Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  The title of Alice in Bed, a sprightly first novel by Cathleen Schine, evokes another Alice, and in truth our nineteen-year-old heroine does seem to be frequently in Wonderland:

  At that moment, Alice lay on her stomach on a table. Her legs were trussed behind her and hung from the ceiling like a ham. “Get me outta here,” she called occasionally.

  “Leave it to me,” the staff nurse said, and Alice was pulled up in bed, her feet were put on footrests, and the rest of her was twirled until her shoulders pressed against the back of the chair. She seemed to be sitting, but was actually several inches above the seat.

  The nurse said, “There!”

  Alice, rigid, resembled the figure in the middle frame of a film strip depicting “The Ejector Seat in Action.”

  A light glared from above. She could see her reflection in the aluminum shade: an expanse of crumpled blue sheets, at one end a little white face, at the other white legs. People in green bustled around her. They all had shower caps on their shoes.

  The rabbit hole that this Alice, a Sarah Lawrence sophomore from Westport, Connecticut, has fallen down is the chasm of disease—her legs have suddenly ceased to function, her hips have agonizingly fused—and her adventures take place in the madcap underworld of a Manhattan hospital and then a rehabilitation center farther downtown. The marvels of modern medical treatment are scarifyingly, if nonchalantly, portrayed as a farce of brutality and noncomprehension, a kind of M*A*S*H de luxe. Though Alice is given all the expert attention her very rich father can afford, no diagnosis, not even a name, is bestowed upon her affliction. “My doctors have finally come up with a possible diagnosis,” she writes a friend. “I may have osteomyelitis, which means my hips are rotting from an infection. Or I may have aseptic necrosis, which means my hips are rotting, but not from an infection. Well! You can imagine how relieved I am to know what’s wrong.” The tall and handsome Dr. Witherspoons (“He took care of famous football teams and was famous himself”) pays a daily visit in which he twists her feet so that she shrieks and sometimes passes out. “The hips never actually moved and neither foot could possibly turn out toward the edge of the bed or in toward the other foot—her joints were unyielding blocks of bone. Why did he insist on twisting this inflamed solid mass?… She thought about it and thought about it, and finally decided Dr. Witherspoons was determining the degree of inflammation from the decibel of her screams.” An especially callous and incompetent nurse, Mrs. Trawling, lets Alice suffer an entire night with worsening phlebitis of the arm rather than pull the I.V. A broken machine would get more care and understanding than Alice, as she describes it. Later, at the rehab center, some of her physical therapists are at least seen as torturers with a purpose, and the nameless surgeon who finally operates on her hips is spared, by way of thanks, being characterized at all.

  If the title also suggests one of those demure-appearing “adult” books toward the rear of the paperback rack, this isn’t entirely wrong, either, for our heroine, at the height of her misery and incapacitation, manages to perform what used to be called an unnatural act upon two men both old enough to be her father. When she becomes a bit more able-bodied, she seduces a boy with a broken spine and, to test her new prostheses, “a friendly aide, who brought along a bottle of Ripple.” Not too much is made of any of this, and it is probably realistic. “In the mist of pain and drugs, her thoughts waxed pornographic.… These two men and their organs seemed to be the only things she had any control over, and she would wait in her bed like a despot to exercise her power.” Beneath its gossamer-light prose and schoolgirl jokiness Alice in Bed is a saga of the body; as a portrait of une femme sensuelle moyenne, a bright upper-class Jewish girl abruptly plunged into a physical nightmare, it is hard to fault. Alice is more than anything bewildered, and focuses on the immediate. She doesn’t aspire to a saint’s fortitude, but she is no Job, either, troubling the heavens with her complaint. Her suffering doesn’t tie into anything bigger; it is big enough in itself. Ms. Schine creditably solves the curiously technical literary problem of how to represent pain. Since pain, like music, is virtually indescribable, there is little to do but carve a kind of empty space on the page where the impalpable entity would fit:

  Her legs, which barely bent at all, were pushed until her knees were as close to her chest as possible. An aide held them there, straining against them, while strange geometric pieces of foam rubber were placed around her hips, knees, and legs. The aide let go, and Alice realized she was wedged into the horrible position by the innocent-looking triangles, circles, and squares. The pain was so intense that she felt nothing but a kind of huge, spilling heat.

