More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  Barthelme’s had many imitators, and not only in his own medium. His work connects literature to performance art, and to comic routines, and Saturday Night Live skits. What makes it literature, however, and irreplaceable no matter how complete its subsequent assimilation into the culture, is the immaculate and luminous quality of his sentences, of his paragraphs. His attention drifts beautifully. Donald Barthelme may seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and from a very high window. But when you rush downstairs to look, both baby and bathwater have come to a gentle and happy landing in the garden.

  —Introduction to “Donald Barthelme” in 3 x 33: Short Fiction by 33 Writers, edited by Mark Winegardner

  Rock of Ages

  In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s hero was born at the inception of India’s modern history. Ormus Cama, the expatriate protagonist of Rushdie’s sprawling, omnivorous and millennial The Ground Beneath Her Feet, is exactly the same age as another great and indefinable bastard nation: rock and roll. Like some overwhelming Rhino Records box set, the novel tries to encompass four decades of pop culture as well as the clash of East and West through Ormus Cama’s imagined life and career. But this overloaded ark of a novel does more than span goat-herders in Bombay and the New York of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol: Rushdie bumps his ship into the realm of alternate history—usually the province of genre experts like Philip K. Dick and Robert Harris—and in one big, sloppy leap, colonizes it.

  Cama, born to a convoluted and fabulous Bombay family, is, like Elvis Presley (and Philip K. Dick), the surviving sibling of a dead baby twin. He’s also a paradigmatic child of rock and roll, born fingering an air guitar and mouthing nonsense lyrics that foretell the hit songs about to transform the culture of the far-off United States. Ormus is a godlike amalgam of Gatsby and Dylan and Orpheus, and by the end of the book he’s a little bit of David Bowie’s character in The Man Who Fell to Earth as well. His significant other is Vina Apsara, an orphan emigrant-in-reverse who ascends to Madonna-esque stardom singing lead vocals in Cama’s music and dies in an earthquake, then becomes the center of a Princess Diana-sized posthumous cult.

  They’re larger than life. The third leg of the triangle at the book’s center is the narrator, another Bombayan, and a Weegee-like photographer who conquers the worlds of front-line wartime photojournalism, fashion, and high art in turn. He serves as footman, documentarian, and confessor for the rockstar couple, all while carrying a torch for—and carrying on an affair with—Apsara. He’s also Rushdie’s mouthpiece for a series of ruminative discourses on exile and loss, pages in which humble reality threaten to inadvertently expose the relative hot air of the rock star genius-is-pain, fame-is-hell stuff.

  Because he’s part Pynchon, Rushdie’s language cascades and spirals, a cornucopia of referents, puns, and rhymes; because he’s part John Irving, his narratives are clotted with backstory, genealogy and momentum-slaughtering foreshadowing. Because he’s both Pynchon and Irving at once he’s never met a coincidence or doubling he didn’t like. The notion of laying his royal flushes on the table one tantalizing card at a time never seems to cross his mind.

  Rushdie cues his alternate history by trotting out a war-horse: in his reality, Kennedy survives the assassination attempt (Oswald’s rifle jams, while Zapruder conks the grassy-knoll gunman on the head with his movie camera). But Rushdie’s concerns are less political than cultural, and subsequent embellishments are less JFK than The Doors or Natural Born Killers: Dionysian rituals of communion and hallucinatory ruptures in the fabric of reality. Ormus Cama is the reluctant witness to this gap between the worlds, and though his music is inspired by these visionary glimpses he—in one of the nicer touches—takes to wearing an eyepatch to cut down on the double vision.

  The novel’s sense of which histories are worth tweaking, and which rock and roll matters, reveals Rushdie as a real ’60s guy. Punk (renamed “Runt”) is dismissed in a brazenly silly one-page aside, and though Ormus’s band has some glam overtones, Rushdie’s notion of the ’70s centers on ’60s lions in maturity or decline: Andy Warhol, the Rolling Stones, and Lennon. The 1980s and ’90s are a summary blur. Rushdie only pauses to extol U2 (flimsily disguised as “Vox Pop”)—who are, in the bizarre alternate reality we all inhabit, reportedly about to record one of Rushdie’s fictional smash hit lyrics.

