An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  What’s remarkable about Smiley’s handling of horses as characters is that she manages to bring it off at all—and more, she does it brilliantly. Through an amazing imaginative leap, she enters into their heads and lets us see the world as they do. Epic Steam is big, burly, hot-tempered and as black as night, and you can feel the resistance in him whenever he butts up against an obstacle to his freedom. These horses are intelligent, too, and as involved in self-discovery as their human companions. Froney’s Sis, orphaned when a month old, isn’t sure about her identity and proves to be too delicate for the harsh demands of racing. Residual, on the other hand, has a “meditative air” and the bearing of a princess. In time, all four animals become distinctive presences, so well developed that you can almost hear and smell them, but it’s a lowly gelding who steals the show.

  Justa Bob is a 5-year-old hard knocker. He’s such a calm, experienced guy, with 39 races under his belt by 1998, that he takes it upon himself to tutor inexperienced jockeys. A joker at heart, he teases the bettors and tries never to win a race by more than a nose. He has a stall at Santa Anita in the early chapters, but his age soon works against him, and he embarks on an astonishing odyssey. No longer does Justa Bob compete in classy allowance company; instead, he is turned into a claiming horse, one that can be bought or sold by any licensed trainer or owner, and he descends from the lofty heights and travels north to the Bay Area and east to Colorado, consistently traded down the ladder until he lands in the barn of R. T. Favor, a stumblebum in and out of jail.

  Smiley’s two-legged characters face problems of their own. They love their horses desperately, but they’re much more cautious when it comes to relationships with other human beings. Rosalind Maybrick, the wife of a rich industrialist, throws herself into a curious affair with a trainer who suffers from dread, simply because she has a sense of wanting something that she can’t name; while Farley Jones has an unexpected romance with a younger woman, a horse fancier who doesn’t know what she wants, only what she longs for. In fact, a longing for the ineffable seems to affect everybody who’s been touched by a horse. Buddy Crawford yearns to be a better person, and even embraces Jesus (although it doesn’t help), and Audrey Schmidt, a little girl who’s lost her father, dreams about cashing enough tickets to own a thoroughbred someday.

  The racetrack provides an ideal, multidimensional backdrop for all the plots and subplots Smiley puts in motion. Her research is exemplary, too. It’s deeply satisfying to read a work of fiction so informed about its subject and so alive to every nuance and detail. From veterinary surgery to the riding tactics of jockeys, she has immersed herself in the anecdotes and the lore of the track, and that allows her to create some nifty set pieces, as when a horse doc encourages an overtaxed stallion to mount a mare by serving him a ration of gin. Only a writer dedicated to the fine points could have come up with Luciano, a horse masseur and amateur philosopher, whose answer to stress is to defeat it with a plate of gnocchi and a glass of wine.

  In such a big, ambitious book, there are bound to be a few slow spots. With so many characters in action, it’s inevitable that some stories will be more compelling than others. The quirkiness of the cast gets a little cute at times, and a couple of people could disappear and never be missed. Smiley has a much-appreciated gift for narrative, but her prose can be clunky in places. And the novel, as a whole, is so sunny that a realist, particularly a paranoid, might wish for a splash or two of darkness to even out the canvas.

  But this is Horse Heaven, after all, and a heaven of any kind implies a happy ending. It’s no surprise, then, when the bad dudes don’t wind up paying for their sins. Buddy Crawford ought to be punished for doping Residual and giving her a life-threatening case of pleuropneumonia, but the filly battles back and survives. Epic Steam, banned from flat racing on account of his savagery, finds redemption as a jumper. Even Justa Bob is spared a trip to the knacker’s yard, courtesy of a sympathetic trainer. There’s a benign deity at the helm in Smiley’s world. Her final chapters have a wonderful restorative quality, filled with grace notes and epiphanies that offer a fitting close to this smart, warmhearted, winning book.

