by Martin Amis
‘Gene, I hear something squawking over there. I’m going to try and shoot it.’
‘What is it?’
‘How should I know? It’s alive, isn’t it?’
Observer April 1986
Kurt’s Cosmos
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
This is far and away Kurt Vonnegut’s best novel since Slaughterhouse 5. However, that’s not saying very much, in itself – especially if you look at Kurt Vonnegut’s novels before Slaughterhouse 5. These include a beautifully intricate space-fantasy, The Sirens of Titan, a coruscating satire on human destructiveness, Cat’s Cradle (usually referred to by fans as ‘the ice-nine book’ or simply ‘Ice Nine’), and a work of moral and comic near-perfection, Mother Night. Mother Night remains to my knowledge the only funny book about the Third Reich ever written, or indeed ever attempted. It is perhaps appropriate that such a novel should have been produced, not by a Jew, but by a German, a German-American who fought the Nazis in World War II.
Galapagos begins brilliantly with a description of a Vonnegut villain. Nobody writes about villains the way Vonnegut writes about villains (as Mother Night proves): he makes them look like lab rats, stupidly pursuing their projects and programmes, quite deaf to the disgusted laughter up there in Rat Control. James Wait, for example, first seen at the bar of the Hotel El Dorado in Guayaquil, Ecuador, presents himself as entirely unexceptional, ‘drab and friendless’, tamed by deep sorrow. ‘He was pudgy, and his color was bad, like the crust of a pie in a cheap cafeteria.’ In fact, Wait is a one-time homosexual prostitute who has made a million in the ‘confidence’ business, marrying and ruining rich old widows. Vonnegut views human infamy as, in the end, a condition of chronic indifference:
It was … hotter than the hinges of hell outside. There was no breeze outside, but he did not care, since he was inside, and the hotel was air conditioned, and he would soon be away from there anyway.
James Wait is fresh off the plane from New York. ‘He had just pauperized and deserted his seventeenth wife.’
Wait has come to Ecuador to embark on ‘the Nature Cruise of the. Century’, a luxury excursion to the Galapagos Archipelago. Joining him on the trip are a familiar bunch of megalomaniacs and nobodies, each of them in thrall to laughable or mischievous non-value-systems: big business, blind scientific advance, the myth of American innocence (an offstage character, a sprightly wreck called Bobby King, memorably embodies the non-values of public relations). It will not alarm Vonnegut fans to learn that the narrator is a ghost, an immortal soul who tells his story from the viewpoint of a million years in the future. This is a necessary distance, if your subject is evolution.
Vonnegut is not embarrassed by the Darwinian perspective, since he has always gazed down on Earthling confusions as if from some cosmic vantage of space and time. A million years hence, according to Leon Trout (1946-1,001,986), human beings will be no more intelligent than the blue-footed booby. In evolutionary terms, man went wrong when his brain outgrew his soul. ‘In this era of big brains, anything which can be done will be done – so hunker down.’
The first half of the book teems with the kind of odd connections and telling metaphors that we reverently associate with early, pre-Slaughterhouse Vonnegut. The organized exposure of various animals to the effects of nuclear blasts was, in the disturbed mind of a Bikini veteran, ‘the exact reverse of Noah’s ark’. Killing people is here called ‘outsurviving’ them (an armed madman rampages, hoping ‘to find more enemies to outsurvive’). All evils, for the purposes of this satire, come from ideas, from big brains. The Galapagos Archipelago was insignificant until Darwin found it instructive: ‘Darwin did not change the islands, but only people’s opinion of them.’ Similarly:
From the violence people were doing to themselves and each other, and to all other living things … a visitor from another planet might have assumed that the environment had gone haywire, and that the people were in such a frenzy because Nature was about to kill them all.
But the planet a million years ago was as moist and nourishing as it is today … All that had changed was people’s opinion of the place.
The second half of Galapagos we reluctantly associate with late, post-Slaughterhouse Vonnegut: it tends towards the formless, the random, the diffuse, the anecdotal. Always tempted by the delights of playful inconsequentiality, Vonnegut grows too attached to his pet grotesques and loses sight of their structural function. Perhaps this is a vestige of another weakness of the late phase, namely sentimentality. But it is only a vestige, and Galapagos is his most tough-minded book since Mother Night.
