The New Criterion

God’s mercy on the Sad Young Literary Man! When Keith Gessen’s debut came out in April—the second book, after Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision (2005), to emerge from the editorial staff of n+1—it was received less charitably than he’d hoped.[1] Sure, Jonathan Yardley and Joyce Carol Oates praised it; one might think that ample encouragement for a first-time novelist. But just because Grandma finds your sailor suit adorable doesn’t mean you won’t get Indian burns on the playground, and before long the cruelties of the media website Gawker had Gessen crying in the sandbox.

“I think deep down inside,” Gessen told an interviewer, “they know that we’re right. Because we are right. And we will bury them.” For we, read the “generational struggle” Gessen represents. For they, read the critics, whatever their complaints, of Gessen’s book. One Gawker commenter finished his boast: “in remainder copies of our crappy novels.” But guess what? I come to praise Gessen, not to bury him. In All the Sad Young Literary Men he’s accomplished a near-Wavian satire of his New York City milieu, and, whether or not that’s what he intended, such an achievement speaks to an undeniable eye for detail and ear for dialogue. He has captured the zeitgeist and served it to us raw and bloody.

Gessen’s story follows three young men—Mark, Keith, and Sam—as they beat on (and off), borne back ceaselessly by ripple upon eddy of inconvenience. What they have in common is a desire to be remarkable, in the sense of being remarked upon, preferably in print. At the outset of our tale, “It was 1998 and the rest of the world was rich.” Not in Sudan, or “the settlements,” or Kosovo, which we hear about a few paragraphs later—but someone is rich, somewhere, and it isn’t Mark: “Mark concluded … that he would have a Snickers bar, but [his girlfriend] Sasha should eat.” So begins the journey of sacrifice and self-pity, as the men seek fame in the near-total absence of money and opportunity.

Only Keith speaks to the reader in the first person, which, Joyce Carol Oates insists, means that Big Keith is “inviting the reader to assume, or to be mistaken in assuming, that [Little Keith] in some way corresponds to the author.” God forbid that some rube might go and decide which seemed more plausible! That would run counter to the spirit of “ambiguity,” a sprinkle of which can turn the most shameless autobiographer into a “novelist.”

I’ll assume that Big Keith is not his character, for that character has a lot to answer for—like proposing to his girlfriend at the moment when the election is called in favor of Al Gore. It’s an unforgivable confusion of the political with the personal, which deserves to be separate, sacrosanct in a way none of Gessen’s characters understands. Their minds are always slightly elsewhere, alternating between ambition and baroque self-doubt. There are plenty of women around in this book, but we learn little of any of them. To borrow from Gessen: “[I]f Sam was any sort of semiotician, this was not a good sign.”

That takes us to the crux of this book’s genius. I read it twice before realizing that it isn’t really about literary men at all. It’s about political junkies, intellectuals, guys who tend to be more concerned with ideas than with people. “Mark had spent his twenties,” Gessen tells us, “even that portion of his twenties that he spent married, preoccupied with the problem of sex. He considered it in the positivist tradition of how to find it, of course, but also, and more significant, in the interpretivist or postmodern tradition of how to think about it, how to ponder it historically, how to discourse about it and critique it.”

The problem of what? The what of sex? While Van Leeuwenhoek here holds his lenses up to a procession of subjects, real literary men fall in (and out of) love, considering it in plain old human terms. Naturally, Gessen is engaged in satire, and makes mincemeat of those who think where they might feel. At times his attitude toward these characters veers dangerously close to sympathy, and you have to remind yourself that surely he can’t stand them, either. But on the whole he’s achieved a disturbing, funny slideshow of the intellect run riot.

The difficulty with his strategy is that it makes for difficult reading. The characters in his book are hard to tell apart; while their interests, philosophies, and “problems” are distinct, their voices are less so. They’re uniformly neurotic, Sam to the point of worrying about how many hits his name returns on Google. Each one frets ceaselessly that his time has come and gone. There is the problem of Internet pornography: how to find it, of course, but also how to discourse about it. Such sweaty-palmed solipsism can be wearying, even brutalizing. Marx put it well: “Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as onanism to sexual love.”

Yet this is, I think, an instructive novel for our election year. It turns out that the “Two Americas,” in John Edwards’s notorious phrase, are not the rich and poor or even the smart and dim-witted, but rather those who find ideas a source of sufficient fascination and those who’d rather spend their time among people—knowing them, that is, not contemplating them like chessmen. Gessen has done an unimpeachable job of showing us the former. Thankfully, we have other novelists, with their more vibrant and humane Americas, to show us the latter.

Humane, however, is not the word that comes to mind when considering Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.[2] The book opens in the America of 1690 and is narrated in part by a slave: “You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog’s profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain.”

I know what you’re thinking: If only I had tuppence for every time that happened!

