Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

  How have you lived your whole life in these streets and never known me? How long did you think you could avoid me? What made you think you were exempt? Don’t you know that I have been here as long as people have cried out for help? Hear me: I am not like those mealy-mouthed pale Madonnas, those simpering virgins! I am older than this place. . . . Spirit of these beech woods and phone boxes, hedgerows and lampposts, freshwater springs and tube stations, ancient yews and one-stop-shops, grazing land and 3D multiplexes. Unruly England of the real life, the animal life!

  At the opening of NW, Leah and Keisha/Natalie are in their mid-thirties. Both are married, and both are dissatisfied with their lives. Leah, who’d studied philosophy in college (“Philosophy is learning how to die”) but didn’t distinguish herself academically, feels undereducated, having prepared herself for “a life never intended for her.” She is visited by her deceased father, whose words she can manipulate: “I love you don’t worry it’s nice here. . . . I can see a light.” Her work is in the “public sector”—she’s poorly paid for her idealism—“the only white girl on the Fund Distribution Team” in a dreary workplace in which, at the end of the workday

  women spill out of every room, into the heat, cocoa buttered, ready for a warm night on the Edgeware Road. From St. Kitts, Trinidad, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Pakistan . . . still open to the sexiness of summer in a manner that the women of Leah’s family can never be. For them the sun is fatal.

  In mockery of herself Leah doodles “I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY.”

  Leah is married to a hairdresser of French West African extraction named Michael who is “more beautiful” than she, as Keisha/Natalie is married to an exceedingly handsome “Negroid Italian” from a bourgeois background. Both women are ambivalent about virtually everything in their adult lives: their work, their mothers, their husbands, the prospect of motherhood (“Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were of the belief that people were willing them to reproduce. Relatives, strangers on the street, people on television.”) Natalie has children with a husband whom she doesn’t respect; to please her husband Leah pretends a wish for children but has a secret abortion from which she is slow to recover psychologically. Both, as girls, are involved in underage drinking; both take recreational drugs as adults. By the novel’s end both women have sabotaged their marriages.

  The tangled plot of NW begins with the intrusion, into Leah Hanwell’s life, of a cunningly manipulative “girl in a headscarf” named Shar who tells her an upsetting story calculated to arouse Leah’s concern; naïvely, guiltily, Leah gives the young woman thirty pounds though she’s suspicious of her behavior and her relationship with a man waiting for her on the street. Subsequently, Leah catches sight of the girl in the neighborhood, and incurs the wrath of a belligerent individual—“a tall muscled threat”—who knocks down her husband and gives her dog a fatal kick to the belly. So much in Smith’s narrative is inward and contemplative that these sudden eruptions into violence are all the more startling.

  Of the two women Leah Hanwell is the less coherent as a character, as she is the less convincing and interesting: the author seems to have imagined her as a foil to the more vibrant Keisha/Natalie, but her “white”-girl personality lacks resonance. It’s claimed for her as an adolescent that she is a “generous person, wide open to the entire world,” a paragon of multicultural idealism:

  Within Brayton [a school in Willesden] she befriended everyone without distinction or boundary, but the hopeless cases did not alienate her from the popular and vice versa. . . . A little of this universal good feeling spreads to Keisha by association, though no one ever mistook Keisha’s cerebral willfulness for her friend’s generosity of spirit.

  After the death of her dog, Leah becomes crippled by “terrible mourning,” and at the novel’s end her desperate husband calls Natalie, when Leah seems to have become depressed to the point of catatonia.

  Perhaps it’s because we come to know Leah through her meandering stream-of-consciousness thoughts that she remains indistinct and improbable, and not sharp-edged; the reader is constrained by Leah’s claustrophobic life for many pages, like a viewer standing too close to one of Chuck Close’s gigantic portraits comprised of pixels, and so unable to recognize a human face.