One of the purest delights of early Vonnegut was the phrasing. As with Elmore Leonard (in this respect, at least, a comparable popular artist), you can read for hours without hearing a single false quantity. Galapagos kicks off with that relaxed musicality and swing. It makes the reader sweat with pleasure, but also with suspense. And if in the end the novel doesn’t quite come good, it makes some marvellous noises along the way.
Observer November 1985
Truman’s Remembrance
Answered Prayers by Truman Capote
A long novel ‘about the Very Rich’, this was to be Capote’s masterwork, or so Capote used to claim. Recycling the author’s baubled past, incorporating twenty years’ worth of terrifyingly intimate letters and diaries, trumpeting the sleepy confidences of maudlin hostesses and blabbing billionaires, it was going to be a tour de force of vicious scandal that would, withal, aspire to the architectonic superbity of Proust. Or so Capote used to claim.
The Very Rich thought that Capote was their mascot or lapdog. In fact he was their unblinking chronicler. The soft-voiced sweetie on the chaise-longue or at the end of the bed was really a pitiless satirist, biding his time. ‘What did they expect?’ said Capote. ‘I’m a writer.’
But what did Capote expect, exactly? When four sections of the novel appeared in Esquire in 1975 and 1976, the Very Rich dropped Capote. And, instead of not minding, instead of going on being a writer, Capote had a nervous breakdown, collapsing under a ton of drugs and drink. Later on he tended to downplay and reattribute his distress. He never liked the Very Rich anyway. Those published sections were no more than warning shots; the novel was burgeoning away in its hothouse. He wasn’t scared. ‘Just wait’, he said, ‘till they see the rest of it.’
Gore Vidal, for one, never believed that there was any ‘rest of it’. From an interview in 1979:
As this is America, if you publicise a nonexistent work enough, it becomes positively palpable. It would be nice if he were to get the Nobel on the strength of Answered Prayers, which he, indeed, never wrote. There were a few jagged pieces of what might have been a gossip-novel published in Esquire. The rest is silence; and litigation and … noise on TV.
And unfortunately Vidal was right. This posthumous novel consists of only three sections, ‘Unspoiled Monsters’, ‘Kate McCloud’ and ‘La Cote Basque’. The putative fourth, ‘Mojave’, was roped into the stopgap collection Music for Chameleons (1980), and left there. A fifth and sixth, ‘Yachts and Things’ and ‘A Severe Insult to the Brain’, though often and fondly discussed by Capote, have failed to surface. Even with running heads, broad margins and fancifully aerated line-spacing, Answered Prayers is nothing more than a frazzled novella. Far from nursing the book through the years to tender fruition, Capote, I suspect, barely looked at it. This seems clear from internal evidence alone, for in every sense Answered Prayers is quite without finish. In the preface to Music for Chameleons Capote noted with satisfaction how his prose was crystallizing into an untrammelled purity. ‘Most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.’ But Answered Prayers is slangy, coarse, unbuttoned – regressive. And while the scandalous snippets might have done for Esquire, it is hard to imagine a fully operative Capote passing them for hard covers. Capote was a craftsman, and Answered Prayers feels ragged.
‘A rollicking soldier-sailor-marine-marijuana-saturated Denny
-Jean cross-country high-jinks’, for instance, ‘or a pasta-bellied whale-whanged wop picked up in Palermo and hog-fucked a hot Sicilian infinity ago’. This is Venice: ‘Sea mist drifts through the piazzas and the silvery rustle of gondola bells shivers the veiled canals.’ This is rural Pennsylvania: ‘A rolling farm filled with fruit trees and roaming cows and narrow tumbling creeks.’ Rolling and roaming? The style is as promiscuous as the narrator. ‘Her pubic hair and her shoulder-length honey-red hair were an exact colour match; she was an authentic redhead, all right.’ (Who is this? Chandler? Spillane?) ‘I massaged the nape of her neck, rippled my fingers along her spine, and her torso vibrated, like a purring cat.’ And who is that? Velma? Zelda?
