More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  I go on about the difference between The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled because When We Were Orphans feels like an attempt to bridge the two. We’re returned from the Mitteleuropean shadows and fog of The Unconsoled to the ostensibly real and historically fraught cities of London and Shanghai between the World Wars, recalling not only The Remains of the Day but also J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and Ishiguro’s two earliest novels. Orphans’s narrator and lead, Christopher Banks, has a Ballardian Shanghai childhood, playing with an expatriate Japanese kid against a backdrop of strife. He’s orphaned at nine by his parents’ vanishing, then whisked to England, where he makes good on childhood fantasies by becoming a “celebrated detective” (impossible, you’ll see, not to put that in quotes). Later he returns to Shanghai to rescue his parents and punish their kidnappers. The Detective’s voice is as agonizingly seemly as the butler’s was in Remains, and, like the butler’s, is full of awkward hesitations and ellipses that suggest unconfronted emotional and factual material. Only the material may be a little stranger in the Detective’s case.

  Orphan’s closest parallel to The Unconsoled, to put it simply, is that the events in the narration don’t make sense. This realization comes gradually, as the novel’s unruffled surface disguises any lapses in logic. The Shanghai Boy Detective’s story is strewn with gaps, but after all it is a kid’s memory, hanging first on a fantasy about a scary manservant who collects monkeys’ hands and magically transforms them into spiders, second on a series of What Maisie Knew hints that Mom is having an affair with the mysterious Uncle Philip. Flash forward: Back in England, the Grown Detective is gathering accolades and pining, ever so politely, for love. Prewar London here has a very Anthony Powell feel, full of cocktail parties and abrupt marriages. Among the adults, the narration’s solipsistic undertone is harder to ignore.

  What the hell kind of detective is the Detective, anyway? He’s got Sherlock Holmes’s gift for effortlessly making sense of baffling crimes and a Holmesian obsession with ferreting out the insidious, evil secret that links all crime and—who knows?—perhaps all human misery. But he’s as humble and normal as Dr. Watson. And about as plausible as the two rolled together. Which is to say, as likely as a boy’s fantasy that “detection” can control or dismiss the chaos of adult experience—in this case, war, parental sexuality, parental death. Ishiguro might almost be satirizing Andrew Vachss, whose detective rescues abused children with a protests-too-much regularity that begs for Freudian interpretation. Or remember The Seven-Percent Solution, where a fictional Freud carefully guides Holmes to the realization that his nemesis Moriarty is really only his mother’s secret lover?

  The fact that the book is a phantasmagoria becomes undeniable after The Detective’s return to Shanghai. Ishiguro’s at his best here, uncorking the seamless but wild shifts of emphasis, and the gently titled camera angles, which made The Unconsoled such a fastidious piece of surrealism. The Detective is caught behind enemy lines in the Sino-Japanese war in a ludicrously garbled quest for the “house of the blind actor, Yeh Chen,” where, he’s come to believe, his parents are still being held, over twenty years after their kidnapping. He’s also on a hunt for the mysterious Japanese POW known as Yellow Snake. Throughout he’s dogged by a sycophantic officer named Grayson, whose confidence in our hero is such that he’s preemptively arranged a public festival for the celebration of the parents’ rescue. Holy doppelgänger, Commissioner! Grayson is the civilian name of Batman’s sidekick, the Boy Wonder. And Batman, come to think of it, is another analogue—a parent-avenging detective living in a world tailored to function as his personal psychodramatic morality play.