  Keisha/Natalie, however, is initially seen from the outside, by an admiring Leah: “Sleek ebony statuary. Tilts her head directly to the sun. [Her husband], too. They look like a king and queen in profile on an ancient coin.” Much later in NW we come to know Keisha/Natalie intimately, as a child of “compulsive” willfulness who is an excellent student because she can concentrate, without distractions; she is puzzled by “what she believed she knew of herself, essentially, and her essence as others seemed to understand it.” Perhaps there is no autobiographical core to Keisha/Natalie, but her personality suggests that of the quintessential novelist who suspects that she alone is lacking an identity:

  (Sometimes, when enjoying [a friend’s] capsule descriptions of the personalities of others, Natalie feared that in her own—Natalie’s—absence, her own—Natalie’s— personality was also being encapsulated by Pol, although she could not bring herself to truly fear this possibility because at base she could not believe that she—Natalie—could ever be spoken about in the way that she—Natalie—spoke about others and heard others spoken about. But for the sake of a thought experiment: what was Natalie Blake’s personality constructed around?)

  Here, too, is a convincing account of the fiction writer’s predilection:

  Walking down Kilburn High Road Natalie Blake had a strong desire to slip into the lives of other people. It was hard to see how this desire could be practicably satisfied or what, if anything, it really meant. “Slip into” is an imprecise thought. Follow the Somali kid home? Sit with the old Russian lady at the bus-stop outside Pound-Land? Join the Ukrainian gangster at his table at the cake shop? Listening was not enough. Natalie Blake wanted to know people. To become intimately involved with them.

  (Just how intimately, and how recklessly, Natalie herself doesn’t yet know.) Keisha/Natalie is very likely the most sustained, sympathetic, and believable figure in all of Zadie Smith’s fiction, encompassing as it does an astonishing variety of characters and types. Particularly as a law student, and as a young (female, black) lawyer, Keisha/Natalie is an astute observer of the seductive atmosphere of the university in which she is an “endangered specimen”—both unwittingly, and deliberately; we are made to feel the thrill of cultural assimilation, as the author herself may well have felt it as a brilliant young undergraduate English literature student at Cambridge in the late 1990s:

  The bad wine flowed. An ancient Judge rose to give a speech. . . . Natalie was enthralled. The idea that her own existence might be linked to people living six hundred years past! No longer an accidental guest at the table—as she had always understood herself to be—but a host, with other hosts, continuing a tradition. “And so it falls to you,” said the judge.

  It’s difficult not to exploit one’s racial identity in a culture in which, being black, “Natalie and her husband needn’t concern themselves too much with politics. They simply were political facts, in their very persons.” Painful ironies abound for one of Natalie’s sensitivity: “Something about Natalie inspired patronage, as if by helping her you helped an unseen multitude.”

  Later, when she has a law degree and is looking for work, Natalie is counseled by an older, glamorous black woman lawyer, a paragon of multicultural success, that what is interpreted as a “passion” for justice in a white (male) lawyer will be interpreted by the presiding judge in a courtroom as “aggressive hysteria” in a black (female) lawyer: “The first lesson is: turn yourself down.” More importantly,

  “I suppose you’re interested in a human rights set of some kind. Police brutality? Is that your plan?” “I’m not sure,” said Natalie, trying to sound bullish. She was very close to tears.

  “It wasn’t mine. In my day, if you went down that route people tended to associa
te you with your clients. I took some advice early on: ‘Avoid ghetto work.’”

  Predictably, Natalie repudiates this cynical advice, joining a tiny legal firm in a squalid part of London as a paralegal; less predictably, she soon quits the firm to take higher-paying work as a commercial barrister with former classmates from law school. (Of course, Natalie takes time to do pro bono death penalty cases in the Caribbean, as befits one in her position.) Her fragile sense of identity is further strained by the responsibilities and hypocrisies of adulthood:

  Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.

