In the metaphysics of early computing, after the vacuum tubes,
while the world was searching for the mouse, there came briefly
to light an interesting cosmological problem. Graphical space
can be described in two ways, either as a mapped set of distinct
dots or as a collection of lines: bitmaps or vectors
respectively. The basic metaphor upon which we would compute was
at stake. We needed to construct an on-screen representation of
depth and organization. Build a system of metaphors that created
the illusion of space on a computer screen out of vectors, and
get a certain kind of computing; do it out of pixels, and get
another. It is a foundational presupposition, choose vectors and
we’ll end up thinking about things in a certain way, as
connections, curves, and shapes; pick bitmaps, and we’ll think
differently, and perceive a collection of individual points. We
might force shapes on our firmament, but everyone knows that
constellations are just that.
Thankfully, we are removed from the
essential metaphor by so many levels of user-friendly windows,
prompt screens, and dialog boxes that it never need occur to
anyone which presupposition won out. In fact, I’m not even sure
which one really rules the machines. I suspect it was bitmaps,
ultimately, and so does John Updike.
Owen Mackenzie, the
collection of scenes and sentences that is at the center of
Updike’s latest romp
into suburban infidelity—it’s difficult
really to call these things Updike has written “characters”—worked
on a vector-based interface for computers.[1]
He went to MIT, met a
wife, went on to work for IBM, and ended up in a small town in
Connecticut as a partner in a company called E. O. Data Management,
working on a thing called DigitEyes, a light pen and touch screen
interface. It was on the wrong side of things, vectors, as was
Owen, its inventor. Not that it wasn’t successful, it was, and
Owen smart, he is, but not Bill Gates smart, and not Microsoft
successful. Vectors lost. The computer screen is not a series of
curves and lines; it’s dots, atoms, and individuals.
At one
point in the dissolution of his marriage (true to form, the
marriages in Updike-urbia are all doomed), he decides not to make
a telephone call because
There were enough energies at work;
things had a way of working out, like his finding his glasses
that time in the dew-soaked empty lot, or his discovering, as he
was devising the algorithms for DigitEyes 2.1, that no matter how
many 3D transformations have been
nested, one branching from the other, the last coordinate
space can be specified in terms of the first, with no more
than a displacement vector and three basis vectors—a
mere twelve scalars to be crunched.
The first of two
things remarkable about this passage is that I hadn’t remembered
Owen wore glasses, even though I’d just spent almost 300 pages
with him. He had pretended to leave some reading glasses
somewhere once as a pretense to make the adultery-commencing
telephone call, but other than that I can imagine no part of his
face, bespectacled or otherwise. It’s the kind of maddening
reminder of how slight these sketches are, as people. They barely
have mannerisms. I’m not suggesting that one needs graceless
pages of physical description. I’ve never felt moored by those
newspaper ledes: “Our hero, a tall man with brown hair gone gray
at the temples and a sagging paunch drove home in his
socio-economically significant …” But I
don’t want to be surprised by someone on page 295. Glasses?
Really?
The other important thing about the above extract is
that Owen, after having built a career out of vectors, had a
revelation of sorts about how the vectors related to one another
by their points. Although a dozen scalars sound like a
cripplingly complex thing to me, I looked it up and found that
scalars have magnitude, but not direction, whereas direction is
the keystone of a vector. Owen’s late observation of the way he’s
mapped out the world, in other words, is that the lines upon
which he’s relied are not in fact lines. The lines are rooted at
points. No matter how convoluted your life gets, you can
describe the last coordinate in relation to the point of origin.
Not by the lines connecting the two, which would by that point
have gone haywire and scrambled around one another like spaghetti
(or the infidelities of a small town), but by the points
themselves. The vector, atomized.
“Owen’s past,” Updike writes, “is like a sheet
of inky blue tissue paper held up to a light, so the holes
pricked in it shine: these stars are the women who let him fuck
them.” Of course. The points of life are sex. I breathe a sigh
of relief here, because it’s sex, not math, that we’re talking
about, and sex, at least, has been demystified by Updike novels.
Owen’s pursuit of sex in Villages is rather unbelievable; people
in these suburbs are more available, more open, and more
promiscuous than anyone I can imagine outside of Updike or porno.
