by John Updike
Though Sam, the dictator, is depicted as a schoolboy, his decline from good intentions into tyranny is barely sketched, as if Achebe expected us intuitively to understand the logic whereby an African government deteriorates, in a modern national setting, into graft, a blinding obsequiousness, and the panicky fiats of a power-holder who holds his power in the dark. No ideal of public service or noblesse oblige shelters high office from the rule of rapacity; everything devolves to the demonstration and retention of status. Chris, pondering the political intricacies of secretaries putting their bosses on the line to other bosses, wonders “why everything in this country turns so readily to routines of ritual contest.” An anachronistic old man who administers the healing kola-nut ritual tells his little audience of coup-survivors, “We have seen too much trouble in Kangan since the white man left because those who make plans make plans for themselves only and their families.” Such a stricture is more apt to be applauded by white men than by the black administrators and intellectuals of Africa’s many independent states, and Achebe deserves credit for facing the fact, however obvious it is, that post-colonial Africa has been no paradise. He seems more bemused and depressed than indignant, and, like Donoso in his political misery, offers as guide only a fond look back at the past, fetching up a gracious figure or two from the old, displaced hierarchies. Though a number of deaths occur in Anthills of the Savannah—with a casual suddenness somehow more grievous than Lopito’s strenuous dying—the end effect is not claustrophobic but strangely lively. Life, life persisting and seeking new combinations, is what emerges from the near-cryptic shuffle of scenes, reminding us that this country of Kangan, whatever else it fails to be, is a collection of people, hopeful people. The kola-nut ritual asserts, “If something pursues us we shall escape but if we pursue something we shall catch it.” The novel takes its title from a phrase in a long prose poem of Ikem’s: “like anthills surviving to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year’s brush fires.”
Ungreat Lives
VOICES FROM THE MOON, by Andre Dubus. 126 pp. Godine, 1984.
CONCRETE, by Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by David McLintock. 156 pp. Knopf, 1984.
As a writer, Andre Dubus has come up the hard way, with a resolutely unflashy style and doggedly unglamorous, unironical characters. These characters have tended to live to the north of Boston’s urbane suburbs, in the region of Massachusetts bordering southern New Hampshire, from Newburyport to Haverhill, the city where Mr. Dubus now resides. The Merrimack Valley was the New World’s first real industrial belt, and has been economically disconsolate for decades; the textile mills moved south and then foreign imports undermined the leather and shoe factories. But life goes on, and life’s gallant, battered ongoingness, with its erratic fuelling by sex, religion, and liquor, constitutes his sturdy central subject, which is rendered with a luminous delicacy and a certain attenuating virtuosity in his new, very short novel, Voices from the Moon.
The title comes from a poem by Michael Van Walleghen, mentioning “the several voices/Which have called to you/Like voices from the moon.” The voices, presumably, are the six characters whose points of view and interior monologues the reader shares in the course of nine chapters. The action takes place in one day, and its principal event is the announcement by Greg Stowe, the forty-seven-year-old owner of two ice-cream stores, that he intends to marry his twenty-five-year-old former daughter-in-law, Brenda. Along with Greg’s and Brenda’s, we get to eavesdrop on the thoughts and perceptions of Joan, Greg’s first wife; Larry, Brenda’s first husband and Greg’s older son; Carol, Greg’s twenty-six-year-old daughter; and Richie, his twelve-year-old son. The story, really, is Richie’s; we begin and end in his mind, early in the morning and late at night, and two more chapters trace, as the day progresses, his inner turmoil over this confusing proposed change within his family. He has been living with his father, visiting his mother in the nearby town of Amesbury and often seeing his brother, who will now, he fears, shun the new household. Richie is a normal-appearing boy—“a lean suntanned boy … neither tall nor short”—with the heart of a saint; he likes horseback-riding and softball and cross-country skiing well enough, but the Catholic Church forms his deepest preoccupation and solace. He attends mass, by himself, almost every morning, and hopes to become a priest:
Now Father Oberti lifted the chalice and Richie imagined being inside of him, feeling what he felt as the wine he held became the Blood of Christ. My Lord and my God, Richie prayed, striking his breast, immersing himself in the longing he felt there in his heart: a longing to consume Christ, to be consumed through Him into the priesthood, to stand some morning purified and adoring in white vestments, and to watch his hands holding bread, then God.
On a different plane of attraction from Father Oberti stands Melissa Donnelly, who is three months older than Richie and, at barely thirteen, one of the youngest temptresses in fiction since Nabokov’s Lolita. In the course of the never-violent events of this summer day—a day, like most, of modest revelations and adjustments—we see Richie’s priestly vocation just perceptibly erode. Though the novel bares a number of hearts, in a range of tough, detached, and even perverse adult attitudes, its supreme and presiding achievement is its convincing portrait of this benign male child, from whom the trauma of parental divorce and the instruction of the church have elicited a premature manliness. When his father asks him his opinion of the coming marriage, Richie merely says, “I want you to be happy,” and the gritty older man has the grace to blush and become momentarily speechless.
