More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  That leaves “Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo” and the title tale: linked stories concerning driving, sex, drugs, and self-hatred. “Design Faults” has all the Ballardian flash but it’s this collection’s title story which toughens and, yes, even darkens Self’s previous vision. The least fantastical tale in the book, it is essentially the interior monologue of Bill Bywater, a drug-abusing psychoanalyst on an insomniacal drive across England. Bill’s ruminations are interspersed with his perfunctory inquisition of Mark, a hapless hitchhiker Bill has picked up and whom he is predisposed to loathe. “Tough, Tough Toys” retrieves one of the themes of Great Apes and strips it of the camouflage of Swiftian goofing: namely, that misanthropy might just be in the eye of the beholder. This hint of auto-critique (Self would forgive the pun) should fool no one: Self is unrepentant in his own misanthropy, and Bywater is punished for displaying the heretical weakness of self-knowledge.

  So, Tough, Tough Toys offers the mixture as before. Self is still funny, brilliant, uneven; he still dares you to think him heartless. The only promises he makes have been delivered: fury, hilarity, and chaos. If you’re looking for rounded characters in a substantial moral framework Will Self is not your man. He remains, as the name suggests, his own.

  —The New York Times, 1999

  On Two Sentences from Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Screenwriter”

  With her malady, the ballerina wasn’t really into fooling around, but I hoped her new medication, Manerix, which was supposed to dampen some of her desire to burn herself, might also lead by inverse ratio to an upsurge in her passion for old-fashioned sex.

  The sentence itself starts out old-fashioned, “malady” confessing the narrator’s sentimentality and “lady” doing double-duty to echo “ballerina.” Then “into fooling around” turns both jocular and abject—into the story’s psych-ward milieu, it introduces a seedy frat boy. This story features cascades of pharmaceutical proper nouns; the one it picks to frame as central, “Manerix,” impeaches the narrator’s curliqued style of denial as mannerist while also saddling the ballerina-lady with a Man. The ebbing, faintly lush “supposed/dampen some/desire” runs poetical hopefulness up against the shock cut of “burn” but “herself” halfway restores the bogus lyricism, at least as far as the ear’s concerned. Then “inverse ration/upsurge” admits a scientific-cum-business-culture bottom line in the narrator’s calculations, incompletely repaired by “passion”—especially as “old-fashioned sex” turns smirkily to the language of a hotel room-service menu (old-fashioned double chocolate malted?). Everything in this sentence predicts the speaker’s grievous inadequacy to the challenge his cutter-ballerina will soon present: “I’m a screenwriter and my movies gross millions and when I write ‘THE CAR BLOWS UP’ there’s a pretty good chance a real car will indeed blow up, but I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of roasting this woman’s cunt over a hot coal.” The problem, though he doesn’t know it, isn’t whether he’s “keen” but whether he’d ever know the difference between a real car and the words “THE CAR”; nor would he distinguish a real cunt from “CUNT” (or coal from “COAL” for that matter). This second remarkable sentence implodes: The startling but fatuous comparison between movie violence and the ballerina’s mutilation fetish indicts only the speaker inserting it between himself and his anxieties—and he can’t keep from bragging about “millions” in the meanwhile.

  —The Stranger, 2006

  Remarks Perhaps of Some Assistance to the Reader of Joseph McElroy’s Ancient History: A Paraphase

  1. At the center of Henry James’s writings, forming a sort of hinge in James’s shelf, perhaps, stand a handful of tales in which someone contemplates and abides with the mysterious and supervalent absence of a dead or dying writer: “The Lesson of the Master,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” “The Middle Years.” Joseph McElroy’s shelf is double-hinged (at least), with two narratives that resonate with this archetypal plot, in The Letter Left to Me and Ancient History: A Paraphase. In Letter, as in the examples from James, the narrator/protagonist is a vulnerable recipient, a would-be interpreter or medium, left to contend with an opaque address from the dark side. Ancient History reverses these charges. It takes the form of an eloquent, garrulous, obsessionally digressive, tender and yet rebuking address to a dead genius.

