Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  If anything broke, anywhere on the estate, he tried to fix it himself; and if he couldn’t fix it, he dismantled it, salvaging it for parts, which he filed in the work barn in a ceiling-high collection of labeled drawers—themselves salvaged, it seemed, from some country auction. It was as though he were two men: the Liam Metarey who owned a third of Carrol Township and spoke with the governor just about every week, and another man entirely—a determined, hardscrabble Scotsman trying to scrape out a living on rocky land. His toolshed looked like the barn of an ingenious and frugal farmer.

  This paternalistic tinkerer presides over a considerably dishevelled household—a wife who drinks and flies a biplane, a son who quits school and enters the Vietnam-era military, and two daughters who compete for Corey’s attention in contrasting, though equally unbalanced, styles. But their collective eccentricities feel halfhearted and joyless compared with those in Emperor of the Air, especially those of the family in “American Beauty,” whose jaunty dysfunction carries on guilt-free, with no burden of dynastic responsibility or need to further a novel’s plot. In Carrol Township, their bohemian ilk, the Millburys, dwell in the “failed farmland” ten miles north of Saline, in a trailer on the edge of a bog; the man of the house has dropped out of a job as a chemist at DuPont, the mother paints, all six children are homeschooled, and, to make ends meet, the family grows and sells raspberries and blueberries. However, a daughter, Trieste, is bright enough to win an internship with the Speaker-Sentinel, and, cantankerous and ill-dressed as she is, gives the newspaper’s publisher an opportunity for mentorship and, guardedly, friendship. Their conversations, often about the ancient Bonwiller affair, form another of the book’s strands, though Trieste is less a character than a case study: “I could hear in her northern hillbilly voice what I later came to learn was her father’s social opposition. A thin flow of bile mixed with a radical amusement and a fierce, uncooked intelligence, nourished over decades of contemplation. Class upon class.”

  The novel’s best characters, the ones we come to know well enough to care about, are women: the narrator’s concerned, loving mother, and the Senator’s mistress and victim, JoEllen Charney. “Victim” only in a sense: it is someone else, it turns out, who allows this inconvenient female—like Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths with Roberta Alden—to die. Corey sees her only once, waiting alone in a restaurant, “a young woman in a flowered hat and dark glasses who looked like what I imagined a schoolteacher on vacation might look like.” Among the male characters, Corey’s father grows another dimension as a widower, and his former neighbor and best friend, Mr. McGowar, whose voice has been destroyed by fifty years of inhaling stone dust, makes a big splash on the page with the words he writes out in capital letters. One thinks of what an Upton Sinclair would have made of Mr. McGowar—a handicapped former quarryman, a symbol of industry’s pitiless exploitation—but Canin plays his phonetic misspellings for laughs and lets him live cheerfully to the age (at last sighting) of ninety-five.

  Canin writes America America in various tenses—present and past—and styles, from staccato to stentorian. Much of the second half of the book feels like an after-dinner speech, a rumbling aftermath of Bonwiller’s “tumble,” studded with reverberant quotations, including Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” in its totality. The staccato style, sometimes merely hasty and melodramatic, is effectively internalized as Corey’s mother suddenly collapses and dies:

  Then comes the first blow. The feeling in her arm dropping away. A shudder over the shoulder and scalp. Then the swooning. The floor pitching. She tries to right herself. Grabs the counter. Use the other arm, silly. Lift! Silly girl! Up, Anna Bainbridge. Up! The floor, wrapping her. All over, how can it do that? Cheeks on the cold linoleum. Funny, funny! God, it’s turning me over. The black and white. The squares. A wave turning me over.

  Bainbridge was her maiden name, not to be confused with the names of G. V. Trawbridge and Corey’s prep-school roommate, Astor Highbridge—a nice guy in spite of his tony moniker.