  The New York Times, 2000

  Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal by Jary Parini

  Lonely, alcoholic, incontinent, arthritic, confined to a wheelchair in the Hollywood Hills and listening tearfully to tapes of his dead partner, Howard Austen, croon Sinatra tunes is how it ends for Gore Vidal in Jay Parini’s revealing new biography. What a sad last act for the former boy wonder who, at the age of 25, had already published five novels including The City and The Pillar (1948), a best-selling landmark in the history of gay literature. It takes some unravelling for Parini, a friend and fan, to get us from Point A to Point B.

  Vidal had an unruly childhood. Born Eugene Vidal, he adopted his maternal grandfather’s surname as his first, an homage to Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma. The senator’s flamboyant daughter, Nina, was his mother. Her marriage to Vidal’s father, a South Dakota farm boy and football star, was brief, and she soon embarked on a life of parties, affairs, and wealthy husbands. She “loved athletes, famous men, and booze, not necessarily in that order,” her son remarked. They rarely spoke. “She didn’t see me,” he complained. “I wished I didn’t see her.”

  In Parini’s opinion, Nina’s early defection caused Vidal’s crippling narcissism. Her neglect led to his need to “inflate himself.” Vidal might well take issue with that theory, much as he once distanced himself from the word homosexual. It’s an adjective that describes a sexual act, he insisted, and not a person. Though he was a tireless cruiser who favoured cleancut youths, he refused to think of himself as gay; instead he was a “degenerate,” a term he used ironically, who “messed around” with guys. He took pride in being a top, more “manly” than a submissive role. The sex he preferred was furtive, often anonymous.

  In spite of his early success, Vidal encountered an unfortunate literary truth. The good reviews don’t always translate into bank notes, so he turned to TV and the movies to fund an increasingly lavish lifestyle. His scripts earned him a small fortune and a slew of movie star pals like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. (Vidal was a world class name-dropper, a tendency Parini shares.) He bought an estate on the Hudson River, the first in a series of grand properties that culminated with a villa in Ravello, Italy, known as La Rondinaia or “swallow’s nest” for its perch on a cliff overlooking the Gulf of Salerno.

  Parini makes a case for Vidal’s fiction, citing in particular the late historical novels that began with Burr, but it’s the essays that matter. There’s no one who writes so incisively or intelligently about the “United States of Amnesia” now. Vidal pulled it off with brio and wit, gleefully tackling the power brokers. He stood witness to his country’s moral laxity. “The world, in his view, had fallen away from a beautiful moment at the inception of the American republic, when—briefly—the ideals of life and liberty seemed to prevail,” writes Parini. Talk shows still courted writers back then, and Vidal made the most of it. “Never lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television,” he quipped. He sparred with Mailer and Capote on The Dick Cavett Show, and jousted with William Buckley, the Republican arch conservative, in several explosive debates during the 1968 presidential conventions. (A new documentary, Best of Enemies, focuses on the debates.) When he accused his opponent of being a crypto-Nazi, Buckley called him a queer and threatened to punch him—heady stuff for prime time. It only added to Vidal’s fame.

  Vidal travelled widely and once, disgusted with the US, considered a move to Ireland. He had Irish ancestry on both sides, liked the tax angle, and looked into buying some property, dirt cheap at the time, in Dublin or Cork. “He had this fantasy of being some kind of Irish gentleman,” Howard Austen, sounding exasperated, told Parini. “I think he was reading Trollope … I said, ‘No way!’ I wouldn’t set foot in Ireland!”

  Meanwhile, the list of Vidal’s celebrity chums grew longer—P
rincess Margaret, Claire Bloom, Leonard Bernstein. He nicknamed his coterie “the Swirl.”

  At his core, Vidal remained a devoted writer, brave and fearless. Mailer, his ostensible antagonist—they actually had a lot in common—praised him in private for handling homosexual themes “modestly, soberly, and with instinctive good taste.” His United States: Essays 1952–1992, a 1,300-page tome that should have come, notes Parini, with “a retractable handle and little wheels,” won the National Book Award for criticism in 1993. His acceptance speech was predictably tart. “As you have already, I am sure, picked the wrong novelist and the wrong poet,” one line went, “I am not so vain to think you got it right this time, either.” Shades of Oscar Wilde.

