I recently saw a man wearing a t-shirt that said “I bring nothing to the table.” These t-shirts should be handed out at the orientation session of every MFA program in the country. Not as a rebuke, but as celebration and encouragement. It is not always a new angle, or a new approach, or a new gimmick that your book needs. Don’t add something just for the sake of adding. That’s destructive. How about bringing nothing to the table? How about thinking inside the damn box every once in a while?

Andrew Sean Greer, when considering and plotting out his book The Confessions of Max Tivoli, clearly thought the family itself—all that malarkey that occupied Austen, Tolstoy, etc.—not quite meaty enough.[1] The family, well there’s something to that, but what can one bring to the table? What if … what if the protagonist was a frog? No, that’ll never work. What if he ages backwards! Lightbulb above the head, agent on the telephone, the whole shebang.

It is possible that if this trick had been smoothly executed, if the character, having established himself as a backwards aging man, settled into a complicated and well-thought-out family/love story, it might be pretty fun, might even be welcome. But for Greer, the backwards-aging man is a crutch. It’s his substitute.

The Confessions begins in the playground; Max Tivoli sits in a sandbox, an old man in a youngster’s body. “There is a dead body to explain. A woman three times loved. A friend betrayed. And a boy long sought for.” It is 1930.

“We all hate what we become.” He writes, asking forgiveness for his childish handwriting. He is sixty, but he is losing his coordination. “I have seen women staring at themselves in restaurant mirrors… . I have seen men back from war.” He feels the need to apologize to a young boy named Sammy. He looks the same age as Sammy, and has contrived to live and school with him.

Tivoli was born in 1871 in San Francisco. The doctor declared him “Rhinocerine,” a word Tivoli is convinced was made up on the spot. He makes a friend in a young boy named Hughie, one of the few folks who know him for what he really is. He spends most of his time passing himself off according to his mother’s advice: “Be what they think you are.”

Much of the meat of the book comes from Tivoli trying to pass. Looking fifty-five, he is inside a boy of fifteen. Looking ten, he’s a sour and spent sixty. There’s an interesting moment when his appearance and his age coincide—at thirty-five he looks thirty-five.

What could be an interesting, even glamorous, adventure is crippled in two ways.

Greer keeps Tivoli in a very small world. The book is a domestic love story. When Tivoli goes to war, we skip it. He and Hughie go driving around the country, but the country is not much explored. It’s an intentional move on Greer’s part. This story takes place inside. A note left for Tivoli is “on custard stationary on the silver tray, beside the toast. One edge of it was dark with spilled coffee.” Tight focus is kept on the small details. We get lots of tea things, gaslights, and rugs— the whole novel seems to take place in the parlor.

Which is fitting, I suppose, considering that Tivoli is trapped inside himself. His confession purports to tell the story of how each of us is the love of someone’s life, and how frequently we screw that up. It is more the story of those trapped within themselves. An old madam wants to pass as a lady. A gay man passed as heterosexual, yearning to come out. Everyone is trapped inside something.

But it is an opportunity lost. I found myself wanting him to travel: Go to Singapore! I encouraged him. They won’t care! Just keep moving, and you’ll be fine. But the only thing he’ll move for is Alice, his true love.

The second unfortunate result of the sandbox confessional is that Tivoli’s voice, to us, is always old. These pages were supposed to have been found in a box. They are his diaries. Much of the book concerns itself with time, and people’s relationship to it, but to us, Tivoli, though he might reflect on youth, is static. When he writes of his conception (with alarming detail) he writes that at 1:28 his “mother’s technical girlhood ended… . And then—at 2:05 exactly (well endured, my young and eager father)—her lover cried out in ecstasy.” That is the voice of experience laid right over the image of conception. So for us there is no progress. To our ear, Tivoli is always an old man. Why should he begin as one?

The backwards aging, then, is reduced to a prop. It allows Greer to fill pages with one-liners about how Hughie, now masquerading as Tivoli’s father, should teach his son to drive elsewhere. It allows for Tivoli to deceive the love of his life three times.