  I’m spoiling the plot next, so put your fingers in your ears and hum real loud if plot’s your thing. Any last doubts as to the grip of childhood material on adult experience—or dream—are trashed when the Japanese expat playmate reappears in a soldier’s uniform, Yellow Snake is revealed to be a close family friend, and the Detective’s mother turns out to have been kept as a sex slave of a barbarian warlord, like Barbara Stanwyck in Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen, or Natalie Wood in The Searchers. Even if I’ve got the sources wrong, I’m namedropping to suggest what Ishiguro’s upper-crusty tone and pedigree seem to deny: that pop-cultural archetypes murmur under the surface of When We Were Orphans. And that a smoothed-over intertextuality in Ishiguro’s last two novels is part of what’s made them hard to get, and part of what makes Ishiguro weirder, as I said, than you might have thought. I’m still not sure whether or not I think the book completely works, but I’ll say for certain that I don’t know of another famous novelist I so wished worked faster, or who I think is moving in a more encouragingly odd direction.

  —Bookforum, 2000

  Footnote on Ishiguro

  Some of these pieces embarrass me. Mainly the book reviews. I think they’re scrupulous critical forays, and I certainly never took shortcuts in the required reading, or falsified my assessments—and that’s why I’m proud enough to help Chris Boucher assemble them here for reprinting, rather than letting them evaporate into the ether. What embarrasses me is the tone, especially in the earliest pieces, those dating back to 1999 and first years of the new millennium. The two entries written for the Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors—Ishiguro and Berger—are good examples. I was new to writing literary criticism, actually new to non-fiction of any kind, and the tone I located came from my earliest impressions of what criticism should sound like. It was borrowed from reading Anthony Burgess’s 99 Novels and But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?, and Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, and Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, and to a certain extent from growing up reading Updike’s book reviews in The New Yorker and Andrew Sarris’s film reviews in The Village Voice. It was a pretty stuffy borrowed tone, to be honest.

  Writing about Ishiguro and Berger a second time you see me groping my way to something a bit more relaxed. Whether I overtly introduce a personal anecdote or make reference to a personal obsession, my approach is anyway more personal, more willingly subjective. My thinking is also, mercifully, couched in a (somewhat) less posh and tortured syntax. On the whole, that’s the approach that pleases me most, and the one that prevails eventually. While the casually-sidling-up-to-you-on-the-barstool approach can certainly become wearisome (did I really have to talk about my smashed fingernail to review Cronenberg’s Consumed?), it has the permanent and renewable virtue of dissipating any air of bogus objectivity. Books are reviewed as they are written, by individuals on or off their game, in or out of their comfort zone, kidding or not kidding themselves about what they understand and control (always some of both, of course). The difference is that the review is written very quickly. You know how college students write papers? Yeah, like that. I think you can count on this. Whereas the book is beneficiary (ha!) of years of rumination, stalling, reservations, well-manicured self-loathing, and the layering-on of gloss, as on the hull of a sailboat.

  Despite gloss, sailboats sometimes sink. Maybe the gloss was too heavy. But I digress.

  The thing I wanted to say about Ishiguro is this: the tone is better in the second piece, but the piece is demonstrably silly. Why should dissipating an air of bogus objectivity be such a good idea? Because objectivity is bogus: reviewers bring stuff to the table. Blindspots, baggage, peeves, leanings, agendas—selves. What I brought to When We Were Orphans was a pet theory, about Batman. The reason I know it is wrong is because one day in London, years later, I sat at Kaz Ishiguro’s dining room table, and brought up the theory I’d aired out in this piece (which he sort-of recalled, or pretended to). Then Ish told me he’d never had Batman in mind, and had no special interest or fondness for Batman. He was very nice about it.

  Why, then, you ask, am I reprinting a piece that I have now called silly and wrong? Because I still feel that in writing the piece, I arrived somewhere I like, and like sharing: it is a layer of gloss I laid on someone else’s boat.

  High Priest of the Paranoids

&n
bsp; Philip K. Dick is a necessary writer, in the someone-would-have-had-to-invent-him sense. He’s American literature’s Lenny Bruce. Like Bruce, he can seem a pure product of the 1950s (and, as William Carlos Williams warned, pure products of America go crazy), one whose iconoclastic maladaption to the conformity of that era seems to shout ahead to our contemporary understanding. And, as with Bruce, the urge to claim him for any cultural role—Hippie, Postmodern Theorist, Political Dissident, Metaphysical Guru—is defeated by the contradictions generated by a singular and irascible persona. Still, no matter what problems he presents, Dick wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one which makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him.

