It is thus not at all surprising that Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist, is about a mid-list poet called Paul Chowder who is too ineffectual even to complete the introduction to his forthcoming anthology of formal verse, Only Rhyme. After all, why wouldn’t Baker make a lateral move from an appalling piece of historical revisionism to a delightful and moving meditation on procrastination, failure, and poetry? And why wouldn’t Baker take as his protagonist a man driven to distraction by subjects great and small—though, in this case, mostly small?
The Anthologist is a rambling monologue, and it sounds marvelously, not to mention uncomfortably, like a contemporary poet. “What a juicy word that is, ‘divulge,’” says Paul on page one, “Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.” This self-effacing blend of the perfervid and the homey is pretty irritating coming from the lectern at a reading, but it works to Chowder’s advantage because we know he is a loser. His weakness for tangents and his fascination for mundane detail (reminiscing about a chin-up bar: “[It] had gray rubber rings, and when you tightened the middle you could hear the doorjamb crack in a nice way”) are not affectations.
But neither are they assets: Paul is paralyzed by his powers of observation, and, as a result, he is going broke. He is unwilling to teach—although The Anthologist, taken one way, is one long lecture on poetry, which Baker prepared to write by recording himself lecturing for dozens of hours. Paul’s existence is the Platonic ideal of “puttering around”: He sits up in his barn (“It smells like I imagine the inside of an old lute would smell”) thinking about poetry, walks his dog, plays badminton with a neighbor, thinks about poetry some more. Paul’s girlfriend, Roz, has left him in exasperation. He misses her terribly, but allows that “true poet’s depression is a rigor mortis of agony”:
Louise Bogan summed it up in two quick lines . . . . “At midnight tears / Run in your ears.” She’s lying there on her back, crying. Her eyes are overflowing, and the tears are cresting and coming around, and down, and they’re flowing into her ears. There’s something direct and physical and interesting about that. Because it’s as if crying leads directly to the hearing. Her grief leads to something audible—a poem.
Paul’s perorations about verse, specifically rhyming verse and its superiority to falsely so-called “free” verse, are engaging and occasionally batty, and—this is how to tell that The Anthologist is the real deal—they make you want to go read poetry. Vis-à-vis the batty end of the spectrum, the British critic Andrew Motion remarked, “Chowder’s insistence that the iambic pentameter is not a five-beat rhythm but a four-beat one has a kind of manic doggedness, but Baker seems genuinely to be using him as the mouthpiece for a pet notion.” But never mind that: The book’s interest does not, ultimately, lie in its ideas about poetry. It functions best as a self-help manual.
That may sound like contrarian nonsense—like that “four-beat rhythm” stuff, which neither space nor logic permits me to “explain”—but it isn’t. The book ends with Paul giving a “master class” at a poetry conference in Switzerland. (It’s puffed-up title is the “Global Word Conference,” another pitch-perfect detail.) Someone asks him: “How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of the poem?” “Well, I’ll tell you how,” he says. “I ask a simple question. I ask myself: ‘What was the very best moment of your day?’” His examples, the ones that come to him immediately, without preparation, are telling:
Maybe you’re just walking diagonally across a parking lot and you’re admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed over the windshield . . . . You, windshield shadow, are the best moment of the day.
This is the true sense in which Paul Chowder is an anthologist: He sorts his moments into keepers and non-keepers. He saves them as phrases and sentences of astonishing oddness and beauty, acorns stored up against the winter of his discontent. They don’t necessarily amount to great or even very good poetry, but they afford the reader a lot of surprise, and pleasure. In an actual self-help manual, stop and smell the roses would be an odorless and antiseptic cliché. One needs to see it put to use in a life of real, hilarious, avert-your-eyes pathos to grasp the value of it. To put it another way doesn’t hurt, either.
Like the critically acclaimed novelist Nicholson Baker, the critically acclaimed novelist Richard Powers, whose Echo Maker received the 2006 National Book Award, has written a novel subjecting a marginalized, melancholic writer to various torments. Russell Stone, the zero of Power’s Generosity: An Enhancement, used to be a successful writer of kooky human interest essays—think Joseph Mitchell’s “Professor Sea Gull”—but he fell apart after one of his subjects attempted suicide. His callous girlfriend left him because his concern for others “was threatening to become tedious.” At the end of The Anthologist, Paul Chowder is painting houses for a living; similarly, Russell’s crisis leads him to a job in construction: “He loved to staple insulation, to cut and nail large square pieces of Sheetrock to freshly plumbed studs.”