But couldn’t we have a man deceive a woman three times without the added distraction? Can’t Greer imagine a way to write of botched love affairs and secret affections without all this?

The Dew Breaker, by Edwidge Danticat, is a series of vaguely interconnected stories concerning Haitians in America and Haiti.[2] The opening story promises a rich tapestry of betrayal and violence, which the book fails to deliver.

We meet Ms. Bienamé and her father on a rather unlikely journey to Florida where they will deliver a sculpture the daughter has carved to a Haitian television star.

The sculpture is “a three-foot mahogany figure of my father naked, kneeling on a half-foot square base, his back arched like the curve of a crescent moon, his downcast eyes fixed on his very long fingers and the large palms of his hands… . It was the way I had imagined him in prison.”

Mr. Bienamé had been in prison in Haiti, but not in the way his daughter imagines. He was not a captive. He’d been a guard—one of the dreaded macoutes. He was a “dew breaker” (they came in the morning, while the dew was still on the ground), a torturer, a thug.

In the last story, perhaps the only really successful story in the collection, we see him younger, still in Haiti. The scene opens on him lounging in his vehicle. “He came to kill the preacher. So he arrived early, extra early, a whole two hours before the evening service would begin.”

The preacher is a revolutionary, a rabble-rouser. He tells stories on his radio show about “brave men and women in the Bible who’d fought tyranny and nearly died.”

The preacher’s death warrant has come down from Duvalier. The dew breaker enjoys his work: “He liked questioning the prisoners, teaching them to play zo and besik, stapling clothespins to their ears as they lost and removing them as he let them win, convincing them that their false victories would save their lives. He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn’t hear the orders he was shouting at them.” But he is tired of this life, is already saving money to leave. Still, he will carry out his order.

After things go very wrong with the preacher, he travels to America and changes his name. But he is a marked man. He is haunted, and the scar on his face serves to remind him of his past. His past haunts his wife, too.

There was no way to escape this dread anymore, this pendulum between regret and forgiveness, this fright that the most important relationships of her life were always on the verge of being severed or lost, that the people closest to her were always disappearing.

But there is little of this haunting in the pages in between.

In “The Bridal Seamstress” a young reporter for the “Haitian American Weekly” interviews a woman who makes wedding gowns. She imagines that the dew breaker lives on her block in Far Rockaway. “This man, wherever I rent or buy a house in this city, I find him, living on my street.”

But most of the chapter is spent drinking coffee, and inside the head of the silly cub reporter, Aline, who comes to the realization that people in the world suffer. “Maybe there were hundreds, even thousands, of people like this, men and women chasing fragments of themselves long lost to others. Maybe Aline herself was one of them.” Aline wants to write about these people, and so does Danticat.

But I’m no more sure of who these hundreds, perhaps thousands, are than I am what it means to chase fragments of one’s self “long lost to others.” Haitians? Victims of torture?

Danticat wants resonance, but she won’t work for it. She relies instead on the atmosphere, and the false richness of the exotic language and rhythm of Haiti. In the middle of the coup that overthrew Duvalier, a young man explains the difference between long-tailed and short-tailed monkeys. The president for life had “gone on television to deny the rumors, saying he was as ‘unyielding as a monkey’s tail.’”

Monkeys with short tails live on the ground … and those with longer tails make their homes closer to the sky, in high trees. Some tree monkeys have tails that are longer than their bodies, tails that they use to swing from tree to tree. We’d both laughed, wondering which kind of monkey’s tail our president imagined himself to be.

“He was a short-tailed one, but now he’s a long-tailed one … looking for another tree.”

No doubt, someone thinks that stuff like “make their homes closer to the sky” is “richly evocative.” But it isn’t. It’s utterly false. Just like the repetition of the word “tail,” it is meant to lull us into a folksy acceptance.

Danticat peppers the book with these exotics: “Claude was a palannit, a night talker, one of those who spoke their nightmares out loud to themselves.” It is not the “palannit” that is the giveaway here, it is the repetition and the use of “one of those.” “One of those” makes you feel as if a wise old Haitian woman is telling you about people.

