See What Can Be Done

  “He does not go to Du Bois’s grave in Ghana,” writes Pinckney in a moment of judgment on the journey to Africa that Phillips writes about in The Atlantic Sound. “He refuses to make his trip a pilgrimage. He has a right to stand outside of that feeling, but it is as though he cannot afford to be moved.” In Phillips’s new book he visits the grave, but he is still not explicitly moved: “It is over a decade now since I followed the austerely dressed young Ghanaian man around the W. E. B. Du Bois Centre in Accra. He showed me Du Bois’s study, his books, his living area and then of course Du Bois’s final resting place in the grounds of the centre.”

  The novelist in Pinckney admires Phillips’s art but seems at times to suspect him of coolness, coyness, impersonality—“By temperament,” writes Pinckney, “it would seem, Phillips is opposed to what in his prologue he must do as a first-person narrator, especially a black one: explain, identify himself. Who am I? I am none of your business; but you, they, it are my business. Perhaps this tone is his way of saying that nothing is more personal than an individual’s ideas.”

  * * *

  —

  One of Phillips’s ideas is the predicament of the African-American artist in his home country, and the first section of A New World Order, entitled “The United States,” is in many ways his best (the others are called “Africa,” “The Caribbean,” and “Britain”). In this first section he includes pieces on Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and the singer Marvin Gaye—all of whom exiled themselves to Europe—and on John Edgar Wideman, who, perhaps more boldly, Phillips suggests, did not. The American oppression of the black man—both subtle and overt—is hardly lost on Wideman, however, and Phillips quotes a searing passage from Wideman’s Fatheralong that sums up the cost of staying and the privilege (however spurious), unavailable to most, of not:

  And we ain’t talking here about middle-class angst cause no taxis stop for your black ass in Rockefeller Center. Nor existential maundering when you ride the commuter train in from Scarsdale and the only seat white people ain’t occupying is the one next to your brown ass. All that’s part of the problem, but the bedrock issue raised by the paradigm of race…is whether you can be someone other than a white person in this society and stay healthy, stay alive.

  As a black man who saw bananas thrown at the nonwhite soccer players of 1960s and ’70s England and who witnessed the violence in London’s Notting Hill during race riots two decades apart (the neighborhood now resides in the American mind as a Hugh Grant film), and as the grandson of a Portuguese Jew, Phillips has no illusions about racism in Europe. (He is equally unromantic about Africa as a diasporan homeland, implying, as many African-Americans have, that cultural attachment to it may be a sentimental folly.) But the innocent optimism with which black artists (Gaye, Baldwin, Wright) have fled to Europe suggests to him that the psychological, sociological, and artistic burdens on the African-American artist are somehow more intense and restrictive in the United States and that Europe poses a greater (even if illusory) freedom from artistic expectation (race as a part-time job, race as glorious/tedious obligation, race as coauthor of one’s work). Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, written in France, had no black people in it at all. Marvin Gaye often wanted nothing more than to sing “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Me and My Shadow,” yet in the States was asked to keep up a certain kind of black image for the Motown label. And if one looks at Wideman’s editorial selection in the Best American Short Stories of 1996, one sees he has chosen love story after love story—all strong and haunting, but scarcely a one concerning race.

  * * *

  —

  To unburden oneself aesthetically from race is, of course, impossible even if it were advisable. The artist necessarily creates not just from who but also from what he is. But it is Phillips’s point, of course, that a person is always many things, and that a society that does not recognize that will prove parochial and stifling for an artist. The saddest tale he has to tell here is of Marvin Gaye, who in his escape from the pressures of the African-American recording industry fled to Belgium to pursue his art in obscurity and effacement—an annihilation of sorts. Although “like American artists before him, he was able to enjoy the freedom of not feeling any responsibility to comment on European society, including its racism,” the price he paid was profound loneliness. Phillips cites a scene from a documentary film made about Gaye:

  Marvin enters a working-class bar which is full of Belgian workers enjoying a beer at the end of the day. They look quizzically at this American black man, and ask him if he’s from Paraguay. Marvin confesses to being a singer from Los Angeles and they laugh at him. Then Marvin attempts to play darts. He is not very good and again they laugh at him….Here, in Belgium, Marvin is neither a star nor is he an American. He has no viable role to play, not even the role of black American sex symbol which he considers so demeaning. The creases of worry on his forehead suggest that he knows what he is in Belgium. He is simply a black man.