This manual labor, apparently a common fantasy of critically acclaimed novelists, doesn’t last, and soon Russell is teaching a B-side Breakfast Club’s worth of Creative Writing students at Mesquakie College of the Arts in Chicago. He meets Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian Berber and refugee from civil war who is possessed of an “eerie contentment.” (A “glow,” you might say.) She laughs a lot, even when talking about the soul-killing nightmare that is her past. How can she be so happy? Russell wonders, to a frankly baffling degree. How about because she got the hell out of Algeria?
Russell hits the books in search of an explanation. In the course of his perfunctory research, he stumbles upon “hyperthymia,” a condition characterized by—rather, a big word for—the happiness and garrulousness he has observed in Thassa. Shortly thereafter, a fellow student attempts to rape Thassa. It is rare that one encounters a scene so careless or contemptuous of plausibility in a book without an embossed title:
He looks down at the helpless brown thing between his legs. It hasn’t gone feral. It’s speaking, still her. She’s saying, “John, not this.” She’s terrified, but not for herself. She says, “John, this kills you.”He slows to figure what she can possibly mean.
And slams back into the trap of thought. He rears up, rolls off her like she’s burning . . . . He curls up into a fetus on her carpet, moaning like a thing trying to be unborn.
Actually, the lead-up to this is even worse: “He wants . . . just for a minute, a little of her spark, her art of pulling a story out of annihilation. He wants to eat her flame.” One is embarrassed even to quote it.
Having almost literally killed her assailant with kindness, Thassa, of course, refuses to press charges. In the event, bigger problems are headed her way. While being interviewed by the police, Russell makes the mistake of announcing that “she might be hyperthymic.” The media seizes upon this, as the media will tend to do in ham-fisted satires of our over-mediated culture, and soon Thassamania is sweeping the nation.
First, she attracts the cheerfully sinister interest of a celebrity geneticist intent on finding the gene for joy. She is barraged by emotionally dunning fan mail. She goes on Oprah (sorry, Oona; Powers’s imaginative leap is to make her Irish), where her innocent inability to cooperate with leading questions results in an angry outburst: “Sister, if you’re telling us that you’re as miserable as the rest of us, why did you come on this show?” She agrees to sell her eggs, so she can use the money to help her brother. She and Russell try to flee the country. She attempts suicide in their motel room by watching Benjamin Button on pay-per-view. (Actually, it’s with pills.)
As in The Echo Maker, which told the story of a man suffering from a neurological impairment called Capgras syndrome, Powers is chiseling away at the mystery of human consciousness: Is it biologically hardwired, or do we, our personalities, experiences, and free will, have some say in the matter? The critic James Wood, author of a recent essay about Powers in the New Yorker, called this a “bogus enigma,” Powers’s answer to which will surprise no one. And it is precisely this inability to surprise, whether with ideas, prose, plot, or even his very conception of happiness, that renders Generosity inert.
Why should a refugee, a survivor, be miserable by default? Are Russell Stone and his creator incapable of imagining, even as a working hypothesis, a survivor’s gratitude at living to see another day? The elementary point that happiness can’t meaningfully exist without its opposite could be expressed so tidily by Thassa’s case that she should perplex no one, least of all the author of this book. As it stands, this zonked-out naïf, as even-tempered as a mannequin, is one of the least credible and least engaging characters to come along in recent fiction. Perhaps it’s not Thassa’s head but Richard Powers’s that ought to be examined.
E. L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley flounders in similar imaginative shallows, but it is nevertheless a deeply pleasurable book—a feel-good book, despite its author’s efforts to make it something more. Critics have compared it to Forrest Gump, a mediocre movie buoyed to immortality by its unapologetic schmaltz. Homer & Langley isn’t schmaltzy, but it goes down as easy as a Whitman’s Sampler. There is no subtext, and nothing is open to interpretation. It is that rarest of things: a good and simple story, well told.