But his sex is vivid. Astonishingly so. He caresses his
sentences out to incredible lengths. Long, wonderful poetry of
the body. Comparing the amount of time spent in coitus in an
Updike novel to the amount of time spent on anything else is an
entertainment itself. History wings by, decades flit along, and
each second of sex is dwelt upon.
But it is sex had in isolation, really. Owen
lives very much as his own point, unable to understand the
vectors around him, or even many of the points with which he
shares his life. The men of his town are “an array of golf
swings.”
In Villages, Owen’s ignorance of those around him
causes destruction and sadness, but it is also a problem of the
book itself. Owen doesn’t understand the people, or the vectors,
and Updike skips all the places in between, leaving us just a
series of dirty postcards. Owen alienates the world around him,
and when he does find happiness, it seems unlikely to the reader.
She’s the same as everyone else; maybe he just gave up. Even if
that surrender, that shrug that constitutes so many of life’s
decisions, is Updike’s point, the illustration of alienation and
isolation need not, in turn, alienate the reader.
In Philip Roth’s latest
novel, The Plot Against America,
[2] young Roth is told by his father that
“in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was
a citizen’s most important duty and that you could
never start too early to be informed about the news of the
day.” It’s a patriotic civics lesson.
“Because what’s
history?” he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive
dinnertime instructional mode. “History is everything that
happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit
Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary
man—that’ll be history too someday.”
The idea that history is
everything casts the net very wide, obviously, but then the
father of young, fictional Phil Roth draws a smaller circle:
Newark. Then a still smaller one: Summit Avenue. And still
tighter: an ordinary man at home.
It’s a very generous,
democratic, and American way of viewing the world, and it makes
me think of some kind of WPA-sponsored mural in which we’re all
wrapped up in the progress, all together in the march forward,
from the men who shape the day, to the men who live it out. Pitch
in, we’re all equals, and every little bit counts. Just because
you’re a modest family on a nice middle-class street in Newark
doesn’t mean that you aren’t a part of the grander thing, the
March of Time.
It is the small picture at which Roth excels. The
family is intimately portrayed, and every character who enters
the story gets a good portrait. There are no throwaway parts in
The Plot Against America. Everything is seamlessly, gracefully
told in a series of reminiscences. All the meals, the trips, the
movies, the bus rides have shades of meaning and inform the
movement of the book. This is where Roth’s talent shines.
An
uncle enters, and Roth brings you up to speed: “My father could
keep pace with Monty’s prodigious expenditure of energy, and his
capacity to endure all manner of hardship was no less remarkable
than Monty’s, but he knew from the clashes of boyhood that he was
no match for the innovator who’s first gambled on bringing ripe
tomatoes to Newark in the wintertime by buying up carloads of
green tomatoes from Cuba and ripening them in specially heated
rooms on the creaky second floor of his Miller Street warehouse.
When they were ready, Monty packed them four to a box, got top
dollar, and was known thereafter as the Tomato King.”
The specificity (“creaky second floor of his Miller Street
warehouse”) and the humor (“known thereafter as the Tomato King”)
work together with Roth’s overwhelming efficiency, and by the end
of two sentences one knows a lot about the brothers’ relationship
to each other. All of this coloration leads to an incredibly
potent interplay of characters. When hearts break in The Plot
Against America, you feel it. The sympathy evoked by Roth for
his characters is astonishing.
A cousin goes off to war and comes
back without a leg. He would go to the beach to bathe his stump
in the ameliorating salt water, then hop out of the surf
crying “‘Shark! Shark!’ while pointing in horror at his stump.” The
geeky downstairs neighbor kid is forced into a friendship with Phil
based largely on proximity and seems to get younger and dumber as
the book goes on and his life gets more and more sad. The aunt
marries a very important rabbi, and her ambition carries her
along and eventually destroys her and reduces her to madness
while she hides out in the Roths’ basement. Each of the
characters in The Plot Against America could fill a book.
Which makes what befalls them all the more moving. Instead of
giving the presidency to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the country
elects by a landslide the heroic aviator and anti-Semite Charles
Lindbergh:
By the time I began school in 1938, Lindbergh’s was
a name that provoked the same sort of indignation in our house as
did the weekly Sunday radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, the
Detroit-area priest who edited a right-wing weekly called Social
Justice and whose anti-Semitic virulence aroused the passions of
a sizable audience during the country’s hard times.