Everything becomes gradually clearer, although it’s never entirely clear what purpose is served by the confusions of the first hundred pages. Here are some Cliff’s Notes that will improve the reader’s enjoyment: Jacob Vaark, a farmer, is prevailed upon to accept a girl as partial payment for a bad debt. She falls in love with a blacksmith hired by Vaark to create fancy ironwork. This is where the book turns into something like historical erotica:

You probably don’t know anything at all about what your back looks like whatever the sky holds: sunlight, moonrise… . The first time I see it you are shaping fire with bellows. The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there.

You can almost make out the embossed gold letters above this African Fabio.

The blacksmith returns the girl’s feelings. Disease ravages Jacob Vaark’s farm, and eventually he dies. The blacksmith leaves. The services of the blacksmith, something of a holistic healer, are required by the Mistress, and the girl is sent to retrieve him: “Mistress give me Sir’s boots that fit a man not a girl. They stuff them with hay and oily corn husks and tell me to hide the letter inside my stockings—no matter the itch of the sealing wax.” I won’t give away what happens as a result.

“Powerful,” in the context of a book review, is very often a weasel word meaning “manipulative.” A novel can coerce strong emotions without earning them. A Mercy is at times genuinely powerful, because it puts faces and personalities to what for most readers will never be more than a history lesson. That said, its real power is often tripped up, if not hobbled, by two problems: Morrison’s programmatic imagination and the clumsiness of her writing. This is a risky thing to say of a Nobel laureate, but it can easily be demonstrated.

First, look at Jacob Vaark. Morrison can’t make him totally unsympathetic, for just the reason I’ve mentioned: It would render her book at best unimaginative and at worst propagandistic—though in this case it would be propaganda for a cause no sane person could oppose. So Vaark is an orphan and a sort of proto-animal rights activist. The first thing we see him do is “free the bloody hindleg of a young raccoon stuck in a tree break.” A “trace of raccoon blood on his hands” is later used to indicate his earthy superiority over the “Catholic gentleman … sordid and overripe,” who sells him his slave, and he “wince[s]” when she is offered to him.

A few pages later he narrowly misses a chance to “shout” at a man beating a horse. He feels “a disturbing pulse of pity for orphans and strays, remembering well their and his own sad teeming in the markets.” Disturbing? It’s hard to see why it should be, because Vaark is something of a secular saint.

With qualifications. For one, he owns slaves, though he doesn’t want to. It’s noted that the “third and presumably final house that [Vaark] insisted on building distorted sunlight and required the death of fifty trees.” Man is everywhere in chains, but that doesn’t stop him from fretting about sunshine and Nature. Forgive me if this, like the detail of a slave noticing “the itch of the sealing wax” against her foot, leaves me unconvinced.

There are, in fairness, some fine details in Morrison’s book. The slaves learn “by trial and error … what kept the foxes away; how and when to handle and spread manure; the difference between lethal and edible and the sweet taste of timothy grass; the features of measled swine; what turned the baby’s stool liquid and what hardened it into pain.” Vaark takes a “leisurely meal of oysters, veal, pigeon, parsnips and suet pudding.” We can see that our author cared enough to learn a lot. Morrison is fully inhabiting an alien world, one every American ought to understand or at least to be aware of.

But there is too much that doesn’t work. How completely we are withdrawn from the historical moment by a phrase like “primary peoples.” How we are browbeaten by an allegory in which a European (ahem, “traveler”) looks at “the starlings sailing into clouds cut by rainbow” and says, “This is mine.” The clanking phrases: “Only bad women wear high heels”; “prepubescent girl”; “reason is not the need,” a pointless echo of King Lear (II, iv); “[w]ife beating was common,” which drags us out of the seventeeth century to a “COPS” rerun.

A character who refers to “the confusion of two things: hunger for you and scare if I am lost” describes bears in the same paragraph: “when they move their pelts sway as though there is nothing underneath … [t]heir smell belying their beauty.” It is one thing to alternate between points of view, which Morrison does, but this inconsistency within the same voice can’t be explained, or ignored.

Perhaps no genre is more difficult than historical fiction, and I record Morrison’s missteps partly to underscore what she has achieved: a racing, vivid depiction of life in the most shameful period of American history. Yes, she suffers from a desire to spell things out for her readers, but it’s impossible not to take something significant, a deeper understanding of this country’s past, from her latest book.

What is perhaps least compelling about A Mercy is its facile treatment of religion. “Shallow believers preferred a shallow god,” she writes, claiming the same spiritual X-ray vision that all skeptics of “organized” religion use to lecture us about the quality or authenticity of our belief. And “[t]he timid enjoyed a rampaging avenging god.” And nonbelievers prefer nothing—but we should be happy that Marilynne Robinson is not one of them.

