Stefan Beck Online

A cack-handed genius

The death on December 30 of Ronald Searle, Britain’s foremost “graphic satirist”—to use his own designation—came as a terrific shock to his countrymen, many of whom thought he’d been dead for ages. Searle, ninety-one, had lived in Provence since 1966, and in France since 1961. He was untroubled by the possibility that his native land had forgotten him. “One marvelous thing about having left England,” he said in 2005, is that Frenchmen and other foreigners have “never heard of St. Trinian’s,” that Pandaemonium of a girls’ boarding school given diabolical life in Searle’s cartoons. Searle, complaining about a British “tendency to pigeonhole you,” thought it nicer to be presumed dead than remembered for work done in the 1950s.

Some were probably shocked for the opposite reason: Wasn’t Searle death-proof? A story known only vaguely to his more casual admirers, but retold with grim vividness by his many obituarists, was the ordeal he survived in his youth as a prisoner of war. At the outset of the Second World War, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers Corps of the Territorial Army. Soon he shipped out to Singapore, naïve, hopeful, and hopelessly ignorant of his adversary. Officers spoke of “yellow dwarves” who “couldn’t shoot straight.” It was 1942. After a month of jungle combat, during which fellow “sappers” were picked off by guerrillas hidden in palm trees, Singapore fell to the Japanese.

There can be no overstating the effect of his four-year captivity, split between Singapore, in Changi Jail, and Thailand, laboring on the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” made infamous by David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Searle considered Lean’s version roseate nonsense, and little wonder: In the Japanese he met only cruelty wedded to an honor culture that saw prisoners as, in a sense, already dead. Starvation, insect bites, dysentery, beriberi, gruesome skin afflictions, beatings—as horrible as these were, worst was to wake up with a dead comrade on either side of him. With lapidary candor, Searle said: “There I lost all my friends.”

There he also gained the full force of his artistry. “They say that I was partly a father of black humor,” he once remarked. He must have appreciated the bile-black irony that a prison camp was his art school: four years as a literally starving artist, with nothing to do but suffer and sketch. Searle produced hundreds of drawings while in Japanese custody. The prisoners donated the flyleaves of their books to their resident Goya. He worked away, hiding the finished products beneath dying men. Searle had been an artist before the war, but in these conditions his creativity took on the urgency of reportage, and of survival.

As another POW put it: “If you can imagine something that weighs six stone [eighty-four pounds] or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that aren’t revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this man had from the ordinary human being.” A difference of temperament explains how Searle, despite all the “horribleness [he] saw,” became the kind of artist he did. Miraculously, over three hundred drawings survived the humidity and violence of Southeast Asia. At first glance, little in the execution of these works anticipates the signature style of the illustrator of the St. Trinian’s and Molesworth books; the star of Punch, Life, Holiday, and other publications; a man as comfortable with Charles Addams– and Gahan Wilson–style grotesquerie as with more broadly appealing work about, e.g., cats, dogs, and oenophilia. The prison drawings are cartoons only in the formal sense.

“Cholera,” made with pen and blue ink on buff paper in Thailand (1943) is exemplary. With a gestural scattering of lines, like hairs clinging to a shower stall, Searle records for posterity the pelvis, ribs, and cavernous abdomen of a dying man. Hardest to look at is the face. Bald, jug-eared, with skeletal temples and nose, it gapes in wide-eyed, open-mouthed astonishment that such fates as this are possible. An earlier drawing, “Dead Soldier, on Bukit Timah roadside, Singapore” (1942), resembles a crucifixion study, the top half taken up with a broken M of outstretched arms and hanging head.

Who would believe the man who drew that would live to be one of the funniest artists of the twentieth century? It makes a kind of sense. Searle explained that “the mentality, really, of everyone who was involved in the war was that no longer the politeness of [the] prewar [world] existed. . . . This obviously changed the attitude toward all things, and certainly as far as humor is concerned.”

As to whether he’d have arrived at his sinister view of life, the jolly menace of his style, given different circumstances, Searle was unequivocal: “Absolutely impossible. You’ve got to have the experience to be able to express it.” Searle, rather than be destroyed by horror and brutality, patiently absorbed them into his tragicomic outlook. He came to see the past as a boon: “If you’re a freelance artist and you’re commenting on the world around you, you’ve got to live on an island. . . . Once you’ve been a prisoner, you never escape from your island prison. And it gives you the point of view of looking around you, of being able to comment or react to anything that’s around you without having any parochial responsibility.” Still, he had to be prepared to benefit from this experience.