Anti-Semitism explodes in the nation. Lindbergh makes pacts with
the Axis powers. The Office of American Absorption is set up.
“Under the auspices of Just Folks—described by Lindbergh’s newly
created Office of American Absorption as a ‘volunteer work
program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of the
heartland life’—[Phil’s] brother left on the last day of June
1941 for a summer ‘apprenticeship’ with a Kentucky tobacco
farmer.” The OAA moves on to the
relocation of entire families soon enough. Phil goes to
visit his aunt, who works at the OAA,
and sees “big maps pierced with clumps of colored pins
and fixed to an enormous colored bulletin board on the wall
[in] back of her desk.” There’s a map of New
Jersey, and a map of the whole nation. Aunt Evelyn tells him
that “Each [pin] represents a family chosen for
relocation. Now look at the map of the whole country. See
all the pins there? Those represent the location to which
each New Jersey family has been assigned.”
So having established the intense humanity of these
families, we then see them as pins on a map, a part of the
political process, a part of history, but in a new, terrifying
way.
History, written at the dinner table, on the avenue, in
Newark. It’s a horrific reversal of the American promise. But
the presupposition is so big, so distracting, that it weighs the
book down. The history here is glossy, a quick-moving pastiche of
street games, gangsters, news broadcasts, and Winchell reports.
It starts to feel like a fantasia, something cooked up. And ever
present in the reader’s mind is that it didn’t happen this way.
So rather than evoke the possibility that there might exist in
America an undercurrent of ugliness, Roth simply sets up a
fantasy world in which that ugliness is expressed, and then
easily dismissed, because, after all, FDR was who the real
America elected.
That Lindbergh would swoop into power, white
scarf flying behind him, and bring into the open all of the
hatred that had been submerged in America is just too tough
to sell. And the care with which Roth builds his families
and his characters is not evident in the building of the
history contrary to fact.
The real shame is that the successful parts of the
book, the intimate, are mired in this swamp of ugly fairy tale,
the public. By creating a public history so far-fetched, and
then failing to deliver it in any believable way, the small
portraits are disconnected from the movement of the book. The
intimate portraits of families and people are left to float like
vignettes in a context we can never quite bring ourselves to buy.
David Foster Wallace has a better
handle on the cadence, nuance, and detail of contemporary
language than any writer working today. His characters are
full of neuroses, motivations, and manipulations, so common
and accurately evoked that you come to believe that you know
them. Shortly after considering this, the average reader
will find that he is very happy that he doesn’t, in
fact, know anyone like the characters in Wallace’s
stories.[3]
The narrator of
“Good Old Neon,” for instance, speaks in a voice that is as
familiar as a ham sandwich, and Wallace submits his authorial
voice to it entirely.
Later I was in analysis, I tried analysis
like almost everybody else then in their late twenties who’d made
some money or had a family or whatever they thought they wanted
and still didn’t feel that they were happy. A lot of people I
knew tried it. It didn’t really work, although it did make
everyone sound more aware of their own problems and added some
useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to talk to
each other to fit in and sound a certain way. You know what I
mean.
The story is a long confession of his own sense of
fraudulence, narrated after his death, and culminating in a
reference to “David Wallace” finding a picture of the narrator in
a yearbook and wondering what could have motivated such a bright,
together guy to kill himself in a car crash.
“David Wallace
trying … to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had
seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must
have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and
doubtlessly painful way—with David Wallace also fully aware
that the cliché that you can’t ever really know
what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and
insipid.” Which is a nice shot at getting out of that,
but no cigar: it’s still a cliché. Wallace gets
away with this stuff all the time. He’ll observe that
some pretty people aren’t happy, or that some
successful people are insecure, or that people don’t
understand how much others respect them, all of which are
observations on the level of an after-school special. What
masks the overworn nature of Wallace’s observation are
the density and cleverness that shrouds the writing.
In the story titled “Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature,” nothing is made of the book by Richard Rorty of the
same title. Rorty’s book (1979) was a famous postmodern
effort to envision philosophy without a commitment to what
Rorty calls “capital T
truth.” Rorty’s attempt to transform philosophy
into a backyard chat (“continuing the
conversation” he called it) was a big hit with trendy
academics, and it is a measure of the book’s celebrity
that its title should furnish a writer like Wallace with a
starting point. Not that it is easy to suss out what
Wallace’s stories are really about. But as in
Rorty’s book, every once in a while an insight or
illumination shines through.