Readers may have guessed from the title that the book is about Homer and Langley Collyer, also known as the Collyer Brothers, the notorious recluses and hoarders found dead in their Harlem brownstone a few months apart in 1947. (Homer was found first, on March 21; Langley’s corpse remained hidden beneath an avalanche of newspapers until April 8.) The task Doctorow sets himself is to envision the sweep of the twentieth century through the eyes of two men who scarcely left home. To make matters more difficult, one of them, Homer, is blind.
Homer, however, doesn’t start out blind, and Doctorow opens his tale with a chilling, gorgeous evocation of encroaching darkness, a high-contrast snapshot in black and white:
What I did this particular winter was to stand back from the lake in Central Park where they did all their ice skating and see what I could see and couldn’t see as a day-by-day thing. The houses over Central Park West went first, they got darker as if dissolving into the dark sky until I couldn’t make them out, and then the trees began to lose their shape, and then finally … all I could see were these phantom shapes of the ice skaters floating past me on a field of ice, and then white ice, that last light, went gray and then altogether black . . .
Doctorow has taken a number of liberties with the story of the Collyer Brothers, but this isn’t one of them. Homer did, in fact, go blind, which not only lends his name a tragic resonance but also provides the story with a counterpoise of loss to match the steady accretion of belongings—to say nothing of historical events and memories—that defines the brothers’ twinned lives. Yet Homer’s loss, which occurs in boyhood, is an obstacle he manages to overcome with good cheer, whereas Langley’s gradual, lifelong retreat from sanity can be neither stopped nor compensated for by other means. The origins of his madness lie in the trenches of World War I, and there is a remarkable passage in which Homer reads his brother like Braille: “I felt more scars on his bare back, and also small craters where blisters had been raised by the mustard gas.”
Madness is not, unfortunately, the novel’s chief subject, which may be its chief defect as a piece of serious literature. The brothers’ psychological makeup is explored in too cursory a fashion. It’s history that Doctorow loves, and his novel is essentially a series of tableaux illuminating political, military, and technological developments, as well as the country’s rapidly changing sexual and social mores and race relations. After the brothers are orphaned by pandemic influenza, they retreat to their home and the comfort and relative permanence of material possessions. But they still have plenty of contact with the outside world via the newspapers Langley compulsively saves and catalogues, and also through servants, frequent guests, eventually television, a wounded mobster, even hippies.
The question is whether much is added to our grasp of twentieth-century turmoil—the Depression, warfare, racism, the internment of the Japanese, the Holocaust, mass media, the moon landing, and so on—by witnessing it through Collyer eyes. It’s a question that doesn’t need an answer. The book is, again, an enjoyable, occasionally haunting read, boasting fine writing. Still, it’s disappointing how rarely the brothers’ takes on events reflect their supposed alienation from reality. The reader must be reminded in all caps, so to speak, that the men are crazy—say, by Langley installing a Model T in the dining room and ranting, “How can you make an ontological distinction between outside and inside?” But they’re never crazy when it counts, because Doctorow keeps them planted firmly on the right side of every important issue. They seem not so much crazy as contemporary.
Doctorow has a lot of practice writing historical fiction, and he mostly steers clear of outright anachronism; that Homer refers to his blindness as a “disability” is by far the most grating infraction. The subtler anachronism of his characters’ enlightened attitudes suggests not carelessness but a lack of imaginative empathy, and that is a more serious shortcoming in a novelist. In fact, these characters are worse than enlightened; they are a special kind of enlightened that only exists in film and fiction, the kind that pretends to have no idea why others think and act as they do.
So we get Langley pretending not to understand warfare (“Langley was almost court-martialed for seeming to threaten an officer. He had said, Why am I killing men I don’t know?”). We suffer Homer pretending not to grasp the social implications of seating his servant/lover at the dinner table with society guests. We are told of that servant-girl, herself a proto-free spirit (like so many poor people in contemporary novels), that “she couldn’t have cared less what this stranger had to say.” We watch Langley dress down a policeman in search of a bribe: “I can respect true bold criminality but not the sly sniveling corruption of your sort. You’re a disgrace to the uniform.” Much the same thing happens when the FBI comes looking for their Japanese servants during World War II. We get it.