When Robinson’s second novel, Gilead, came out in 2004, over two decades after her debut, Housekeeping (1980), not even the most godless reader dared to call it anything short of genius. The brilliant critic James Wood (author of 2003’s The Book Against God, to keep things in perspective) wrote in The New York Times of Robinson’s “vivid slashes of poetry” and of her “spiritual force that’s very rare in contemporary fiction.” Rare to the vanishing point, I’d add.

“Imagine,” Robinson wrote in her essay collection The Death of Adam (1998), “that someone failed and disgraced came back to his family, and they grieved with him, and took his sadness upon themselves, and sat down together to ponder the deep mysteries of human life. This is … human and beautiful … even if it yields no dulling of pain, no patching of injuries. Perhaps it is the calling of some families to console, because intractable grief is visited upon them.”

This describes her new masterpiece, Home, in a hundred words or less.[3] John Lennon asked us to “imagine … no religion.” That sounds pretty pitiful next to the imaginative request made by Robinson, an unapologetic Calvinist, and utterly shames the tedious atheists we encounter these days. The first of many things to praise about Home is that it lays bare the folly of those who pretend there is nothing of value in the Bible. I can think of no other work, except Tobias Wolff’s short story “The Rich Brother,” that does such incredible things with the parable of the Prodigal Son.

The son in this story is Jack Boughton, who makes limited but important appearances in Gilead. Home takes place in the same town, at the same time, as Gilead—Gilead, Iowa, in the mid-1950s—and its characters are the same. Gilead is narrated by a dying Congregationalist minister named John Ames, and is addressed to his very young son. Ames’s best friend is a dying Presbyterian minister named Robert Boughton. At one point Boughton’s wayward son shows up after a long absence—so long that he’s missed his own mother’s funeral—and Ames palpably detests him for visiting so much pain upon his greatest friend and confidante. But he never fully understands Jack’s pain, the reason for his flight, or the reason for his return. The reader doesn’t hold this against him: It took Robinson an entire additional book to explain it to us.

One is forcefully reminded by this fact that a single book cannot contain all that a man thinks or feels or remembers. Next to the attention Robinson lavishes on Jack’s soul, the dismissal effected by Toni Morrison in a single sentence—that “[s]hallow believers preferred a shallow god”—reads like lazy, not to mention heartless, negligence. Morrison’s “shallow believers” aren’t people; they’re ideas, cardboard stand-ins for a safe and popular prejudice. There isn’t a single character in Home who isn’t so entirely, lovingly fleshed out that you expect to find him standing at your elbow, saying, “Yes, it was exactly like that.”

Glory Boughton, who in spite of being a daughter represents the good son in this story—she cares for her dying father while her brother simply hangs around, struggling not to drink or steal—shows exactly what I mean. Glory’s belief is shallower than Jack’s lack thereof, because Jack has a preternatural familiarity with Scripture and theological nuance. But she has a greater talent for empathy and intimacy than any other character in Robinson’s orbit. She is good. That may be an unglamorous quality, but it is one to which novelists and people in general would do well to accord greater respect. To be good is far more demanding than to be complex, which most people are already by virtue of being people. It’s also a quality that is difficult to depict, or to make interesting, in fiction. Robinson makes us as attentive to Glory as to scene-stealer Jack.

This is not to say that Jack is all bad. He tries against his nature to be better, as he’s done his entire life. He seeks his father’s forgiveness on mostly honest terms. He has a child whom he loves deeply, with a black woman whom he loves deeply, at a time when this is so incomprehensible that he can’t admit it to his own father. And Gilead, as readers of Gilead know, was in earlier days an abolitionist enclave! But when Jack offers his tentative approval of civil rights stirrings in Montgomery, his father says:

“I have nothing against the colored people. I do think they’re going to need to improve themselves, though, if they want to be accepted. I believe that is the only solution.” His look and tone were statesmanlike. He was making such an effort to be mild and conciliatory… .

Finally [Jack] said, “I’m a little unimproved myself. I’ve known a good many Negroes who are more respectable than I am.”

His father looked at him. “I don’t know where you get such a terrible opinion of yourself, Jack.”

In a mediocre novel this exchange would serve no purpose but to remind us that we are meant to like Jack and to dislike his father. In Home, it is precisely what it would be in real life: a meeting of two human beings in which prejudice, personality, conscience, and priorities meet and duke it out. Robert Boughton isn’t evil or contemptible just because he hasn’t reached his son’s state of color-blind grace, nor is Jack exonerated of his own crimes because he holds an opinion that twenty-first-century readers can approve of effortlessly. This is how we know that they’re people: They’re both good and bad in ways that are credible and not merely pedantic.