  Dick’s great accomplishment, on view in the twenty-one stories collected here, was to turn the materials of American pulp-style science fiction into a vocabulary for a remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation. It’s a vision as yearning and anxious as Kafka’s, if considerably more homely. It’s also as funny. Dick is a kitchen-sink surrealist, gaining energy and invention from a mad piling of pulp SF tropes—and clichés—into his fiction: time travel, extrasensory powers, tentacled aliens, ray guns, androids and robots. He loves fakes and simulacra as much as he fears them: illusory worlds, bogus religions, placebo drugs, impersonated police, cyborgs. Tyrannical world governments and ruined dystopian cities are default settings here—not only have Orwell and Huxley been taken as givens in Dick’s worlds, so have Old Masters of genre SF like Clifford Simak, and Robert Heinlein and A. E. Van Vogt. American SF by the mid-1950s was a kind of jazz, stories built by riffing on stories. The conversation they formed might be forbiddingly hermetic, if it hadn’t quickly been incorporated by Rod Serling and Marvel Comics and Steven Spielberg (among many others), and become one of the prime vocabularies of our age.

  Dick is one of the first writers to use these materials with self-conscious absurdity—a “look at what I found!” glee which prefigures that of writers like Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders, and Mark Leyner. Yet having set his characters loose inside his Rube Goldbergian inventions, Dick detailed their emotional abreactions with meticulous sympathy. His people eke out their days precariously, never knowing whether disaster is about to come at the level of the psychological, the ontological, or the pharmacological. Even his tyrannical world dictators glance neurotically over their shoulders, wondering if some higher authority is about to cause their reality to crumble or in some other way be exposed as fake. Alternately, they could always simply be arrested. Dick earned his collar as High Priest of the Paranoids the old-fashioned way: in his fiction, everyone is always about to be arrested.

  The second set of motifs Dick employed was more prosaic: a perfectly typical 1950s obsession with the images of the suburbs, the consumer, the bureaucrat, and with the plight of small men struggling under the imperatives of capitalism. If Dick, as a bearded, drug-taking Californian, might have seemed a candidate for Beatdom (and in fact did hang out with the San Francisco poets), his persistent engagement with the main materials of his culture kept him from floating off into reveries of escape. It links him instead to writers like Richard Yates, John Cheever, and Arthur Miller (The British satirist John Sladek’s bulls-eye Dick parody was titled “Solar Shoe Salesman.”) Dick’s treatment of his “realist” material can seem oddly cursory, as though the pressing agenda of his paranoiac fantasizing, which would require him to rip the façade off, drop the atomic bomb onto, or otherwise renovate ordinary reality, made that reality’s actual depiction unimportant. But no matter how many times Dick unmasks or destroys the Black Iron Prison of American suburban life, he always returns to it. Unlike the characters in William S. Burroughs, Richard Brautigan, or Thomas Pynchon, Dick’s characters, in novels and stories written well into the 1970s, go on working for grumbling bosses, carrying briefcases, sending interoffice memos, tinkering with cars in driveways, sweating alimony payments, and dreaming of getting away from it all—even when they’ve already emigrated to Mars.

  Though Dick’s primary importance is as a novelist, no single volume better encompasses his accomplishment than this collection, which doubles as a kind of writer’s autobiography, a growth chart. From Twilight Zone–ish social satires (“Roog,” “Foster, You’re Dead”) to grapplings with a pulp-adventure chase-scene mode which was already weary before Dick picked it up (“Paycheck,” “Imposter”), the earliest pieces nevertheless declare obsessions and locate methods that would serve for thirty-odd years. In “Adjustment Team” and “Autofac,” we begin to meet the Dick of the great sixties novels, his characters defined by how they endure more than by any triumph over circumstance. “Upon the Dull Earth” presents an eerie path-not-taken into Gothic fantasy, one that reads like a Shirley Jackson outtake. Then, there is the Martian-farmer-émigré mode, which always showed Dick at his best: “Precious Artifact” and “A Game of Unchance.” Later, in “Faith of Our Fathers” we encounter the Dick of his late masterpiece A Scanner Darkly, working with the I Ching at one elbow and the Physicians’ Desk Reference at the other. “Faith of Our Fathers,” together with “The Electric Ant” and “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts,” offers among the most distilled and perfect statements of Dick’s career: black-humor politics melting away to Gnostic theology, theology to dire solipsism, solipsism to despair, then love. And back again.

