See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  In “Cocky Olly,” the narrator’s thoughts journey irretrievably into her past, seemingly because she has refused—actually, bodily—to take the trip to the places of her childhood, places she passes on her way to and from London. “One of these days, when there is no one with me, I plan to go and look at these places, but I never do,” she says. And so the story becomes enmeshed in a long childhood memory, never to return to the present time. “Then it was Cocky Olly again,” she says, ending the story with a favorite childhood game, “and all of us racing around.”

  Situated—however sentimentally or awkwardly—in the rolling landscape of the past, a Pritchett character can turn a back to death. The author himself looks at death, if not squarely, at least wryly. It is his bleak jest that in the title story the local topography offers a place called “the Coffin” for ambitious climbers. In the bleakly comic “A Change of Policy,” love and death attempt to outwit each other in bizarre plot shifts: a printer—his wife, Ethel, a comatose stroke victim—falls in love with Paula, an editor for whom Ethel was once a secretary. “I’ve the feeling that I’ve been standing up all night for years,” he tells his new love. In her guilt, Paula pays the wife a visit in the hospital: “There was a sudden crash of oxygen cylinders that were being unloaded from a truck in the yard outside. The eyes did not move. Suddenly it occurred to Paula to speak in a peremptory office voice: ‘Ethel!’ she said….There was no movement in the eyes.” Just as the title suggests, circumstances change abruptly in this story, and nothing brings Ethel back from death’s jaws faster than her husband’s sudden death after a horseback riding accident. In yet another curious turn, the two women become close friends, taking a cottage together in another village. Death is turned a back on. The past, practically and resourcefully, is made usable in the present.

  In the final story, “The Image Trade,” Pearson—a famous older writer, perhaps not unlike Pritchett—must contend with a photographer intent on capturing his image for posterity: a kind of death mask. “You will miss all the et cetera of my life,” the writer says. “I am all et cetera….My face is nothing. At my age I don’t need it. It is no more than a servant I push around before me….It knows nothing. It just collects. I send it to smirk at parties, to give lectures….It calls people by the wrong names. It is an indiscriminate little grinner. It kisses people I’ve never met….I know I have a face like a cup of soup with handles sticking out….What wouldn’t I give for bone structure, a nose with bone in it!” The picture he finally sees is a quiet marbling of death and life: “No sparkling anemone there but the bald head of a melancholy frog, its feet clinging to a log, floating in literature. O Fame, cried Pearson, O Maupassant, O Tales of Hoffmann, O Edgar Allan Poe, O Grub Street.”

  One feels keenly in these stories a master’s presence, sharp and even as that longed-for nose with bone in it. Pritchett’s is a literature of deep humanity—a mature artist’s extension of affection into unexpected corners, a lover’s unflagging interest in life. “I looked at the heads of all the people in the room,” one of his narrators says. “They seemed to be like people from another planet. I was in love with them all and did not want to leave.”

  (1989)

  Stanley Elkin’s The MacGuffin

  Stanley Elkin’s novels have sometimes been criticized for their disregard of form and organized plot, for what some might see as their overindulgence of the author’s poetic gift—his besotted high style. In The MacGuffin, that mad, Joycean poetry is, pleasurably enough, still there. The sentences are long riffs of jazz; the words swarm and lather; the prose is exuberantly betroped, exhilaratingly de trop—one imitates it badly. But more self-consciously than in his previous novels—which include The Living End and George Mills—Elkin has placed at the thematic heart of his book a discussion of this “failure” of his at narrative construction.

  The title may say it all. The MacGuffin, a term used by Alfred Hitchcock, refers to that element in a Hitchcock film—or in narrative generally—that is a mere pretext for a plot. The MacGuffin might be the papers the spies are after, the secret theft of a ring, any device or gimmick that gets the plot rolling. The plot, moreover, is simply a pretext for an exploration of character. The MacGuffin itself has little, if any, intrinsic meaning. The MacGuffin, said Hitchcock, is nothing.