  Alice in Bed bears comparison with another tale of a cruelly hurt young person, Denton Welch’s A Voice Through a Cloud; both works leave icy shards in the mind.

  Ms. Schine writes in short, cool takes that in their innocent juxtapositions are often funny. She has a real caricaturist’s flair; of Alice’s two middle-aged lovers, Simchas Fresser, a hypnotist from Israel, is sketched as having hair that “when he had taken off his sheepskin hat … rose off his head like a wedge of cake” and the diminutive, playful Dr. Davis as “sitting lightly on the chair, elegant as an egg in a nest.” Alice’s letters to her friend Katie, who is incarcerated in a mental institution, and to her father, who has left her mother and moved to Vancouver, are sassy and sad in exact late-adolescent proportions. Alice has a smidgin of literary ambition:

  Then Alice read an article announcing that everyone was writing screenplays, so she began her own. “I Was a Teenage Gimp,” she wrote at the top of a sheet of paper. She crossed that out and wrote “The Magic Molehill.”

  But Ms. Schine’s glancing, skipping style, while it makes Alice’s yearlong ordeal bearable to read about, does not do well at creating the weave, the thickening circumstance, of a novel. Alice’s parents, though her mother is in constant attendance and her father’s inopportune defection is a source of pain to rival osteomyelitis, remain minor characters, bundles of identifying tics more than felt presences in Alice’s world. Their separation and divorce, though simultaneous with Alice’s illness, never merges with it in a way that would indicate a novelist in charge. Things just happen in this book. Characters—visitors, nurses, fellow invalids—come and go, appear and disappear. Dr. Davis, to whom much drolly honed description is devoted, vanishes from Alice’s life without a farewell, and Simchas Fresser gets a one-line kiss-off: “Simchas Fresser went into a deep depression and they had to stop seeing each other.” Alice’s year of agony and rehabilitation is a kind of clothesline on which incidents and characters dangle and dry. Even the central questions that keep us reading—what is wrong with Alice? will she be cured?—are answered in a manner offhand and skimped; a wry, skittish, female lie-down comic vies for our attention with Alice the agonist.

  Both this and Mrs. Jhabvala’s novel show a world without guilt, one in which nobody makes a mistake. Whether your hips freeze or you fall in love with a rotter, it’s beyond your control, it happens to you. Without the possibility of a mistake, there can be nothing to repent of, and no tragedy—just the flow of what Freud called common human unhappiness, bearing along with it moments of exceptional health. Louise Sonnenblick’s happy moment occurs when she is about Alice’s age, a young woman skating on the frozen pond of the Gruenewald: “She glided around on the ice with the same ease as she danced, not thinking of her feet at all. Her eyes were half shut so that the bright crystal sunlight came to her dimly, and so did the voices of the other skaters.” She has not seen Bruno standing there admiring her. He treats her to a cup of hot chocolate; while her attention is intent upon keeping a chocolate-and-froth mustache from appearing on her lip, he begins to propose. Still very much a girl, “she wanted to get back to her drink—she loved it so—but desisted, for she realized this was a very solemn moment.” And a moment handsomely realized in fiction, a moment worthy of Thomas Mann in its corporeal radiance and latent irony. Both these novels, so unlike in their textures—the one Ger
manic and musty, the other American and breezy—have their moments and epiphanies, but all somehow displayed behind glass, like beautiful objects that can no longer be handled. The reader never quite ceases to be an audience, of human lives that offer those who live them no alternatives and therefore pass as sheer glossy spectacle, like the existences of animals.

  Back to Nature

  SEVEN RIVERS WEST, by Edward Hoagland. 319 pp. Summit Books, 1986.