  2. I’ve just heaved out my effort at categorical description—“a reverse-engineered Jamesian address to the dead”—at great cost. For, like most—all?—of McElroy’s fiction, Ancient History stymies the categorical impulse to an extreme degree. McElroy’s prose, coming on less like a street-gang than like a storm cloud of evocations, intimations, and signifiers, robs the reader of his guidebook and compass. McElroy doesn’t shirk clarity, or particularity; he’s a great bestower of intensely clear descriptive and conceptual moments. His writing consists of almost nothing else. But there are few writers less interested in standing to one side, in the role of ringmaster or stage manager, to interject with comparisons, framing remarks, or encompassing descriptions. For a reader hungry for announcements as to what he or she is experiencing, before, during or after the experience of it (and we are all this reader, sometimes, most especially at the fraught start of a new relationship to what fiction can do, the kind a first encounter with a master necessarily entails), a plunge into McElroy can be vertiginous.

  3. It is worth it.

  4. Another Advertisement for McElroy, while I’m risking those: like most writers who throw up such explosive challenges to ordinary narrative “sense,” McElroy’s at heart an adamant realist. A realist, that is, in the sense that his discontinuities generate, it seems to me, from a single pure impulse: to sort out what consciousness—our interval as minds trapped inside bodies on planet earth—really feels like, when pushed through the strange machine of language. Like this, damn it, not like you’ve been told before! It is with such self-appointments, rather than any desire to innovate in narrative or language per se, that a writer like McElroy sets out on a life’s work. And that, in turn, is what makes it (see #3, above) worth it: McElroy is demanding that his machine of language think, with each sentence it sets down, about what life on earth really consists of (hint: it can be vertiginous).

  5. Anyone seeking further such general encouragement ought to consult, as I have, Garth Risk Halberg’s eloquent “The Lost Postmodernist” (on Women and Men), and the invaluable McElroy festschrifts in both Electronic Literature and Golden Handcuffs Review—perhaps most especially Mike Heppner’s defiant envoi “The Courage of Joseph McElroy,” which itself gives a reader courage, too.

  6. Ancient History consists of an address, then—to whom? The famous dead writer, a suicide, bears a striking resemblance to Norman Mailer (in as much as he gives speeches in put-on accents, runs for office, writes about outer space, divorces spectacularly, punches and bleeds in public, etc.). The narrator, Cy, lives in the same New York apartment building as the Great Dean Man; he’s snuck into the famous writer’s rooms during the police investigation, there to deliver the text as a monologue both written and spoken, with a brief interruption during which he hides, like Hamlet, behind a curtain. Monologue consisting of what? Of centrifugal meditations on Cy’s coming of age in the company of two friends, one—like the narrator—a native of Brooklyn Heights, a city boy. The other, a friend from summers spent fleeing the city, a country boy. The two friends have never met, but may be on the verge of doing so; this possibility is for the narrator strangely destabilizing, and supercharged. So: two sets of men in erratic conjunction. Around them: women, children, careers, fame, public events, the world, outer space. McElroy is a specialist in matters of spatial relation: neighbors upstairs and down, passersby on the street, the eerie distances contained inside nuclear families—generally, he makes a subject of the power of adjacency and proximity in our intimate lives. Yet why should the Mailer-like writer be made to listen—if the dead can listen—to Cy’s stories of his two friends? The answer is that for all the intellectual and polit
ical force of the addressee’s public career—and these forces are respected by Cy as considerable in themselves—this monologuist may be seen to believe that the addressee has missed something. Missed something of life as it is actually lived, missed a thing as elusive as it is essential. It might even be supposed that it is this absence, this oversight, which has driven the addressee to his suicide.