  By degrees, Natalie begins to see herself as inauthentic: she isn’t happily married, she secretly loathes her high-paying work as a barrister, she even feels alienated from her children, who are so very different from the child she’d been in the Caldwell council estate not so many years ago:

  She was surprised to meet herself down a dark alley. It filled her with panic and rage to see her spoiled children sit upon the floor, flicking through past images, moving images, of themselves, on their father’s phone, an experience of self-awareness literally unknown in the history of human existence—outside dream and miracle—until very recently.

  Though claiming to loathe the Internet, Natalie is irresistibly drawn to the Internet, where she creates for herself a shadow-identity—KeishaNW@gmail.com—and where she discovers that “she was what everybody was looking for.” Sordid, quasi-comic promiscuous encounters with couples of various genders follow in dreamlike sequences that test the reader’s credulity. So carefully self-invented, Natalie begins to fall apart as if on cue. When her husband discovers her KeishaNW identity on her computer, Natalie’s seemingly perfect marriage is wrecked.

  NW ends in confusion and disintegration. In a long nightmare sequence, perhaps in emulation of the brilliantly bizarre “Nighttown” chapter of Ulysses, Natalie returns on foot to her childhood neighborhood, where she encounters a debased and drug-addled Nathan Bogle, for whom she’d once felt an attraction. A sexual encounter between them—however unlikely this would appear, under the circumstances—seems to dissociate Natalie from the death-bound (white) man of her childhood. Riding a bus she sees old, familiar landmarks with a transformed vision:

  The Cock Tavern. McDonalds. The old Woolworths. The betting shop. The State Empire. Willesden Lane. The cemetery. Whoever said these were fixed coordinates to which she had to be forever faithful? How could she play them false? Freedom was absolute and everywhere, constantly moving location.

  In the end, Natalie and Leah are joined together in a curious sort of conspiracy, as in a regression to their girlhood friendship in the Caldwell council estate.

  NW is an unexpectedly ironic companion novel to White Teeth, a darker and more nuanced portrait of a multiracial culture in the throes of a collective nervous breakdown. Its perimeters are forever changing, like its accents and the tenor of its neighborhoods. In NW the mood is, if not precisely tragic, sober and subdued; one might wish to celebrate a truly “diverse” urban neighborhood like Willesden and yet—there are muggings, murders. There is a brisk drug trade. Bonded as individuals in NW might be, the “fixed coordinates” of their lives are finally suffocating and lethal. There are no farcical interludes here, as in previous works of fiction by Zadie Smith, as there are no paper-thin cartoon characters to enact them. Maturity may lie in the brave repudiation of nostalgia; the realization that “maybe it doesn’t matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself.”

  JOAN DIDION:

  RISK AND TRIUMPH

  We are uneasy about a story until we know who is telling it.

  Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

  It is rare to find a biographer so temperamentally, intellectually, and even stylistically matched with his subject as Tracy Daugherty, author of well-received biographies of Donald Barthelme and Joseph Heller, is matched with Joan Didion; but it is perhaps less of a surprise if we consider that Daugherty is himself a writer whose work shares with Joan Didion’s classic essays (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968; The White Album, 1979; Where I Was From, 2003) a brooding sense of the valedictory and the elegiac, crushing banality and heartrending loss in American life. Only another writer of fiction could so sympathize with Didion as a creative artist in a continuous struggle with “narrative limits” as well as a social realist and critic; to Daugherty, born in 1955, Didion has long been a visionary, “a powerful voice for my generation.” So identifying with his subject, who has suffered personal, familial losses in recent years, as well as a general disillusionment with American politics, the biographer inevitably becomes “an elegist, writing lamentations”; Didion’s memoir Blue Nights (2011), a meditation upon motherhood and aging as well as an elegy for Didion’s daughter Quintana, who died at the age of thirty-nine in 2005, is “not just a harrowing lullaby but our generation’s last love song.”