The brothers’ “crazy” philosophizing is, with a few incoherent exceptions, less batshit than banal. Prepare to be reminded at every turn that life is short, that man is animal to man, and that humanity is “a poor fitful thing of no dominion.” This kind of showy fatalism is an easy way out, and undermines both the realism and the emotional force of the novel. “Christ,” Langley groans, “what I wouldn’t give to be something other than a human being.” You aren’t one, Collyer, not quite—but you’ll do in a pinch.
Kazuo Ishiguro can bring outsiders and nonentities to life with the best of them. Recall that two of his most famous characters are an emotionally repressed butler (The Remains of the Day) and a clone oblivious to the fact that she’s been raised for her organs (Never Let Me Go). The characters in Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall are similar portraits of what might charitably be called a lack of self-awareness. This is the cruel trick at which Ishiguro excels: He forces his creations to tell us more than they know about themselves, and it’s rarely pretty.
As the title suggests, these stories are variations on a theme, but that theme is neither music nor nightfall. More than anything else, it’s the thin line that separates success and failure, happiness and self-loathing. That each of the main characters is a musician or music lover is, if not exactly incidental, far from the most captivating aspect of these curious tales. As for nightfall, it figures memorably only in the first story, but Ishiguro’s sleepy, subdued tone earns him the right to call these “nocturnes.”
The first story, “Crooner,” forges an impromptu alliance between Janeck, a café musician in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, and Tony Gardner, a fast-fading star (think Tony Bennett, toward the casino-circuit end of his career trajectory) who winds up in Jan’s audience. As luck would have it, Gardner enjoys special significance in Jan’s personal history:
Tony Gardner had been my mother’s favorite. Back home, back in the communist days, it had been really hard to get records like that… . Years later, when I was working in Warsaw and I got to know about black-market records, I gave my mother replacements of all her worn-out Tony Gardner albums, including that one I scratched . . . . So you see why I got so excited when I recognized him, barely six meters away.
Tony Gardner has become almost as much of a nobody as Jan, but this fact is lost on the starstruck guitarist. Jan is delighted when Tony proposes that they team up to serenade his wife, Lindy, from a gondola. Tony’s tone of mournful resignation tells us that this is not your typical Hallmark-ready stunt, that something is amiss.
Jan is still in the dark when Lindy asks, “Is this some sort of joke?” before vanishing from her hotel window. “We did it, Mr. Gardner!” Jan gasps. “We got her by the heart.” It comes to light by story’s end that the serenade is more of a send-off; Tony is leaving his wife, not vice versa, because he believes a younger bride will help his “comeback.” Nevertheless, Jan ranks the singer as “one of the greats,” and, though the end of the Gardners’ marriage makes him “a little sad,” he savors the memory of that night.
What’s the point? Is Jan’s impenetrable naïveté being presented as a kind of success more desirable than what Tony Gardner craves? Jan isn’t the only character in this book who, though a bit of a schlemiel, comes off a good deal better than his more ambitious, more materially and socially successful peers. “Come Rain or Come Shine,” the most effective and most disturbing story of the five, is about a married man using his and his wife’s least successful friend to cast himself in a better light.
“She needs perspective.”“So you decided to invite me for a visit. To be Mr. Perspective.”
At last, Charlie stopped and met my eye. “Don’t get me wrong, Ray. I’m not saying you’re an awful failure or anything. I realize you’re not a drug addict or a murderer. But beside me, let’s face it, you don’t look the highest of achievers. That’s why I’m asking you, asking you to do this for me. Things are on their last legs with us, I’m desperate, I need you to help . . . . Just be yourself for a few days until I get back.”
Ishiguro’s dialogue, and even his narrators’s voices, can have an almost spookily stilted quality. Lucky for him, this frequently works in his favor. He achieved perfection, for instance, with the fastidiously controlled cadences of Stevens in The Remains of the Day. The flattened, anonymous prose on display in Nocturnes, while anything but musical, places Ishiguro’s new stories between fables and dreams—or, as in “Come Rain or Come Shine,” nightmares. (Could anbody in real life make such an outlandishly ugly request in such unabashed earnest?)
The unpleasant directness of these tales, which offer few literary ornaments or stylized filler to distract from the storytelling, lies, in part, in the unpleasantness of their thematic undercurrent: Success will elude many of us, and for many others it will be worse than the alternatives.