Searle was born in Cambridge, East Anglia, on March 3, 1920. His beginnings were, as they say, humble, but his family wasn’t poor: “We didn’t have any money. There was a difference.” That difference was a knack for hard work and self-reliance. It was also a native eccentricity. Whatever his family was poor in, it wasn’t spirit. His father, a Post Office employee, may not have been odd, but his relatives were. Aunt Edie “was known to dust the coal.” His father’s cousins were “earning their living on the music-hall stage as lady serpents. In brief costumes of fringed scales, [they] would ooze about the stage of any theatre that had the courage to book them.”

Young Ronald himself was a performer, a boy soprano known, to his enduring horror, as the “Nightingale of East Anglia.” Though paid handsomely for concerts—six shillings, three of which he got to keep for art supplies—Searle recalled, “Before my East Anglian wings could really take off, my voice dropped, and all was well.”

Searle’s love of culture extended to a fascination for the architecture and history of Cambridge. If his leaning toward the bizarre predated the war, Cambridge was to blame. It was full of “lovely museums where there were everything from shrunken heads to fabulous African masks.” (One St. Trinian’s cartoon depicts a schoolgirl eyeing her sleeping dorm-mate maliciously while taking notes on a huge volume called How to Shrink a Human Head.)

For his style, Searle blamed not only Cambridge but also his hands:

Quite suddenly I began to draw. I had been scribbling for ever. Now it took shape and I became, first fascinated, then obsessed, with what it was possible to do with pen and pencil. No one paid much attention to this, nor to the fact that the drawings were immediately grotesque. This was assumed to be one of the penalties for being “cack-handed,” local dialect for mocking a left-hander. . . . I had the inborn advantage of the eccentric.

At fifteen, he was fired from a solicitor’s office for drawing all day on stolen paper. Anyone who was doing the same thing in his high school classes at that age will have cause for envy. Searle was soon contributing to the Cambridge Daily News and Granta. His lodestars were Max Beerbohm; George Grosz, a book of whose work “stayed in my pocket when I went into the army”; and the usual suspects, Cruikshank, Gillray, Hogarth, and Rowlandson. He received his first real instruction at the Cambridge Technical School. Soon he’d be doing his study abroad in Southeast Asia.

Postwar life was a cycle of success (career), failure (personal life), success (personal life), self-imposed exile, and belated recognition. The challenge of providing for his wife, Kaye Webb, and two children spurred Searle through a period of Stakhanovite productivity that cemented his reputation.

He left his family in 1961, a move he described as both self-centered and the best decision of his life. It was, he said, a matter of survival. One finds it difficult to excuse his callousness, but the trials of his early life make it harder still not to take him at his word. He stayed with his second wife, Monica Koenig, until an especially bitter end. The drawings he made to ease the suffering of her terminal cancer are now collected in Les Très Riches Heures of Mrs Mole (2011).

There is little biographical excitement to be had from Searle’s postwar existence, but there is an awful lot of brilliant work. Where to begin? St. Trinian’s, with its feral schoolgirls, would have been enough to make Searle a national treasure. In The Terror of St. Trinian’s, we find “A shrieking horde of Lower School types”—a representative cartoon of tiny, pinafore-clad harpies, wielding sickles and maces, in combat with a fireman. Later, in a splendid two-page drawing, the arsonist-heroine Angela Menace “rescues” Headmistress Umbrage from the blaze Angela herself has set. Curls of inky smoke meet webs of water and ladders—

Total chaos. Turn the page too quickly and you might miss the tiny, hooting, savage faces in the crowd below. Searle had mastered this kind of manic spectacle, with its discomfiting suggestion—years before such films as If . . . (1968) dared to think themselves subversive—that the bestial lurked even in spider-legged schoolgirls.

And speaking of spiders! What about the marvelous illustration in Whizz for Atomms (1956), the third of Searle’s Molesworth books, depicting the spelling-challenged schoolboy Nigel Molesworth (Searle’s topp character, as any fule kno) as a leering, fanged, two-dozen-plus-legged space tarantula? Caption: “Nearer and nearer crept the ghastly thing.” It’s as if Odilon Redon woke up one dreary morning and decided to be funny.