  Though his fictions often deal with distracted goof-offs, Canin knows the world of hard work. He itemizes practical procedures and labels humble implements: “buck knives,” “compression nuts,” “a slider” (to carry a man under a car), an “old Rockwell impact wrench,” a “drip line,” “wash trays.” Newspapers are “arranged on café sticks in the library,” and the Metarey sisters have the family dog “stretched out on their laps like a white stadium blanket they were sharing.” Commanding, throughout, an impressive geographical range of reference, Canin brings this once wild, winter-bitten region to life with the eye of a native:

  The terrain is really quite beautiful here, a run of shallow, overlapping hills that are staggered from the glacier’s first track through the basin, the low horizon striped by the shadows of their intersecting valleys.

  When the bulldozers move in, we mourn the felling of the Metareys’ age-old oaks as if they were a New World cherry orchard. Corruption and change are what the novel is about, and the hazards of being taken up by the rich. Out of loyalty to the Metareys, Corey lies that he has never seen Bonwiller take a drink; to conceal the damage to a drunkenly driven car, Bonwiller and Liam Metarey, that benign benefactor, involve the boy in a deliberate crash in which he could have been seriously injured. “Nasty sport” is how Corey’s wife sums up the Metareys’ meddling in his life. And his subsequent rise in social status may not be on merit alone: he has married money. “The history of riches is always sordid,” he declares to the reader, and is informed by his father that progress is “always half criminal.” As for journalism, he concludes that “undifferentiated silt-panning for truth serves the citizenry only slightly better than a crooked disregard for it.” Maybe the reader isn’t in such safe hands after all. America America doesn’t quite earn its grand, double-barrelled title, but its reach is wide and its touch often masterly.

  Relative Strangers

  THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE, by Andrew Sean Greer. 195 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.

  Andrew Sean Greer’s 2004 novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, quite brilliantly fulfilled the difficult task it set itself—to show the life of a man born old, who over the decades grows backward into infancy and, finally, nonexistence. This narrative feat had been attempted before, by Scott Fitzgerald and Gabriel Brownstein, but never at such length or with such loving ingenuity. At every turn of Max Tivoli’s wrong-way life, his predicaments and discoveries light up the human condition as the odd thing it is and, in addition, give us vivid glimpses of San Francisco’s colorful past as it evolves toward the present. The novel is magical; but such a success holds for the novelist a temptation to cast himself as a magician and stuff his sleeves for every performance onstage. The great Nabokov did something like this, out of loyalty to illusion and deception as aesthetic ideals, but Greer is possessed by a serious tenderness that asks the reader’s indulgence in a way that the aloof Russian would have scorned. Greer’s new novel, The Story of a Marriage, announces its basic illusion on the first page:

  We think we know the ones we love.

  Our husbands, our wives … We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know.… One morning we awaken. Beside us, that familiar sleeping body in the bed: a new kind of stranger.

  Presto, change-o. The plot meant to illustrate these ruminations is so tricky, so full of pregnant pauses and delayed revelations, that to discuss it at all is to risk giving it all away. The narrator, who reveals herself as female on the second page, when she speaks of her husband, does not let the reader know until page 48 that she is African-American. The news at this point is startling, but, in retrospect, it explains a certain tense reserve in her voice, an embattled, extra-keen awareness of the passing pedestrians and car headlights in the neighborhood of Ocean Beach, north of San Francisco. Hers, it turns out, at this juncture in the early 1950s, is the only black family, across the street from the only Jews. Perhaps her
name, Pearl, was a tip-off, or the skimming mention of her eating in “a special area of a department-store lunchroom, after being turned away by two others,” but this reader was taken by surprise. Mysteries cling to some fraught asides and constrained locutions in Pearl’s tale. “Pearlie, I need you to marry me” is Holland Cook’s way of proposing marriage, and “Let me take care of you” her inspired way of announcing her availability. A shadow, a rumor, of disability hangs over the groom from the start, though everyone agrees that he is an attractive, amiable man.