When she is not relying on exoticism, she is relying on the interweaving of the stories, the presence of the dew breaker, whose stories bookend this collection. The implied tapestry, however, is not there. The threads that are supposed to interlock do not. Danticat has banked on a support system that she failed to provide for herself, and most of the book feels empty because of it.

I don’t mean to say that the exotic has no place in books. I only mean to suggest that it has not a weight of its own. A foreign or exciting rhythm can make a speech pleasing to the ear, but it does not grant that speech depth. There must be a structure on which the writer might hang his trinkets.

Thomas Mallon, in Bandbox, raided the junk store for all the quirks and details he could get his hands on about jazz age New York.[3] We know where we are immediately. Mallon’s opening line: “Cuddles Houlihan got clipped by the vodka bottle as it exited the pneumatic tube.”

Joe Harris, his boss, editor-in-chief of the men’s monthly Bandbox, had “at this late, sozzled hour … mistakenly fed the interoffice mail chute not the translucent canister containing his angry communication to Cuddles, but the still-half-full, six-dollar quart of hooch he was regularly supplied with by the countess in the fact-checking department.”

In a fictional world rumored to mirror pretty closely that of the late Art Cooper of GQ and David Granger of Esquire, Joe Harris’s best senior editor has gone off and started a magazine of his own. Now, they find themselves in competition for eyeballs, ad dollars, and scoops. “The war between the two men and magazines was still a matter of novelty jousting with novelty—in a time when novelty itself had lost its newness.”

Mallon, like a variety-show juggler, starts tossing up stories: perhaps too many, if the truth be told. They are at times hard to remember, and a few of them fail to fire. There is a complicated proto-PETA subplot that promises much comedy (a warehouse full of exotic animals really ought to go somewhere) but ultimately seems invented only to give one minor character a way out of the book in the closing pages.

Most of Mallon’s yarns work out much better; throughout, he is funny, confident, and bright. His writing is snappy: at an editorial meeting, one editor is describing the pieces he’s acquired “like a weary magician extracting rabbits for his colleagues who couldn’t even find the top hat.” Not only is it a wonderful simile, it keeps perfectly in line with the atmosphere of the book. Another man’s “insides and brain were now popping like one long glorious Fourth of July.”

Things are whirling out of control over at Bandbox, the staff is losing its edge, and hooch, sex, and drugs have taken their toll—everyone is getting dull. Into this vivid world marches a rube from Indiana named John. An avid reader of Bandbox, he knows how to compliment people, and finds himself sharing a table with his heroes—the writers and editors.

No one at the table had interrupted John’s excited narrative to ask why he had come to the city, or what circumstances had preceded his departure from Indiana. It was, to these diners, a simple given that everywhere else was a place you left, that each person arrived in Manhattan like an appliance ready to be taken out of its box and plugged in. This nice boy was just one more shiny creature off destiny’s assembly line.

Destiny’s assembly line has quite a trip in store for John, soon re-named “Shep” by the staffers. He gets himself packed into the trunk of a gangster’s car and shipped out of town, and in so doing, offers them just the story they need to galvanize their own floundering careers and save the magazine.

Add to the kid and the gangster a cocaine-addled omnisexual male model, and the Italian restauranteur who gives him drugs in hopes of one day gaining his love. Add a made judge and a bevy of trollops, self-interested writers and editors. And it all fits together, “Just like Scanties!” (a “detestably unseductive piece of modern apparel”).

It’s never as tight and true as the masterpiece of journalism comedy, Scoop, nor is Bandbox ever quite as well put together as P. G. Wodehouse, but it seems to me that to call those examples to mind at all is a triumph.

True to form, all are delivered exactly what they deserve by the closing chapter. The good and the innocent triumph, those who have worked hard are rewarded. The venal and manipulative are destroyed. Wedding bells will soon be chiming for lovers who have finally found their place with one another.

Although Tom Perrotta’s capacity for doubt is endless, he comes on as understanding. He appears to create characters with which one might sympathize. Even his child molesters are not grotesques.

