Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Narrated in the first person by the widower Aaron, The Beginner’s Goodbye begins with seriocomic urgency: “The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.” Aaron’s doctor-wife Dorothy, dead for almost a year, suddenly begins to appear to him unpredictably, and in public. Aaron is convinced that Dorothy isn’t an apparition or a hallucination but “real”:

  People would pretend not to recognize either of us. They would catch sight of us from a distance, and this sort of jolt would alter their expressions and they would all at once dart down a side street, busy-busy. . . . I didn’t hold it against them. I knew this was a lot to adjust to.

  It isn’t clear if Aaron is hallucinating, or very quietly mad; or, in an alternative universe to which fiction alone has the key, he is actually being visited by his wife:

  Maybe the reason I didn’t ask Dorothy why she had come back when she did was that I worried it would make her ask herself the same question. If she had just sort of wandered back, absentmindedly . . . then once I brought it up she might say, “Oh! My goodness! I should be going!”

  At other times, Dorothy’s presence is more ambiguous, and may not be public but merely private:

  Then I was walking toward the post office . . . and Dorothy was walking beside me. She didn’t “pop up” or anything. She didn’t “materialize.” She’d just been with me all along, somehow, the way in dreams you’ll find yourself with a companion who didn’t arrive but is simply there—no explanation given and none needed. . . . Oh, she looked so . . . Dorothy-like! So normal and clumsy and ordinary, her eyes meeting mine directly, a faint sheen of sweat on her upper lip, her stocky forearms crossing her stomach.

  And there is the Dorothy who appears to her former husband as a plainly guilty conscience:

  She said, “I would have asked more questions.”

  “Pardon?”

  “We could have talked all along. But you always pushed me away.”

  After a year and more, Aaron has begun to think that his grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there but the sharpest edges are . . . muffled, sort of. Then, every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check, and—whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.

  Though Aaron insists that he loves Dorothy, or had loved her, he rarely recalls her in terms other than those that stress her physical plainness and clumsiness. She was five-feet-one—(he is six-feet-four). Dorothy was “short and plump and serious-looking” with “owlish, round-lensed glasses that mocked the shape of her face. Her clothes made her figure seem squat—wide, straight trousers and man-tailored shirts, chunky crepe-soled shoes. . . . Only I knew her dear, pudgy feet, with the nails like tiny seashells.” She was eight years his senior, with the “social skills of a panda bear.” Only Aaron knows that beneath her boxy clothes she was “the shape of a little clay urn.” Even in their wedding picture Dorothy is ill-dressed, in a “bright-blue knit stretched too tightly across the mound of her stomach.” It’s difficult to imagine the couple as lovers, as both seem asexual, or prepubescent, incongruously encased in middle-aged bodies. Aaron and Dorothy haven’t the impassioned adolescent yearning of Carson McCullers’s misfit lovers, which so pervades that writer’s work as to make the grotesquely improbable probable, and poignant. Even as he awaits her visitations Aaron continues to find fault with Dorothy:

  If she had properly valued me, for instance, wouldn’t she have taken more care with her appearance? It was true that I had been charmed at first by her lack of vanity, but now and then it struck me that she was looking almost, well, plain, and that this plainness seemed willful. As the months went by I found myself noticing more and more her clumsy clothes, her aggressively plodding walk, her tendency to leave her hair unwashed a day too long.

  The possibility strikes Aaron in the imagined words of his older sister It’s too bad his wife had to die, but was she really worth quite this much grief? Does he have to go on and on about it?

  Aaron learns that a carpenter-friend was visited by his father after the father’s death, and that the carpenter wasn’t particularly surprised or upset by the visitations, to check up on his work:

  “Must have been a couple of months he did that. . . . He never said anything. Me, neither. I’d just stand there watching him, wondering what he was after. See, the two of us had not been close. . . . So I wondered what he was after. Anyhow, he moved on by and by, I can’t say exactly when. He just stopped coming around anymore. . . . He came back to make sure I’d turned out okay.”

