The Slippage: A Novel

by Ben Greenman

  About the book

  Plotting a Point

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I went to see an author read at a bookstore. He was older, though probably not as old as I am now. He was not exactly famous, but he had done good work for years. He was proud of what he had achieved, and rightly so. I sat on an uncomfortable chair with two dozen other youngish people and admired his reading for the clarity of vision, the lack of histrionics, and the evident pleasure he took in his sentences. He was not self-satisfied. He was not foolish. He did not talk about things like advances or sales. He was a good role model for a young writer.

  Afterward, the audience asked questions. Two of them have remained with me. The second, I’ll talk about later. The first came from a young woman in the crowd who stood to ask it. She asked the writer why he wrote at all. The audience laughed, but it wasn’t a combative question. I think she just wanted to know why an intelligent person with other options would devote his life to the art of prose, which is often a prescription for obscurity. He thought about it. He scratched his not quite beard. “Well,” he said. “I guess to connect with people.”

  At that moment, my heart fell a little bit. I didn’t measure it, but I’d guess a centimeter. It fell because his answer was incomprehensible to me, and it was incomprehensible to me because, up to that point, my own fiction had approached the question from the opposite direction. I wrote not to connect with others, but to prove the impossibility of connecting with others. One of the first stories I had finished was from the perspective of a dog about to get put down in an animal shelter. The dog was uncertain what his life had meant, if anything. The dog had loved the human to whom he had been attached, or thought he had, but his current state cast that entire set of memories into doubt. The dog was exiting life with only slightly more information than he possessed when he entered it, and less certainty that any of that information had value. I’m not sure the story was any good, though it contained at least one nice touch, which was that the dog could express himself, but only within his own head. He was narrating, but not communicating. He had thoughts, but no one understood him, or even heard him.

  It is possible that if I had stayed after the reading and approached the author to talk about his answer, he would have reconciled his worldview and mine. He might have said that the impossibility of connecting was exactly what motivated his attempt to connect. We might have been speaking the same language. But I left. I thought I was proving my point by leaving, but maybe I had proven his point by going to the reading in the first place. Maybe I had proven his point by reading at all, his work and the work of others, or by feeling, as I encountered any book, a mix of attraction and repulsion: to the prose, to characters, to an author’s ear for language, to imagery, to plots. Maybe I had proven no one’s point.

  The story about the dog was published in a college literary magazine a few years later. The writer from the reading got a little more famous, then a little less famous, then a little more, then a little less. It was and remains an admirable course. A while later, I got a deal with a publishing house. When the first copy of my first book came off the press, I flashed back to that reading, and to that question. Was writing about connecting with people, or about erecting a monument to the fact that connection was impossible? In that first book, and for many years afterward, I answered that question indirectly: aggressively, but indirectly. I wrote high-concept short stories, often comic, that had a certain amount of alienation or ruptured communication baked right into the dough.

  Then it came time to write a more traditional novel. “The time has come,” said a voice from on high. It turned out to be my editor. The first thing I did was reject the suggestion out of hand. Instead of taking up a traditional story, or a traditional mode of storytelling, I created a new character who was the enemy of tradition: a conceptual artist who distilled his fears about the way the world (mal)functioned into a series of graphs. His approach, I decided, would be to burlesque any attempt to make sense of the chaos and randomness of the world. Shortly after I thought of him, I started to make graphs on his behalf. One of the first was a recursive commentary on the way comprehension slips away from you even as you reach for it.

  That graph made me laugh, once, and then it made me sad. It contains both sadistic and masochistic elements. It has also landed differently in my mind at different times: it has seemed like a superficial paradox but also a profound abyss. A little while later, I was looking at it upside down and thought of a companion graph.

  That one was also sad, maybe even sadder. Look at the line: It goes up like something optimistic: a bird on the wing, an answered prayer. But it’s measuring the dishonesty needed to falsify that optimism. I tacked that one up next to the first one and looked at it until the gray line went even grayer, at which point I made another graph about dishonesty.