In Little Children, one of the threads we follow through a suburban landscape of playgrounds and swimming pools is the story of a sex offender recently released from prison.[4] He exposed himself to a girl scout, and is suspected in the disappearance of a girl. He spends most of the book at home with his mother, smoking and watching television. Perrotta’s sympathy extends even to him: “It was weird, but Ronnie actually liked going to the hospital. People were friendly there. They smiled at him in the elevators and corridors, and treated him as if he had as much right to be there as they did, an attitude he didn’t often encounter in public places.” You have to remind yourself that the sympathy you feel is for a child molester.

Ronnie is there for added suspense, and to put into relief the subtler child abuse—and obsessing affectionate objectification—that is going on throughout the book. The moms are all either smothering or uninterested, the fathers are mostly at work. The children are just there, something one must care for in the way that one must put gas in the car or vacuum the rug. These parents fixate on being parents, but they don’t do much actual parenting. Occasionally, they are the recipients of affection, usually from the parent with whom the child spends less time. One mother is freshly surprised every time she realizes that her friend Jean actually likes her daughter.

Sarah lost her girlfriend and made a wreck of graduate school, so she got a job at Starbucks. It was a miserable life until a wannabe swinger with a deep affection for internet porn asked her if her day was going as badly as his and she chucked all her Women’s Studies mumbo jumbo and bisexual proclivities and married him.

Now, she must remind herself to “think like an anthropologist. I’m a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself.

Her child Lucy is nothing but a burden to her.

If any of the other mothers had asked how it was that Sarah, of all people, had ended up married, living in the suburbs, and caring full-time for a small child, she would have blamed it all on a moment of weakness.

Into her life walks an equally stressed father, Todd. Referred to by the playground mommies as “The Prom King,” Todd is a physically fit, blond, frat boy pretending to study for his third try at the bar exam, though he tends to spend more attention on a group of skateboarders than he does on his law books. He and his wife don’t seem to get along anymore; she’s much more interested in having their son in bed than she is in having him.

Obviously, such a situation is due for a mixing up, and a little suburban adultery fits the bill perfectly.

Sarah “picked up Madame Bovary and discovered an entirely different novel from the one that existed in her memory.”

Perrotta makes excellent jokes.

A dinner party at which Todd and Sarah are attempting to conceal their affair from their spouses ends with Todd’s wife hiding on the floor under the table, staring at the nail polish on Sarah’s toes. “She didn’t really want to get up just yet, to sit in her chair and carry on a civil conversation with the woman who’d stolen her husband.” She stays under there for way too long. “‘I’m fine,’ she said, still on her hands and knees, still staring dumbstruck at the other woman’s toes.”

At church, a fight between the child molester and another suburban train wreck takes on vaudevillian characteristics, pants around the ankles, ear twisting: the whole shebang.

One realizes, however, that these jokes are somewhat cinematic. And with that realization, the book begins to disintegrate. The characters are simple. Their problems, and attempted solutions to those problems, are predictable. Sarah’s husband’s interests are a little off the map, but other than that people tend to deliver rather pat little packages of thought. Sarah displays a fair amount of the same idiocy of which she accuses the other mommies, it’s just of a different stripe.

Discussing Madame Bovary, one woman says “I found it refreshing to read about a woman reclaiming her sexuality.” And another says, “Is that a nice way of saying she’s a slut?” And another: “I’m tempted to go so far as to say that, in her own strange way, Emma Bovary is a feminist.”

What becomes clear is that they are all idiots. Everyone in the book is an idiot. All of Perrotta’s sympathy is a sham. He gives each of them just enough flesh and weakness for us to relate to them, and then he calmly strafes them. He is cynical beyond belief. But cynicism should not be confused with depth. Attacking the foibles of modern American suburban parents is shooting fish in a barrel.

Imad Rahman’s debut collection of short stories, I Dream of Microwaves, springs from a single idea.[5] What if basically everyone in the world were an actor?

