It was with a mixture of chagrin and perverse delight that I read the blurbs on a debut novel called, of all things, How to Sell. Jonathan Franzen: “[V]ery hard to stop reading.” Zadie Smith: “A funny, unforgiving novel about how we buy and sell everything.” Benjamin Kunkel: “This is the inevitability of truth-telling, of tragedy, of the setup to a good joke, and very possibly, of the inevitability of the classic.”
Oh, so that’s how to sell. The blurb isn’t, of course, a form known to foster restraint and reflection, but in this case there is a frankly Barnumesque discrepancy between what is promised and what awaits the unsuspecting mark. (Should you doubt the publishers are up to some chicanery, consider the cover—a recumbent Sexy Lady with pearls in her mouth—and the title, which doubles as the shortest Reader’s Guide in publishing history. It’s a rare book that makes a bid for both literary snobs and fans of Harlequin romance.)
The book follows two brothers, Jim and Bobby, who are salesmen at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange in the 1980s. Jim has been at it a while, but Bobby is a (Canadian) country bumpkin, a wide-eyed innocent waiting to be corrupted by money and city lights. Except he isn’t terribly innocent (“the first time I considered jewelry was the morning I stole my mother’s wedding ring”), and the process of his corruption, if it can be called that, is insultingly familiar. A limo waiting at the airport? Cocaine? Women? While you’re at it, why not get Ray Liotta for the audiobook?
At least the author, Clancy Martin, knows whereof he writes. He worked in the luxury jewelry business, and the technical knowledge he brings to his book is marvelous, easily the high point of the effort:
What Old John was doing for me was grinding out the “18kw,” or eighteen-karat white gold stamps, on the bracelet . . . and restamping the bracelet “Pt,” or platinum. He would rhodium-plate the whole afterward to give it that false brightness of freshly polished platinum. This was a common trick in the industry, which I tried to avoid because it was amateurish, and easily discovered if the piece in question was ever inspected by another appraiser.
There’s plenty of that insider wisdom, and it’s fascinating—enough fun to make you wish you were reading a fast-paced noir and not a ponderous work of “literary” fiction that dawdles a polite distance behind the reader at all times. Surprise is anathema to Martin’s book. We have two brothers; we can count on a love triangle to drive a wedge between them. When Bobby’s girlfriend becomes a prostitute, we know he’ll pay her for sex, as a sort of wry comment about how “we” buy and sell “everything.”
It’s one of those statements that sounds deliciously jaded but doesn’t stand much scrutiny. The “we” comes courtesy, you may recall, of Zadie Smith, but it’s a ubiquitous tic, and helps explain where How to Sell went wrong. “We” in critic-speak almost always means “everyone but me”; in this case, oddly enough, it seems to mean “very few people other than the scumbags depicted in this book.” Don’t misunderstand me: From Macbeth to the crime novels of Charles Willeford, I love a good villain. But, in trying to make his grifters somewhat sympathetic, representative of universal human foibles, Martin has only made them forgettable.
Here’s how Martin’s novel should have opened: “In 1999, while taking a break from my Ph.D. . . . I nearly became the world’s largest counterfeiter of Fabergé eggs.” He wrote that in February, in the London Review of Books. With a story like that, why did he give us these lightly sketched small-timers fighting over indistinguishable women? (Yes, one is a hooker, and another, with little English, is called “the Polack.” Beyond that, good luck keeping track.) The dialogue seems intentionally stilted, inexplicable in a novel about silver tongues. It is an outgrowth, maybe, of what one blurb calls “stripped-down” prose, but which I’ll call merely flat and joyless. Martin has wasted an opportunity to braid his one-off experience and specialized learning into a good story. Writing has little in common with sales: You can stamp a dust jacket with anything you like, but it’s an amateurish trick, easily discovered. The good stuff sells itself.
Sometimes false advertising is an accident. Take John Wray’s novel Lowboy. The cover features an illustration by Adrian Tomine, whose dour comics are a hipster touchstone. The plot follows a schizophrenic boy who wants to save the world from global warming by losing his virginity. Lowboy takes place almost entirely in the New York City subway system. It was also written almost entirely on the subway. It has been promoted on the subway. As the improbably named Thessaly La Force reported on The Book Bench, a New Yorker blog, “Last night, I caught the L train with the writer John Wray and some forty other people. We listened as Wray read . . . through a bullhorn. At Bedford, we disembarked, and headed to Spike’s for free beer and music.”
Talk about subterranean: We’re in a veritable Marianas Trench of hipsterism. But I shouldn’t have believed the hype this time, either. Wray is, in fact, an original stylist and a skillful storyteller, and should be forgiven his gimmicks.
