The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  2666 consists of five sections, each with autonomous life and form, sufficient that Bolaño evidently flirted with the notion of separate publication for the five parts. Indeed, two or three of these might be the equal of his masterpieces at novella length, By Night in Chile and Distant Star. In a comparison Bolaño openly solicits (the novel contains a series of unnecessary but totally charming defenses of its own formal strategies, and magnitude), these five long sequences interlock to form an astonishing whole, in the same manner that fruits, vegetables, meats, flowers, or books interlock in the unforgettable paintings of the Italian master Giuseppe Arcimboldo to form a human face.

  As in Arcimboldo’s paintings, 2666’s individual elements are easily cataloged, while the composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit, conveying a power unattainable by more direct strategies. Parts one and five, the bookends—“The Part About the Critics” and “The Part About Archimboldi”—will be the most familiar to readers of Bolaño’s other work. The “critics” are a group of four European academics, pedantically rapturous on the topic of their favorite writer, the mysterious German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. The four are glimpsed at a series of continental Archimboldi conferences; Bolaño never tires of cataloging how a passion for literature walks a razor’s edge between catastrophic irrelevance and sublime calling. As the four become sexually and emotionally entangled, the puzzle of their devotion to a writer who declines their interest—declines, in fact, ever to appear—inches like a great Lovecraftian shadow over their lives.

  Following dubious clues, three of the four chase a rumor of Archimboldi’s present whereabouts to Mexico, to Santa Teresa, a squalid and sprawling border city, globalization’s no-man’s-land, in the Sonoran Desert. The section’s disconcertingly abrupt ending will also be familiar to readers of the novellas: The academics never locate the German novelist, and, failing even to understand why the great German would exile himself to such a despondent place, find themselves standing at the edge of a metaphysical abyss. What lies below? Other voices will be needed to carry us forward. We meet, in part two, Amalfitano, another European wrecked on the shoals of the Mexican border city, an emigrant college professor raising a beautiful daughter whose mother has abandoned them, and who is beginning, seemingly, to lose his mind. Bolaño’s genius is for weaving a blunt recitation of life’s facts—his novels at times evoke biographies, case studies, police or government files—with digressive outbursts of lyricism as piercing as the disjunctions of writers like Denis Johnson, David Goodis, or, yes, Philip K. Dick, as well as the filmmaker David Lynch. Here, Amalfitano considers a letter from his absconded wife:

  In it Lola told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a night job that started at ten and ended at four or five or six in the morning … For a second he thought it was all a lie, that Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some big company. Then he saw it clearly. He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of Paris blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning company’s smock, a worn blue smock, sitting writing the letter and maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw Lola’s fingers, Lola’s wrists, Lola’s blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a trick photograph that isn’t a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion.

  Bolaño has been compared to Borges for his bookishness, but from the evidence of a prose always immediate, spare, rapturous, and drifting, always cosmopolitan and enchanted, the Bolaño boom should be taken as immediate cause for a revival of the neglected master Julio Cortázar. (Cortázar’s name appears in 2666, but then it may seem that every human name appears there, and that Bolaño’s book is reading your mind as you read it.)

  By the end of Amalfitano’s section a reader remains, like the earlier critics, in possession of a paucity of real clues as to 2666’s underlying “story,” but suffused with dreadful implication. Amalfitano’s daughter seems to be drifting into danger, and if we’ve been paying attention we’ll have become concerned about intimations of a series of rape-murders in the Santa Teresa slums and foothills. What’s more (if we’ve been reading flap copy or reviews), we’ll have noted that “Santa Teresa” is a thin disguise over the real town of Cuidad Juárez, the site of a dismayingly underreported sequence of unsolved crimes against women, with a death toll that crept into the hundreds through the decade of the ’90s. In the manner of James Ellroy, but with a greater check on both prurience and bathos, Bolaño has sunk the capital of his great book into a bottomless chasm of verifiable tragedy and injustice.

  In the third section—“The Part About Fate”—this real-world material dawns into view in the course of a marvelously spare and pensive portrait of a black North American journalist, diverted to Santa Teresa to cover what turns out to be a pathetically lopsided boxing match between a black American boxer and a Mexican opponent. Before arriving in Mexico, though, the journalist visits Detroit to interview an ex–Black Panther turned motivational speaker named Barry Seaman, who delivers, for twelve pages, the greatest ranting monologue this side of Don DeLillo’s Lenny Bruce routines in Underworld:

  He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last fifteen years at best whereas a movie star could go on for forty or fifty years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80 … might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of seeming. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances …

  At last, and with the blunt power of a documentary compilation, comes part four, “The Part About the Crimes.” Bolaño’s massive structure may now be understood as a form of mercy: 2666 has been conceived as a resounding chamber, a receptacle adequate to the gravity—the weight and the force—of the human grief it will attempt to commemorate. (Perhaps 2666 is the year human memory will need to attain in order to bear 2666’s knowledge.) If the word “unflinching” didn’t exist I’d invent it to describe these nearly two hundred pages, yet Bolaño never completely abandons those reserves of lyricism and irony that make the sequence as transporting as it is grueling. The nearest comparison may be Haruki Murakami’s shattering fugue on Chinese military atrocities in Mongolia, which sounds the moral depths in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Like Murakami, Bolaño’s method encapsulates and disgorges dream and fantasy, at no cost to the penetration of his realism.

