American novels

These were my reactions to four quite different American novels read as I travelled across the States in May of last year.

Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is a fine work of literature. I feel quite confident in this opinion, despite having come across many derogatory references to it or its author, and few that claim any serious classic status for it. Although the descriptions are journalistically detailed, and utterly specific to a certain (now historical) time and place - I'm glad at least to have made the acquaintance of New York before starting in on it - the satire is not dated at all. On the contrary, it is on a universal level, quite worthy of the Roman satirists or of Schiller's definitions of the genre. This is a function of the essential simplicity of the book's plot: for whatever subplots Wolfe is spinning through the sultry Manhattan streets, we remain planted in the expensive patent leather shoes of his anti-hero Sherman McCoy, facing his inexorable downfall. There are no twists and no buffoonery: we are made to share his perspective and his horrible, pit-of-the-stomach sensation (over hundreds of pages) - "no, no, this is all a terrible mistake". In this sense the novel possesses more of a kinship to tragedy than to to the crime thriller - we are not being thrilled, we are being sickened. And yet even while looking through Sherman's eyes and feeling his self-pity, we know that the situation is not tragic (it is simply not serious enough: Sherman is not going to lose his life, and by the end of the book he seems to have gained more of a genuine purpose in it than he had to begin with). It is blackly comic; and Sherman is a dupe and a self-deluding fool, by the time of his final abasement a figure of pure slapstick mockery. The chasm between these two perspectives is the true measure of the book's understanding of human nature.

To take only one of the subtler examples: Wolfe depicts his hero at two high-society cocktail parties hosted by friends of his wife. At the first he is virtually ignored, made to feel small and dull: he cannot understand the treatment he receives, and why the other guests do not recognise him as a man of power, a financial "Master of the Universe". At the second, however, which occurs after news of Sherman's involvement in a hit-and-run incident in the Bronx has hit the papers, he is feted, the hostess and assembled dignitaries hang on his lips, their eyes gleaming with wonder and curiosity. Sherman finds it even harder to figure out what is going on here than he did at the first party. In the taxi home his puzzlement spills over, he tries to get some kind of explanation out of his wife - and receives nothing but a pitying shake of the head in reply, with the answer "Sherman, you're too easily pleased". Pleased with what, then? With the attention he has been given, the apparent social "success". But he can only take pleasure in that because he is so blinded by vanity as to think that the other guests are actually responding to him as a person, an individual with his own profound worth - which they recognise. Doubt plagues him because he cannot understand why they should be according him this recognition now, with all the scandal surrounding his name, and not when his achievement was still untarnished. Yet this doubt does not disturb in the least the innocence of his vanity, his assumption that his self-worth is what is at stake in such a scenario. (That is the awful, snakelike truth of this scene, that vanity and innocence pair perfectly with one another, in adulthood just as once in early childhood.)

The natural corollary of his wife's rebuke - that he can be "easily pleased" because he is shallow - is thus in one important sense untrue. Sherman is far more concerned to understand and to be understood at a deep level than anyone else at the soiree: the problem is that the other guests are shallow. They don't see anything of Sherman's character at all, either as he wishfully imagines it or as it really is (a mass of petty vanities: Wolfe demonstrates with clinical precision, the scalpel of prose slitting and probing a repulsively decayed yet still familiar psychology, how a man's life can be spent in almost every minute worrying about his self-respect). All that attracts them to him is the wish to hear the latest gossip from the horse's mouth, and to indulge a little vicarious nostalgie de la boue. The sadness of his wife's shake of the head finally symbolises, for me, this truth: what good would it even do Sherman if he saw what was happening? Why renounce the comforting illusions of vanity, if it merely permits one to fraternize with superficial and cynical people in the full knowledge of how superficial and cynical they are? Would the shock of that knowledge not make Sherman himself so cynical that any chance of redeeming such a situation, such a life, would be lost?

While Wolfe shows how minute observation of the details of a particular time and place can enhance writing's universal import as well as its satiric punch, the beginning of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence made me wonder if Wharton was not too close to the society she describes. She lavishes impressive powers of recall some thirty years after the fact (one is reminded of Proust!) on the fashions, turns of phrase and social customs of people one cannot to begin with feel any sympathy towards, so taken up are they by the strangely dutiful (and titularly "innocent") vanities of late-nineteenth-century New York. Characters who say things like "Oh my dear, how can you possibly countenance someone who wore black at their coming-out?" make you roll your eyes in disbelief. Yet the overall tone is not satirical, or at least ceases to be after one of the most effective "flash-forwards" probably ever written in a novel. The hero Archer has married, decided to renounce his great love the Countess Olenska, and raised children happily with his dignified but blinkered wife. The age in which her views and values seemed so firm, so self-evident has slipped quietly into the past, even before she herself dies as one of its last representatives - and Archer, who never represented it, but who has nonetheless defined the course of his life by an act thoroughly typical of its buttoned-up moral code, is invited by his son to accompany him to Paris. There, of course, Ellen Olenska still lives, the Count now dead, nothing standing in the way of a meeting and re-awakening of their love - and how does Wharton end the book? With a masterstroke, one of the most shattering endings I can remember reading; one unexpected but at the same time (as soon as one reflects on it) inevitable. For after all how could the lovers' meeting be played in a fashion that would do justice to the expectations, longings and frustration of two lifetimes?