Down with Skool! (1953), Searle’s first collaboration with Geoffrey Willans, may be the funniest book about childhood and education ever produced. It is the spoonful of sugar necessitated by a bitter pill like George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys.” On many pages one asks which came first, Willans’s text or Searle’s visual gag—but the answer is plain. This was a perfect partnership, two comic minds burning at the same fever pitch. “Kanes I Have Known by N. Molesworth” includes “2. The ‘Nonpliant’ or ‘Rigid’ with silencer attachment to drown victims [sic] cries.” It’s a cane to which is tied, with a dainty bow of twine, a bottle of ether.

As a journalist, Searle drew the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961; the Berlin Wall in 1963; François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his detested Tonton Macoutes in 1968; and a host of humanitarian crises. He exhibited work in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1971, the first living non-French artist to earn that distinction; contributed regularly to Le Monde until late in his life; and was made Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2007. His work inspired beloved illustrators like Ralph Steadman, Quentin Blake, and Matt Groening.

In 1979 Searle prepared a poster for UNICEF’s Year of the Child that epitomizes his outlook. A candy-colored horde of creepily cheerful children wreaths a monochromatic globe, like a womb, pregnant with a huddled, starving boy. Searle once said, of his nightmare in Southeast Asia, that the jungle was beautiful but full of danger. He was speaking also of the world as it is. Though he never succumbed to a reflexive bitterness, Searle couldn’t lose sight of a horror kept in check by man’s precarious capacity for goodness. “Everything,” he said, “goes back to being a prisoner. You can’t have that sort of experience without it affecting the rest of your life.” He remained life’s prisoner to the end, forever trying to buoy, instruct, and memorialize the doomed souls stuck in the same cell with him.

The Map and the Territory

“You know,” remarks a character in Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, “it’s the journalists who’ve given me the reputation for being a drunk; what’s curious is that none of them ever realized that if I was drinking a lot in their presence, it was simply in order to put up with them.”

A passing familiarity with Houellebecq the media figure, a man described variously as an enfant terrible, an agent provocateur, an Islamophobe, a misogynist, a pornographer, an egomaniac, and a sad sack, will give away the surprise: The speaker is Houellebecq himself, in conversation with an enormously successful French photographer and painter named Jed Martin. Martin, the novel’s true subject, has enlisted Houellebecq to write a catalogue essay. During their first meeting, Martin interrupts Houellebecq’s desultory tangent about Thai brothels by saying, “I have the slight impression you’re playing your own role.” Houellebecq brightens. He couldn’t, it turns out, agree more.

It is both a pleasure and a relief to find Houellebecq having such fun with himself and his public persona. The critics, and this one is no exception, have perhaps been too quick to see a pessimist or nihilist, whose inflammatory outburts and despairing outlook are as much an apparatus of self-promotion as they are symptoms of philosophical laziness. He is a wealthy tax exile and winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt (for this novel), but in Public Enemies, a book of his correspondence with the gadfly Bernard Henri-Lévy, he gives voice to almost comical delusions of persecution. He is indeed well-disliked by many, but he brings it upon himself. Behind this puzzling self-caricature and calculated contempt is a mind hard at work.

The Map and the Territory is the first of Houellebecq’s books to give serious treatment to characters not modeled on the author. Jed Martin’s progress as an artist is traced from childhood, when his drawings of flowers meet the bemused approval of his babysitter: “Little boys draw bloodthirsty monsters, Nazi insignia, and fighter planes . . . rarely flowers.” Just before his seventh birthday, his mother kills herself, a barbed parallel with Houellebecq’s own abandonment by his mother, Lucie Ceccaldi. At the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Martin takes up photography, applying himself to the “systematic photography of the world’s manufactured objects . . . . Suspension files, handguns, diaries, printer cartridges, forks . . . an exhaustive catalogue of the objects of human manufacturing in the Industrial Age.”

Martin is a reader, and an avid student of Catholicism’s influence on Western culture, while “his contemporaries generally knew more about the life of Spider-Man than of Jesus.” Yet, as he tells a journalist late in life—the narrative perspective here is something like an art-critical biography—he wants “simply to give an account of the world.” He has a monkish disregard for friendship or any other human connection. His only romantic relationship, with a beautiful Russian woman named Olga, begins by accident (“The image of the virile brute who is good in bed had been coming back in force lately . . . . Such a situation did not really put Jed at an advantage”). He has been making photographic enlargements of old Michelin maps, and she is a Michelin PR executive who has been tasked by the company with, for lack of a better phrase, co-opting his work.