  By the time we return to matters of literature, and meet Archimboldi, a German World War II veteran and a characteristically culpable twentieth-century witness whose ambivalent watchfulness shades the Sonoran crimes, we’ve been shifted into a world so far beyond the imagining of the first section’s “critics” that we’re unsure whether to pity or envy them. Though Archimboldi’s literary career is conjured with Bolaño’s customary gestural fulsomeness, 2666 never presents so much as a scrap of the fictional master’s fiction. Instead the titles of Archimboldi’s books recur as a kind of pulse of implication, until the conjectured power of an unknown literature has insisted itself upon us like a disease, one that might just draw us down with the savagery
of a murderer operating in a moonless desert.

  A novel like 2666 is its own preserving machine, delivering itself into our hearts, sentence by questing, unassuming sentence; it also becomes a preserving machine for the lives its words fall upon like a forgiving rain, fictional characters and the secret selves hidden behind and enshrined within them: hapless academic critics and hapless Mexican boxer, the unavenged bodies deposited in shallow graves. By writing across the grain of his doubts as to what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world’s disasters, Bolaño has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable.

  Now throw your hats in the air.

  —The New York Times Book Review, 2008

  Homely Doom Vibe

  Who listens?

  An irresistibly compact and annoying question, posed by George, the title character of the book in your hands. That question is like a pinprick of light in a dark surface: the only entrance you’ll be offered. Better crawl through and see what’s there.

  How good does an author or a book have to be to be reintroduced? To be pulled back into print by the devotional efforts of editors and writers (all of us only readers, really, when it comes down to it), pulled back against the unceasing tide of new titles, how good? I’m here to tell you how very good Paula Fox is. It’s hard to do more, though, than be a gnat buzzing at the outer surface of a lozenge, writing critically about an artifact as dense, distinctive, and self-contained as Poor George. If, however, the lozenge is somehow swallowed and absorbed, an essence seeps through the body, then lives on the surface like a new set of nerves. What I mean to say, as I try to decide what to tell you about Poor George, is that I’m lately wearing the book as a skin, one particularly tender to social loathing and self-loathing, to morbid confession disguised as chitchat, and, above all, to postures of self-willed innocence in human relations. Paula Fox writes with a crushing accuracy about these things, here and elsewhere. And if this isn’t always a skin I’m completely eager to wear, perhaps I’m closer to understanding how a writer as great as Fox can linger for so long at a proximity from the acclaim and readership she deserves. There’s no justice but maybe a certain inevitability, that a master of elucidating what’s denied everywhere under the surface of human moments—and of measuring the texture of that insistent, howling denial—should find her own work denied, kept at bay at the edge of vision.

  So who’s this George who wants to know who listens? He’s a schoolteacher, a husband, a Samaritan—a nobody. George might be trying and failing to father a child, and he might also have an Achilles’ heel in the area of unexamined bisexual longing—likely there’s a few longings, his own and those of his loved ones, which he’d be well advised to take a closer look at. But really, here’s the key thing about poor George: Don’t tell the guy, but he’s made of gorgeous sentences. Sentences which are gorgeous because of how closely they listen. A vibrant writerly intelligence shines everywhere through the bars of George’s prison—in fact the bars of his prison themselves might be said to be made up of the compressed and blinding sunlight of literary sensibility. Try, for instance:

  “He had to convince Ernest of—of what? Convince him that much had gone before, that he had not sprung from sticks and stones to find himself on a dead planet thinly covered with sidewalks leading nowhere.”

  Or:

  “When she is silent she is very silent, George thought, and found himself interested in her. She vomits speech, then retreats, like some mud dweller.”

  Or:

  “In that empty landscape where only the two trees and the toppling uprights of the shed gave shelter, they had stumbled towards each other, falling into the prickly dust in a thick, graceless embrace, their faces straining against each other’s shoulders like two swimmers racing desperately for opposite shores.”

  The question is, who listens to sentences like these? Not George. George only teeters at knowingness, then retreats. Not only is he not as smart as the sentences which form the bars of his prison but, disconcertingly, crucially, he’s not as smart as the sentences he’s given to speak. Fox grants him the acid wit accorded the rest of her characters, but his tongue knows more than he does, as he completes his numbed and persevering daily route through himself and his life. George watches his wife cry: “One large, luminous tear was on her cheek; dazzled by its brilliance, he watched it run under her chin and disappear. Perhaps, he thought, he was crazy. The weight … the weight of everything was stupefying.” I’d venture that the weight George staggers under is the weight of how much everything is forced to mean when you’ve tried to deny the meaning of what actually is.