  Ah, the lyrics. Rushdie can’t avoid the trap that snared Don DeLillo, Scott Spencer, Norman Spinrad and others: his genius’s song lyrics die on the page. He shouldn’t feel bad—so do many of Dylan’s. The music’s inaudible, for nearly 600 pages. This leaves Rushdie stranded in a protests-too-much valley of hyperbole:

  …it was the voice that did it, it’s always the voice; the beat catches your attention and the melody makes you remember but it’s the voice against which you’re defenceless…Never mind what kind of voice. When you hear it, the real thing, you’re done for, trust me on this.

  Ground resumes Rushdie’s interrupted fall towards the culture of the West, after the retreat into allegory and the East of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and The Moor’s Last Sigh. The notorious earthward tumble that opens The Satanic Verses is recapitulated here, not once but many times: between earthquakes (which plague Rushdie’s alternate present), helicopters, jets, and the upsweep of global fame, Rushdie’s characters have ground beneath their feet less often than not. It’s probably telling that several of the most closely observed and finely written passages take place on airplanes. Plenty of recent writers have turned out novels that show evidence of being written during grueling book tours; Rushdie has, by direst necessity, gone them all one better. If he now identifies with martyrs and exiles, who can blame him?

  Yet. Martyrs and exiles are one thing, but these characters are practically pantheistic deities. Again and again Rushdie makes it clear that for Cama and Apsara the only real obstacles lie within; for these titans mortal dilemmas are shrugged off as easily as their thousands of discarded lovers. Maybe the photographer-narrator was meant as tonic, a paparazzo to play off against Princess Di. If so, Rushdie blew it by making him nearly as famous and as much a genius as his subjects.

  The novel form, baggy and panoramic as it may be, also thrives on privacies, on moments of humble particularity that play against the banners of history and legend. In Rushdie’s breathless vision of worlds in collision his players touch gritty earth too infrequently, and his wide-screen spectacular finally has not quite enough in focus in the foreground. Earthquakes and the history of rock and roll: their scale ultimately defies fiction, unless tempered by the worm’s eye view—or the ignominious fan’s. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, as in the real world, the hits (of various kinds) just keep on coming, but we’re left yearning for the story behind the top 40.

  —The Village Voice, 1999

  My Hero: Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Though it was not long ago, I can’t remember when I first heard the whisper in the literary sounding-room: that a Norwegian writer, more or less my age, had belched out a brooding six-volume autobiographical sequence of novels under the provocative title My Struggle; that it had taken his national literature by storm and that in his homeland he was being read and gossiped about as avidly as J. K. Rowling at Pottermania’s apex. I must have read two or three reviews or mentions by other writers before I happened across the first volume, A Death in the Family, in a bookshop. Of course it seemed preposterous: the vast claims, comparisons to Proust, the peculiar specificity of Norway—when had I last read a living Norwegian? Had I ever? First rumors of a previously unknown great writer invariably feel like a hoax—I remember when word of Roberto Bolaño slipped out, fifteen years earlier. I remember when, at eighteen, someone revealed to me the existence of Gaddis’s The Recognitions, a book, I was told, to rival Moby-Dick. Resistance is aroused, for a writer, in the form of rivalrous skepticism. As a reader, one suffers the dread of disappointment, the reluctance to glimpse a naked emperor. Yet for me, from the very first page, all rumors, doubts, or preemptive weariness evaporated, repla
ced by the oxygen-blast of this vast novel’s utterly absorbing tone of remorseless, questing curiosity toward the problem of existence. The book investigates the bottomless accumulation of mysteries everyday life imposes, from the vantage of a helplessly undisguised narrator: a stroller-dad, navigating a mundane world of diapers and tantrums on train platforms, who suspects he is the possessor of literary genius, and finds these selves bitterly incommensurate. He’s also enmeshed in the earlier selves that delivered him to this present one: a pensive son of a depressed drunkard, a friend, a citizen, a subject of global modernity. Knausgaard’s approach is plain and scrupulous, sometimes casual, yet he never writes down. His subject is nothing less than the beauty and terror of the fact that all of life coexists with itself. Knausgaard’s a hero, who landed on greatness, seemingly in a flash, by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery. I can’t wait for the translator to finish the last three volumes.