  Chronological in its basic structure, The Last Love Song is not a conventional biography so much as a life of the artist rendered in biographical mode: we pick up crucial facts, so to speak, on the run, as we might in a novel (for instance, in Didion’s debut novel Run River, 1963) in the midst of other bits of information: “By 1934, the year of Didion’s birth, the levees [on the Sacramento River] had significantly reduced flooding.” We learn that Didion’s first, crucial reader was her mother, Eduene, a former Sacramento librarian descended from a Presbyterian minister and his wife who followed the Donner-Reed party west but decided to split from the doomed group in Nevada in 1847. An acquaintance of the family tells Daugherty that the Didions and their extended families “were part of Sacramento’s landed gentry . . . families who called themselves agriculturalists, farmers, ranchers, progressives, but they were the owners, not the ones who got their hands dirty.” With a novelist’s empathy Daugherty notes: “For all its visibility and influence, the family felt prosaic, muted, sad to Didion, even as a girl. Clerks and administrators: hardly the heroes of old, surviving starvation and blizzards. . . . A whiff of decadence clung to the gentry, making their folks grip fiercely the privileges they did retain.”

  Many passages in The Last Love Song read with the fluency of fiction, and the particular intimacy of Didion’s fiction, as if by a sort of osmosis the subject has taken over the narrative, as a passenger in a speeding vehicle may take over the wheel. We feel that we are reading about Didion in precisely Didion’s terms:

  In considering—and not quite hitting—the real story of Patty Hearst, Didion felt sure the periphery was the key. She looked for an out-of-the-way anecdote, seemingly insignificant, channeling all of California; the pioneer experience in its modern manifestations; the historical imperative; the chain of forces shaping Tania: a verbal image as immediately impactful as the spread legs, the carbine, and the cobra.

  She was after this same effect in Play It As It Lays, a “fast” novel, a method of presentation allowing us to see Maria in a flash.

  A snake book.

  A poetic impulse, surpassing narrative.

  Somewhere on the edge of the story.

  And:

  In the final analysis, Didion’s attraction to conspiracy tales, particularly in the 1980s, has less to do with the intrigues themselves than with her persistent longing for narrative, any narrative, to alleviate the pain of confusion. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”—and if the story is not readily apparent, we will weave one out of whatever scraps are at hand; we will use our puzzlement as a motivating factor; we will tell our way out of any trap, or goddamn seedy motel.

  Introducing the highly charged topic of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s adoption of their daughter Quintana Roo in 1966:

  In the mid-1960s, the preferred narrative was, We chose you. Positive. Proactive. A comfort to the child. What the narrative d
idn’t address—a howling silence no boy or girl failed to perceive—was that if we chose you, someone else chose to make you available to us.

  To relinquish you.

  Family law.

  Though Daugherty is never less than respectful of his subject he cannot resist the biographer’s urge to interpret motives seemingly unacknowledged by the subject, as in a gently condescending film voice-over:

  In retrospect, in reading this reference to the severing of families ties [in Didion’s essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”] it’s easy to see that Didion in the Haight was worrying about her adopted daughter back [home], the house cased all day by strangers driving unmarked panel trucks. And as in all her subsequent work, whenever she wrote about her daughter, she was also writing about herself.

  But is this true? Is this in any way provable? In biography we are tempted to claim, as in life we are tempted to claim, that the plausible may be true; what would seem to be, to be. But in life it is rarely the case that causes and effects are so clear, and the same should hold in the art of biography, which should present possibilities, theories, inferences as tentative, not flatly, stated. You have only to examine Didion’s prose before her daughter came into her life to feel that Didion would very likely have written about Haight-Ashbury residents (adolescents “who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”) exactly as she did, if she’d never adopted a baby. Or rather, the predilections that urged Didion to adopt are those that resulted in her writing as she does—out of an imagination that veers toward disorder and disaster at a time in American history (in a decade of assassinations, for instance) in which such responses are hardly aberrant. And it might be said of any writer that when he/she writes about any character, the subject is actually the self.