  In Elkin’s novel, however, the MacGuffin appears to be a strangely metamorphosing idea. Or perhaps it is a fixed idea in an absurdly shifting world. One thinks of the joke from which the MacGuffin is presumed to have derived its name: Two men are on a train. “What is that package?” asks one. “That’s a MacGuffin,” answers the other. “What’s a MacGuffin?” “It’s for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands!” “Well, then, that’s no MacGuffin.”

  As personified in Elkin’s novel, the MacGuffin is “the Muse of his plot line,” the “odd displacements, the skewed idiosyncratic angle.” It is an imagined voice, an inner imp, a guardian devil to the novel’s protagonist, Bobbo Druff, Commissioner of Streets of a midsize American city. Druff, at fifty-eight, has lost his ease and wants it back, “the way some people wanted their youth.” He is experiencing a kind of “aphasia, or Alzheimer’s, or the beginnings of senility”; “something dark was going on in the old gray matter…some sluggish, white stupidity forming and hardening there like an impression formed in a mold.” Druff’s MacGuffin is the ordering force of paranoia, the seeing and making of plots, the reading of symbols in municipal routine, the straining after coincidence and story.

  There are things that have set Druff up for this dementia, this “alcoholic vaudeville.” There are the coca leaves in his pocket. There is his deteriorating health. And there is his guilty conscience: he has committed adultery; he has taken graft. He feels he will be found out. The “hair tars and breath shellacs,” the “intimate cheeses and bitters,” will give him away.

  “If you’ve asked for the bribe they generally give you up to three weeks per thousand,” Druff tells his worried son, Mikey, who is thirty and still lives at home. “If you’ve been bribed, they usually let you off with a fine….It’s your dad’s policy only to accept bribes.” “I know that,” Mikey says, “it’s what all those fines could do to your net worth.”

  What preoccupies Druff and his MacGuffin the most is the death of Mikey’s girlfriend, a Shiite Muslim named Su’ad who has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. Druff himself once lusted after her, just a bit, while she held forth about the Shiite cause. “It all sounds to me like your typical power grab,” he once told her. “We see it time and again down at the Hall.” The local here stands for the universal. As Commissioner of Streets, Druff must find out why Su’ad has died in one of them. Could it have been a faulty traffic light? In Elkin’s world there is nothing more complicated—or simpler—than municipal America.

  The time span of this chapterless narrative is approximately two days, and in that period Druff spends many hours being driven around the city by his chauffeur, “Dick the spy,” fantasizing himself the victim of sting operations, reminiscing about the days when he first met his wife (who had managed to turn her scoliosis into a “lewd suggestion”), and discussing with Dick the strange traffic in the middle of the night.

  “It’s the nurses,” says his driver, the spy. “They come on at seven at night. It’s experimental. It plays hell with their menses unless they have the middle shift, the eleven-to-seven one, but the thinking today is that PMS gives them an edge.”

  To which Druff can only ask, “Is this true?” Everything to him, a man “old enough to be from a generation that still marveled that there were car radios,” has begun to seem plausible, equally convincing or unconvincing. This is particularly true of Su’ad’s death. Did she smuggle rugs or legitimately import them? And what did she want with Mikey? She was “very devout…into that stuff like a terrorist,” and his son planned on going back to Lebanon with her. “I was going to let them make
me a hostage,” he tells his father.

  But Druff finally learns that minutes before her death Su’ad attended a lecture by “an Arab congressman from the state of Delaware with whose conciliatory views Su’ad was in strong disagreement.” The congressman, referring to “our Israeli cousins,” stressed the necessity for all sides to dedicate themselves to solutions in the troubled Mideast. Angry, Su’ad stood up and made a heated reference to a need for final solutions; an hour later she was dead.

  There is no mystery solved here, no sacred story set like a table, not really. Elkin is brilliant, but in his own brilliant way. His vision is not, as the generals have referred to the Persian Gulf war, “scenario-dependent.” It is less hollow, more nervous, than that. “Life is either mostly adventure or it’s mostly psychology,” says the voice of the MacGuffin, before it takes its leave of Druff. “If you have enough of the one then you don’t need a lot of the other.”