  —The Guardian, 2014

  A New Life (Malamud)

  In conversation with a friend, I once tried to account for my particular fascination with Philip Roth’s early novel Letting Go. In attempting to characterize the book and how it stood apart from Roth’s oeuvre, I blurted out: “Letting Go is Roth’s Richard Yates book.” What I meant, I guess, was that for one book Roth had tried to write a normatively autobiographical novel of postwar American life, outside any conjuration of the mythic or absurd. Tried to paint within the lines. In order to confront the suffocating fullness of American life in the fifties, Roth had run his character up against the possibilities of marriage and children and a conventional career, and by doing so tried to isolate the theme of freedom-versus-responsibility that was so deeply implicit in the life of those times. Richard Yates wrote that book over and over again, Roth and Bernard Malamud only once.

  I don’t mean to suggest any possibility of direct influence. In fact, Letting Go, Revolutionary Road, and Malamud’s A New Life were all published within a year of one another. Rather, I wonder if it might be some kind of principle—that many writers had felt they had to try writing such a novel, that the moment determined the necessity of such books. So, call A New Life Malamud’s Yates novel.

  Certainly it is his most traditional, and least mythic. Though I don’t mean to point to biography (I honestly don’t know the facts of a life story about which Malamud was famously reticent, and don’t think it important to know them), the book is tonally autobiographical. The story is archetypal, but for a change Malamud doesn’t emphasize archetype. Samuel Levin, formerly a drunkard, as the first sentence beautifully informs us, takes a teaching job in a rainy Western state, not understanding why he’s been chosen from among hundreds of candidates, too grateful to care or look closely enough to discern he’s coming to teach at an agricultural college, not a liberal arts school. Levin’s a definitive Eastern outsider, flinching from past failure and eager to make the new life that migration Westward has always promised.

  The genre is the Western, but the nearest Malamud can bring himself to the genre is in its refusal. For Levin, tenderfoot with a tender heart, is also a schlemiel, prone to absurd crises, so ill-suited to his adopted landscape that he’s not yet a driver of cars. Decorous in his own mind, in outward behavior he nearly always commits too much, blurts his thoughts, stays too long, makes Hail Mary passes into an end-zone full of players from the opposing team. This pattern proliferates in comic miniatures in the picaresque first half of the book. Then farce mires, and Levin lurches into tragic inextricability in his affair with an English Department colleague’s wife. Tragic or comic, Levin’s a reverse Zeno. While he pictures himself a slow beginner advancing on his future by half steps, in truth each time he lifts his foot he takes a step and a half, at least.

  A New Life, seemingly the least Jewish of Malamud’s books, plays at being secular. The word Jew is only mentioned once, practically on the last page. When it comes it’s nearly as a sigh of acceptance: yes, of course there’s also this, I am one of the Chosen People, if things weren’t already bad enough. There’s an Irish red-herring, too: Joyce is quoted in an epigraph, and the book fools with Joycean streams and puns (Life, Lev, Love) a few times. The elderly grammarian who dies in Levin’s arms mumbling about the mysteries not of the infinite but of the infinitive is a jape worthy of Flann O’Brien.

  More intimately, Levin is haunted throughout his year of teaching by a precursor-ghost at the college, the dissident Irishman Leo Duffy. Inheriting Duffy’s office, and his role as faculty agitator, Levin becomes fascinated and intimidated by the strong impression left by Duffy’s flameout (though he’ll far outdo Duffy by the end). And Duffy’s suicide note, with its own abrupt, Beckettian pun, seems to move Levin to an ultimate commitment to his fate. How many characters who fail to appear in the novel in which they are named have such vivid life?