  At the time of his death at forty-four—he was shot by his cross-dressing Pentecostal minister father in a family squabble—Gaye was attempting to use comedy to send up his professional quandaries, and his final, satirical songs include one entitled “Dem Niggers Are Savage in the Sack.” For a man who, as his father did before him, liked to dress in women’s wigs and lingerie in private, such songwriting was a reaction to ideas of African-American manhood and the “burdensome public role of ‘Sex God’ ” he felt the record business had foisted upon him. And here Phillips’s usually sturdy phrasing grows soggy as it does sometimes, oddly, when he’s passionate. “The days when he could write and perform socially committed, yet heart-wrenchingly sensitive work seemed to have receded into the distant past.”

  * * *

  —

  Phillips’s essay on V. S. Naipaul may be the strongest in his section “The Caribbean.” Here—despite the melancholy spin he has previously given American expatriation—he speaks of the “gift of displacement,” a sometimes advantageous and energetic creative condition he feels is complained of unfairly by Naipaul, as if it were unique and bitter medicine, a price Naipaul alone paid for art. (That there are inconsistencies in Phillips’s own thinking on these matters, depending on whom he is writing about, makes this book seem no less rich or deeply considered. Surprisingly it is just the opposite.) Naipaul’s sense of his own rootlessness, to Phillips’s mind, is accompanied by a contempt for third-world culture and people: “Already comfortable with his prejudices, sure of his judgement and determined to write, there is something alarming about young Naipaul’s lack of self-knowledge.” But Phillips writes approvingly of Naipaul’s 1994 novel A Way in the World, calling its great accomplishment “making art out of displacement and despair.” He sees Naipaul as “beginning to make peace with his homeland of Trinidad” only to return later to generally dyspeptic antipathies, beginning with Among the Believers, his book about his travels in the Islamic world.

  Naipaul’s family lost their status as Brahmins with their migration to Trinidad, and one might suspect this condition (in addition to Naipaul’s own temperament) may be partly responsible for what Phillips sees as Naipaul’s misanthropy, his intolerance, and the “wall of self-regard between himself and the people who produced him.” But Phillips’s last criticism, the one that says Naipaul has sacrificed in his art “any real expression of affection for his homeland or its people,” seems intellectually spurious, since here Naipaul is being held to standards to which no serious literary critic would consider holding Sinclair Lewis or Flannery O’Connor, for instance. Nor does Phillips himself always hold it against others, including J. M. Coetzee, about whom Phillips writes well here, never, however, emphasizing what might be thought of as Coetzee’s own misanthropy. That one must withhold contempt for one’s homeland is not a literary idea at all. That one cannot make “outlandish, racist, unscholarly, inaccurate statements in books and in interviews, and still be taken seriously”—P
hillips’s charge against Naipaul—of course is. But Phillips has conflated these two things in his arguments about Naipaul. And when he gives way to strong feelings, Phillips can sound maudlin and fond of fondness for its own sake. He insists that Naipaul has turned away from his earlier work and his true subject matter: “Caribbean life—the people, the music, the heat, the flora, the fauna, the sunrise, the sunset, the history.” The sunrise? The sunset? Phillips is partial to horizons and sometimes seems to be listening to music when he writes of them (“for as they stood on the deck of the ship and stared out at the white cliffs of Dover, they carried within their hearts a dream,” he writes of the early Caribbean immigrants to England).

  Naipaul’s father’s own failed literary career, and what Phillips takes to be Naipaul’s quiet sneering at it, is at the heart of the issue, Phillips thinks, though he also demonstrates that he may have underestimated the son’s real love and admiration for this Trinidadian journalist-father who encouraged his newly British son in every way, but also encouraged him to write sympathetically about his homeland (which Phillips himself, of course, wishes Naipaul had done). At his father’s death (of “a broken heart,” Phillips suggests in another treacly moment) Naipaul sent his family a mournful telegram that read in part, “He was the best man I knew.” Surely, then, there was some part of Naipaul that was listening. His response to Elizabeth Hardwick that the red dot in the middle of an Indian woman’s forehead means “my head is empty” doesn’t seem necessarily a cultural slur but may be more complicated in its ironies; perhaps it serves as a commentary on the oppressive aspects of Hindu marriage, though Phillips will give it credit for being nothing but “idiotic.”