A dramatically versatile overview as in Voices from the Moon risks reminding us too much of the overviewer. Mr. Dubus has taken especial care with his three women, and has much to tell us about female sexuality and, contrariwise, the female lust for solitude: Joan, having “outlived love,” rejoices in her manless apartment and the comradely after-hours company of her fellow waitresses. Carol and Brenda also live alone, but have not yet outlived love, and seem therefore a bit cursed; one of the novel’s theological implications is that in seeking relief from solitude we sin, and fall inevitably into pain. Joan reflects that “Richie had always been solitary and at peace with it”; so it is with a distinct sense of loss that the reader sees him, at the end, turn toward a human comforter. All three women, though assigned different attributes, are given neither much physical presence nor a palpable distinctness at the core; all three are too ready, perhaps, to train their thoughts upon the bumbling, rugged wonder of the masculine. Brenda fondly marvels at the way male friends never really talk about their lives, standing together at bars for hours, and how they fight “like two male dogs” and how “also like dogs they would not hurt each other.” And Carol, looking at her own father, comfortably sees “in his lowered face, and his smile, that look men wore when they knew they were bad boys yet were loved by a woman anyway.” For Dubus’s men, as for Raymond Carver’s not dissimilar quasi-blue-collar, sixpack-packing heroes, women tend to loom larger than life and to merge into one big, treacherous, irresistible lap. Carol, whose daughterliness cuts across the great sexual division, and Larry, who by a twist in his nature somewhat straddles it, are relatively cloudy stops in Mr. Dubus’s tour of the Stowe family. Of his nine chapters, too many end with an embrace, with or without tears, and sometimes the language becomes overemotional: “and in the sound of his expelled breath Greg heard defeat and resignation, and they struck his heart a blow that nearly broke him, nearly forced him to lower his face into his hands and weep.” The language can also wax abstract: “Because when you fought so much and so hard, against pain like this as well as the knee-deep bullshit of the world, so you could be free to lie in the shade of contentment and love, the great risk was that you would be left without joy or passion, and in the long evenings of respite and solitude would turn to the woman you loved with only the distracted touch, the distant murmurs of tired responsibility.” At the opposite pole, the simplicities of Hemingway intrude: “He crouched to lock the rear wheel and was
very hungry and hoped his father was making pancakes.” And there is an excess of procedural detail, relating not to catching fish in the Big Two-Hearted River but to food preparation along the Merrimack: pancakes and bacon, tequila, lunch for the diet-conscious, vodka with onions and pepper—we learn how to prepare and consume them all. These characters are well catered to.
Yet Mr. Dubus’s willingness to brood so intently above his disturbed, divorced, mostly lapsed Catholics lends his survey an aerial quality, an illusion of supernatural motion, that reminds us of what people used to read novels for. How rare it is, these days, to encounter characters with wills, with a sense of choice. Richie and his father both muster their inner strengths, make resolves, and grieve over their decisions. The most threatening opponents, Greg believes, are spiritual: “self-pity, surrender to whatever urged him to sloth or indifference or anomie or despair.” In this book the streams of consciousness are channelled by mental exertion; the mind is a garden where some thoughts and impulses should be weeded out and others encouraged. An idea of purity beckons everyone to a clean place described by the epigraph:
No, there is
Nothing left for you
But to stand here
Full of your own silence
Which is itself a whiteness
And all the light you need.
Greg daydreams of walking beside an unspoiled Amazon, “where each step was a new one, on new earth.” Brenda renounces promiscuity, and Joan has walked away from motherhood, at enduring cost to herself; when the opportunity arises to “tell one of her children something she knew, and to help the child,” she seizes it, spelling out for Larry—who feels humiliated by losing his ex-wife to his father—the way in which the wound will heal and life will go on. For Jack Kerouac, another Franco-American from the Merrimack Valley, Roman Catholicism had dwindled to a manic spark, a frenetic mission to find the sacred everywhere; for Mr. Dubus, amid the self-seeking egos of secular America, the church still functions as a standard of measure, a repository of mysteries that can give scale and structure to our social lives. The family and those intimate connections that make families are felt by this author as sharing the importance of our souls, and our homely, awkward movements of familial adjustment and forgiveness as being natural extensions of what Pascal called “the motions of Grace.”
• • •
Motions of another sort, in another country and on another social level, are described in Concrete. Though short, the novel—the fourth by Thomas Bernhard to be translated into English—does not seem especially so. Bernhard’s particular contribution to the armory of the avant-garde, and a daunting one, was the elimination of paragraphs, so that the bitter pill of his writing is administered as steadily as an IV drip, and solid page follows solid page as if in an album of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings.