  You thought only the thirsty media cared for you, Dom—to drink you down and piss you out: the meteoric you at San Gennaro taking a flap in the face from one of those flag-exposing twin guinea hens who run Empire Hardware while yours truly watched through the fence with Joseph and Mary and their boy behind me; or you not quite upstaging sweet Seeger on the Hudson babbling huskily over your bourbon to a black news-chick while the skipper and his banjo sang us down the stinking tide; you bleeding right onto a hand-mike a raincollared TV reporter darted to you like an electric prod, against a field of dark Barrio stone the edge of live gunshots one summer night when you were supposed to be not in Spanish Harlem but giving a big birthday party for Dot in Edinburgh; you getting mugged all alone on Brooklyn Bridge a month ago by three kids who it turned out didn’t know who you were then or even by name later in some station house; you vomiting on a TV talk show, pointing at the eggy pool and calling it “Magma,” and after mopping your mouth and tongue-tip, answering the host’s original question straight and mild.

  And those excuses posted in the kitchen for any and all callers? And what about “EARTH = SPACECRAFT”? That addendum hardly seems an excuse for anything. Would you use it to put off a media representative? Or is it a hot-line excuse for the President of the United States to whom if he phoned you to congratulate you on being you you could say, “Sorry, can’t talk now: the earth is a spacecraft.” I’m losing you, Dom…

  7. So, maybe Ancient History is a kind of secretly-not-too-late intervention: Mailer was, after all, still alive. McElroy’s argument with his titanic soulmate (for I believe McElroy may have felt Mailer to be his rare equal in curiosity about the existential implications of the new technology and media that had altered the scope of our planetary understanding, and, assuming I’m right, I believe he would have been right to feel this). One Brooklyn boy calling to another to reconsider his “Manichean” (the word is McElroy’s) exaggerations in favor of a view more grounded in awarenesses of bodies in time, bodies in their places, in rooms and in streets and in nature, and most of all as bodies in relation to others rather than existing in solipsistic outer-space vacuums of ego:

  As on the educational channel last week my small Emma was watching the thin man Mr. Rogers from his own private outer space end his kids’ show “You make each day such a special day. You know how. By just your being you,” the gossip column Eagle Eye said that your wife Dorothy had got her final decree but that you were sitting around these days enjoying life in your “vast elegant” living room running your slide collection round and round your Carousel projector—mostly “candid news shots involving himself.”

  McElroy’s narrator persistently feels the uncanny call of his life as both a child and a parent, as well as a resident of the specific and intimate cultural space of midcentury Brooklyn: “I take the measure of my Heights street’s space partly by my two-sewer line-drive which Hugh Blood backpedaled to catch without coming within thirty yards of the harbor-view dead-end whose lamp-post and black-iron fence were roughly in the same plane as the street window of my parents’ third-floor bedroom…”

  8. A speculation, doomed to be incomplete for many reasons, not least my insufficient grasp of literary theory: Joseph McElroy, with his ecstatic depiction of consciousness as a thing incarnated in the unstable but gorgeous relations between humans and their companions here on spaceship earth may be exactly the great writer who most needed—most needs—the terminology of what is currently called “Affect Theory” to come along and account for what he’s getting at.

  Ancient History, then, because of the clarifying urgency of its mode of address, is possibly McElroy’s manifesto, a master key, even—the hinge, I called it earlier, of his shelf. At the least, a precursor to his two most daunting (and divergent) masterworks: the densely economical Plus, that outer-space deconstruction of the absolutes of solipsistic estrangement, and Women and Men, McElroy’s symphonic and encompassing depiction of the vast field of human proximities. The way such proximities bind us to the permanent mystery of presence—in our bodies, and in time—despite how consciousness and recollection seem precisely designed to escape such limits, much as a space voyager escapes the field of earth. The way our thinking, no matter how abstract, takes place inside, not outside, our lives.