  A New World Order is a largely brilliant and persuasive book with which one will quibble occasionally. But then Phillips quibbles with himself. He closes the introduction to his section on the United States with a statement to which the remainder of his book too often gives the lie. “Race matters,” he writes (as if paging Cornel West). “Sure it does, but not that much.”

  Not that much? Well, it’s an idea.

  (2002)

  Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

  The novelist Margaret Atwood has wandered off from us before: once, in 1986, to the mid-twenty-first century, for a feminist dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are enslaved according to their reproductive usefulness; another time, in 1996, to the nineteenth century, to make thrifty use of her graduate work at Radcliffe in the faux-Victorian novel Alias Grace. These were forays and raids. In her chronicling of contemporary sexual manners and politics, Atwood has always been interested in pilfering popular forms—comic books, gothic tales, detective novels, science fiction—in order to make them do her more literary bidding. Her previous novel, The Blind Assassin, is the best example of the kind of narrative pastiche at which she excels.

  In her towering and intrepid new novel, Oryx and Crake, Atwood, who is the daughter of a biologist, vividly imagines a late-twenty-first-century world ravaged by innovations in biological science. Like most literary imaginings of the future, her vision is mournful, bleak, and infernal, and is punctuated, in Atwood style, with the occasional macabre joke—perhaps not unlike Dante’s own literary vision. Atwood’s pilgrim in Hell is Snowman, who, following a genetically engineered viral cataclysm, is, as far as he knows, the only human being who has survived. Snowman (formerly Jimmy) has become arboreal, living in trees and in shelters of junk, roaming the beaches and picnic grounds of a former park—where fungi sprout from rotting picnic tables and barbecues are festooned with bindweed—scavenging for food. His only companions are a dozen or so humanoids, the Crakers—gentle, naked, beautiful creations of Jimmy’s old, half-mad scientist friend Crake. Freed from their experimental lab, the Crakers also live near the beach. They eat nothing but grass, leaves, and roots; their sexual rituals have been elegantly and efficiently programmed to minimize both sexual reproduction and unrequited lust. To them, the man they call Snowman is a demigod or a prophet. Unable to tolerate sunlight, Jimmy wears a ghostly bedsheet. For the Crakers, the real gods are Crake, whom they have never seen, and his girlfriend, Oryx, whom they have. The Crakers await the gods’ return and listen to stories that Snowman tells them about Crake and Oryx. A holy, yarny scripture is already emerging.

  Parallel with this vision of a blighted future is the novel’s dramatic story of how the global apocalypse came to pass, told in flashback. Jimmy and Crake grow up as friends in gated communities, safe from the environmental degradation that has already overtaken the outside world. They are the privileged children of scientists who work for top-secret agribusiness and biotech companies with names like Helth Wyzer and OrganicInc Farms. The latter, for medical-transplant purposes, makes pigs that are genetically altered with human DNA; after the apocalypse, these extraclever “pigoons” go hunting for Snowman like hounds after a fox. There are other mistakes, too—creatures called wolvogs, which are exactly what you would expect. Later, Crake’s classmates work on developing, for a fast-food venture, headless, legless chickens—“Sort of like a chicken hookworm,” Crake says. Such genetic ambitions will not sound outlandish to anyone who has kept abreast of current poultry-farming practices or knows that scientists have experimented with splicing fish genes into tomatoes to prevent freezing.

  Although the boys’ daily lives are full of swimming pools, bullet trains, completely self-contained shopping malls, and games like Kwiktime Osama, they maintain a curiosity about the world outside in “the pleeblands,” of which they have little experience. They have lost parents in the madness of this sinister and isolated lifestyle. Crake’s father, burdened with the knowledge of pharmaceutical conspiracies, “jumped” from an overpass; Jimmy’s mother, critical of her husband’s work, grew depressed, then disappeared. While quite young, both boys come to suspect that their parents have been executed.