One solution would have been to cut the novel short with Archer waiting, poised on the threshold. This I am sure Wharton could have managed well and movingly, but there is still something dissatisfying about it, not only because it's a "trick" that's often been used, but because it would end on a note of prospection, when the mood of the final section and of the novel as a whole is one of retrospection. So instead Archer lets his son go in ahead to meet Ellen and the assembled party, promising he will follow - and he never does. Seated on a bench on the other side of the street, he looks up to the brightly-lit windows of Ellen's apartment in the deepening dusk, and when the shutters are finally drawn down by the servants he returns alone to his hotel. Wharton shares little or nothing of what is going through his head, but she does not need to: the poignancy and dignity of the act are enough. With such a final image one can easily forgive Wharton that her style is not as "refined" as Henry James', or that the earlier part of the book had its longueurs and lapses into romantic cliche.

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Don DeLillo's Underworld portrayed the same America, I concluded after finishing them; even if Underworld is seven times the length of the Pynchon and in quite a different style. Bigger doesn't mean better: Pynchon's novel is the more successful for me, and more convincing in its imaginative delineation of the modern American "frontier", California. I forget the book's date, but it startled me: I had expected it to be twenty years later. All the themes of the American collective unconscious are there: motels, TV, freeways, shrinks, shootings, garbage, kitsch, paranoid hermeneutics, underground networks of conspirators, and the sense that in a completely interconnected universe "every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important" (that's E. M. Forster, quoted by Zadie Smith in an epigraph to White Teeth, but it's a very American-flavoured idea). In this last symptom of modernity lies a particularly crucial difference from the bourgeois world of experience of nineteenth-century Europe, essentially not much changed in 50s America. If you read Balzac or Flaubert's minute descriptions of bourgeois interiors you couldn't exactly maintain they thought trifles unimportant; but those details contain no promise of redemption, they merely confirm the deadlocked pattern of a "respectable" existence which can only be broken by a major catastrophe or by crime (adultery, suicide). In the networked world, freed from respectable isolation by automobiles and the media, one can find genuine meaning in the smallest observed thing, such as the logo on a postage stamp, and experience epiphanies at the most unpromising of moments, such as driving down a freeway (both of these prompt illuminations for Pynchon's heroine Oedipa Maas).

The excellence of Pynchon's book lies in spotting this era-defining change in consciousness without overplaying it: The Crying of Lot 49 remains short, light, disorientingly inventive, and comic to the core. Underworld, however, falls into the trap inherent in any attempt to conjure with "epiphanies". DeLillo's style portentously expects an epiphany at every juncture, and given how many junctures (not to mention disjunctures) there are in the jigsaw-puzzle plot, this makes for a superfluity of irritatingly "significant" moments. Not only the disconnections in the narrative, jumping back and forth from coast to coast and decade to decade, but the disconnections of DeLillo's sentences seem to want to enforce a plenitude of sensation and significance at every point. He writes very beautifully, there's no doubt of that. Often the prose is as densely worked, the words as carefully chosen as poetry, and sustaining that level of attention to the world and words over 800 pages is pretty miraculous. But also close to monotonous - because the intensity never slips, even as the tone and syntax are subjected to constant variation.

DeLillo's ambition in terms of theme causes similar problems. His "Great Post-War American Novel" must include: baseball (check) - B52s (check) - the Cuban missile crisis (check) - immigrants (check) - AIDS (check) - civil rights marchers (check) - teenagers, graffiti, urban deprivation, casual sex, Frank Sinatra, Vietnam protests, housewives making Jell-O, Sputnik, serial killers, waste disposal, TV replays, condoms, heroin, Arizona deserts, Russian nuclear tests, road trips, conceptual art and the assassination of John F. Kennedy (check, check, check, check...!). This is not quite as indiscriminate a list as it sounds: there's a reason why Korea and Vietnam don't really feature, for instance, which is that DeLillo clearly wants to keep the Cold War cold, stressing the dark potential of the symbolic (Sputnik or the first Soviet bomb tests) rather than the messy, blazing, meaningless realities of actual combat or its traumatic aftermath. But despite some degree of selection the list of themes touched on sounds suspiciously like the contents page from a twentieth-century history textbook (Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, for example). In the weakest section of the novel, subtitled "Selected fragments public and private in the 1950s and 1960s", DeLillo abandons his plot(s) to fill in 150 pages with a kind of free empathetic chronicle of all the "big stories" he hasn't managed to cover so far. It's almost as if he has deliberately covered all the historical bases so as to give himself the best possible shot at the title "Best American Novel of the 20th Century" - which he only narrowly missed in a New York Times Book Review critics' poll a year ago (Underworld came second to Toni Morrison's Beloved). Martin Amis in fact took DeLillo to task for the novel's looseness and "disparate" quality; yet it could only sound like a weak caveat beside its manifest skill, ambition, and sheer size.

I feel odd making these criticisms, because (as will unavoidably emerge in any future postings to this blog on critical topics) I don't find unity, especially narrative unity, an important aesthetic criterion; I like fragmentary forms, and enjoy skilled poetic craftsmanship on a local level more than anything. Moreover, much of my experience has been guided by the search for epiphanies of one sort or another (not that there's anything special in that). In these respects, Underworld ought to be a favourite book of mine. But - dazzling, multi-layered work though it is - it doesn't have the sustaining warmth that I need from a writer of fiction, and remains in the end strangely loveless and lustless, as if the desire for vision, stretched taught over the frame of every line, had finally shrivelled and gone slack. The central character, Nick Shay, looks back from the mod-con, cleaned-up, west-coast lifestyle he now leads to his gritty, driven, improvised existence as a teenager on the streets of New York, and feels a kind of regret. So cool and unemotional has he been, though - less a character than a perceiving machine to drive the aesthetic energy of DeLillo's sentences - that by this stage we find it hard to sympathise with the feelings DeLillo wants to claim for him. For a real literary epiphany, one might conclude, insight alone is not enough: it must occur in a human context, one that is after all built largely by the conventional apparatus of character and dramatic movement that modernism wished to escape from.