While reading Gilead and Home I stumbled upon William Styron’s Darkness Visible, a brief but terrifying memoir of depression and attempted suicide. Prior to reading it, I took a fairly strict, uncompromising view of offing oneself, that it was cruel, avoidable, and inexcusable. I was startled to find that Jack’s fictional suicide attempt, involving a car he is idly attempting to restore and affording the detail of a diabolically chemical odor about him in church, did more to rearrange my sympathies than Styron’s real one. I don’t consider this a spoiler. Robinson’s specialty is individuals, not symbols, not plot twists, and only books that traffic in the latter can really ever be “spoiled.”

Marilynne Robinson’s may be the most complex America I’ve read this year, with the roundest characters and the most precise and gorgeous prose, but the America I enjoyed the most is in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.[4] Perhaps that’s because Netherland, which takes place mostly in New York, describes a city I once lived in, or because it describes the present day, which we all still live in, for good or ill. But I think there’s a great deal more to it.

Gessen’s book, for instance, vividly describes the present day, but he lingers too long on what is worst and most pessimistic about it. Netherland describes the true promise of America, not the resentment, disappointment, and joyless competition Gessen sets forth. All the Sad Young Literary Men is about gamesmanship: being smarter, better known, more “correct” than the next guy. Netherland, tellingly, is about a game, cricket, in which anybody can join. Where Gessen says, “We will bury them,” O’Neill seems to say, “We will unearth them.” We’ll give faces to Emma Lazarus’s famous “huddled masses,” as well as to everyone privileged and secure, with the understanding that if we don’t like what we see, we can at least be interested in it.

O’Neill’s narrator is a wealthy banker, Hans van den Broek, from the Netherlands, who lives between London and New York City. His marriage begins to fracture after 9/11 and his wife returns to England with their son. This doesn’t galvanize Hans. Instead, he loiters in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, fraternizing with misfits—memorably including, though it may sound contrived, a cross-dressing “angel”—and eventually, elsewhere in the city, a Trinidadian called Chuck Ramkissoon.

There is no other word for Chuck than “dreamer.” Among his several enterprises is the New York Cricket Club, the headquarters of which he gloriously envisions in Brooklyn, on a plot of land he dubs Bald Eagle Field. His naming it with such bold, unironic fervor is a key to his consciousness: He doesn’t want to make America over in his own image, nor to “fix” or “heal” it. He wants to do something more generous and more useful: He wants to embody it. So he argues, in terms no more convincing for being factual, that cricket and not baseball is, historically speaking, America’s original national pastime. He also demands to be buried in Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, “[n]ot Trinidad, not Long Island, not Queens.”

Who else lies under the Green-Wood? Henry Chadwick, Chuck explains, the “father of baseball,” who “played cricket and baseball. They were totally compatible as far as he was concerned. He didn’t see them as a fork in the road. He was like Yogi Berra.” He goes on to say, not without criticism of American barbarity, that “all people … are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket.” He advocates better living through cricket: “What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match.”

Hans quite reasonably reels at the “Napoleonic excess of the peroration,” the fact that Chuck “had set up a graveside address, for God’s sake.” And he knows that Chuck is not the wholly idealistic innocent he’s pretended to be, because, under the pretense of helping Hans pass his driver’s license test, Chuck has been making Hans an accomplice in his underground lottery: “[W]ithout explanation, Chuck directed me, his driver, to addresses in Midwood and East Flatbush and Little Pakistan in Kensington, a couple of times taking us as far as Brighton Beach.” This, not the New York Cricket Club, is the enterprise that gets Chuck killed.

Later, Hans rehearses another gazetteer:

I traveled in a rented car up the Saw Mill and Taconic parkways. My preparatory examination of the road map had turned up such place-names as Yonkers, Cortlandt, Verplanck, and, of course, Peekskill; and set against these Dutch places, in my mind, were the likes of Mohegan, Chappaqua, Ossining, Mohansic, for as I drove north through thickly wooded hills I superimposed on the landscape regressive images of Netherlanders and Indians, images arising not from mature historical reflection but from a child’s irresponsibly cinematic sense of things, leading me to picture a bonneted girl in an ankle-length dress waiting in a log cabin for Sinterklaas, and redskins pushing through ferns, and little graveyards filled with Dutch names, and wolves and deer and bears in the forest, and skaters on a natural rink, and slaves singing in Dutch.

Everyone has drawn the tidy parallel between Chuck and Jay Gatsby, as if to say that all self-invention is created equal. But there are those who dream only of standing above and apart, no matter how lonely they may find it there, and then there are those who survey the American landscape with “a child’s irresponsibly cinematic sense of things,” and see the bizarre play of people and places and events, and say, like Chuck Ramkissoon and Hans van den Broek, We are all in this together.

Notes
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1. All the Sad Young Literary Men, by Keith Gessen; Viking, 256 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.
2. A Mercy, by Toni Morrison; Knopf, 176 pages, $23.95. Go back to the text.
3. Home, by Marilynne Robinson; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pages, $25. Go back to the text.
4. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill; Pantheon, 272 pages, $23.95. Go back to the text.