The market’s corrupting effect on human and, in particular, sexual relationships has long been Houellebecq’s major theme. The story of Martin’s rise to fame and fortune is, similarly, a satire of the art world and of the market’s corrupting effect on the creative impulse and its fruits. In his late career, Martin returns to figurative painting, producing a celebrated series about professions, e.g., The Journalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut Chairing an Editorial Meeting; Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager (Vorilhon is the leader of the much-mocked Raëlian cult, which inspired Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island); Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology, and the unfinished Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market.

Yet, buried in this deft dissection of the artistic life is an unexpected, oblique meditation on death. One of Houellebecq’s most affectingly drawn characters is Martin’s dying father, a former architect with whom he takes Christmas dinner each year. Martin insists on cuisine à l'ancienne, a phrase and theme which recurs in unexpected places. We find him at a funeral à l'ancienne, one “which didn’t attempt to dodge the reality of death.” At other funerals, the artist had been “shocked that some of those present hadn’t bothered to switch off their cell phones before the moment of the cremation.”

Martin recalls a Malagasy burial practice he learned about from a former lover. “One week after the death, the corpse was dug up, the shroud was undone, and a meal was eaten in its presence . . . then it was buried again. This was repeated after a month, then after three . . . .” Much later, when the character Houellebecq is gruesomely murdered (decapitated, in fact, as is his dog) and Martin is consulted by the police, an investigator recalls a time when, “feeling that he was beginning to have difficulty bearing crime scenes, he had gone to the Buddhist Center of Vincennes to ask them if it would be possible for him to practice asubha, the meditation on the corpse. The lama had at first tried to dissuade him: this meditation, he had opined, was difficult, and not adapted to the Western mentality. . . .”

The investigator’s bewilderment in the face of evil—all crimes, he believes, come down to sex or money, and he is vindicated vis-à-vis the Houellebecq case—has much in common with the author’s disillusionment with and disappointment in human existence. But it is Martin’s relationship with his father, whom cancer has forced to suffer the indignity of an artificial anus, that makes The Map and the Territory a great achievement. In a moment of moribund free-association, Martin’s father, the subject of The Architect Jean-Pierre Martin Leaving the Management of His Business, breaks down recalling a nest he once built for some swallows: “They never wanted to use my nest. Never.”

Martin interrupts: “Swallows never use a nest built by human hand . . . . If a man so much as touches their nest, they leave it to build a new one.” It’s a lie: He’s made up this factoid off the top of his head to reassure the old man. “His father had just relived, for the last time, the hopes and failures that formed the story of his life. It doesn’t amount to much, generally speaking, a human life.” This is no sentimental or cynical power play on the author’s part. Like Jed Martin, Houellebecq, for all his bad-boy trappings, has only ever wanted to depict life as he believes it is. This is not to say he never wanted it to be otherwise, and that has never been clearer than in The Map and the Territory. Indeed, he has arrived here at something like a pacific acceptance of mankind’s—to put it mildly—imperfect lot. “There was in the voice of the author of The Elementary Particles something that Jed had never noticed before, that he’d never expected to find, and that he took some time to identify, because basically he hadn’t found it in anyone, for many years: he seemed happy.” Put another way: Houellbecq is dead—long live Houellebecq.

Twelve Unusual Christmas Reads

Every home should have a hearth, but my landlord says the fireplace is defective and that any attempt to use it will constitute breach of lease. What he means is that he’s taken my measure and thinks my living room is a tinderbox of rolling papers, pornography, and fried chicken cartons. He’s quite mistaken. In my parlor he would find a lovely Christmas tree, twinkling like the very dome of heaven, and a troop of apple-cheeked Hummels I acquired last year but haven’t yet managed to pawn. Tinsel, garland, and chestnut shells are the only combustibles on offer. This atmosphere of holiday cheer cries out for a wood fire, or even a Duraflame log, by which to read Christmas classics.