However, his sentences make lucid sense. Trained as a musician, Bernhard wrote for the ear, and in Concrete the voice of the narrator flutters on and on, unravelling in a fascinating comedy of self-incrimination. The narrator’s name is Rudolf, and he is writing these “notes,” it turns out, in Palma, on Mallorca. But most of the action (if you can call it that) occurs in Rudolf’s country estate of Peiskam, where his delicate nervous system is recovering from a visit by his sister and he is trying to sit down at last to “a major work of impeccable scholarship” upon the composer Mendelssohn. Rudolf, who lived in Vienna for twenty years, was active in musical circles there and may even have published a critical article or two but has long since retired to Peiskam, where he fulminates, takes medicine, stalls, and becomes more and more of a recluse, seeing on a regular basis only Frau Kienesberger, his housekeeper. He is, we eventually learn, forty-eight years old and for most of his life has been dependent on medicine: “I myself owe everything to chemicals—to put it briefly—and have done for the last thirty years.” A life so fruitless and self-indulgent requires money: “Basically I have no right whatever to lead the life I do, which is as unparalleled—and as terrible—as it is expensive.” His wealth is inherited, and rouses his prose to one of its few surges of enthusiasm:
My sister’s business sense, which is her most distinctive trait, though no one would suspect it without knowing her as well as I do, comes from our paternal grandfather. It was he who made the family fortune, in the most curious circumstances, but at all events, however he did it, he made so much money that my sister and I, the third generation, still have enough for our existence, and all in all neither of us leads the most modest existence.… In fact, even though I am the most incompetent person in all so-called money matters, I could live for another twenty years without having to earn a penny, and then I could still sell off one parcel of land after another without seriously impairing the estate and thus lowering its value, but that won’t be necessary, and it’s absurd to contemplate it in view of the fact that I have only a very short time left to live, thanks to the incessant and inexorable progress of my illness.
Devotees of modern literature have met Rudolf’s type of neurasthenic, self-doubting, hypercritical, indecisive, and demanding personality often before—in the letters and works of Kafka and Proust above all, but also in the luxuriant nervous systems and imaginations of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann. These all, of course, got down to work, and it is doubtful that Rudolf ever will; but the artistic sensibility, and a certain power of fascination, are his. His diatribes have a swing to them—Austrian politics becomes “all the horror stories emanating from the Ballhausplatz, where a half-crazed Chancellor is at large, issuing half-crazed orders to his idiotic ministers [and] all the horrendous parliamentary news which daily jangles in my ears and pollutes my brain and which all comes packaged in Christian hypocrisy.” The suggestion that he get a dog to relieve his solitude prompts a magnificent caricature, not without truth, of the global dog situation:
The masses are in favour of dogs because in their heart of hearts they are not prepared to incur the strenuous effort of being alone with themselves, an effort which in fact calls for greatness of soul.… If the dog has to go out, I have to go out too, and so on. I won’t tolerate this dog comedy, which we can see enacted every day if we only open our eyes and haven’t become blinded to it by daily familiarity. In this comedy a dog comes on the stage and makes life a misery for some human being, exploiting him and, in the course of several acts, or just one or two, driving out of him all his harmless humanity.
Sudden aphorisms dart from Rudolf’s free-wheeling discourse: “Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophany.” “Everyone wants to be alive, nobody wants to be dead. Everything else is a lie.” His own maneuvers—changing rooms, arising at a certain hour—to minimize his discomforts and secure a foothold in which he can begin writing his book have the beguiling energy of Kafka’s nameless hero’s futile efforts to secure his “Burrow.” These movements and the shifts of his monologue suggest less Pascal’s motions of Grace than what Nathalie Sarraute described as “numerous, entangled movements that have come up from the depths,” and whose “restless shimmer” exists “somewhere on the fluctuating frontier that separates conversation from sub-conversation.” Rudolf’s sister exists in his discourse as elusively as a sea-monster in deep waters: she first appears to be a vulgar ogress whom he detests, but as he goes on, and describes her active life as a real-estate agent among the very rich, we see her as a normally dynamic woman of a certain set and style, faithfully trying to tease and goad her neurotic little brother into something like her own health. He does not hate her; he loves her, with the resentful adoration the ineffective feel for the effective, an emotion given its classic expression in Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” Rudolf goes Kafka one better, however, in finally identifying with his sister, for all his protests against her: “We’re both like this: for decades we’ve been accusing each other of being impossible, and yet we can’t give up being impossible, erratic, capricious and vacillating.”
And, just when the
reader has resigned himself to another Beckettian study of total inertia and claustrophobic captivity, Rudolf manages to get himself out of fogbound Peiskam and to Palma. There he describes the scenery, the relative warmth, his agonies of recuperation after the adventure of the flight, and a story told to him over two years ago, during his previous visit to Mallorca, by a stranger, a Bavarian named Anna Härdtl, whom he and a local friend met on the street. Her tale, of a young woman’s rather pedestrian misadventures with marriage and an ill-advised appliance shop, was as relevant as a shaggy-dog story to Rudolf’s normal concerns, but he listened and now relates it, briskly and circumstantially, in his normally self-obsessed “notes.” On his present visit to Palma, his memory of Anna Härdtl causes him to visit the local cemetery, where all the tombs are of concrete, giving this book its title. The hardness of Palma concrete contrasts with the soft fog and musty furniture of Peiskam, and, though Rudolf ends in his usual, typically modernist state of “extreme anxiety,” he has been brought, for an interval, to think of somebody else’s troubles.