  REINDEER MOON, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. 338 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

  Once upon a time in the Fifties, before words like “ecology” and “counterculture” had any circulation and when the phrase “back to Nature” comfortably implied that there would always be a Nature to go back to, there were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two young literary persons destined to spend an unusual amount of their future out-of-doors, in faraway places, seeking rapport with animals and so-called primitive peoples. Edward Hoagland and Elizabeth Marshall, of the Harvard-Radcliffe class of 1954, precocious as writers (he wrote an eventually published novel, Cat Man, while still an undergraduate, and she had a short story printed in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories of 1953), have trod the less trodden ways in the decades since, and have become known for their non-fiction—his essays and travel books and her anthropological studies of African tribes. Now, within a few months of each other, both have produced novels—he, Seven Rivers West, and she, Reindeer Moon. Both books describe (and include maps of) perilous treks in a reconstructed past—his, the Canadian Rockies of 1887, and hers, central Siberia twenty thousand years ago. And both are excellent books, wonderful in the root sense: they renew our sense of wonder. They revive that elemental awareness dulled in the all-but-suffocatingly urbanized America of our tired century.

  Hoagland’s fiction, though he followed Cat Man with two other novels, has been quietly received. Readers of The New Yorker may recall from seventeen years ago a curious gem of a short story, “The Final Fate of the Alligators,” about an aging sailor who kept a fully grown alligator in a bathtub in his apartment on Twenty-first Street. It and two other tales of Manhattan were published last year under the title City Tales, by the Capra Press of Santa Barbara. The two non-alligator stories display a tough wisdom, a poetic slant, and many superb sentences but also an elusive grittiness—a faint abrasive pugnacity to the prose—and an impatient, sporadic way of moving that interferes with their forward glide. The longer of them, “The Witness,” is, Mr. Hoagland’s introduction confides, “about as autobiographical as fiction gets,” and has much the tone of the boldly discursive and frank essays that have made his reputation. “I found at the end of the 1960s,” the introduction continues, “that what I wanted to do most was to tell my own story … without filtering myself through the artifices of fiction.” The change of genre came with a change of milieu. The nameless hero of “The Witness,” after detailing the varieties of urban brutality visible from the windows of his workplace on Lafayette Street, and permitting glimpses of a doomed and dingy affair he is conducting with a married woman on the floor below his apartment on the Lower East Side, announces, “I needed a vacation badly, needed to get to the country; I was irritated simply by humans and human activity.” To the far country, then, be it Alaska or British Columbia or northern Vermont or the Sudan, Mr. Hoagland has gone, with his avid yet somehow bleak attentiveness. His first non-fiction book, Notes from the Century Before, had begun, he tells us, “as a diary intended only to fuel my next novel.” Though the journal was kept in the summer of 1966, it seems as though his observations of the lonely mountains and rivers and men of western Canada have, after twenty years, fed into the majestic panorama of Seven Rivers West.

  The front matter holds an epic disclaimer: “This novel is an invention. No people or tribes, no rivers or mountains, no villages or events are drawn from life.” A map shows the seven titular rivers (plus nine or so others) and the numerous, quaintly named mountains (Shipshape, Muckaboo, Belly, Tooth, Many Berries, Mother, Mad Me) of the invented territory; it contains two features, the Continental Divide and the tracks of the fictional Winnipeg and Pacific Railroad, that place it on the British Columbia–Alberta line not far from what is now Banff National Park. The map also traces the novel’s story: the trip, by horseback, foot, and raft, that Cecil Roop, a young man from the Massachusetts Berkshires, took up north into the Rockies and back down again, in search of a bear to tame and carry east to the vaudeville circuit. In this adventure, which begins as the ice is breaking up in the rivers and ends a few moons later, Cecil is accompanied by Sutton, a stout, older man from Louisiana with hopes of a gold strike and a circus trick of diving into shallow water and landing on his belly; Margaret, a middle-aged Crow squaw widowed by one white man but left with a taste for more; Charley Biskner, a true leather-clad “mountain man,” with some gold dust kept in “a buffalo’s or a moose’s scrotum” and a tight cabin high on the Memphramagog River; Left-Handed Roy, a shaky old “desert rat” who lost one arm in a sawmill accident; and more horses and dogs (not to mention a mule, cat, and kitten) than I could count, though Mr. Hoagland particularizes and cherishes them all. This ungainly crew swims rivers and climbs mountains and encounters the sparse human and rich animal population of an almost virgin land. Though the buffalo herds have been decimated, and a few settlers established, this is still the frontier. The railroad is just coming to the newborn town of Horse Swim as Cecil leaves; the river has recently been named Margaret in honor of one of our characters; and the Indian tribes are acquainted with white men but, in the mountains, far from subdued.