The natural-gas heater will have to suffice. Herewith, a 12 Days of Christmas reading list you might actually enjoy. I won’t tell you to reread A Christmas Carol, sniffle at “Gift of the Magi,” or keep a straight face for the concluding line of Chekhov’s “At Christmas Time” (to wit: “The hot douche, your Excellency”), when there are so many other odd, beautiful, and at times hilarious selections out there.

Day 1: Jacobus de Voragine, “Saint Nicholas,” Legenda Aurea. One encounters the word “hagiography” so often in reviews of celebrity bios that one forgets it’s a real genre—a surpassingly weird one. Jacobus, né Jacopo, was a 13th-century Genoan archbishop and compiler of what we might call Lies of the Saints. His entry on Nicholas is loaded with bizarre goodies, including the origin of St. Nick’s preference for invading homes through the chimney.

Day 2: John Betjeman, “Advent 1955.” It was perhaps Betjeman’s “background of solid bourgeois respectability,” as Paul Dean put it, that encouraged him to pen the ur-verses against the commercialization, and mawkish sentimentalization, of Christ’s birth. “We raise the price of things in shops,/ We give plain boxes fancy tops/ And lines which traders cannot sell/ Thus parcell’d go extremely well/ We dole out bribes we call a present/ To those to whom we must be pleasant.” But the poem ends on a strikingly uncynical note.

Day 3: Max Beerbohm, A Christmas Garland. A compendium of literary parodies—some loving, some devastating—on the subject of Christmas. Many of the authors Max buttonholes beneath the mistletoe are too obscure for modern readers to care about, but parodies of G. K. Chesterton (“Some Damnable Errors About Christmas”), Joseph Conrad (“The Feast”), and George Bernard Shaw (“A Straight Talk”) are priceless. Chesterton: “I select at random two of the more obvious fallacies that obtain. One is that Christmas should be observed as a time of jubilation . . . This brings me to the second fallacy. I refer to the belief that ‘Christmas comes but once a year . . .’”

Day 4: Neil Gaiman, “Nicholas Was . . .” A very short story from Smoke and Mirrors, which can be enjoyed online. “The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.” The moral of the story: Sucks to be Santa. (See also: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale.)

Day 5: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Father Christmas Letters. Christmas has always been neck and neck with Halloween for the title of Best Time to Traumatize Your Kids. This year my cousin let one of her daughters torment one of her sons with fake threats from The Man Up North. The practice, whatever Child Protective Services may think of it, enjoys a distinguished pedigree. Tolkien used his Northern European imagination not to frighten but at least to compel belief in the corpulent, red-clad judge. His illustrated letters to his children, which feature a North Polar Bear, Ilbereth the elf, and goblins, are an invaluable template for those parents who find it funny to watch their kids’ eyes go wide and scared-shitless as Christmas approaches.

Day 6: Robert Frost, “Christmas Trees.” It wouldn’t quite be winter without “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” but “Christmas Trees” is dearer to my heart now that I live 133 miles from Manhattan. The poem, a “circular letter” to friends, deals with some citified jerk who tries to clear-cut Frost’s forests at 3¢ a tree. Frost doesn’t take the bait: “I doubt if I was tempted for a moment/ To sell them off their feet to go in cars/ And leave the slope behind the house all bare,/ Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon./ I’d hate to have them know it if I was.”

Day 7: Washington Irving, Christmas Sketches. Geoffrey Crayon’s impressions of Christmas, from The Sketch-Book, are a perfect American companion to Dickens’s Christmas Carol. (A Christmas Carol was very much Dickens’s answer to Irving; he once remarked, “I do not go to bed two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm upstairs to bed with me.”) Irving’s old-style perorations are as mellifluous and soothing as a pewter goblet of heavily fortified eggnog. Here, in “The Stage Coach,” we discover that Christmas break was ever thus: “It was delightful to hear the gigantic plans of pleasure of the little rogues, and the impracticable feats they were to perform during their six weeks’ emancipation from the abhorred thraldom of book, birch, and pedagogue.”

Day 8: Tobias Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow.” It isn’t a Christmas story, but it’s very much a winter’s tale—and it lends the necessary tincture of violence and menace to this list. The twist, when it comes, makes O. Henry look like a hopeless pansy. If only he hadn’t looked like one already.