  When Dorothy’s’ unpredictable ghost is on the scene, The Beginner’s Goodbye quickens, and the reader is drawn into the pathos of Aaron’s delusion. Obviously Aaron is being haunted by the unfulfilled nature of his marriage, and by his inadequacy as a husband. Like Macon Leary of The Accidental Tourist, who drives his wife from him through his inability to mourn with her the death of their only son, Aaron is meant to be congenitally obtuse, and maddeningly passive. For most of the time Tyler can’t seem to think of anything for Aaron to do other than try to avoid well-intentioned friends and neighbors who ply him with unwanted casseroles (“After I recorded each dish, I dumped it in the garbage”) or take him out to restaurants where he has to endure relentlessly banal conversations about food. He sees his dull, predictable friends and fellow office-workers; he has supper with his garrulous, possessive older sister Nandina (“born lanky, and ungainly, and lacking all fashion sense. . . . An aging girl, was what she was. . . . Her elbows jutted like coat hangers, and her legs descended as straight as reeds to her Ping-Pong-ball anklebones”); he revisits his demolished house, which is being repaired and renovated. Unlike Leary of The Accidental Tourist, who falls in love with an endearingly ditzy dog-trainer who transforms his zombie-bachelor life into something approximating real life, Aaron remains in a stasis of indecision, waiting for his deceased wife to “appear” to him.

  Anne Tyler has a special place in her heart for individuals who lack enthusiasm, zeal, spirit—who prefer to stay at home watching favorite television programs rather than venture forth into independent lives. Ezra of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant conceives of a restaurant that is resolutely non-chic, non-glamorous and non-gourmet, where “he’d cook what people felt homesick for,” and “what you long for when you’re sad and everyone’s been wearing you down.” No waiters but waitresses who are “cheery, motherly” and might urge upon customers “gizzard soup . . . made with love.” Macon Leary of The Accidental Tourist makes a living writing moderately profitable self-help books in “chunky, passport-sized paperbacks” with such titles as Accidental Tourist in America, Accidental Tourist in France, Accidental Tourist in Germany, et al., simply written little books for people who find themselves in intimidating situations for which they are not temperamentally or intellectually suited. (“Did Amsterdam have a McDonald’s? Did Mexico City have a Taco Bell? Did anyplace in Rome serve Chef Boyardee ravioli? Other travelers hoped to discover distinctive local wines; Macon’s readers searched for pasteurized and homogenized milk.” ) So too in The Beginner’s Goodbye, Aaron works for a family publishing house known in the trade as The Beginner’s Press, part vanity press (typical books are memoirs titled My War, My Years with the City Council, The Life of an Estate Lawyer, published for a fee, and virtually unedited) and part self-help press that has published a series with such titles as The Beginner’s Book of Kitchen Remodeling, The Beginner’s Book of Birdwatching, The Beginner’s Wine Guide, The Beginner’s Book of Dog Training—“These were something like the Dummies books, but without the cheerleader tone of voice—more dignified. And far more classily designed.” The best seller in this series is The Beginner’s Colicky Baby. In the depressed state of clarity following his wife’s death, Aaron one day feels revulsion for his life’s work:

  A set of instruction manuals whose stated goal was to skim the surface. A hodgepodge of war recollections and crackpot personal philosophies that no standard publishing house would have
glanced at. This was the purpose of my existence?

  Aaron comes to realize that his marriage had been unhappy—“Or it was difficult, at least. Out of sync. Uncoordinated. It seemed we just never quite got the hang of being a couple the way other people did. We should have taken lessons or something, that’s what I tell myself.” And, more harshly: “What I do remember is that familiar, weary, hopeless feeling, the feeling that we were confined in some kind of rodent cage, wrestling together doggedly, neither of us ever winning.” Aaron remains baffled and exasperated by his wife in their posthumous marriage:

  I felt she expected something of me she wouldn’t state outright. Her face would fall for no reason sometimes, and I would say, “What? What is it?” but she would say it was nothing. I could sense that I had let her down, but I had no idea how.