  Now the buzzing gnat reminds me to inform you that Poor George is funny. Not “also funny” but essentially, vitally funny, in the perverse vein of Kafka and Flannery O’Connor. There are Diane Arbus photographs in prose here, as Fox offers her vision of bodies as poorly operated puppets:

  “Four young men walked by. They were disparate in physical type but each face bore the same sullen inward look. They were thin, shaggy, book-carrying, slovenly, and their arms and legs appeared to have been glued on with little consideration for symmetry. ‘I have seen the future and it walks,’ George said. At that moment one of them turned and stared at Lila, at her prominent breasts. There was no expression on his face at all.”

  Here’s another:

  “The woman, red-haired and massive, was shaking a small boy whose head was encased in a transparent bubblelike helmet. On it was printed ‘space Scout.’ From inside, the boy gazed out coolly like a fish. A blind Negro, his white cane poking out in front of him, hesitated and stopped. The woman shot a furious glance in his direction, then banged on the helmet with her knuckles.”

  Poor George was Fox’s first published novel; Desperate Characters, now part of the pantheon, her second. I heard echoes: Ernest, the kid in Poor George, is a conflation of Desperate Characters’ stray cat and the vandals who savage the country house, while Poor George’s Walling mimics Charlie Russel in Characters, each a hipster-irritant contrast to the uptight male lead. What Poor George does that Desperate Characters resists doing is explode. It feels like Fox tried it once each way, in her first two: tightening the screws in Characters and letting the wheels fall off in Poor George. The result is both more disorienting and more relieving, in the strict sense of tension released.

  To my eye, the funny nightmare of its last sixty pages aligns Poor George with novels by Thomas Berger, Charles Webb, L. J. Davis, and Bruce Jay Friedman, all pretty much contemporary. Reminding me of all of them at once, it helped me get how ’60’s literary critics might try to label a certain vein of American fiction of the time—though the label they found, “black humor,” was as inadequate as any a writer was ever compelled to reject. I’m not even sure why I bring it up, except that Poor George is of its time, richly so. And, that I miss a certain homely doom vibe which seemingly used to be more casually deployable, as in those novelists I’ve listed, and in films like Robert Altman’s Three Women and Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name, and in Randy Newman’s songs from the same period. Yet if it’s amazing what can be recognized and forgotten (or denied), it’s also amazing what can be restored, and Paula Fox has, I think, become the most encouraging revival from completely-out-of-print status since Dawn Powell. What I mean to say is, for yourself, not for me or Paula or George, read the book. Listen to it.

  —Introduction for Poor George, 2001

  Ambivalent Usurpations

  Is there any stronger evidence of the anhedonia of our reading culture than that Thomas Berger’s novels don’t flood airport bookstalls? There is simply no better way to destroy an hour or three. I envy you your first encounter, if that is what it is, with Meeting Evil, or with Berger (and, yes, this is a fine place to start). This is one of Berger’s most relentless and ingenious fictional “contraptions,” as a praiseful reviewer once dubbed them, and now that it is in your hands—turn to chapter one and be shanghaied—
it needs, as they say, no further introduction.

  I’ll give it one anyway, just for the chance to shout that Thomas Berger is one of America’s three or four greatest living novelists. I emphasize novelist, for Berger’s greatness resides in the depth and extensiveness of his commitment to and exploration of his chosen form. There’s no writer more invested in and trusting of the means and materials of fiction qua fiction: scenes and sentences, chapters and paragraphs, and, above all, characters—their voices and introspections, their predicaments in fictional worlds. He’s cultivated this investment to the exclusion of all forms of topicality or sociology, autobiographical appeals to readerly interest, superficial “innovations,” or controversialism. Berger’s too interested in the mysteries of narrative to bother with metafiction, yet his world does possess a certain rubbery pleasure in its own artifice. He doesn’t bother to disguise fiction’s proscenium arch—his “realism,” such as it is, resides in his assiduous scrutiny of daily existence, at levels both psychological and ontological. Berger adores novels too much to play at their destruction, or to be embarrassed at his participation in a tradition.

  Berger’s commitment has another aspect: Apart from a scattering of short plays and stories, he’s devoted himself entirely to the novel and eschewed side work like journalism, screenwriting, or teaching. Nor has he spent his capital pontificating, issuing manifestos, attending conferences, or granting more than a small handful of interviews. What this may have cost him in terms of journalistic ink, who knows? A few years ago I made the mistake, in writing an entry on Berger for a literary encyclopedia, of claiming that he’d fallen from a “critical and popular heyday” in the ’60s. Berger wrote me to gently correct my error, explaining he’d never had a “heyday,” dragging out the sales figures to prove it. No, Berger’s hovered for fifty years in a middle distance, proof neither of the proposition that genius is always rewarded nor that it is universally overlooked. The paradoxical fate of a writer impossible to revive because he’s never been sufficiently neglected is somehow quite suitably Bergerian.