  At around that point, the idea of a novel-length work based on that character fell apart. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. I found myself backing off of the graphs slightly. It wasn’t because my editor and I had talked about a more traditional novel. It was because the graphs were comfortable for me in every way. They were habit. I made dozens of them. And while part of creative work is doing the things that you do well, part is deciding when to disrupt your own habits. In terms of that question from the reading decades ago, the graphs were not a way of connecting with others, or even a way of admitting that connection was impossible. They were a way of forestalling the question by communicating primarily with myself.

  I printed out the graphs, set them aside, and moved forward with the novel. It became something different, less a staging ground for conceptual pieces, more a straightforward investigation of marriage, of childlessness, of emotional and sexual infidelity. These were common topics, I knew, because they engirdled the lives of many people I knew.

  Then a strange thing happened. A guy I had communicated with a little bit online started posting the graphs on his website, and the graphs began to acquire some measure of popularity. People responded to them. There was, briefly, some talk of making a book of the graphs.

  At that point, I knew I had to abandon them, or at least move them farther and farther away from the novel I was creating. I went back to the book. The conceptual artist became a secondary character. His sister and her husband came to the fore, along with those questions about marriage and fidelity and suburban emptiness and disappearing youth. The charts were still over my desk, addressing some of the same questions, but they were no longer presiding over the book. The charts were now a set of ideas that had been abandoned by another set of ideas. What better way to explore loneliness?

  So, what is loneliness? It’s everything except for the few things that it is not. Last year in the Guardian, Teju Cole made an excellent list of books about loneliness. He picked works by W. G. Sebald, Ralph Ellison, Lydia Davis, and more. All his selections were good, but they were also primarily books about solitude, books about lives without connections. The deeper I got into this book, the more it seemed to be about the opposite: a highly connected life that was nevertheless lonely. (I started to write “that was full of loneliness,” but it seems strange to say that something is full of loneliness. It’s like saying a room is full of emptiness.) The main character, William, is married, without children. He works at an office with coworkers he sees nearly every day. At some point, he starts sleeping with a woman who is not his wife. Does he ever make a meaningful connection? Is it even possible? (There is a moment in the book where he forges a relationship with a boy, the son of an old friend. Briefly, that nourishes him, but it is short-lived as well.) Some might argue that William does what everyone does: he enjoys a series of temporary connections that, over the course of a life, add up. They would not necessarily be wrong. But I would ask them a follow-up question: Add up to what?

  So is that the real question? Is The Slippage an attempt to discover life’s ultimate purpose—or, alternatively, to discover that there isn’t one? That seems grandiose, though it may also be accur
ate. For most of my own life, I have assumed that the thing that makes life tolerable is meaning, and that the thing that makes meaning is art. Facts are necessary things, but they are just the footholds in the wall you use to climb higher so you can see (or hear) art. And even when you get within reach of art, there’s often not enough of it, or at least not enough of the right kind. I don’t mean to say that you can’t find art you like. That’s not hard to do. But liking is only the beginning. Each and every piece of art, whether a short story or a painting or a pop song, has a specific effect on a certain reader/viewer/listener at a certain time. And art, like medicine, can save or doom. Sometimes the art you like isn’t the art that challenges you. Sometimes the art that challenges you isn’t the art that enlarges you. Sometimes a piece of art grabs you tight but lets you go too soon: disappointment. Sometimes you depend on a piece of art to rescue you and it leaves you cold: more loneliness. If you could locate exactly the right kind of art exactly when you needed it, that would be great. But believing in that kind of efficient delivery requires an implausibly optimistic view of the world and how it operates. How things really work, I think, is that we need to clear away much of what’s created so we can find the things that are meaningful to us. And so, in the novel, I found a role for the chart artist by setting up a subplot in which two forces are locked in battle: art and fire. Both are refining forces, though one is an agent of creation and the other an agent of destruction. At one point, following a rash of arsons in town, the chart artist develops what some might call an unhealthy obsession with fire, and then translates his obsession into artwork:

  I liked that graph when I thought of it. It seemed funny without also being mean. I even considered making it the sole graph in the body of the novel, reproduced below a normal old paragraph of prose. Instead, it ended up here. Later, it occurred to me that it (along with many of the other graphs) actually encodes a great deal of anxiety on my part about how artwork is received. This graph, the fire graph, is a metaphor of enthusiasm. It speaks to the odd process by which an audience (of critics, say, or students, or the reading public, whatever that means) does or does not take to a book.