This is a novel about the Very Rich, so the imagery tends towards the exotic – or at any rate the expensive. Colette’s friend Miss Barney speaks ‘in tones chilled as Alpine slopes’. On the facing page, Colette herself has ‘slanted eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl’. Whatever that might look like. A corgi wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses would be equally evocative, though a lot less opulent. Similarly, an ordinary anecdote about drunken speechlessness is still an ordinary anecdote, even when the speechless drunk is Montgomery Clift.
It isn’t that the beau monde was too big for Capote’s talents. The beau monde was too small for Capote’s talents. Here, at least, in human terms the Very Rich are very poor. Interestingly, they are not interesting; incredibly, they are not even credible. They are certainly not the ‘unspoiled monsters’ of Capote’s chapter title: they are spoiled mediocrities, they are boring freaks. The backgammon bums, the sweating champagne buckets, ‘the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White’s’, ‘Lafayette, The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle’, ‘Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes’: how keen can a writer afford to be on all this?
Truman Capote spent the last ten years of his life pretending to write a book that was never there. Why? He was far too tough, I think, to fear further reprisals or ostracism from high society. He didn’t write the book because the book was never there – artistically. Capote must have been mortified by a sense of creeping fraudulence. And such feeling as survives in Answered Prayers has to do with anticipated rejection, with finding out that your friends are strangers, and always were. An assignation with a ruined playwright:
What I thought was: here’s a dumpy little guy with a dramatic mind who, like one of his own adrift heroines, seeks attention and sympathy by serving up half-believed lies to total strangers. Strangers because he has no friends, and he has no friends because the only people he pities are his own characters and himself – everyone else is an audience.
Observer November 1986
Don DeLillo’s Powers
Mao II by Don DeLillo
Post-modernism in fiction was never a school or a movement, like symbolism or surrealism, and had none of the revolutionary trappings – executive committees, special handshakes, manifestos cobbled together in cafés by ambitious young drunks. It was, instead, evolutionary: something that a lot of writers everywhere began finding themselves doing at roughly the same time. Even its exponents could see, in post-modernism, the potential for huge boredom. Why all the tricksiness and self-reflection? Why did writers stop telling stories and start going on about how they were telling them? Well, nowadays the world looks pretty post-modern in many of its aspects. It is equally fantastical and wised-up, and image-management vies for pride of place with an uninnocent reality. Post-modernism may not have led anywhere much; but it was no false trail. It had tremendous predictive power.
Don DeLillo is an exemplary post-modernist. And perhaps he is also pointing somewhere beyond. Whereas his contemporaries have been drawn to the internal, the ludic and the enclosed, DeLillo goes at things the other way. He writes about the new reality – realistically. His fiction is public. His dramatis personae are icons and headliners: politicians, assassins, conspirators, cultists. His society has two classes: those who shape the modern mind, and those whose minds are duly shaped. It is entirely fitting that the hero of DeLillo’s longest, best and most recent novel, Libra, should be Lee Harvey Oswald: a sleepwalking ideologue who, in a single act, achieved iconic immortality, becoming a kind of flux-tube of national paranoia.
As a package, Mao II could hardly look more sprucely post-modern and transmedial. The title, which sounds like its own sequel, refers not to the Mao silkscreen on the cover but to the 1973 line drawing – by Warhol, naturally, the great displacer or degrader of images and icons. Each section of the book is preceded by a beautifully hazed photograph: a rally in Peking, a mass Moonie wedding, the tortured crowd on the terraces at Hillsborough, Khomeini’s funeral, the cracked streets of Beirut. The documentary feel is appropriate. DeLillo is giving it to us straight: there’s never the slightest doubt about what’s going on. We move freely, in brightest light. It is the protagonists who grope and stumble. A blurbist might call the cast of characters ‘unlikely’, but they are more or less familiar players in the DeLillo game: a terrorist, a hostage, a terrorist broker or PR man, a reclusive (indeed wraithlike) American novelist, his obsessive fan and archivist, a monomaniac photographer, and an only partly deprogrammed disciple of Master Moon.