  By the novel’s end, Aaron has worked through his “issues” of miscommunication with Dorothy, and the final vision he has of her, she is “shining all over, and growing shimmery and transparent. . . . And then she was gone altogether.” Unsurprisingly, Aaron soon remarries, a woman from his office of whom we know little other than that she has eyes of a kind “a child might have drawn . . . with the lashes rayed around them like sunbeams” and enjoys cooking, and so will nourish him in a way that Dorothy could not. This a spare, quiet, understated little novel, a slender autumnal tree from which most leaves have fallen. Like the Beginner’s series from which the title has been taken, it makes no great claim upon our imaginations or our emotions; it “skims the surface” of grief in a trajectory that ends, as if inevitably, in the widower’s remarrying his office secretary. Tyler’s affably bright prose style isn’t geared for irony or a deep countermining of emotion, let alone profound emotion; if this is a novel of loss, it’s also a novel of the failure to express loss, the failure to have fully lived before loss, as one senses that the protagonists of Updike’s and Roth’s autumnal novels have indeed lived. Yet there is a singular, curious passage in The Beginner’s Goodbye like no other I can recall in Tyler’s fiction, in which the zombie-like Aaron undergoes a sensuous private experience that verges upon the erotic in its wonderment and intensity:

  The cookie was oatmeal-chocolate chip. It wasn’t a flat disk, like the kind you buy in stores; it was a big, humped hillock of a thing, lumpy with whole oats and studded with extra-large bits of chocolate, not chips so much as chunks. I took an experimental nibble. The chocolate lay coolly on my tongue a few seconds before it melted. The dough had been baked exactly the right length of time—some might say underbaked, but not I—and it was chewy inside but crisp outside, with some tiny sharp pieces of something that provided a textural contrast. Nuts, maybe? No, not nuts. Harder than nuts, more edgy than nuts. I really didn’t know. I seemed to have finished the cookie while I was deliberating, so I pried the lid off the tin and selected another. I needed to pin this thing down. I bit off a mouthful and chewed thoughtfully. The oats had their own distinct identity; I suspected they were the old-fashioned kind, rather than the quick-baking. I would have liked a glass of cold milk but you can’t have everything.

  On and on the cookie-eating continues in a trance of bliss, as, unwittingly, the widower is falling in love with whoever baked these cookies in which, as she will later reveal to him, the secret ingredient isn’t nuts but soy grits—“For the supplemental protein.” In a world of diminished things, Tyler seems to be telling us, such cookies, underbaked and lumpy as they may be, are as much as we can hope of romance.

  SMILING WOMAN:

  MARGARET DRABBLE

  A woman who has spent the morning having a broken tooth replaced finds herself in a part of London where, three years before, she’d frequently met a lover for surreptitious lunches during the course of “a long and lovely year.” She returns to their restaurant—telling herself it’s just expediency, not sentiment—where, within a few minutes, she’s unexpectedly joined by her former lover for whom the encounter is just as unexpected. After a flurried exchange the two discover—not surprisingly—that they are still in love with each other, and not with their spouses, and will resume, it’s suggested, the love affair that had brought them such anxiety and such happiness. The story ends with the omniscient narrator’s droll, detached, yet not unsympathetic observation:

  Like many romantics, they habitually contrived with fate by remembering the names of restaurants and the streets they had once walked along as lovers. Those who forget forget, he said to her later, and those who do not forget will meet again.

  This deft commingling of the unabashedly sentimental and the ironic matter-of-fact is characteristic of Margaret Drabble. A fastidious, if at times somewhat compulsive, chronicler of the vagaries of women’s lives in England since the early 1960s—when Drabble’s bright, insouciant debut novel A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) was published to critical acclaim—Drabble has conjoined the strengths of “old-fashioned” realism with the playful detachment and blatant myth-making of Postmodernism; the early, slender novels intensely focused upon distinctly female experience—The Garrick Year, The Millstone, Jerusalem the Golden, The Waterfall—dramatically evolved into more broadly based, researched novels narrated in the third person, often from multiple perspectives, on subjects of “sociopolitical” and historical significance—The Needle’s Eye, The Ice Age, The Realms of Gold, The Witch of Exmoor, The Seven Sisters, The Red Queen. Like her boldly original predecessors Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and Doris Lessing, Drabble has cast a cold, analytical eye upon her society; at a relatively young age she came to the conclusion, as she states in her Paris Review interview of 1978, that individuals are not isolated but part of a “theme” or “pattern” greater than themselves. Not the narrowness of individual experience was to be her subject but, in the magisterial way of George Eliot and Arnold Bennett, as much of contemporary English society as she could conjure into her fiction.