  With a mysterious offhand assurance the novel conveys the unsettled, improvised, ragged state of the Wild West, as the wary and growingly demoralized but still-savage redmen intermingle, in these vast areas, with the forward edge of white adventurers, eccentrics, romantics, and entrepreneurs—a huge anthropic event that, though often sung in film and story, acquires a startling freshness through Mr. Hoagland’s details. The sexual interaction, for instance, between white men and Native-American women, downplayed in the textbooks, is here bluntly and tenderly explored, via the persons of two squaws—the hardened and somewhat whorish Margaret, who joins up with Sutton, and the quite unassimilated Lizzie, a young Sikink widow and captive with whom Cecil reaches a tussly and insecure accommodation. “Lizzie” is his version of “Xingu,” meaning “Young Basket.” The warmth of her vibrant though alien life and, as their courtship progresses, of a common human nature breaking through language and cultural barriers is vividly rendered: “To his nose she smelled no different from the Thloadennis—a sort of mixture of pikefish, smoke, charcoal and tamaracks.… He found he didn’t care that she was as tall as him and her arms nearly as muscular. He liked her quizzing eyes and the planes of her face, which were less hefty than the Thloadennis’ crowded cheeks, and the bulge of her hank of hair under her hat, and her strong hips.” In the various tense encounters that the white wanderers have with local Indians, we feel the poignance of this moment of continental mixing. The Native Americans are neither implacably hostile nor stupidly gullible; their actions and attitudes are shaped by the very human question “What’s in it for me?” Not much, it turned out in the long run; but in the short, many deals were struck, that permitted traffic and an uneasy co-existence. As Charley says, “The West is a great place for turnover.”

  Along with his keen and non-judgmental intuitions into human arrangements, Mr. Hoagland provides a wealth of tactile details about the tools, costumes, sights, and usages of the frontier. The tops of a horse thief’s ears were clipped, as a stigma; cowboys wore rattlesnake skins as neckties; pioneers arrived deafened by the screeching of their wagon wheels; a sun hat could be kept stiff by washing it in starchy potato water—just the first chapter yields these facts, along with such strongly flavored old words as “navvies,” “platted,” “hightailed,” and “quinsy.”b Remarkably precise sentences revive vanished sights:

  He was elegant in his tan shirt and pants, trailed by a lovely blo
nd matched pair of trotters hitched to a democrat, with cheesecloth screening over their noses to ward off the flies.

  Last year’s onions were still stored in his house, braided in chains by their dried tops, the chains looped across the low ceiling beams, along with split string beans, which were strung up by the many hundreds like tiny two-legged dried-leather britches in walking postures all around.

  Man’s old-fashioned agriculture and husbandry are thus vivified, but it is the timeless—the animals and rivers and mountains—that excites Mr. Hoagland’s noblest style. His particularization of the successive rivers, in terms of tint and surge and bottom quality, is as intimate and loving as his naming and description of the various animals, domestic and wild—the dog “Smoky, who was smoke-colored and affectionate but suffered from epilepsy”; a billy goat “with its brisk, fastidious gait, cowlicky beard, bald knees, and deep-thinker’s forelock”; a grizzly bear “as purple-colored as a plum”; a moose “with his brown bell swinging and two upside-down chairs on top of his head.” The animal world yields to the author’s anthropofugal eye incidents of a human strangeness and fallibility:

  A kingfisher dashed out in pursuit of a fish hawk and actually rode on its neck for a hundred yards, sitting like a broncobuster, while underneath their conjoined, monstrous shadow a groundhog on the riverbank took such fright it bumped its head and stunned itself in diving for its den.

  The effort to render precisely the vast mountainscapes drives Mr. Hoagland’s prose to a kind of sprung rhythm, a Hopkinesque compression: