a big Moody list. It’s clunky and weird, but at least perhaps he’ll get it all out of his system right here at the front of the book, and we’ll move on to some swirling congregation of characters clustered around a common, socially significant hysteria.
The hysteria at the center of The Diviners is a mini-series. It is invented on the fly by an action-hero movie star in a slump, who is working at, and working his way through the women of, an independent film company called “Means of Production.” If such a script existed, even as a treatment, it would tell a multi-generational saga focused on divining that would begin with the old “Mongol hordes” and end in Las Vegas, with a heavy theme of thirst: the thirst of the Mongols, the thirst of the television viewer, thirst as represented by a Mongolian water pitcher on a Bob Dylan album cover.
Through a series of crossed wires and missed communications that could have made for a wonderful thirty-minute episode of any number of sitcoms, the mini-series becomes a hot property. People want this thing. It’s gonna be big, I tell you. People in The Diviners are easily duped, because Moody seems to hate them all. All his characters have only the most desperate, venal motivations; they are always at their worst; they are unrealistically stupid.
It seems at times that every scene in this book concerns the introduction of a new character in an unfamiliar place. To take Moody’s language of film, every opening shot is out of focus, and incredibly wide, and on something we’ve never seen before. Typically, the opening sentence of a chapter is excruciatingly obscure. Page four hundred seventy-seven: “The distinguished jurist, at work, in the temple of jurisprudence, District of Columbia, tenth day of December.” In four hundred seventy-seven pages, we’ve never met a jurist; we’ve never been in Washington D.C. We have no idea what’s going on, or why.
Throughout, Moody’s list-making is lazy:
The happy couples with their freshly cut lilies from the flower district, the pickup soccer players who never pass the ball, the weekend barbecue enthusiasts with their George Foreman barbecue products, their squeezable ketchup bottles, their chef’s hats, the park bench romancers, mashing their chapped lips together, the carp feeders in the botanical gardens, mallards clustering before them awaiting the stale white bread, Vanessa has contempt for them all.
At least, at this point in the book, we’ve been introduced to Vanessa. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that the flower district in New York is wholesale, so the couples didn’t buy their flowers there, and if they had, they wouldn’t have bought lilies, because it’s November. The whole thing is shaky—soccer players in a New York City park who aren’t good? Foreman grills next to chef’s hats? One begin to suspect that Moody hasn’t gone outside in a long time.
When not listing things, Moody is a Zelig to his own scene; he’s a complete sucker for technical-sounding jargon. If there are cops, you’re reading a pretend police report; if there are nurses or doctors, you’re reading a pretend chart. The lingo infiltrates everything: “Parents report that the victim is known to date young men but is not at present involved with any male romantic or sexual partner on any ongoing basis.”
It is with incredible frustration that one reaches “Epilogue and Scenes from Upcoming Episodes” and confronts the fear that nothing will be resolved, that a healthy half-dozen story lines have been left behind, unresolved forever, while an entire scene will be played out by two characters we’ve never met. Some of the plots would resolve by their own momentum, if the reader thought back to the last scene, with whatever new information is relevant to that piece of the story, but it’s not the reader’s job to try to remember whether he has enough information to resolve the story of the alcoholic grandmother who hears cell-phone conversations in her head, who has escaped from her hospital and gone to Florida “to put a stop to all this election madness.”
The Diviners is a collection of individual scenes and disconnected characters. Buried in the pile, there are some good things: Randall Tork, “the greatest wine writer in history,” is hilarious and almost moving. There is another bit about a telephone conversation between publicists. But they are distinct packages. You could pluck them out and publish them separately with only a little massaging. Nothing moves together; the only momentum is the author’s apparent disdain for everyone and everything. The only meaning comes from pretense.
There will always be young people hanging around in coffee shops. The fashions will change, but never quite as much as we think they’ve changed. They will smoke until it becomes illegal, and they will always be high on glossy philosophy, e.g., they will have their minds blown by the idea that it is the individual that defines the self. They will consider that acts left undone at the moment of their death will not be counted among their accomplishments. They will be aroused by exotic locales, where the language barrier adds false depth to their communications, where the achievement of understanding one another at all can stand in for true conversational success, and, most importantly, where the divide between poverty and wealth is a glaring chasm on which a steady focus is easily accomplished without much seriousness of purpose.
One of the most important aspects of this phase of sophomorism is that it is temporary. Their enthusiasm will, ironically, cause them to read enough books to illustrate that the world is much, much more complicated than they had assumed. They will find some humility. They will return from their Peace Corps of the mind (or, indeed, the literal one), and stop insisting that they know the answers, just about the same time that their meat-eating cousins across the quad are quitting the objectivist club.
Early in Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, twenty-eight-year-old Dwight Wildmerding’s girlfriend Vaneetha says to him that he and his roommates remind her of “Nineteen ninety-three, the boys during freshman year. The greasy hair, the deliberate aimlessness.”[5] He disagrees with her, and she continues: “You’re a living cliché,” she tells him, adding: “It’s not even a fresh cliché.”
I knew she was right… . But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn’t help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it.
Midsummer saw what a friend of mine referred to as Kunkelfest: suddenly, briefly, it appeared that Benjamin Kunkel was being shot out of a cannon aimed at the literary firmament. His rise to stardom was double-quick. Comparisons were made, displays of his book here erected near the front of big box stores. Michiko Kakutani reviewed the book in the voice of Holden Caulfield:
In Indecision, Dwight—or this ghostwriter he got, Benjamin Kunkel—goes into a lot more of all that David Copperfield kind of stuff than I ever would, and he’s a helluva lot older than I was when I went through my madman phase, but still, you’ve gotta admit we’re coming from the same sort of place.
They are coming from the same sort of place—only Dwight is twenty-eight. A helluva lot older indeed.
Dwight is afflicted with abulia. He cannot make decisions, and is crippled by this to the point that he’ll eat everything bagels rather than decide on a flavor (which is like Borscht belt humor: How indecisive is he? … and the rimshot).
He lives with other overgrown boys in a Manhattan apartment that they’ve divided into cubicles, so that Dwight can joke about the similarity between his work and his home, and so, at one crucial moment, a paper airplane can fly into his bedroom.
One of his roommates delivers a drug—very reminiscent of DeLillo’s pill that cured the fear of death in White Noise—which will cure abulia.
Dwight gets fired from Pfizer—here comes another one, pfired—just about the same time that he is semi-invited to visit a prep-school crush in Ecuador.
He journeys to Latin America, eats hallucinogenic drugs, and ends up without his intended girl, but rather with a girl named Brigid, a Belgian anthropologist, with whom he falls in love.
Okay: it’s a Peace Corps bildungsroman via Carlos Castenada, and while that’s a description I’m sure won’t have readers of this magazine running off to the Borders, it’s a legitimate genre.
But Dwight is twenty-eight, not eighteen. He ought to know better—in other words, he ought to know not to marry that girl and bring back to the States a huge mess of socialist politics revealed to him while he was tripping.
There are a lot of clues throughout the book that perhaps Kunkel is on to this, perhaps Kunkel knows that his character is much too old to be the way he is. Certainly, Kunkel is aware of Dwight’s hypocritical interior monologue criticizing his dad’s drinking (he’s drunk or high a lot, our Dwight), and turning over the idea that his father’s “scotch-and-golf-oriented generation” might not be so different from “my more weed-and-rock-climbing one.” Certainly Kunkel is aware of how childish it reads when Dwight announces to the waitress bringing their lunch that “the carnage is for him.”
Kunkel must be aware of the immaturity of the prose. Kunkel wrote it, after all. How could he unintentionally write “And when I’d suggested that she was such a special person in my book that I despaired of finding any matchingly special context, such as a really nice restaurant, or one we could afford, she’d accused me of sophistry”?
After giving a truly absurd speech at his prep-school reunion about how he is going to be a “worker on the garden path of global justice,” we find him back in Latin America. “Began memoir today. How fast I write! As easy as talking.”
Many reviews have reflected on Kunkel’s revolutionary politics, and how he seems to believe that a book can change things. But he wrote in the New York Times Book Review, in an essay on terrorism in literature that had a notably more mature style than anything in Indecision, that “a writer’s own work may amount to little more than a series of pranks, some historical graffiti.”
I started with the question: Is Kunkel very stupid? I don’t think he is. Is Kunkel nineteen? Definitely not. I worked on in this vein.
I have no way of knowing whether or not Kunkel’s idiotic, twenty-eight-year-old boy-child is intentional, but when I read Michael Agger, in Slate, write that
Indecision suffers, in its second half, from the kind of speechifying one might find in a Rand novel, and I wonder if their writerly aspira- tions are all that far apart. There are plenty of hints in Indecision that Kunkel believes that a novel can spark a revolution …
I can’t help but think that the joke’s on Agger. When McInerny writes in the New York Times Book Review that Kunkel is doing “something more ambitious by somewhat abashedly presenting the birth of a social conscience as a genuinely redemptive moment,” I turn back to Dwight’s speech: “I mean to say that only when other people have the same freedom which we have devoted ourselves to squandering—only then will we really finally know what we should have done with ours in the first place.” Anyone who believes that this is the birth of a social conscience needs to read more carefully.
I may be wrong about this. I may be unable to get out of my own postmodern/ironic way, but it seems that everyone has mistaken Kunkel for the character of his own creation. And while that doesn’t make his creation any more palatable, it is the best tribute to a first-person novel I can think of.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
- The March, by E. L. Doctorow; Random House, 384 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.
- Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie; Random House, 416 pages, $25.95. Go back to the text.
- Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis; Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.
- The Diviners, by Rick Moody; Little, Brown, 512 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.
- Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel; Random House, 256 pages, $21.95. Go back to the text.