The protagonist throughout is named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “I was trying to get my mind off drinking by pouring hot coffee on my arm when I got a letter out of the blue from an old girlfriend, Eileen. There was a one-way Greyhound ticket to Ohio and a handwritten note.” He had been working for “America’s Most Wanted,” playing criminals in their re-enactments of crimes. But there was not enough darkness in his heart. “The casting director, a forgettable (makeup, jumpsuits) woman named Janice, was concerned that I played the parts too soft, left too much room for audience sympathy, and did not, or could not, precipitate enough malice.” He wants to add subtext, let his characters be tormented by demons. She wants monsters.

Kareem is going nowhere, and he wants to improve himself. “I was thinking that Ohio was as good a place as any, that Ohio was neutral, like Switzerland.” He calls his agent: “I’m not drinking any more… . I’m not drinking any less.”

It turns out that Eileen’s motivations are not entirely pure. Her sister has married a cannibal. Actually, he’s an ex-football hotshot turned actor named Buzz Johnson who is playing a cannibal. Her grandmother wants to donate money to charity, $35,000, and, for 10 percent, Buzz is acting the part of the “charity” to which Eileen’s sister believes the money should be given. “If Cecelia’s bringing in her cannibal, I can’t simply show up empty handed. I’m on committees; I’ve made promises; there are people depending on me.” She wants him to be Bosnian. “I need for you to be tragic and burdened with grief. I need for you to deliver some monologues steeped in despair. This is it, the role of a lifetime.”

Exaggerated to absurd heights, for sure, but when two girls bring home guys to win the approval/money of the grandmother, of course it’s a show, of course they are actors. Rahman has taken the presentation of self, the “best face forward” and made it a self-conscious act, a real act. If all the world is a stage, then everybody is acting.

Things don’t go as well for Kareem in Ohio as he might have hoped. The next story, the funniest in the book, finds him deserted by Eileen. She’s run off to Brazil, where she’s saving piranhas after stabbing Kareem in the leg.

He is working as “Zima Zorro at the Ancient Mariner Sports Bar and Grill.” “I had to wear a three-piece corduroy suit with a black polyester cape and a floppy sword. A pencil-thin mustache snaked around my upper lip.” His job is to sit around the bar looking “wonderfully cool and refreshed as [he] chugged elegantly on a six-pack of Zima.”

One day at work he finds that he has some competition: the Red Bull Matador. “There was something genuine about him that made me feel like a phony.”

Kareem rents out his house to a pornography studio. It’s his birthday. “I did some grocery shopping at the liquor store.”

The jokes come fast in this collection. Everyone is a tragedy, everyone is phony. A character in the story “Real, Actual Life” (in which Kareem is teamed up with Valentina as hard-boiled pursuers of those who keep video tapes out too long) speaks only by quoting movies. Even when she screams, she is quoting Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.

It’s all show business. Kareem in a tight spot, forgetting his lines in a traveling Shakespeare company in Karachi, quotes Brando “choosing style over substance.” When local clerics raid the show, Rahman writes, “They had righteous indignation down to an art.”

“We’re actors … not people.”

Everyone—a doorman:

Apparently they’d been through the same unsuccessful audition for a network pilot a few years back. It was pitched as Reservoir Dogs meets Stand by Me psychodrama, to be shot Dogma style with hand-held cameras and no artificial lighting.

When Kareem finally decides not to act and goes after a job as a dog walker, it turns out that he is, in fact, playing a dog walker in a homegrown “reality” show. When he pretends to be Mexican, people ask him to pretend to be Arab so they can catch some terrorists.

It’s a little relentless, this idea, and might have been better served if Rahman had simply stapled the thing together a little tighter and made it a novel. Regardless, it is gutsy and funny. Rahman has a brilliant sense of the absurd. He writes a kind of calm Beckett—not the grad school Beckett, all earnest and intense, but the Beckett of the short stories, the Beckett that was inspired by Buster Keaton movies to write out the horrible in laughter and farce.

Collections by Stuart Dybek come along infrequently, very infrequently. They are worth waiting for. Dybek is one of the best fiction writers working today. He writes without pretense, without artifice. Never does he drop the reader: no matter how weird things get, his easy, steady prose brings you right along. His new collection is titled I Sailed with Magellan.[6] Here is a collection of interconnected stories firing on all eight cylinders.