  In their college years, Crake and Jimmy part ways, Crake being the more scientifically brilliant and ambitious, Jimmy the more verbal and skeptical. Crake goes to the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute (also known as Asperger’s U), where the cafeteria serves shrimp (in contrast to the genetically processed fare available to the general populace), and prostitutes of one’s choosing are available through Student Services: “Once a student there and your future was assured. It was like going to Harvard had been, back before it got drowned.” From then on, Crake is destined to be a prized geneticist. As a student he is able to reap half the profits of anything he creates; thereafter he can name his price. Jimmy, on the other hand, is sent to the crumbling, neglected Martha Graham Academy:

  The Martha Graham Academy was named after some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century who’d apparently mowed quite a swath in her day. There was a gruesome statue of her in front of the administration building, in her role—said the bronze plaque—as Judith, cutting off the head of a guy in a historical robe outfit called Holofernes. Retro feminist shit, was the general student opinion. Every once in a while the statue got its tits decorated or steel wool glued onto its pubic region—Jimmy himself had done some of this glueing—and so comatose was the management that the ornaments often stayed up there for months before they were noticed.

  Tonally, Oryx and Crake is a roller-coaster ride. The book proceeds from terrifying grimness through lonely mournfulness, until, midway, a morbid giddiness begins sporadically to assert itself, like someone, exhausted by bad news, hysterically succumbing to giggles at a funeral. Atwood begins to smirk and deadpan: “There was a lot of dismay out there, and not nearly enough ambulances.” She invents an assisted-suicide site called nitee-nite.com. Of Crake’s experimental BlyssPluss Pill, she writes, “They hadn’t got it to work seamlessly yet….A couple of the test subjects had literally fucked themselves to death, several had assaulted old ladies and household pets, and there had been a few unfortunate cases of priapism and split dicks.” Here she is on the scientifically designed mating rituals of the Crakers:
r />   Courtship begins at the first whiff, the first faint blush of azure, with the males presenting flowers to the females—just as male penguins present round stones….At the same time they indulge in musical outbursts, like songbirds. Their penises turn bright blue to match the blue abdomens of the females, and they do a sort of blue-dick dance number, erect members waving to and fro in unison, in time to the foot movements and the singing: a feature suggested to Crake by the sexual semaphoring of crabs. From amongst the floral tributes the female chooses four flowers, and the sexual ardour of the unsuccessful candidates dissipates immediately, with no hard feelings left. Then, when the blue of her abdomen has reached its deepest shade, the female and her quartet find a secluded spot and go at it until the woman becomes pregnant and her blue colouring fades. And that is that.

  No more No means yes, anyway, thinks Snowman.

  In the world of Oryx and Crake—a future rendered precivilized by catastrophe—one can feel the influences of Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro, or Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. In the novel’s whimsical fantasies of biological evolution and technology, one can discern the dark left hand of Ursula K. Le Guin, and in its shrugging, eschatological amusement it channels the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut. In fact, the sick joke and the botched experiment are offered up as rough equivalents and become, through the technical alchemy of the novel, a kind of trope for life itself.

  Seventeen years ago Mary McCarthy, reviewing The Handmaid’s Tale, found it unconvincing as a jeremiad: “Surely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition….It is an effect, for me, almost strikingly missing.” She complained, too, about the weak characterizations, and suggested that the novel’s lack of a new language for its future, such as Orwell had created in 1984, left its world less than fully imagined. But a dystopian novel is not intended as a literal forecast, or even necessarily as a logical extension of our current world. It is simply, and not so simply, a bad dream of our present time, an exquisitely designed horror show in which things are changed from what we do know to a dream version of what we don’t. Atwood does this well. To ask a novel to do more is to misunderstand its nature. Besides, given what is known about fish-gene-enhanced tomatoes—or those genetically modified goats that produce spider silk—the biologically reengineered world of Oryx and Crake ceases to seem very far-fetched. As for the characters here, McCarthy would be more pleased. They are mostly male, Atwood being rare among feminist writers in apparently liking her men—if not their institutions—better than her women. (Not since Edith Wharton has a female writer filled her oeuvre with so many unpleasant female characters.) Jimmy is not only complex, sympathetic, and anchoring; he is also the observer of the new language that abounds in this new world, and the curator and lexicographer of the old words that no one uses anymore—“Knell. Kern. Alack.” Atwood does Orwell, and McCarthy, one better. She even devises a kind of exuberant elegy for the word toast.