  Pearl and Holland were children together in Kentucky, and began to walk home from school hand in hand as teen-agers. In 1943, Pearl helps Holland’s mother protect the young man from the draft, tutoring him and bringing him fond but chaste companionship in the farmhouse room where he is hidden. An illness blows his cover—Pearl goes for the doctor, who is not the one to report him to the police. The draft officer, failing to elicit any philosophical beliefs that would justify draft evasion, gruffly releases him, saying, “Boy, I can’t put down that you’re just a goddamn Negro coward. I can’t have that in my district.” Holland is drafted, and is severely burned when his transport ship is sunk. Meanwhile, Pearl has been enlisted by a Mr. Pinker to be a factory worker on the West Coast and to spy on her fellow-employees (“Be a finker … for Mr. Pinker!”). She complies, and then becomes a WAVE. When, shortly after the war, she spots Holland on a Bay Area park bench, she is “startled to see such despair on his square handsome face.” On his side, he doesn’t even recognize her. As she pursues the relationship, he warns her, “You don’t know me, not really.”

  Nevertheless, they marry. They have a child, Sonny, who contracted polio and must wear leg braces. Holland is a caring father but a moody husband, frequently away on business. At home, he sleeps in his own bedroom. In deference to his supposed fragility, Pearl pampers him to the remarkable extent of clipping disturbing items from the newspaper. But all seems relatively well in Ocean Beach until, in 1953, an elegantly dressed white man, with a broken nose and “sapphirine” blue eyes, rings at the door; he introduces himself to Pearl as Buzz Drumer and, before long, tells her that he and Holland met in an Army hospital and fell in love. Buzz has come to get his former lover back. He is rich, and offers to recompense Pearl if she conspires with him in his lovelorn plan to carry Holland off. She hates the idea, but feels helpless: “I did not know how to fight a white man; I was born without that muscle.”

  So the novel settles in as a murky triangle and a historical study of how American blacks, gays, and pacifists fared “in tragic times”—that is, between 1943 and 1953. Greer was born in 1970. Though there is no disputing the contemporary facts and news stories—the Second World War, rationing, harsh government treatment of conscientious objectors (“conchies”), racial discrimination, homophobia, Cold War militancy, McCarthyism, the Rosenbergs, air-raid drills, Korea—with which Greer sketches the background of his story, this background has a papery feel to it. I was put in mind of Henry James’s ringing admonitions, in 1901, to Sarah Orne Jewett on the subject of “historical” fiction:

  You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like—the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as nought.… You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman—or rather fifty—whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force—and even then it’s all humbug.

  Whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned: in indicting, however lightly, the hard-hearted prejudices and dispositions of an earlier time, a writer emphasizes that he has transcended them. He invisibly substitutes his own (in favor of, say, love, tolerance, and peace), with their own possibly less-than-eternal shelf life. A merely diagrammatic situation emerges. Greer is so tactful, so respectful, in his portrait of the colored Cook family that they seem colorless. His crucial invention, Buzz Drumer, a homosexual passionate enough to sacrifice his fortune for a bygone conquest, is oddly unpersuasive as gay; he is so politely and persistently attentive to Pearl that he is mistaken for her lover. Questions of plausibility arise. Would one male American really try, in 1953, to buy another from his wife? Would she, even if a daughter of the Jim Crow South, so docilely entertain the proposition? Would any couple be as radically noncommunicative as Pearl and Holland? And would even a woman who (as Holland admiringly says) “talked like a book” tell her story with such meanders of metaphor as:

  You cannot go around in grief and panic every day; people will not let you, they will coax you with tea and tell you to move on, bake cakes and paint walls. You can hardly blame them; after all, we learned long ago that the world would fall apart and the cities would be left to the animals and the clambering vines if grief, like a mad king, were allowed to ascend the throne.