Day 9: Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One can read Gawain in an hour or two, if it’s in translation—Simon Armitage’s is easy to digest—and it’s an ideal Christmas repast. Most of this 14th-century poem consists of elaborate descriptions of Christmas partying at Camelot, the court of King Arthur, and the rest is a supernatural thriller—perhaps what Andy Williams had in mind when he crooned about “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.” Armitage even uses the word “wodwo,” at one point, which should guide readers to Ted Hughes’s poem of the same name, and to the “Wild Man,” which, in Northern European folklore, is one of Santa’s pagan precursors.

Day 10: Terry Pratchett, Hogfather. Death takes a holiday. Things get weird. Trust me.

Day 11: Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, How to Be Topp. The closing chapter of this most brilliant, and fantastically illustrated, “children’s book” is all about Christmas. “The Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-You Letter” belongs in every child’s arsenal. There’s also this mouths-of-babes heresy: “Personaly i do not care a d. whether Marley was dead or not it is just that there is something about the xmas Carol which makes paters and grown-ups read with grate XPRESION, and this is very embarassing for all. It is all right for the first part they just roll the r’s a lot but wate till they come to scrooge’s nephew. When he sa Mery Christmas uncle it is like an H-bomb xplosion and so it go on until you get to Tiny Tim chiz chiz chiz he is a weed. When Tiny Tim sa God bless us every one your pater is so overcome he burst out blubbing.”

Day 12: Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal. The crown jewel of the Christmas bookshelf. Rock Crystal contains the most gorgeous descriptions of a frozen landscape you’re likely to encounter in any book, as well as the most affecting Christmas miracle in world literature. Adam Kirsch called it a “parable of frightening depth.” That this simple story of two lost children manages to scale such heights is a testament to the holiday season’s imaginative power. The NYRB version, translated by the poet Marianne Moore, belongs on every civilized bookshelf, all year round.

The Capital Gang

“When a man is tired of London,” said Samuel Johnson, “he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” You could say the same about Paris, Rome, New York, or Chicago, and nobody would blink. But plug in Albany and you’ve got a laugh line. Yet William Kennedy did precisely that when, in O Albany!, he called himself “a person whose imagination has become fused with a single place, and in that place finds all the elements a man ever needs for the life of the soul.” In the nine novels of his Albany Cycle, which now includes Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, Kennedy proves that he means it.

New York’s Capital District, which includes not only Albany but also such dark Satanic mills as Schenectady, Troy, and the tongue-twisting Watervliet, is notable for corruption, urban decay, and miniature hot dogs. It has little to offer the aesthete or the bon vivant. Its appeal is of a fundamentally masculine nature. Kennedy’s world is short on women and long on gangsters, gamblers, hobos, pool sharks, drunks, political bosses, flunkies, agitators, and risk-hungry journalists.

Changó opens in Albany, in 1936, with a boy named Daniel Quinn waking to Bing Crosby singing “Shine”—in person. Quinn, the grandson of the hero of Kennedy’s Quinn’s Book (1988), has wandered sandy-eyed into the mystery of male camaraderie. His father George, Bing “Bingo” Crosby, and a brilliant black pianist named Cody give him an oblique lesson in racial politics:

“‘Shine’ isn’t just a song,” Cody said.

“No,” said Bing. “It’s an insult. A bad word but a great song. The song turns the insult inside out.”

After just six pages, the story jumps ahead to 1957 and Havana. Quinn, now a journalist, is about to meet his future wife Renata, on “the same night he summon[s] the courage to talk to Hemingway” at the Floridita. If you are the sort of reader who is skeptical of a man whose imagination rarely ranges beyond Albany, you will cringe at the prospect of an encounter with Papa. Is Kennedy, now eighty-three, aware of the fact that Hemingway’s masculinity is regarded as aspirational, a drunken self-caricature? Will Kennedy go for hammy ventriloquism, or fall into the trap of taking Hemingway seriously? Kennedy’s Hemingway advises Quinn to “remove the colon and semicolon keys from your typewriter.” Yup, hammy ventriloquism. Then he punches out an obnoxious patron, who later challenges Hemingway to a delightful set piece of a duel. Hemingway proceeds to order a filet mignon and a daiquiri, and to remark that “jerks are no joke.”

Only a writer as seasoned, as conversant in masculine display, and, let’s face it, as old as Kennedy could get away with any of this. He is reminding his readers that if masculinity is, as they say, performative, that is exactly why it’s impressive: it is easy to be yourself, but it takes practice to be someone you are not. Kennedy addresses the hokiness of his old-school tough guys and the palmy, exotic setting by making it a sort of rueful tribute to itself. Sort of a nostalgia act with brains.