This story is about a man
who must now by court order keep his collection of living Black
Widow spiders in a briefcase rather than the garage, and his
mother, whose face has been twisted by a cosmetic surgery mistake
and now looks “insanely frightened at all times.” The whole
story takes place on the bus ride to the lawyer’s office, where
they’ll be setting up the basis for the mother’s malpractice
suit.
The story is a mere eight pages long, yet within it,
Wallace has hurled a mountain of information. Information comes
at you constantly, in no particular order, and with no
perceivable hierarchy. It’s scattershot.
In one or two
regrettable moments on insensitivity also I have joked about
taking the bus all the way through into Studio City and environs
and auditioning Mother as an extra in one of the many films
nowadays in which crowds of extras are paid to look upwards in
terror of a special effect which is only later inserted into
the film through computer-aided design. Which I sincerely regret,
after all I’m all the support she has. To my mind however it is
quite a stretch to say that an area of weakness in a
twenty-year-old garage roof equals failing to exercise due
diligence or care.
Robbe-Grillet tried this in his nouveaux romans.
The authorial intent, he felt, was unknowable, and it was too
despotic of the author to structure the items in a story as if
some were more important than others. The smudge left by a
squashed bug on a wall is as important a feature of the room in
which the action takes place as the characters are. Wallace has
removed the tedious descriptions of the trivial from the idea,
but his MO is pretty much the same. Things, regardless of their
weight, are described in detail. When the moment lends itself to
this, like the moment when we suddenly realize that the briefcase
is actually full of spiders (and when we realize, we realize it
in all caps:
OHMYGODITSFULLOFSPIDERS! is what happened in my
brain) it can be remarkable. Because the information we’ve been
receiving is disorganized, and detailed, we’ve come to be wading
through a swamp of it, exhausted and confused. Out of that swamp
rises an image, a quick flash that shimmers with vitality:
Recently as the bus crossed Victory Boulevard as I looked down
to check the status I saw accidentally protruding from one of the
ventilation holes at the case’s corner the slender tip of a black
jointed foreleg; it was moving about slightly and possessed the
same luminous coloration as the rest of the specimens, moving
tentatively in an exploratory way.
This image has stayed in my
mind. Images are not always as successful, and they are frequently damaged
by the very techniques that create the effect.
There’s a
daydream I have about David Foster Wallace, in which he is
sitting in a La-Z-Boy, and he’s got a stack of owner’s manuals
piled up to the armrest on his right, and about half as many on
his left, and he’s reading through them all. Then I imagine him
calling to get more. Just as Wallace takes up with incredible
specificity the rhythms of our speech, he treats the world’s
things with excruciating attention. Every fax machine, every
telephone, every microcassette recorder, and every rental car are
perfectly catalogued. He’s knows every button, every plastic. He
knows the names of the ingredients in insecticides.
He observes
very closely, and he catalogues very well. That’s what makes his
book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again some of the
best new journalism written. His ear for dialogue and his eye for
detail make him a merciless, hilarious, and brilliant recorder of
the contemporary situation. One cannot help but feel, while
plowing through a story about a man who shits fully finished
sculptures, that all this detail, all these products, and all
these tics of contemporary speech patterns, with all the
baggage of neurosis behind it, might be exactly that which we
turn to fiction to escape. And that if all this achieved, ultimately,
something more than “it’s really hard to know what happens inside
other people” it would be worth it, but without a transcendence
of something, without something sublime, it’s just tough going
reminiscent of very hip television, or, worse yet, real life.
Far, far from any sort of real life, in a project seemingly
directly at odds with the writers I’ve discussed above, is
Cynthia Ozick. A web of narrative coincidence, poetic rapture,
and quirky scholarship fills Heir to the Glimmering World.[4]
Young Rose, recently adrift in the world, sees an
advertisement in the Albany Star: “Professor, arrived 1933
Berlin, children 3–14, requires assistant, relocate NYC. Respond
Mitwisser, 22 Westerly.”
It is 1935, and Rose is eighteen.
Professor
Mitwisser studies the Karaites, an old sect of essentialist Jews
who refute the Talmud, and stick to literal interpretations of
the Torah. They are long-gone heretics and rebels, and no one,
especially the Quakers who brought the Mitwisser clan to America,
seems very interested in them.
