See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  “Iran, Canada, Kansas—where is your home?” asked Caroline.

  “I don’t really know,” said Omar. “Kansas now, I suppose.”

  “You will stay in Kansas?” asked Caroline.

  “It’s difficult to get a job teaching college,” said Omar. “If they offer me one, I suppose I will stay there. Or go wherever I can find a job.”

  “That seems a bit strange to me: to allow a job to decide where one lives. Surely you are not so cowed by reality as that?”

  “I’m afraid I am very cowed by reality,” said Omar.

  “Oh,” said Caroline. “Why is that?”

  * * *

  —

  But in Cameron’s newest novel, deliciously vital right from the start, and as inviting as if less cozy than his previous ones, no one speaks like a mesmerizing airhead from another era. Though the characters are for the most part younger than in his other novels, they seem not just smarter and less desiccated but wiser and more worldly. And the genial hum of his previous narratives has been replaced by an articulate if paralyzed cry, which is occasionally ratcheted up to a scream. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You features the ways and current crises of a Manhattan family (dismantled and demented in recognizable fashion by divorce). The first sentence alone tells you how succinctly Cameron can get to the maddened heart of the matter, the voice, the milieu: “The day my sister, Gillian, decided to pronounce her name with a hard G was, coincidentally, the same day my mother returned, early and alone, from her honeymoon.” Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a piece of vocal virtuosity and possibly Cameron’s best book: it retains the lucid and unlabored prose of his previous ones but wastes less time; it may be his most successful novel on its own terms—terms that are not as modest as they may initially seem.

  That in many ways this novel contains the least childlike characters he has ever created makes it especially unfortunate that the publisher has already been labeling it a young adult novel. The narrator is a smart-talking eighteen-year-old named James Sveck, who shares a bit of Holden Caulfield’s snarky dismay. But he also has in common with the narrator of Andorra a love of smooth Roman stone and a prickly, pedantic relationship to human utterance. What Peter Cameron has done is written a sophisticated and adult book, although with fewer trellises and champagne flutes and tablecloths than in his previous books and less notice of architectural features such as newels and cornices. People speak less formally to one another, and more confrontationally, and use contractions. No one is likely to say they’ve slept “marvelously” the night before. They are more likely not to have slept at all:

  “I can’t believe you didn’t notice I was missing,” I said.

  “Get a life, James,” said Gillian. ...

  “I just thought someone might notice that I never came home.”

  “Oh, we would, eventually,” said my mother. “You just have to stay away a bit longer next time.”

  In addition to bracingly comic dialogue, the novel possesses too much emotional complexity and artfulness of construction to exclude adult readers—for instance, the desire of a young man simply to be seen, let alone seen for what he is, is given several plot strands: two different instances of running away, and one elaborate instance of posing as someone else (in a computer chat room), all to win notice.

  Similar assessments, of course, can be made of Great Expectations, as well as the most famous of American boy narrators, Huckleberry Finn. And then there is The Catcher in the Rye itself, and although one would hesitate to place Cameron’s novel in all this immortal company, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You will very likely elicit comparisons both to those great books and to more recent ones by, say, Jonathan Safran Foer or Benjamin Kunkel.

  * * *

  —

  James’s best friend is not a fellow teenager but his grandmother in New Jersey, who refers to herself as “the poor man’s Kitty Carlisle Hart.” His father works in a high-security midtown skyscraper, has a Diebenkorn in his sun-filled office, and is about to have some cosmetic surgery on his eyes. As a kind of preemptive strike or out of idle and insensitive curiosity, he asks James if he is gay. James’s mother, a thrice-married art dealer whose latest husband has absconded with her credit cards, and whose assistant is gay, also asks James if he is gay. James’s sister, dating a language theory professor named Rainer Maria Schultz, is the only one in the family who doesn’t ask. She is described by the flap copy as “his mordant older sister,” but this is not her story. James’s longest discussions are with his mother and his therapist, whom the flap copy refers to as “Teutonic.” Cameron’s prose, however, takes us out of labels and types of every kind:

  “Well, you don’t think it’s weird?” Gillian asked Rainer Maria. “An eighteen-year-old boy who visits his grandmother?”

  “No,” said Rainer Maria. “You Americans have so little family feeling. In Germany…we love our grandparents.”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t love them,” said Gillian. “I just think visiting them is weird. It will be so good for you to go away to school, James. ...”

  “I’ve decided I’m not going to college,” I said.

  “What? Since when?”

  “Today….I’m thinking about moving to the Midwest.”

  “The Midwest? The Midwest of what?”

  “The United States,” I said. “The prairie states.”

  “The prairie states? I think you’ve read My Ántonia one too many times.”

  “Hush, Gillian. I think this is a very good plan for you, James,” said Rainer Maria. “The college experience in the United States is a farce.”

  “Hello!” said Gillian. “You teach in a college.”

  “My dear Gillian, if everyone had to believe in the work he did, not much would get done in the world,” said Rainer Maria.

  James quite candidly does not care for people his own age, or so he says, or perhaps this is a convenience, as Cameron has always been more interested in the grown-up world, especially young adults and very old ones, even if they are childlike in their conduct. The social canvas and range of dramatic action here may seem deceptively narrow: a high school senior who lives with his mother and sister; visits his father, grandmother, and therapist; recalls a brief misadventure at an academic teen conference in Washington, D.C., called “The American Classroom”; makes a mess of a crush he has on his mother’s assistant. But this apparent quietness is not atypical for Cameron, nor is a narrative strategy in which we are privy to the subdued wit of even the angriest and most unhappy people:

  For a moment I could tell my mother didn’t get what I meant, and then she got it. She looked at me with a sort of hurt, amazed expression. “You think I’m a tyrant?”

  “I think you have tendencies toward tyranny,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  Neither young adult literature nor even really a coming-of-age story, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is most surprisingly of all the subtlest September 11 novel yet written (if one can speak of the September 11 novel as a genre, and I think, with respect, that one can). So accomplished is its subtlety that one is not even aware of this novel’s true subject until three-quarters of the way through, and then its mention—“You know we’ve never talked about September 11”—a remark made rather late in the day by James’s therapist, rises up out of the story’s barely submerged anxiety (it is perhaps initially, casually planted there by James’s ominous visit to his father’s high-in-the-clouds office) and casts on the book a sudden, brilliant light. James has been wanting to skip college and use his tuition money to buy a house in the Midwest—now we see why: two years before, he had been in tenth grade, at Stuyvesant High School, within close view of the World Trade Center when it was attacked. “I’m thinking about the woman who died on September 11 who no one knew was missing,” James says
to his therapist and then continues to himself:

  …To die like that, to disappear without a trace, to sink without disturbing the surface of the water, not even a telltale bubble rising to the surface, like sneaking out of a party so no one notices you’re gone.

  Disappearance of every sort has become James’s fearful fascination. A child’s sense of safety in the world has been catastrophically undermined, and although this is a novel full of precise, skeptical observations about everything from art galleries to divorce to looking for love in New York City, its real subject is what happens to children when they witness terrible violence. How is such an event moved on from? Who do these children become when they are grown, and what faith is no longer possible for them as they continue to live in an anarchic world that still somehow brims with pleasure, beauty, and love? James’s response lies in a kind of repudiation of death. Memories will be stored in things. Perhaps, he imagines, “love could naturally result in clairvoyance.” The possessions of a beloved might lend their holy voodoo. When his grandmother leaves him her “ghostly remnants”—all her possessions—his parents want him to sell them to an estate liquidator:

  That’s the word they use: liquidate. But I refused. With some of the money my grandmother left me, I’m paying to have everything stored in a climate-controlled warehouse in Long Island City.