  Drabble, born in 1939 in Sheffield, England, married since 1982 to the distinguished man of letters Michael Holroyd and, since 2008, a Dame of the British Empire, is one of the most versatile, and the most accomplished, writers of a dazzling generation that includes Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, and Ian McEwan. Not only is Drabble the author of seventeen novels but she has also written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson and literary studies of Wordsworth and Hardy; she is the author of A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature and the encyclopedic The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She is the middle sister of an impressive literary family: her elder sister is the novelist A. S. Byatt and her younger sister the art historian Helen Langdon.

  It was with the publication of The Needle’s Eye (1972) that Drabble shifted the range of her subjects, and in this way the depth of her prose fiction. Not a single, fixed-perspective female voice animates The Needle’s Eye but voices: one of them the voice of the divorced, feckless Rose Vassilou whose ex-husband is suing her for custody of their children, and the other, more startling voice of Simon Camish, a London barrister who is male, skeptical, mercilessly sharp-eyed and judgmental. Bringing these voices together, creating out of the interplay of jarringly different personalities a rich and compelling if in no way extraordinary narrative, Drabble found a way of exploring her larger, abiding subject—the vicissitudes of contemporary English culture—not unlike a diviner’s rod that would animate the ambitious succession of densely textured and somewhat dystopian novels to follow.

  By degrees Drabble’s Britain became, in the era of Prime Minister Thatcher and beyond, the “mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystrene hamburger cartons” deconstructed in The Radiant Way (1987) and its sequel A Natural Curiosity (1989), The Gates of Ivory (1991), The Witch of Exmoor (1996) and The Seven Sisters (2002). At times the novelist’s issue-oriented agenda suggests a formulaic structure, as if Drabble were checking off timely issues to explore, like immigration, or the outrages of Thatcherite capitalism; but more often, the novels brim with sharply observed life and the author
’s seemingly infinite sympathy for “ordinary” women who must remake their lives out of the wreckage of domestic life—very likely echoing the way in which Margaret Drabble remade herself, after the breakup of her first marriage to the actor Clive Swift, in 1975, which left her with three young children and no means of support other than writing.

  Of course, these “ordinary” women turn out to be, like poor left-behind Candida in The Seven Sisters, anything but ordinary. Candida begins as a diarist of her own life in London, postmarital, accidental and haphazard; as the novel unexpectedly takes flight in an orthogonal move tracking the adventures of seven “sisters” who trace the journey of Virgil’s Aeneas from Carthage to Naples, it moves through a sequence of dramatic shifts of perspective that define Drabble as a curious blend of the Postmodern and the storyteller of tradition, and reveal Candida as something of a seer—a female Aeneas of our time. (The Seven Sisters is Drabble’s Ulysses—not Odysseus but Aeneas is the progenitor, and not the male Leopold Bloom but the female Candida is the mythographer.)

  If there is any drawback to Drabble’s bravura technique it might be that the author has cultivated an Olympian overview that somewhat reduces and flattens the significance of her characters, occasionally, as in A Natural Curiosity and the more broadly satiric The Witch of Exmoor, cramming too many characters into too conscribed a space.

  Despite the detached and ironic tone of much of her fiction, Margaret Drabble is by no means an apolitical or indifferent observer of contemporary times. In May 2003 she published a vehement critique of American foreign policy in The Telegraph under the title “I Loathe America and What It Has Done to the Rest of the World”: “My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me like a disease. It rises in my throat like acid reflux.” In fact it isn’t America or the American people whom Drabbles loathes but the Bush-Rumsfeld Iraqi War with its death-bearing planes painted like grinning cartoons and its Orwellian perversion of language—“friendly fire,” “collateral damage.”