The Mitwissers had escaped Berlin in
terror. They had driven around the city in a big black limousine
because “only important people would ride in an auto like that,
big and black, and the driver had a black cap with a shiny beak,
like a policeman.” The eldest daughter tells Rosie that “all over
Berlin … there were impromptu raids; people were being
arrested right out of their own apartments, or the apartments of
relatives or friends, wherever they tried to hide.” They drove
around the city in their best clothes, and used the bathrooms at
elegant hotels, staying in motion all the while to insure escape
to Sweden.
They are refugees, with a strong sense of what they’ve
left behind: the privilege, the tradition, the mother says to her
daughter of Rose, “What a pity the Fräulein cannot when she hears
him recognize Goethe.”
Heir to the Glimmering World is a book
about absence.
Elsa Mitwisser, the mother just above, was a
physicist, who tells Rosie that she worked with Schrödinger, and
that her idea is at the core of the Schrödinger equation. She bit
into an egg, and noticed that the bite was there, its existence
proved by its absence. They invented “a wave function that
extended throughout space, just as the missing outline of the
bitten egg extended in principal beyond the existing body of the
egg.” Schrödinger’s equation is used to predict the outcome of
events, the distribution of results.
Absence of money, absence
of homeland, absence of mind, absence of love: everyone in this
book is missing something, like an egg from which a bite has been
taken, and the missing is that which defines them. Their missing
parts, like the imagined waveform that flows out of the egg, also
collide and define the lives of those around them.
Rosie’s
father, before he died while driving some of his students from their
prep school to a gambling outing in Saratoga, would say to her on
her birthday, “On this day, eight years ago, Jenny left me.” Jenny
being his wife, Rose’s mother, whom he claims died in childbirth.
Years later, she still remembers it. When she turns nineteen:
“Nineteen years since my Jenny left me,” she thinks her
father might say, if he was alive.
To this cast of fragile
folks, each missing something, add the Bear Boy. His father had
turned him into a character in a children’s book, and now he’s a
rich adult. Desperate, alcoholic, isolated, and flippant, but very
rich. He is the benefactor of the family, he sends packets of
cash. But he sends them irregularly. The absence of money is a
frequent problem in the Mitwisser house; the Professor doesn’t
even like to leave the lights on.
Ozick writes an exquisite
prose, hers is a swirl of lovely sentences that describe the
gravest misfortunes I can imagine. She pulls no punches, and her
evocation of sorrow and cruelty are stunning.
The daughter
Anneliese won’t go near a school, because one of her teachers
broke two bones in her hand with a metal bar that
she kept in her
desk. The class was asked to
name two achievements attributed to
Chancellor von Bismarck and “[w]ith the short metal bar Frau Koch
smashed two narrow bones. Because I gave the answer. Because I
forgot I was forbidden to speak.”
It makes Philip Roth’s
anti-Semitic fantasies look like comic books, it must be said.
The book is a swirl of domestic events: James the Bear Boy runs
away with the daughter, she returns pregnant, Rose’s distant
cousin (and sometimes benefactor) Bertram falls on hard luck and
lands at the Mitwisser house after his girlfriend Ninel is killed
in the Spanish civil war. Domestic events and arrangements are
tossed on the choppy waters of the world’s problems again in
Ozick, and in Ozick the focus is excruciatingly tight. When Rosie
at one point journeys to the library in Manhattan, the space
around her seems limitless. Just that she is out of the house
seems to fill the book with fresh air.
In the end, the past
begins to fade into the “white light of myth.” The children
continue their steady path towards assimilation, and we leave
Rose, immeasurably grown from when we first met her, taking control
and seemingly for the first time being controlled not by the
absence of things, but by the presence of possibility.
Max Watman writes frequently for The New York
Sun and other publications.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
Villages, by John Updike; Knopf, 321 pages,
$25.
Go back to the text.-
The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth; Houghton Mifflin, 391 pages,
$26.
Go back to the text.
Oblivion: Stories, by David Foster Wallace; Little, Brown, 329 pages,
$25.95
Go back to the text.
Heir to the Glimmering World, by Cynthia Ozick; Houghton
Mifflin, 310 pages, $24.