  As in all of Cameron’s work the past is both longed for and swept away. James’s climate-controlled warehouse is his own sort of church with its own congregation, a shakily stubborn protest against time, change, and disappearance. It is a bravura performance, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a stunning little book, a demonstration that adolescence, like a weekend, or the countries of Andorra or Uruguay, may seem an awkward, otherworldly way station suspended between two more prominent and fixed points (France and Spain, Brazil and Argentina, the long, numb workaday weeks that may appear to represent an absence from living). Yet it remains a fundamental place in the human psyche from which no one ever really moves on:

  I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.

  Poised between childhood and adulthood, adolescence stands there for a short, vivid time howling like a dog. Eventually, it is simply buried. But buried alive.

  (2007)

  Donald Barthelme

  When, within a year’s time, both Raymond Carver and Donald Barthelme succumbed in their fifties to cancer (Carver in August 1988; Barthelme that next July), it was as if the reigning president and vice president of the American Short Story had suddenly died. Both were beloved by peers and acolytes, though they struggled for readers, and each, in separate decades, had revitalized a genre that since the invention of television has been continually pronounced both moribund and in a condition of renaissance (recovering from moribund).

  Both writers were inimitable even as they were widely imitated. Carver, younger, less productive, a practitioner of a spare, gritty realism often called minimalism, was the junior executive. Donald Barthelme—sparkling fabulist and idiosyncratic reinventor of the genre, practitioner of swift verbal collages, also sometimes dubbed minimalism—was commander in chief. Barthelme’s particular brilliance was so original, so sui generis, despite its tutelage at the feet of pages by Joyce, Beckett, and Stein, that even his own brothers Frederick and Steven, also fiction writers of intelligence and style, wrote more like Carver.

  Carver and Barthelme were hard-drinking westerners, men’s men, and alcohol and cigarettes eased their isolation (regional and existential) in a literary life amid East Coast institutions, bohemian and otherwise, though in the end both died prematurely as a result. The cultural sea changes of their adult decades were enormous, and one is reminded of all the Prohibition-era addictions that were acquired by Jazz Agers in the 1920s, young people navigating similar renegotiations of social mores. Perhaps artists of any time tend to possess introverted dispositions that need bracing and enlivening to exude even the cool, feigned indifference preferred in Barthelme’s later 1950s jazz age. “Edward worried about his drinking,” Barthelme wrote in an early story. “Would there be enough gin? Enough ice?”

  There is no indication in Tracy Daugherty’s thorough new biography of Barthelme, Hiding Man, that these two late, great masters of the short story ever actually met, though Daugherty’s title could be used to caption the life of either of them, as it might be the appropriate title for any number of literary biographies, since presumably a writer has lived his life more on the page than off, and in such a distorted, imaginary, and playful fashion that he or she steps away from his desk and walks out into that other world half-formed, half-spent, half there—those particular fractions being optimistic.

  * * *

  —

  Donald Barthelme was born in 1931, the namesake and eldest son of Donald Barthelme, Sr., a Houston architect of distinction and renown and of formidability to his children, all of whom were gifted and successful and desired to please him. Frederick and Steven became professors and novelists; the only girl, Joan, became the first woman vice president of Pennzoil. A third brother, Peter, became a successful advertising executive and wrote mystery novels. Helen Bechtold, their adored mother, was a beauty and a wit. Donald Junior’s second wife and lifelong friend, Helen Moore Barthelme, in an admiring memoir she wrote even after being dumped for a younger woman, compared them all to the James family (Henry, not Jesse, though perhaps, it being the West, there was a touch of both) in stature and accomplishment.

  The family home, as a material structure and as a venue for intellectual conversation, stood out in Houston. The house was designed by their father and was part of his modernist crusade. The furniture “was architect furniture, a lot of swoopy Scandinavian stuff,” according to the baby of the brood, Steven. Moreover, the master bedroom had no door, which seems almost unimaginable for that era. Both Donalds revered as biblical Marcel Raymond’s From Baudelaire to Surrealism, a book presented to the son by his dad.