  Parini’s book has a curious provenance. Initially Vidal, always controlling, invited Walter Clemons, a sympathetic reviewer, to write his biography, but Clemons never finished it. The project fell next to Fred Kaplan, who delivered a long, stolid work that displeased its subject. Vidal lobbied Parini to write another version, but Parini had his own obligations to fulfil. He suspected his mentor would drive him crazy, too, so he held off until Vidal exited stage left before seeing Every Time into print. His stated aim was to portray the “angel and monster alike.”

  To a fair degree he succeeded. Parini was fond of Vidal, so his tone is gently affectionate. He’s content to relate the facts without digging too deeply. He could’ve done more with such sources as Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene; they’re given short shrift. The book was written at intervals over decades, and it feels sketchy in places. But the diaries Parini kept offer valuable observations and insights, as well as some splendid set pieces—a liquid lunch in Amalfi with Bernstein, for instance, who shouts at the garrulous Gore, “I’m the fucking guest here! And I can’t get a word in edgewise!”

  For all his fame, Vidal died alone in Hollywood at age 86. He’d salted away a $37 million estate, but he didn’t leave a dime to his closest relatives or the devoted Filipino cook/nurse who cared for him during his last years. He donated the money to Harvard instead, presumably for the prestige. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. He seems never to have been beholden to anyone, except perhaps Howard Austen. He fashioned an empire of self, as Parini puts it, and from that there was no escape.

  Irish Times, 2015

  Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

  With the death in January of Robert Stone, at the age of 77, the United States lost one of its grand masters, a novelist of keen intelligence and supreme integrity whose work never shied from addressing such daunting questions as the problem of faith in a godless age.

  In Stone’s books, as in Joseph Conrad’s, the value of human life always hangs in the balance, and his characters, because of their frailty, confusion or plain mean-spiritedness, often serve to diminish it. That’s certainly the case in Dog Soldiers (1974), a classic tale of the paranoia and duplicity of the Vietnam era, now reissued by Picador.

  At the novel’s centre is John Converse, a jaded freelancer based in Saigon, who gets involved in a drug deal to earn some easy money—or so he assumes. In exchange for arranging to smuggle three kilos of heroin into California for a former lover Converse will make a cool twenty grand. But he soon feels uneasy about the mission and wonders if that’s because he finds it morally objectionable.

  Moral objections can be slippery in Vietnam, however. Sometimes, as Converse has learned, they are overridden by “larger, more profound concerns.”

  He recalls an incident known as the Great Elephant Zap, when machine-gunners in US planes mowed down elephants (a true story) because they were “enemy agents” carrying supplies for the Viet Cong. The Zap left everyone disgusted, but the memory leads Converse, hyped on pot and Scotch, to a cockeyed revelation. “And as for the dope, Converse thought, and the addicts—if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.”

  So much for the moral objection. Converse has overridden it. As for his malaise, it’s merely fear: “It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul, the formula through which he could confirm his own existence.”

  In this remarkable passage, with customary insight, Stone deconstructs the hapless logic that governed the United States’ conduct in southeast Asia, showing how its ripple effect threatened to corrupt an entire society.

  The bungled war grew into an obsession, one he came by honestly. After the success of his award-winning debut novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967), set in the New Orleans of hipsters and hucksters, he moved to London and decided to see Vietnam up close—a duty, he felt, for an American writer of fiction. He obtained press credentials of a sort from Ink, an underground paper, and bought a plane ticket. He lasted six months and departed in a state of shock. The war “was this enormous, endless, boundless, topless, bottomless mistake.” Stone told the New York Times, “something I was not used to seeing the United States do.” His outrage colours every page of Dog Soldiers.