Quinn pursues Renata, a woman he likens to Ava Gardner, to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where Renata lectures students about “Changó, the warrior king of kings,” a Santería god. Renata, of whom Quinn rhapsodizes that “there was no garment she would not enhance if she wrapped herself in it,” considers Hemingway an ill-tempered buffoon, but takes a liking to Quinn. Thus does Quinn become entangled with the classic femme fatale, who observes exotic rites and runs guns for the enemies of the Batista regime. Quinn will find work with Renata’s brother-in-law, Max, at the Havana Post; Renata will be tortured in the wake of an assault on the Presidential Palace; Quinn will get his interview with Castro, in a scene influenced by Kennedy’s own meetings with the dictator.

The story returns to Albany, to Kennedy’s turf, after a little over one hundred pages. Robert Kennedy has just been shot in Los Angeles, and is “comatose but wide-eyed on a hotel kitchen floor, vigils for him now unfolding across the nation.” Anybody familiar with William Kennedy’s books will regard Albany as the real story, a respite from that protracted and disorienting, albeit entertaining, Cuban prologue. No more cameos from famous men, but plenty of screen time for the members of Kennedy’s old upstate gang. Though the parallels between revolutionary Cuba and Albany on the brink of a race riot may be somewhat forced, the panorama of Albany in the ’60s is expertly done.

Quinn has just dropped his father George on the front steps of the Elks Club—to be baby-sat, more or less: “George got out of the car and took two steps toward the Club, and when Danny pulled away George turned around to watch him go. He looked up and down the block for the Club, crossed State Street and walked down the hill and crossed Pearl Street.” George, needless to say, suffers from dementia, and is about to traverse Albany on a journey that is equal parts—or maybe 2 to 1—Ulysses and “Mr. Magoo.”

On the loose and firmly convinced that it is the ’30s, George is an ideal vehicle for Kennedy’s obsessions: change, memory, and the beauty and persistence of the past. George frequently breaks into song, a device that might seem heavy-handed or maudlin were it not clear how deeply Kennedy appreciates this music. Changó is a deliberately musical book, and it is after George stops for a beer that the prologue comes full circle: the bar belongs to Cody, the piano player. The man who serves George is Roy, Cody’s radical son, whom senile George mistakes for a “wonderful fella” named “Nigger Dick Hawkins.” An oblivious old man putting his foot in his mouth is the least of the racial strife about to engulf Albany.

As befits a novel named for a Santería god, Changó is a strange and often bewildering book. What it’s about depends, in large part, on who’s looking. It is a commentary on machine politics, as many of Kennedy’s books are: a scene in which poll watchers confront election fixers is among the novel’s most memorable. In both its Havana and Albany episodes, it illustrates what happens when the unstoppable force of individual conscience meets the seemingly immovable object of political power.

As a treatise on race relations, it offers paradoxes that the nation—and its binary-minded young people—would do well to contemplate. How can George, know-nothing user of racial epithets, be pals with Cody? How can “Shine,” derided and dismissed by Roy as a “coon song” and “shuffle stuff,” be seen as something almost transcendent by his father? The book ends on a cinematic note—a feel-good note—with the principals safe from the rioting, dancing the night away at the dying Cody’s farewell concert.

As Saul Bellow once wrote of Kennedy, “He could take material from skid row and write about these people as fully human as anyone else. . . . He wrote about them from the inside.” In Changó, Kennedy plays a vigorous variation on a shopworn theme: no man is an island. The Albany machine, with its cruel, careless trampling of human wishes, has always been the perfect foil for Kennedy’s real subject—the other machine, whose cogs are love and loyalty, friendship and community. Kennedy may be the first to admit how frequently that machine breaks down. What of it? When it’s working at full tilt, it is beautiful to behold.

11/22/63

Stephen King has something for everybody. For a highbrow critic like Harold Bloom, who condemned King as “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis,” he offers a punching bag. For a certain type of highbrow reader, he offers a handy way to establish populist bona fides. When Nabokov wrote, in an essay on Jekyll and Hyde, “I am not one of those college professors who coyly boasts [sic] of enjoying detective stories,” he had this type in mind. For everyone else, King offers escape, or even respite, from reality. Pure entertainment. The sales figures bear this out. The cinematic adaptations needn’t even be named. Chances are you’ve had nightmares about one or two or most of them.