  In view of all this, that Donald Barthelme the writer would marry a woman with the same name as his mother, then later travel to Scandinavia and marry a Dane, read the writings of Freud, become famous for his own aesthetic crusade, and pen a novel Oedipally titled The Dead Father might seem something of a foregone conclusion and a biographer’s delight—or perhaps, in the way of foregone conclusions, a biographer’s headache.

  Moreover, the first part of Tracy Daugherty’s book has to negotiate many ambiguous antecedents and much referential confusion about which Donald Barthelme it is discussing, père or fils (later in life the father’s entry in Who’s Who was still “much longer” than the son’s, which gave the junior Barthelme a good guffaw). Mr. Barthelme the architect was also given to cleverness and mischief similar to his son’s: when he designed Texas’s Hall of State, he had carved into the frieze of the building the names of fifty-nine legendary Texans. According to Daugherty:

  The first letters of the first eight names, reading left to right—Burleson, Archer, Rusk, Travis, Higg, Ellis, Lamar, and Milam—spell the architect’s name, minus only the final e. A playful touch, a buried secret: These would become hallmarks of his eldest son’s art, as well.

  The son’s life was full of fits and starts. There was Catholic school and a desire to be part of the arts—but which one? There was college interrupted and gone uncompleted. There were (eventually) four marriages. There were early stabs at newspaper work, music (he was briefly the drummer in a touring band), museum directing, journal editing. What he most needed took him a surprisingly long time to do: leave Houston and move to New York. A stint as a soldier in Korea, two Texan marriages, and four dead babies with his second wife—infants whose bodies were given to medical research, so there were no graves and no old-fashioned-style mourning—perhaps took the wind out of his sails (his first wife said she left him because she wanted to see the world and Don didn’
t). But his restlessness and unhappiness in Houston had to be diagnosed by a psychotherapist as his simply needing to get out of town. He then began to believe it.

  Donald Barthelme didn’t set foot in New York until he was already in his thirties—unusual for an American writer. At a Staten Island literary conference, where Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, and Edward Albee were the faculty, Barthelme arrived as a customer. It was July 1961 and he wanted to get the great Mr. Bellow’s opinion of his short stories, which was, it turned out, not a happy one. Barthelme’s narrative collages, his “serious toys” infused with American music and French theory, seemed to Bellow to lack an inner life; Bellow was cranky already at having to do this conference in order to make his alimony payments.

  In a way, Barthelme’s work was all inner life, partially concealed, partially displayed. His stories are a registration of a certain kind of churning mind, cerebral fragments stitched together in the bricolage fashion of beatnik poetry. The muzzled cool, the giddy play, the tossed salad of high and low: everything from cartoon characters to opera gets referenced in a graffiti-like chain of sentences. Conventional narrative ideas of motivation and characterization generally are dispensed with. Language is seen as having its own random and self-generating vital life, a subject he takes on explicitly in the story “Sentence,” which is one long never-ending sentence, full of self-interruptions and searching detours and not quite dead ends (like human DNA itself, with its inert, junk viruses), concluding with the words “a structure to be treasured for its weakness as opposed to the strength of stones.”

  The story “For I’m the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You”—whose lilting title refers not to the Irish ballad “Bold O’Donahue,” as Daugherty insists, but to an old Bing Crosby song called “Remember Me”—ends with a character’s memory of Tuesday Weld turning from the screen to tell him that he was a good man. “He had immediately gotten up and walked out of the theater, gratification singing in his heart.” When he is then physically assaulted, salt emerges from his eyes and “black blood from his ears, and from his mouth, all sorts of words.” A belief in language and culture persists indomitably in Barthelme’s sad, hip world and makes life worthwhile and deserving of what Thomas Pynchon has called “the radiant quality” of Barthelme’s attention.