Where How to Sell is a thriller trying and failing to be a Serious Book, Lowboy has a genuinely split personality; it is a highly literate, literary thriller, recalling at times Simenon’s Monsieur Monde Vanishes. “Lowboy” is Will Heller, a sixteen-year-old who flies the coop after being released from a psychiatric hospital. He retreats to the tunnels beneath New York, where he mingles with underworld characters—the homeless, prostitutes, pimps—while hotly pursued by a police detective, Ali Lateef, and his mother, whom he calls “Violet.”
Wray doesn’t romanticize mental illness, and it’s clear at the outset that we are not meant to learn anything from his troubled protagonist. It would be callous, and incorrect, to say that Lowboy is an excuse for aesthetic or linguistic experimentation, but he is certainly an occasion for both. He sees the world through a broken kaleidoscope, darkly, and this makes for some strange poetry:
A green girlshaped pillar rose through the veins of his retina like ivy twining through a chainlink fence. As soon as his eyes were closed her beautiful face began to disassemble. He’d suspected it would. Her features came apart like knitting.
I’ve never liked the rather showy habit of making single words out of hyphenated ones (“girlshaped,” “chainlink”)—Wray hasn’t got it quite as bad as Cormac McCarthy, thank God—but in this case it serves a purpose, suggesting frantic forward motion. As for the rest of it, it’s amazing that the narrative’s loony precision—precision, at times, about sights or sensations only Lowboy can understand—never slows the reader down:
What could he say to that but I’m so sorry. She took his hand in both of hers and brought it to her stomach. She made a place for it under her shirt. His hand felt a current: a mustering there. Her ribs shifted upward with three precise clicks, like the bones in the back of a snake. His hand found her hip, no thicker than a doorhandle, and she gave the least imaginable shiver. His weight carried him toward her. Her thumbnail caught the hollow of his neck. His lips came apart and a small defenseless thing was lost forever.
The book recalls Simenon; it also recalls Updike. If you feel a queasy déjà vu while reading Lowboy, it’s possible you’re thinking of Updike’s Terrorist (2006), to which Wray’s plot is uncomfortably close. Lowboy substitutes a mentally ill boy for a boy radical, a police detective for a concerned teacher, a worried mother for an oblivious one, and an ex-girlfriend for a would-be lover. Lowboy is, in his own way, in danger of committing a terrorist act: We soon learn, if the detective were not enough of a hint, that despite his lyrical madness he is prone to violence, having once pushed his beloved onto the subway tracks. (He needs to cool his body, and so the world, through sexual congress, but, really, couldn’t that mean anything to someone in his condition?)
I note this similarity to Terrorist not to play gotcha, but to give Wray his due for having produced the superior book. One is tempted to find a fundamental pointlessness in following the thoughts of a lunatic—not a character who is going crazy, but one who has already moved there and hung out his shingle. But Wray’s empathy, for which Updike struggled without success, is both highly developed and highly unusual; it is an invitation not only to marvel at authorial prowess but also, indeed, to learn empathy.
There is, for instance, a moment when Lowboy’s mother gets past her own blinkering maternal instincts:
Who’d have thought Will was so important to them, she thought. Then another idea struck her, with such unexpected severity that she almost cried out loud: He’s not important to them. They’re not afraid for Will at all. It’s everybody else they’re afraid for.
Lateef laid the folder down and cleared his throat. “There seems to be nothing I can do to convince you not to waste my time, Miss Heller. So what I’m going to do is this: I’m going to read you the details of your son’s original offense.”
This is smartly done, making her struggle to grasp what is immediately apparent to the reader, then making Detective Lateef punish her cluelessness with a bit of casual cruelty. The reader is impatient with her—doesn’t she care that people are in danger?—then grateful to Lateef for knocking sense into her, and finally forced to see how little virtue there is in sneering at a mother’s love, however it distorts her judgment. This isn’t manipulation on Wray’s part; he is providing an opportunity, not an answer.
Lowboy’s teenage girlfriend, who is believable in a way that teenage girls written by adult males rarely are, offers many such opportunities for empathy. When Lowboy tracks her down at her school, the scene is much as one would expect. She is shocked (or makes a show of being shocked), as that is the mature and sensible thing to be, but then is lured into folly by an adolescent combination of curiosity, fascination, and lingering affection. She appears convinced of her special insight into his condition, but, in teenage fashion, it is more about feeling special than anything else. All of this is implied in just a few lines of dialogue:
“You’re supposed to leave me alone. You’re supposed to not see me.”
“I know.”
“There’s a court order, Heller. Fifty feet at all times. There’s no way you could have forgotten that.” She picked the cell phone up. “Did you forget?”