I state the obvious here because, never having read King before his new 11/22/63, had every expectation of falling into one of these camps. My ignorance isn’t intended as a handy way to establish elitist bona fides. I’d always wanted to read King. As a kid I got a few pages into It before my mom confiscated it, having chanced to see the sentence, “The fish had eaten this unfortunate gentleman’s eyes, three of his fingers, his penis, and most of his left foot.” Later, my grandma confiscated Gerald’s Game before I even started it. It was, needless to say, her own copy.

11/22/63 isn’t a horror story, though part of it is set in the same clown-haunted Derry, Maine, in which It opens. King’s much-bruited “sense of place,” his Maine, may be studied by the dumbed-down academe of the future the way Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha is now, to the dismay of Harold Bloom’s corpse. In 11/22/63 the sense of place is replaced with a sense of time. The novel is about Jake Epping, a high school English teacher who travels into the past to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Its subject, and in certain important ways its main character, is time itself. It reveals King as an almost willfully mediocre prose stylist, a great storyteller, and—here’s the complicating surprise—a thoughtful navigator of the questions a curious normal person would have about time, causality, memory, and love.

In other words, King is not Borges. He is your favorite high school English teacher, the one who married once, never left town, devoted his life to kids, and inquired as deeply as his mental equipment permitted into things that matter.

Jake Epping would be a failure by big-city standards, which is why he’s so appealing. His wife’s alcoholism destroyed his marriage (alcoholic King knows whereof he speaks), and the book opens with him slogging, like the Atlantic’s Professor X, through adult-education comp themes. One of his students writes, painfully and in emblematically crappy prose, of the tragedy that destroyed his family and left him crippled. Soon thereafter, Al, a diner owner of Jake’s acquaintance, suddenly dying of lung cancer, reveals that his pantry is a portal to 1958. Al, who has been using said portal to buy cheap hamburger meat, beseeches Jake to perform a nobler task that occurred to him too late: Save Kennedy in 1963. But Jake, the earnest Everyman, finds he wants to save everyone.

King goes easy on the SF time-travel minutia. He tells the reader only that every time the traveler passes through the portal, his previous emendations to the space-time continuum receive a cosmic stet. If Jake fails on his first try, he may try, try again. Only after a while does he realize things don’t go entirely back to normal. He begins to notice odd coincidences or resonances—he refers to them as the past “harmonizing” with itself—that say something’s not quite right. There are jarring echoes of words and situations; people in the past who resemble, Wizard of Oz-style, people in the present; the déjà vu that makes all of us go a little mad sometimes. In what I suspect is characteristic King fashion, “not quite right” turns out to mean “terrifying.”

I knocked King’s prose. All I mean is that it’s breezy. His figures of speech invoke pop culture. His humor is observational in a folksy way, usually while pretending to impatience with itself. He is probably capable of other registers, but wise enough to know that his target audience—from the wind-ruddied denizens of Vacationland to the regular folk of the greater U.S.—doesn’t want them. More power to him. The trouble for a reviewer is that the tail meat, the twists and turns of his densely plotted and intensively researched story, must be held in reserve. Here’s a teaser: Jake Epping takes the name George Amberson. He stays flush by abusing his knowledge of sporting events; this plot leads to tragedy. He trails Lee Harvey Oswald and peripheral players like the best of G-men, even employing historically accurate surveillance equipment, so that he can be certain the man he has to kill is actually the guilty party. And he falls in love with a lindy-hopping high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill—but whether he saves her is, in the end, an open question.

It’s strange to say a middling stylist like King is a national treasure, but there it is. Even the abysmal H. P. Lovecraft, one of King’s touchstones, enjoys pride of place in the Library of America. What makes King great isn’t his writing, but his knack for prodding the average person to wonder about time, fate, theodicy, and humanity (for King finds the humanity even in an assassin) in a useful, albeit rudimentary, way. The past is obdurate, the book tells us again and again. It doesn’t want to be changed, and will fight violently any attempt to change it. King’s imagination may be weirder and woollier than many of his contemporaries’, but the themes explored in 11/22/63—loss, nostalgia, regret, and wishful thinking—belong to all of us.