  The MacGuffin, then, is not only an Elkinesque portrait of the sorrows of the body and the moral perils of work. It is a plea for the power of talk, for talk as its own resolution—even Druff’s manic rapid-mouth-movement, all simile and parentheses and searching stammer, the deejay yak of the heart. Even this verbiage, the novel seems to say, perhaps especially this verbiage, this incoherence, is an intimacy, a negotiation—a prayer against death, a stay against war.

  (1991)

  Don DeLillo’s Mao II

  If terrorists have seized control of the world narrative, if they have captured the historical imagination, have they become, in effect, the world’s new novelists? For sheer influence over the human mind, have they displaced a precariously placed literature? Are writers—lacking some greater if lethal faith—the new hostages? “Is history possible? Is anyone serious?” These are some of the questions posed by Mao II, the latest novel by Don DeLillo, who has already proved with such books as Players, White Noise, and Libra that no one can match his ability to let America, the bad dream of it, speak through his pen.

  Mao II takes its title from one of Andy Warhol’s famous portraits of Mao Zedong. For DeLillo, the Warhols are more than mock chinoiserie: they anticipate the televised image of the official state portrait of Mao, defaced with red paint in Tiananmen Square. In Mao II, the Warhol pictures marry the ideas of totalitarianism and image-making, prompting speculation about how fame is transformed into a death mask, how a portrait can freeze the mind behind the face. Fittingly enough, the novel begins and ends with a wedding, that most stereotypically photographed occasion. And yet, while this bookending creates a palindromic comedy, these are anticomedic, apocalyptic nuptials.

  Not that Mao II doesn’t now and then attempt a joke. As with so much of DeLillo’s work, the novel has a discursive sweep, and its narrative movement from serious idea to serious idea is rigorously un-neat, like the gathering and associative movement of the brain itself. But as a story about a reclusive writer, written by a reclusive writer, it has a sense of humor. Early on in the novel, a mad street person, “great-maned and filthy, rimed saliva in his beard, old bruises across the forehead gone soft and crumbly,” bursts into a bookstore; “I’m here to sign my books,” he tells the security guard. Later, when the protagonist, a novelist named Bill Gray, falls into the company of a Maoist terrorist sympathizer, their tense conversation takes an unexpected turn: “There’s something I wanted to ask the other evening at dinner,” says the other man. “Do you use a word processor?”

  But overall, as one might expect from DeLillo, this is a dark tale, one that is focused on the writer Bill Gray and the various characters circling his life at a time when Gray is particularly weary of his well-guarded seclusion. Indeed, that seclusion has become a kind of captivity; in a way, he is looking for a changing of the guard. Thus Gray escapes the confines of his country home to visit a friend at a New York publishing house, then finds himself agreeing to go to London to give a reading on behalf of a poet held captive in Beirut. When he arrives in London, however, the reading is postponed because of a bomb threat. But Gray moves ineluctably toward the Middle East (via Athens and Cyprus) and toward the fate of the poet-hostage, which, in an act of professional brotherhood but also of spiritual mystery, Gray insists on trying to prevent or share—or appropriate. In that contest between art and life, this is a scenario that both mirrors and is the “master collapse” that is Gray’s final book.

  The people in Gray’s life at this critical time include Scott, a compulsive and maniacal fan who has tracked Gray down and volunteered himself as an assistant, enforcing Gray’s solitude, managing Gray’s career, commanding Gray’s life. There is also Scott’s lover, the waiflike Karen (who is sometimes Gray’s lover as well), a former follower of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with a visionary streak that allows her to see what others can’t and to speak, in eerie mimicry, what others speak. And there is Brita, the literary photographer whose portraits of Gray, she and he both briefly believe, will help usher him out into the world of the living, though it is not long before she gives up photographing writers and turns to those who make the real news—the terrorists.