“You’re the one who crossed the street, Emily.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
He nodded at her and shrugged his shoulders and began to cry . . . . “What did they do to you?” Emily said.
“Where?”
“You know. In that place you got sent.”
You can probably guess where it goes from there, all the way to the end of the line. The book ends badly, both for the characters and in the sense that Wray’s imagination loses steam and splutters out. But where it is good it is very good—doubly impressive when one considers how easily it could have slid into tedious melodrama or irresponsible whimsicality. John Wray imposes significant challenges on himself and tackles them with palpable pleasure and care; his novel’s flaws and occasional irritants are not really worth dwelling on.
A novelist can fail in many ways, but the most common stumbling block, at least in recent fiction, seems to be dialogue. What a delight and relief, having suffered through Clancy Martin’s awkward, contraction-challenged back-and-forth, to read two books in a row full of actual conversation. John Wray does it all. Colson Whitehead has a more limited dramatis personae, but the dialogue in this Autobiographical Fourth Novel—as he jokingly calls it in a note included with the uncorrected proof—is first-rate.
As he jokes—when was the last time you heard that in connection with a work of even partial autobiography? Sag Harbor is a fitting answer to the reading public’s apparently inexhaustible fascination with miserable childhoods. You won’t find Whitehead’s young surrogate, Benji Cooper, locked in a kennel, burned with cigarettes, or called “It”— although at times he thinks being called “Benji” is bad enough. As a matter of fact, Benji, his brother Reggie, and their friends spend the entire novel in the titular Hamptons beach community. There’s nary a child molester to speak of.
This quasi-memoir is a departure for Whitehead. Having spent most of his career inventing, at times rather wildly, he’s earned the right to indulge in a haze of benign nostalgia. And Sag Harbor is, despite a few stabs at adolescent pain, a remarkably and sometimes soporifically benign book. Think of it as Stand by Me without the corpse, or A Christmas Story in the wrong season. The only obvious distinction between Sag Harbor and those movies is that the characters in Sag Harbor are black. What makes Benji Cooper unusual, what justifies a long book devoid of real conflict—a beach read that’s literally about hanging out at the beach—is the fact that his upbringing takes place in the interstices between white and black culture. He goes to prep school in Manhattan. He plays Dungeons & Dragons, a game too white even for most white people, even in the 1980s. But that’s only half of who he is:
I just knew that it was okay to like both Afrika Bambaataa and Kraftwerk, and I liked what Afrika did with Kraftwerk. Across the ocean right there, the Germans banged out tunes on state-of-the-art synthesizers. Soulsonic Force, they had the reverb up so high . . .
The frequent pop culture references will keep some readers glued to Google, but they aren’t by any means his only recourse when describing cultural tensions. There is, as I said above, his dialogue. Benji and friends are at each other’s throats at all times, but Benji has to be more careful about what comes out of his mouth, lest his influences show. Kraftwerk is only the beginning: Cringe as a joke about Honoré de Balzac is met by his peers with bewildered silence.
Whitehead gives us a grammatical chart (modifier/participle/object) explaining black insults—thus “Angela Davis lookin’ bitch” or “fake Adidas wearin’ nigger”—and muses that “[t]rue masters of the style sometimes attached the nonsensical ‘with your monkey ass’ as a kicker, to convey sincerity and depth of feeling.” There is a touching and often comic nerdiness in his exposition about this type of cultural quirk, but much of it feels dated. Jokes about Jheri curl juice, ashy skin, and Cosby sweaters may be inescapable, but they’re hardly satisfying. At least Whitehead spares his readers a reminder that white folks are bad dancers.
The discussion of race is front and center, but, unlikely as it may sound, it often feels forced, even irrelevant. When Whitehead notes that Sag Harbor is “mentioned in Moby-Dick—it’s a Sag Harbor ship that takes Queequeg from his South Sea home to America,” he can’t resist adding:
I’ll point out that Queequeg had a bit of double consciousness about him, to embroider a theme: “And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.”
Clever, but it feels dutiful. Benji isn’t interesting because he’s straddling the black and white worlds and drawing from both of them. He’s interesting because he’s interesting, interesting because he’s Benji. Whitehead has no problem developing his characters, but Benji outshines all the others. I don’t believe this is because he’s an authorial surrogate, lavished with authorial attention. I think it’s because many young people, whatever their race, are content to adopt prefabricated personae. It’s pretty clear that the young Colson Whitehead was not. No double consciousness, only his own.
This is what I mean by calling Sag Harbor a benign book. Once one accepts that Benji is an individual, not beholden to anyone’s cultural standards or expectations, what remains is a quiet, gentle tale of growing up in a good and decent place, with good and decent parents, into a good and decent man. A sleepy premise for a novel, perhaps—but, then again, given what readers are likely to expect of a book like Sag Harbor, perhaps a remarkably radical one.