  If Dick thrived on the materials of SF, he was less than thrilled with the fate of being only an SF writer. Whether or not he was ready for the world, or the world ready for him, he longed for a respectable recognition, and sought it variously and unsuccessfully throughout his life. In fact, he wrote eight novels in a somber realist mode during the 1950s and early 1960s, a shadow career known mainly to the agents who failed to place the books with various New York publishers. It’s stirring to wonder what Dick might have done with a wider professional opportunity, but there’s little doubt that his SF grew more interesting for being fed by the frustrated energies of his “mainstream” ambition. Possibly, too, a restless streak in Dick’s personality better suited him for the outsider-artist status he tasted during his lifetime. Dick was obsessed with stigma, with mutation and exile, and with the recurrent image of a spark of life or love arising from unlikely or ruined places: robot pets, discarded appliances, autistic children. SF was Dick’s ruined site. Keenly engaged with his own outcast identity, he worked brilliantly from the margins (in this regard, it may be possible to consider the story “The King of the Elves” as an allegory of Dick’s career). “Sci-Fi Writer” became a kind of identity politics for Dick, as did “Drug Burnout” and “Religious Mystic”—these during the period when identity politics weren’t otherwise the province of white American males. Here, from an introduction written for Golden Man, a collection of stories assembled in 1980, Dick reminisces:

  In reading the stories in this volume you should bear in mind that most were written when SF was so looked down upon that it virtually was not there, in the eyes of all America. This was not funny, the derision felt toward SF writers. It made our lives wretched. Even in Berkeley—or especially in Berkeley—people would say, “But are you writing anything serious?” To select SF writing as a career was an act of self-destruction; in fact, most writers, let alone most other people, could not even conceive of someone considering it. The only non-SF writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, who I met at a literary party in San Francisco. He autographed a file card to me this way: “To a colleague, Philip K. Dick.” I kept the card until the ink faded and was gone, and I still feel grateful to him for this charity…So in my head I have to collate the experience in 1977 of the mayor of Metz shaking hands with me at an official city function, [Dick had just received an arts medal in France] and the ordeal of the Fifties when Kleo and I lived on ninety dollars a month, when we could not even pay the fine on an overdue library book, and when we were literally living on dog food. But I think you should know this—specifically, in case you are, say, in your twen
ties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are an SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is a justified fear. People do starve in America. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains have been burned-out by drugs, men who could still think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempt to weather that which cannot be weathered…Kabir, the sixteenth century Sufi poet, wrote, “If you have not lived through something, it is not true.” So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.”

  The conflations in this passage are so perfectly typical—SF writer and uneducated street girl, Dick’s suffering and yours. His self-mocking humility at Herbert Gold’s “charity” is balanced against that treasured, ink-fading file card: a certainty that value resides in the smallest gestures, in scraps of empathy. Dick was a writer doomed to be himself, and the themes of his most searching and personal writing of the 1970s and early 1980s surface helplessly in even the earliest stories: the fragility of connection, the allure and risk of illusion, the poignancy of artifacts, and the necessity of carrying on in the face of the demoralizing brokenness of the world. Dick famously posed two questions—“What is human?” and “What is real?”—and then sought to answer them in any framework he thought might suffice. By the time of his death he’d tried and discarded many dozen such frameworks. The questions remained. It is the absurd beauty of their asking that lasts.