  DeLillo has written about terrorists before, in the 1977 novel Players, but Mao II has something else haunting it: the ordeal of Salman Rushdie. DeLillo shares a publisher with Rushdie, and in Mao II the New York publishing house that Gray visits is one at which there are visitor searches and guards. The idea of a writer held hostage is so understandably traumatizing to DeLillo that he has used his narrative to work variations on this theme: the blindfolded poet in a basement in Beirut; the hermitic and professionally hamstrung novelist in a study in upstate New York. And, lest the pairing seem merely a melodramatic metaphor, DeLillo, with a kind of insistence, makes these lives intersect. This can really happen, he seems to be saying. Look for a writer, and you will find a terrorist. And a hostage. This is the new literary dialectic. It is also the evening news.

  * * *

  —

  No one’s prose is better than DeLillo’s. “I’m a sentence-maker, like a donut-maker only slower,” says Bill Gray. DeLillo’s description of a writer’s face through the viewfinder of a camera becomes a poem complete unto itself: “She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets.”

  The novel is also filled with set pieces that show off the author’s great skill with a scene and with multiple points of view. There is, for example, the Orwellian opening, a mass wedding of thirteen thousand at Yankee Stadium. “It’s as though they designed this to the maximum degree of let the relatives squirm,” says one of the “flesh parents,” futilely scanning the bridal veils for her daughter. “How they hate our willingness to work and struggle,” thinks Karen, the daughter she is looking for. “They want to snatch us back to the land of lawns.”

  When, toward the end of the novel, DeLillo has Bill Gray (who is suffering internal injuries from a hit-and-run accident in Athens) sit down in a Cyprus restaurant to make witty if coded chitchat with some British tourists, it is a portrait of the artist as the dying Mercutio, and it provides the book some of its best dialogue—speech that sounds like speech rather than writing. Often in the complex orchestration of his ideas, DeLillo makes his characters name and sing all his tunes for him, speaking in dazzling chunks of authorial essay that read as if they had been created by someone who no longer cared how people really spoke. Here, though, in this careful, bitter dinner scene, everything—the tension, the tone, the dialogue—is exactly right.

  Among the myriad other things to admire in Mao II are DeLillo’s way of capturing a representative slice of a city, his ability to reproduce ineffable urban rhythms, his startling evocations of sights and smells. He has a discerning and satirical eye, which notes unexpected
details like Gray’s “sepia toenails” or the “cancer coloring book” in the pocket of a car door.

  Indeed, it is to the larger idea of the image—its use as a bridge between public and private, its doubtful integrity, its sanctimonious politics—that Mao II keeps returning. A mass wedding, a photo session with a writer, an international revolution—all attempt an elimination of the self through the imagistic replication of the self. Seen this way, imagery is a kind of cemetery, a repository for the proliferating residue of life. (“The room drained the longings out of him,” DeLillo writes of the hostage poet in that basement cell. “He was left with images.”) In DeLillo’s metaphorical system, the self figured and multiplied is death: an army is the opposite of a person. Likeness is the canvas of farewell. Only anarchic Beirut seems to have “consumed all its own depictions”; Gray has trouble even finding a map of the place.

  If one remains less moved by Mao II than engaged and impressed, that is the contract a reader must often make with a book by DeLillo; he is seldom an emotional writer. Nonetheless, one may find oneself hoping just a little for something approximating the feeling and power of, say, Marguerite Oswald’s monologue in the closing chapter of Libra, or even the chill gallows humor of White Noise, which accomplished so much sustained and mournful queasiness.

  Still, within its own defined parameters, within the boundaries of its own paradoxical discourse, DeLillo’s new book succeeds as brilliantly as any of his others. One thinks of the novel’s own refrains: Bill Gray’s memory of a family joke, repeating the instructions in the hat section of a Sears catalogue, “Measure your head before ordering,” and the prayerful chant of an unheeded street beggar, “Still love you. Spare a little change…Still love you.”