  What happens after a book comes out? People read it and have reactions, and some of them express those reactions, in print or online. It’s a perfectly workable process. But it’s also a strange process, reductive and confusing. Earlier, in telling my story about the reading I attended as a young writer, I mentioned that audience members asked two questions that have remained with me. The first, as I have said, was about connection. The second was this: “Is this your best book?” A young man asked that question. I believe he was wearing overalls, which is neither here nor there. The older (but still young) writer tilted his head as if he was thinking. He scratched his not quite beard. His answer was this: “No.” The audience laughed. “What I mean,” he said, “is that I think the best is yet to come.” Once more my heart fell a little, not because I didn’t see the wisdom of the writer’s answer, but because I thought I saw something false flickering at the heart of it. The chances that your next work will always be better than your last are slim indeed. Over the course of a career, work both draws closer to inspiration and moves farther away from it. Believing in steady improvement is an operating fiction. And yet, pride tells you to be more proud of the most recent work than the work that came before it, and to pretend that it is the most completely realized portrait of your inner state. Again, much of this becomes irrelevant if an artist signs up for a lifetime subscription to his or her own artwork. Long fallow periods can be followed by a new flowering. Movements can be profitably lateral instead of aggressively, deceptively vertical.

  After I left that reading, I went to a restaurant and did some doodling on a napkin. One of the things I doodled was a graph that later inspired a piece of work by the conceptual artist who did not quite become the center of this book. It seems like an appropriate place to end.

  Read on

  Author Recommendations

  THIS BOOK IS ABOUT MARRIAGE: other things, too, but maybe mainly marriage. Here are some other works that also look closely at the idea.

  Frederick Barthelme, Second Marriage. Frederick’s brother Donald has a grand literary reputation, deservedly so. Fewer people, maybe, know about Frederick. His novels are more realistic and also more comic, which combine to make people feel that they’re somehow miniatures. They’re not. They see sharply and they say what they see just as sharply.

  Frederick Busch, Harry and Catherine. Busch is one of my favorites, for his clear-eyed prose and his devotion to real people. This novel takes place solidly in the real world, with politics and history underlying an adult love story. It’s beautifully written and expansive when it comes to ordinary human emotions.

  Lorrie Moore, “Real Estate.” For years, Moore has been putting up good work on this particular plot of land. This story is about illness and compromise and violence and the importance of humor in dissolving all those things, at least temporarily. It also contains a great working definition of marriage: “a fine arrangement generally, except one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.”

  Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates. This, in a way, is the counterweight or countermovement to the Moore story. The people may be specific, but the world they inhabit is very general, satirical in the broad sense. I thought about the Lurie book often as I wrote my own, though they have very little in common. Oh, also, Mick Jagger is in the TV-movie version of the Lurie book.

  The Bible. My book is a book about infidelity, at least somewhat, and it raises the question of whether it can be part of a healthy marriage. Statistics say yes. The Bible says no. But what else does the Bible say? Let’s look at Deuteronomy 22: “If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, and give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel’s father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.” Family values, I guess.

  Donald Westlake, Drowned Hopes. Westlake’s the best, and this is one of his best, a heist book with a nearly perfect hopelessness. Why is it also a book about marriage? Because there’s one little subplot involving Bob, a guard at a reservoir, who is thrust into a hastily arranged marriage with his girlfriend, Tiffany. The marriage and its accompanying pressures proceed directly to Bob’s brain and attack it via nervous breakdown. Bob’s story only takes up a few short chapters—they’re central to the plot, but marginal to the main characters—and it functions like the cartoons around the edges of Mad magazine. Still, it’s one of my favorite portraits of American marriage.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  OTHER BOOKS BY BEN GREENMAN

  Superbad

  Superworse

  A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both

  Correspondences

  Please Step Back

  What He’s Poised to Do

  Celebrity Chekhov

  COPYRIGH
T

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

  Cover art: Salute to Water Bodies by Amy Bennett, courtesy of the artist & Richard Heller Gallery

  Background photograph © PMX/Alamy

  THE SLIPPAGE. Copyright © 2013 by Ben Greenman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-06-199051-9

  EPub Edition © May 2013 ISBN 9780062100665

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