  Converse’s path to the big score quickly turns rocky. His partners in crime are equally unsuited to the task. His wife, Marge, a cashier at a sleazy San Francisco porn theatre, has a taste for opiates herself, and his courier, Ray Hicks, an old army buddy, is a probable psychopath who studies The Portable Nietzsche and “cultivates the art of self-defense.”

  Hicks, too, is uneasy about the job. Dealing smack is bad karma, he believes, but he agrees to deliver the stash to Marge. “Why not, he thought. There was nothing else going down. He felt the necessity of changing levels, a little adrenalin to clean the blood.”

  That “why not” echoes through the novel like a mantra. In the absence of moral objections it’s possible to construe every act as permissible, even excusable, from slaughtering elephants to dropping napalm on innocent civilians.

  Among the dark pleasures of Dog Soldiers is Stone’s inimitable style. Few writers can match his range. He swings from baroque literary flourishes to down-and-dirty street talk, creating a rhetoric all his own. His dialogue is tart and blackly funny, one reason Hollywood latched on to his books as movie material. (Stone wrote the screenplays for Dog Soldiers, filmed in 1978 as Who’ll Stop the Rain, with Nick Nolte, and for A Hall of Mirrors, filmed in 1970 as W.U.S.A.)

  For Hicks the nightmare starts at Marge’s place. She’s strung out on Dilaudid and doesn’t have the money he’s owed on delivery. Worse still, two men break into the house while they’re arguing. They claim to be feds; Hicks subdues them: “‘You know these guys?’ Marge shook her head. ‘We’re Federal Agents, lady,’ the blond kid said. ‘You’re in plenty of trouble.’ Marge looked at him for only a moment. ‘Are they?’ she asked Hicks. ‘They’re take-off artists,’ Hicks said. ‘That’s who they are.’”

  Whoever they are, they want the heroin. Hicks and Marge escape, hitting the road through southern California’s low-life enclaves and attempting to unload the drugs. Converse, back home, falls victim to the phoney feds, who savagely beat him and drag him along as they track the fugitives. All the elements of a highbrow thriller are in play.

  The chase ends at a commune near the Mexican border, where Hicks once basked in the hippy glow. That scene is now as dead as the Summer of Love, and the resident guru zones out on home-made rose-hip wine. Hicks and his pursuers engage in an apocalyptic shoot-out, and it’s fair to say, without revealing the details, that no one is better off in its aftermath.

  Converse and Marge, reunited again, are on the lam without the heroin, although scarcely a happy couple. “‘Why does this shit happen to me?’ he asked Marge. ‘Do I like it?’ ‘You manage to handle it,’ she said. ‘Handle it?’ He was outraged. ‘One thing I hate,’ he told her, ‘is tough-mindedness. It repels me.’ ‘Sorry,’ she said.’”

  Some critics cite Dog Soldiers as Stone’s best novel, but surely A Flag for Sunrise (1981), his Central American epic, or Outerbridge Reach (1992), about a solo sailor who betrays himself by cheating to win a race, are just as accomplished.

  And for sheer enjoyment there’s h
is memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007), an account that begins aboard a naval transport ship in Antarctica and features his adventures with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The title refers to the greening of the day on Manzanillo Bay in Mexico, where Kesey hid out for a while—primal, primary, primo.

  Stone’s short stories will also reward the reader, particularly the anthologists’ favourite, Helping.

  Robert Stone was a gentle, humble man, the child of a schizophrenic mother and an absentee father. For four years from the age of six he lived in an orphanage run by Marist brothers. Largely self-educated, he carried his learning lightly. Stone had a finely tuned sense of humour, qualified as a first-rate raconteur, and loved a drink and a good conversation.

  When Stone was last in Dublin, some years ago, we talked about the world’s ongoing miseries over a pint. Our only hope for the future, he suggested, was to imagine that we’re better than we are. His characters usually fall short of the mark, but the books they inhabit will last a long, long time.

  Irish Times, 2015