  Then there’s Gilley, Levin’s grating, grinding pedant of a rival, with his pathetic compulsion to photograph what he doesn’t understand. And Fabrikant, the dour mysterious scholar on horseback, who with his odd Germanic name may perhaps be another image of the Jew, one assimilated to the dark side of the moon. But Levin refuses all these images of a possible alternate self, or of a defining antagonist, in favor of the affections of his Olive-Oylish girlfriend.

  Here is finally why the book refuses to be any kind of Western: because unlike a Western hero, whose primary engagement is with other men, Levin is in his lonely heart a lover of women. Not an incompetent one, either. In the end, A New Life commits itself, with beautiful discomfort, to being a love story, full of private feeling made into the most passionate sort of art. When the schlemiel drives his family out of the frame of Gilley’s camera, and into the future, the book’s title is revealed as absolutely sincere. Malamud’s Yates novel is also his funniest and most embracing, an underrated masterpiece.

  —Introduction to A New Life, 2004

  A Mug’s Game

  I recently eavesdropped—literally, lurking behind a half-open NYU conference-room door—as John Ashbery gave a “craft talk” to a packed-to-the-rafters room full of aspirants to the condition of poetry. Ashbery, in the form of a patient, barely-ever-annoyed question-and-answer session, quite diligently composed a long first draft of a John Ashbery poem in front of the students, though I’m not certain any of them, Ashbery included, knew that that was what he was doing. Each time a questioner attempted to grab up a little bit of the Ashbery essence with the eyedropper of his or her inquiry to him, that same essence spilled and slithered away, like a blob of mercury, to immerse itself deeper and deeper through a three-dimensional maze of Ashbery’s own sensibility. Several students asked him in sequence to weigh in on the difficulty of “content” in poetry such as his. After ignoring the word the first instance or two, Ashbery suddenly wheeled on it, and delivered this apparent certainty: “Content is only the sides and bottom of a box.” He drew a box in the air with his hands. “Nothing more.” The students contented themselves with this, or discontented themselves, and Ashbery went on with his solemnly merry improvisations on the subject of a writing life, more or less reminiscing in interior monologue, leaving out only names, dates, and other identifying furniture of his life. Half an hour passed before another courageous student pressed at this lingering image, the “box” Ashbery had helpfully sketched. “Sir, if content is a box, may I ask what is inside?”

  “I’m sorry?” said the disconcerted poet.

  “What does the box hold?”

  “Oh! Nothing at all,” Ashbery said. “It’s entirely empty.”

  We’re all, no matter how lucid, stuck within the unworkable conundrum of our selves, and frequently most confounding precisely when we feel we’re speaking most plainly. Gilbert Sorrentino spent fifty years telling us directly who he suspected he was and what he suspected he knew, about Brooklyn, poetry, social class, ambition, jazz, influence, form-versus-content, capitalism, and “realism,” a word I’d need to place in scare quotes as a testament to Sorrentin
o’s long passionate skepticism as to its value if I didn’t suspect it myself. In Sorrentino’s writing, we again and again encounter a mind whose only way of handling a first introduction is to blurt out “Don’t we know one another already?” and this sensation utterly permeates Something Said, a 1984 collection of Sorrentino’s essays (a book I possess in its luscious North Point Press edition, a tall, jacketed, mint-green-now-fading-to-dun paperback, which still bears the pencil price of “7.75”—half-off the publisher’s list of 15.50!—scrawled in it by one of my colleagues at Pegasus Books, in Berkeley, where I took it home from the literature section two or three years after it was published). Something Said would certainly seem to be a Jupiter’s-moon in the great solar system of the poet-novelist’s works, and there’s little about the book (or its non-history of reception) to evidence any vast claims for Sorrentino’s significance as a critical voice. The pieces themselves, bearing dates and watermarks as various and sporadic as “New York Times Book Review, 1977”; “Kulchur, 1963”; “The Nation, 1962”; “Sixpack, 1974”; and “Unpublished, 1959” are mostly short. Not “brief” though. These little two- and three-pagers are compressed, barked-out like James Cagney monologues, by a writer evidently only quitting work on the present poem or chapter long enough to get it exactly right, and then forget he had to do it at all. Sorrentino, as a critic, is superbly impatient. Often he couldn’t be bothered even to paragraph.