  Greer is a prose writer who works on the edge of the overcooked, and there is nothing wrong with that—better that than raw—but can we believe in these highly seasoned sentences as passing through Pearl’s mind?

  A crowd of untended roses lay bruised and blue in the dusk, alongside daylilies caught in the act of closing for the night. In one, a tardy bee engrossed herself among the shutting petals. Perhaps she would linger too late, become trapped in the mindless flower, struggling in there all night, exhausting herself to death in that pollened room.

  A bit too artfully, Greer spices up the narrative by making parts of it, while we watch, vanish: a crucial question is interrupted by an air-raid alarm and left unanswered; a “rain-soaked Holland” appears to Pearl in a dream “with a single word on his lips,” which we never hear; Buzz gives his central revelation and proposal—a speech “pieced … together over the years, practiced … over and over in his bachelor’s rooms downtown”—in brief paraphrase. On page 79, a soda jerk, William Platt, mutters “an ugly term” as Pearl leaves a drugstore; on page 44 we learn that the term was “nigger.” When Pearl hears that a training accident has affected Platt instead of her husband, she mumbles “something before I burst into tears”; we have only to turn the page to discover that the mumbled phrase was “Thank God.” It is Buzz Drumer’s shame, perhaps, that delays the explanation for his missing little-finger joint—noticed when Pearl meets him on page 11—until page 156. It is involuntary memory that leads Pearl, while dancing with a man who hums along with the tune, to fish for “something that was gone the instant I felt it,” and that turns out to be the memory of young Holland, back in Kentucky, “humming in my ear as he lay beside me on the bed.” The author more than once evokes the magician’s art, tempting us to equate legerdemain with storytelling and the course of love: “to place the gleaming coin on the heartline of your hand, close it in a fist, and—presto!—a moment later the fingers open on barren palm.”

  The Confessions of Max Tivoli was a beautiful stunt, a defiance of actual gravity that needed, to hold it down, all the trinkets of realism, of period detail and solemn aphorism that Greer could provide. The Story of a Marriage, taking up the ambiguities of intimacy and bisexuality, is a less unusual human story, that of “changeling boys … and the poor girls who someday would love them.” Women loving gay men in vain crop up not infrequently in today’s fiction—in Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant and Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travelers, for instance—and scarcely need the complications of race and mid-twentieth-century mores to heighten their predicament. Greer overestimated, perhaps, his theme’s fragile strangeness, and armored it in the equivalent of the painstakingly provided Fifties cars and clothes and background music of Far from Heaven, a blue-lit mock-weeper of a movie. The industriously unearthed details of how West Coast soda jerks used to concoct a “Suicide” or of how truly precarious amusement-park rides used to be are fascinating in themselves but marginal to his tale of divided loyalties and dangerous affections.

  The Story of a Marriage is a sentimental, overwritten, overcalculated novel that nevertheless proves moving in the end, pulling
all its prevarications and flourishes into an affirmation of the unideal everyday as it was experienced fifty years ago and, possibly, as it is even now. Looking back, Pearl decrees, “The way we lived would not do, would not hold”; the improvements in overt racial and sexual attitudes, the lessening of received prohibitions and discriminations, need just a glance at our national campaigns and headliners to be confirmed. But even in benighted yesteryear, life had to be lived, on the terms available. Greer’s instincts vote, in the end, for the unmagical and enduring, for the brightness of—to give away the novel’s last two words—“startling day.”

  Dreamy Wilderness

  A MERCY, by Toni Morrison. 167 pp. Knopf, 2008.

  Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. Her newest novel, A Mercy, begins with some kind of confession from an unnamed voice, which reassures the reader:

  Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark—weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more—but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth.

  We are not totally reassured. What blood? What have you (there in the dark) done? The darkness does not quickly lift: “You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog’s profile plays in the steam of a kettle.” A dog’s profile does what? “That night”—what night?—“I see a minha mãe standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron. Other signs need more time to understand.”