One complaint: Whitehead’s diction, except when he’s dipping into something unpleasant, like his father’s drinking, is elevated, almost mock heroic, in a way that can become grating:
My mouth was everything you have ever found repellent gathered together, piled in a cauldron, melted down by sadists into an abhorrent alloy, and then shaped into clips and wire for placement on my teeth. I wore braces, you see, tiny self-esteem-sucking death’s-heads all in a row, turning my smile into a food-flecked grimace. Oh, I kept them pretty clean, but a series of corn-on-the-cob-related incidents had planted the seeds of a neurosis.
Yes, and now it appears to be full-grown. Amusing, up to a point, but this treatment trivializes its subject—childhood, that is, not braces. Adolescent pain is pain nevertheless. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t have been worth writing about in the first place.
I hate to keep returning to poor Clancy Martin, who, after all, was just minding his own business, so I promise this is the last time. I was telling a friend about How to Sell. “It sounds like a cheap Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney knock-off,” he said. By coincidence, I was just settling in to read McInerney for the first time; I’d be able to see for myself.
My understanding of the McInerney phenomenon is as follows. In 1984, with the publication of Bright Lights, Big City, he captured the zeitgeist—if you believe the laughably insular notion that this certain species of New Yorker was representative of anything outside itself, or even particularly interesting. Suffice to say that he captured a zeitgeist, in a way that readers found both entertaining and, on some level, validating. Their bloody noses and anomie, early mornings and deviated septa became the stuff of high art, and McInerney earned the thanks of a grateful zip code.
He owed much of his renown after that to a self-consciously public social life, but he wasn’t a one-hit wonder. He went on to publish an impressive number of novels and story collections, and has weathered a great deal of harsh criticism. In a Salon interview, he was asked: “Kingsley Amis once said that a bad review ruins his breakfast but not his lunch. How much do they affect you?”
“Well,” he allowed, “they do ruin my breakfast probably.”
So he doesn’t come across as a vapid party monster or self-indulgent dilettante. He comes across as a man who genuinely loves to write. This assessment may come as no surprise to his devotees, but McInerney is a man whose reputation noisily precedes him. First-time readers should put their prejudices aside and consider his work in the sobering light of day.
It isn’t that McInerney can’t write a fine sentence. His prose is frequently a pleasure to read. He isn’t afraid to be funny. Take a representative line from “It’s 6 a.m. Do You Know Where You Are?,” the story which evolved into Bright Lights, Big City: “You are leaning back against a post which may or may not be structural with regard to the building but nonetheless feels essential to the maintenance of an upright position.” It’s a world-weary, borderline hard-boiled quip. He’s got plenty of ’em. It isn’t his language but his subject matter that’s the problem. He lacks imagination—and he seems blissfully unaware of that.
Here’s McInerney, practically gloating, in the preface to the new edition of his collected stories, How It Ended: “‘My Public Service’ . . . was written in 1992, years before Monica Lewinsky became a household name.”
What sort of eerie prescience might warrant such a comment? Did he anticipate the dress, the cigar, the semantics? No. The story is about a philandering politician, full stop. The twist is that the pol’s persecutors discover too late that he just wanted to be held. “She looked very sad,” says the narrator, of a screen star who knew the man, “although I’d grown old enough to wonder if it was genuine sadness or the mask of an actress.” How old is that, exactly? “The mask of an actress”—and, for that matter, the story’s conceit—is the kind of earnest banality that belongs in a college magazine.
Now that McInerney is no longer young, it’s interesting to try to guess how old or new each story is, whether it’s juvenilia or a year old. How about “Invisible Fences,” about a man in flyover country who likes to watch his wife have sex with strangers? Will it be a parable about miscommunication and jealousy? Will the title refer to the buried electric current that keeps the man’s dogs in the yard—and will it also refer to the unspeakable sexual boundaries we cross at our peril? This sort of thing may have been fresh once, but not in 2007.
Stories like this show us that just because a story describes very messy circumstances, doesn’t mean it can’t be pat.
McInerney obviously enjoys what he does. Other people enjoy what he does, too, and a writer who keeps his audience in mind deserves points. But the success of these stories lies, I believe, in the inevitability of their outcomes. McInerney’s confidence, perhaps a gift of early fame, is also a handicap: He seems always to write the first thing that comes to mind. He doesn’t linger over his thoughts long enough to devise surprises. There is not so much a shock as a yawn of recognition.
This man, we are told, was the voice of a generation. The voice of an era!
Guess you kinda had to be there.