  —Introduction to Ancient History: A Paraphase, 2014

  VI

  Thomas Berger and I Have Never Met (Ishiguro, Berger and PKD)

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  The Remains of the Day, the story of an English butler in painstaking denial of both his employer’s Nazi collusion during World War Two and his own lost hopes for emotional fulfillment, is a stately and melancholic diagnosis of tragic reserve, and a book now taken for granted as a masterpiece by a writer still just in his mid-forties. The plot is negligible: The butler Stevens drives his master Lord Darlington’s car across England and ruminates on the past glories of Darlington Hall, on the death of his father, himself a great butler, and on Miss Kenton, the housekeeper whom he might have once dared to love. The voice of Ishiguro’s butler is arduously deferential—perhaps as a Japanese émigré raised in British schools, the author was uniquely placed to know how servility infiltrates self, culture, and history. Remains is an essay in the use of unreliable narration—not in this case to show a gross comic disparity between the narrator’s observations and the reader’s perceptions, but instead to detail the workings of self-abnegation.

  Few American readers knew how specifically Ishiguro’s first two novels, each depicting postwar Japan, were dry runs for The Remains of the Day. A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World are brief, elliptical, and precise. Pale View is told by a Japanese housewife now living in England, Artist by a retired painter and patriarch, but their voices, as they recount lives pierced by hesitation and regret, are similarly mournful, digressive, and finally, unreliable. Pale View is the more striking of the two for its barely glimpsed images of horror—but both books disappeared beneath the shadow of Ishiguro’s third.

  Perhaps, though, Remains was not only a consummation, but a dead end. Perhaps Ishiguro felt misunderstood as a historical realist, or was sick of awards—he’d won one for each of his first three books, climaxing in the Booker for Remains. Whatever the reason, he threw off the shackles of expectation and acclaim with the sprawling, brilliant, and exasperating fabulation The Unconsoled. The dreamlike epic of Ryder, a celebrated composer struggling to pull off a concert tour stop in a surreal European city, Unconsoled forcibly insists on comparison to Kafka. The amnesiac Ryder meets with every possible frustration as he attempts to check into his hotel and find a quiet moment to practice for his performance: accusatory relatives, manipulative journalists, and drunken rival musicians. Dozens of minor characters are given five- and ten-page speeches, in set pieces alternately hilarious, harrowing, and stultifying. The Unconsoled is at once a great psychological dystopia and the most hilariously distended entry yet in the “booktours-are-hell” genre. It’s also a riveting instance of a highly controlled writer challenging his own methods at every level of his narrative—though aligned with Ishiguro’s previous work as a study in regret and complicity. One is tempted, finally, to call The Unconsoled promising, for it shows its author pushing towards another, completely different kind of masterpiece.

  —The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, 2000

  The Butler Did It

  Kazuo Ishiguro is much weirder than I think you think he is, and I want to find a way to say how, since When We Were Orphans is his weirdest book yet. I’m not sure it’s as unified a conception as The Remains of the Day or The Unconsoled, but then
, when I had a chance to weigh in on The Unconsoled, I leaned back from that book’s brilliance a little—a year later I think it’s a masterpiece. The Unconsoled was infuriating in many ways—imagine Henry James and Franz Kafka collaborating on a seven-hundred page description of a painting by Giorgio Di Chirico—but it aches in memory like a ruined monument.

  But wait, you say: Wasn’t Ishiguro the Anthony Hopkins-stuffy-butler-Booker-Prize guy? That’s him. And didn’t everybody ignore the book that came after? Not exactly. The Unconsoled’s defiance of follow-up expectations—and its exhausting where-are-the-paragraph-breaks too-late modernism—earned some tepid reviews and (I’m guessing) disappointing sales, but I know a lot of patient readers who’ve taken to it. The book felt like a repudiation of The Remains of the Day’s popular reception—Ishiguro may have been irritated that he’d been taken for a realist, that the feebly tragic love story and historical particulars had gotten the attention instead of his meticulous use of unreliable narration to explore a relentlessly, if almost subliminally, fantasizing consciousness. Denial’s habit of decorating the world with splendid but pernicious nonsense—that’s his subject. I also think the butler’s problems with his dad were more important to Ishiguro than the thwarted romance the film adaptation underlined. In the two books that follow he’s exhibited a belief that romance and sex are tiny, helpless figures dancing on a precipice beside a sea of familial and parental craziness.