The loose focus of the book is Perry Katzek. He writes these stories, and stars in them himself with his brother Mick, his father Sir, his Moms, his Uncle Lefty, and a neighborhood full of barkeeps (the one armed Zip), mobsters (Joe, the hitman, haunted by ex-girlfriends in a haze of sleeplessness and booze), former masked wrestlers, Ralphie the sick little boy, not expected to survive, miraculously struggling through to his eighth birthday. The lives are loosely intertwined, as if the book itself is a neighborhood; the neighbors are always showing up in each other’s stories.

Dybek moves us from Perry’s youth, which he spent standing on the bars of Chicago’s corner taverns, singing “Ol’ Man River” for free root beer for himself and free boilermakers for his Uncle Lefty; to his adolescence, in “Je Reviens” where he pilfers a bottle of perfume he sees a woman trying in Marshall Fields and follows her to a hotel in an attempt to give her it as a gift, only to learn that she is not a guest of the hotel, but a mistress, or a prostitute; to him as a young man, keen on Kerouac, trying to save money to go to Mexico with his friend Stosh and cooking up a plan to steal orchids and sell them. The flowers they case turn out to be irises.

But summarizing Dybek’s stories does not do them justice. They are too graceful and gentle to be summed up.

Consider this scene in “Blue Boy”: A procession of the disabled from the parish emerged from the alley and join a parade,

a couple of World War II vets, mainstays from the bar at the VFW Club, one with a prosthetic hook and the other with no discernible wound other than the alcoholic staggers; and Trib, the blind newspaper vendor; and a guy who delivered pulp circulars, known only as —what else?—the Gimp, pushing his wheelchair for support; and Howdy, who’d been named after Howdy Doody because his palsy caused him to move like a marionette with tangled strings.

It was a parade of at most a dozen, but it seemed larger—enough of a showing so that the onlookers could imagine the battalions of wounded soldiers who weren’t there, and the victims of accidents, industrial and otherwise, the survivors of polio and strokes, all the exiles who avoided the streets… . Maria Savoy who’d been lighting a water heater when it exploded, or Agnes Lutensky.

He moves from the universal to the specific (battalions of soldiers right down to Agnes Lutensky). He evokes the whole neighborhood feeling; Perry knows all these people by name, it is an urban scene, a Chicago scene. At times, I’m not even sure why I’m so moved by these digressive, almost impressionistic stories, but they work.

He writes a whole subtle world. His characters end at impasses, they stand at thresholds, they learn something. His style is divergent. We learn a lifetime of Mick’s history while he stands, back in the old neighborhood, listening to a Mexican gang kid ask him what he wants.

The gangster comes to threaten the barkeep, and the barkeep wants to stand up to him. The gangster, in turn, is hassled by his boss, and by his waking dreamstate. They are not victims, not in the way that Danticat would write victims. We are not to feel sorry for them. But they are not the winners of the world, either. They are tossed around their neighborhood, tossed around this book.

Dybek knows the rhythm of his streets and his voices. He can put them to use. His fiction is subtle, strikingly original, and brilliant. He never pushes too hard for effect, and he never lets you down.

These are elusive stories. One is not entirely sure what to think. These days, where authorial intention and opinion are so easy to spot, where writers hang little flags on the characters they use to make points, it is refreshing to see a writer so involved in the art. He is carefully, subtly putting together human emotions, not to make a point, not to disapprove or champion, not to comment, but to illustrate.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

  1. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer; Farrar Straus and Giroux, 288 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
  2. The Dew Breaker, by Edwidge Danticat; Knopf, 256 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
  3. Bandbox: A Novel, by Thomas Mallon; Pantheon Books, 320 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.
  4. Little Children: A Novel, by Tom Perrotta; St. Martin’s Press, 368 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.
  5. I Dream of Microwaves, by Imad Rahman; Farrar Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
  6. I Sailed with Magellan, by Stuart Dybeck; Picador, 320 pages, $14. Go back to the text.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 22 Number 9, on page 58
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