We are in an intensified millennial present, the Last Days – what the Moonies call ‘hurry-up time’. ‘When the Old God leaves the world,’ DeLillo writes, ‘what happens to all the unexpended faith?’ It’s not that people will start believing in anything: they will start believing in everything. ‘When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops.’ Karen, who first appears as one of the brides in the Mexican-wave, blind-date Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, is only the most extreme symptom of an (apparently) general condition. The post-modern world magnifies the self to the point of insupportability; those who can’t take it will need to surrender to an idea or – easier still – a personality. The icon of this overlordship is of course the inscrutable Chairman, who tried to replace the thoughts of a billion people with the thoughts of Mao. At the same time Mao heroized the masses, the dark crowds to whom, DeLillo hints, the future ‘belongs’.
Brita is the driven photographer. She used to photograph derelicts, but now she’s switched to writers (any writers, all writers). Her lifework is a kind of ‘species count’, a pictorial census of the breed. ‘I’m not interested in photography,’ she tells Karen: ‘I’m interested in writers.’ And Karen very sensibly asks: ‘Then why don’t you stay home and read?’ But we all know that second-hand isn’t close enough any more. Or better say third-hand. The event or the person is first-hand. TV is second-hand. Print is third-hand.
A break comes Brita’s way when she is asked to photograph the world-famously reclusive writer Bill Gray. Bill is also world-famously blocked, or burnt-out. His two ‘lean novels’ are agreed to be classics, but he has spent more than twenty years on number three – and it’s a dud. Bill lives in elaborate obscurity with the devoted Scott, a personable heterosexual ‘in his absurdly early thirties’, who is almost the kind of fan American celebrities need least: the kind that shows up with the gun and ‘the roguish smile he’s been preparing for weeks’.
Practically blindfolded, Brita is brought to Bill’s house. She takes her photographs, and talks and listens, and spends the night, as planned. And yet somehow her visit turns out to be pivotal, entraining Bill’s dramatic re-emergence, and his eventual death. It is, one gathers, the simple theft and dissemination of his likeness (‘the image world is corrupt’) that releases Bill from his mythic solitude. Release him, in fact, into the heart of the contemporary action, into the ‘event glamour’, to use Saul Bellow’s phrase, which leads Bill to New York, to London, to Athens, to Nicosia, to Beirut.
The main difficulty with Mao II is knowing how seriously, or respectfully, we are meant to take Bill and Bill’s ideas, many of which struck this reader as neither true nor interesting. DeLillo is wonderfully good with his ‘ordinary’ crackpots: Scott and Karen are done with unimprovable in
wardness; and the glazed pages about the Beirut hostage, although they at first seem dutifully virtuoso, are frequently exquisite. But Bill is lopsided. As a novelist inside a novel, he has an automatic post-modern authority, and he gradually becomes the book’s spokesman or compère. Soon, everyone starts talking like the hero (a common tendency in the novel of ideas). And everyone keeps agreeing with him: ‘I like your anger.’ ‘Interesting.’ ‘Very nice indeed.’ At one point Karen says, ‘I never think about the future.’ Then we get: ‘ “You come from the future,” Bill said quietly.’ When main characters say things ‘quietly’, you know it’s meant to be good stuff.
Bill thinks that there’s ‘a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists’ and that ‘terror is the only meaningful act’ and that ‘what terrorists gain, novelists lose … The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.’ Too often the novel seems to bear Bill out – to weave a circle round him thrice. Brita compares his study to ‘a bunker’; on her way to Bill’s place, she feels she is ‘being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat’. ‘Some’ terrorist chief? Which terrorist chief lives in Westchester or wherever it is, writing fiction and shunning publicity?
DeLillo does better – does wonderfully – when he interprets rather than propounds. His topography is unique: hard-edged, metallic, riveted into place, like Moonie Karen’s brainstorms, which come ‘with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain-made, the eerie gleam of who you are’. He writes about the city (‘the deep stream of reflections, heads floating in windows, towers liquefied on taxi doors, bodies shivery and elongate’), and then says: ‘Nothing tells you what you’re supposed to think of this.’ But DeLillo is telling you, all the time. This is Bill, talking to an answering machine:
