I began writing about television by accident. I did not watch much television as an adult and had not watched much as a child, having grown up in a house where the watching of it was discouraged and highly supervised. We read the Bible every night at the dinner table, and in general television was considered a little wicked and lazy and for special occasions. Like eggnog. But in 2010, after The Wire was already out on DVD, I watched the series on a binge (also like eggnog)—living in David Simon’s Baltimore for an entire summer—and afterward, intoxicated, and wanting to extend my experience there by reading what other people had to say (one terrific function of cultural criticism is a kind of afterlife of the original encounter), I could not find very much written about it. The London papers had some articles, but there was very little in the American press: nothing in The New Yorker and what seemed like minimal coverage in The New York Times. I asked Bob Silvers if he would like something for The New York Review of Books, and he quickly said yes. His sensibility was always spry, eager, open, a source of joy for everyone who worked for him. He was so hiply catholic in his tastes and interests that he was game for practically any kind of cultural commentary: meditations on regional politics, reports on every manner of book, television series, film, or event. Gameness is a beautiful quality in a person. My ignorance of a topic never deterred him from trying to assign it to me. He started offering more and more television for me to watch and see what could be done. I turned only a few things down. But I took on programs and films I was genuinely interested in watching and wrote about them in my Martian way. Montaigne’s que sais-je. A little light, a little wonder, some skepticism, some awe, some squinting, some je ne sais quoi. Pick a thing up, study it, shake it, skip it across a still surface to see how much felt and lively life got baked into it. Does it sail? Observe. See what can be done.
LM
Nora Ephron’s Heartburn
Nora Ephron, whose name sounds like a neurotransmitter or a sinus medication, and who has made a reputation for herself with snappy, journalistic essays, is now, with the publication of Heartburn, a novelist with a vengeance. While much has already been made of the book’s thinly veiled relationship to the real-life demise of Ephron’s marriage to investigative reporter Carl Bernstein, Heartburn is interesting less for its roman à clef minutiae than as a text-as-test look at how and whether autobiographical art can function as therapy: What can art expurgate, what will art necessarily sentimentalize, from what can art never rescue anyone? Ephron’s narrative itself seems unclear as to whether the literary telling of one’s injuries is exorcism, revenge, or masochism. “It takes two people to hurt you,” says Ephron’s narrator and protagonist, Rachel Samstat. “The one that does it and the one who tells you.” It is a remark that glimpses her own narrative dilemma. When the “teller” is both casualty and curator of her own bad news, might not the so-called cathartic narrative be, finally, an act of self-mutilation? A redundant pain? Do we, as Joan Didion says, “tell ourselves stories in order to live,” or is there something decidedly else involved?
The artist in Ephron’s novel is metaphorized into cookbook writer. Rachel Samstat, seven months pregnant and mother of one, retreats into Cuisinarts, linguine, and TV cooking shows, while her husband, Mark Feldman, a Washington, D.C., columnist, quietly falls in love with the wife of an ambassador—all within the townhouses of our nation’s capital: “It’s stuff like this that got us into Cambodia,” says Rachel. The novel begins when Rachel first discovers Mark’s affair and ends a few weeks later, when she finally lets go of her marriage, surrendering to her husband her beloved vinaigrette recipe, which she’d previously been withholding in a last-ditch effort at keeping him interested. Food in Rachel’s world is power and downfall, hobby and social fabric; recipes can fend off unpleasantries. She recalls the sixties as being a time when people were always looking up and asking, “Whose mousse is this?” She deems the definitive pronouncement of the years following as “Pesto is the quiche of the seventies.” Rachel’s society is self-consciously bourgeois: “We would all say these things as if we had never said them before, and argue over them as if we had never argued over them before. Then we would all decide whether we wanted to be buried or cremated.” Hers is a vaguely jet-settish world of talk-show therapists, celebrity dinner parties, large American Express bills, expensive country homes. Materialism battles uninvited poetry, unwelcome neurasthenia: “Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn,” says Rachel, “and I’ll show you a real asshole.”
The success of Ephron’s novel as art depends in some ways on its ineffectuality as revenge. Her generous inability to present a wholly unlikable portrait of Mark—he courts Rachel charmingly, sings her silly songs, lovingly talks her through two Caesareans—genuinely stirs the reader, although it betrays Ephron’s continuing affection for the figure of the husband, permanently sentimentalizing a man who does not seem to have earned the bittersweet clemency much of the portrait grants him. Nonetheless, his character weathers even the novel’s bitchiest moments because of it. Rachel exacts no satisfaction from this tale. At the end she seems her own victim: alone, unavenged, scarred by the untimely rips in her body and in her life.
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As anyone who has ever eaten standing over a kitchen counter knows, cooking can be an act of excruciatingly delayed gratification. Things must be chopped, stewed, simmered, and the impulse that prompted it all can dissipate in the culinary shuffle. Ephron’s Heartburn, like many acts of literary retaliation, has taken too much time and craft to be a potent swipe at anyone; artful preparation has mellowed and sweetened the ingredients. It is less revenge than revision, less actively asserted rancor than retroactively inserted wit. Though Rachel says to her therapist, “If I tell the story it doesn’t hurt as much,” and “if I tell the story I can get on with it,” the story makes the reader feel too sorry for her to believe that telling it has done her any good at all. Ephron’s nostalgia and revenge are simply different forms of one another. The sad deliciousness of concoction, even served with the best Ephron whine, seems more a miserable monument to sorrow than anything that could vanquish the muck of the real. Catharsis is nowhere to be glimpsed, which is how art should be.
(1983)
Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos
Yes, American culture is more smart than wise. But Kurt Vonnegut, that clown-poet of homesickness and Armageddon, might be the rare American writer who is both. He dances the witty and informed dances of the literary smart, but while he does, he casts a wide eye about, and he sees. He is a postmodern Mark Twain: grumpy and sentimental, antic and religious. He is that paradoxical guy who goes to church both to pray fervently and to blow loud, snappy gum bubbles at the choir.
Galápagos, Vonnegut’s new novel, boasts the energies and derring-do of his earlier works. It is the story, sort of, of a second Noah’s ark, a 1986 nature cruise booked with celebrities (Mick Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Jacqueline Onassis, and others) that in the wake of planetary catastrophe—famine, financial crises, World War III, and a virus that eats the eggs in human ovaries—is fated to land on the Galápagos Islands and perpetuate the human race. Humanity “was about to be diminished to a tiny point, by luck, and then, again by luck, to be permitted to expand again.”
All this may sound like a glittery and Darwinian Gilligan’s Island, not really what Galápagos is at all. Although certainly the novel has something to do with the giant crush America has on celebrity, the famous people never really do make it into the story, and what we end up with is a madcap genealogical adventure—a blend of the Old Testament, the Latin American novel, and a lot of cut-up comic books—employing a cast of lesser-knowns that includes a schoolteacher named Mary Hepburn, an Ecuadorean sea captain named von Kleist, a former male prostitute named James Wait (whose skin color is “like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria”), a dog named Kazakh (who, “thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality”),
plus a narrator who turns out to be none other than the son of Kilgore Trout, that science-fiction hack from Vonnegut’s earlier books.
Leon Trout, Vonnegut’s doppelgänger, speaks to us, moreover, from a million years hence, from the afterlife, whence he can best pronounce on what was wrong with us twentieth-century folk—our brains were too big—and reveal what, through evolution and for purposes of survival, we became: creatures with smaller brains and flippers and beaks. Even if people of the future “found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?” Leon Trout asks. And: “It is hard to imagine anybody’s torturing anybody nowadays. How could you even capture somebody you wanted to torture with just your flippers and your mouth?”
Vonnegut has probably always been a better teller than maker of stories. One continually marvels at the spare, unmuddied jazz of a Vonnegut sentence and too often despairs of his ramshackle plots. Galápagos is, typically and perhaps aptly, structured spatially, like an archipelago, tiny islands of prose detached from that apparently dangerous continent of time—childhood reminiscences, parables, interviews, real and invented history, nature writing, sapient literary quotations, a soldier’s confession. (The literary novel, alas, has always lacked a natural form.) This is a narrative style engendered by emergency, the need to get directly to something. It is susceptible, however, to an unhelpful chaos and can defeat its own purpose by blithely wandering off and turning whole chapters into scrapbooks of blather and dead end.
But Vonnegut seems eventually to get where he wants, shining his multicolored lights and science-fiction what-ifs on the huge spiritual mistake that is the Western world. He wants to tell us things: It is not the fittest who survive; it is merely those who happen to survive who survive. The earth is a “fragile habitat” that our big brains have failed to take care of. We must hope for flippers and beaks or nothing at all. We are all, finally, being too mean to one another. “I’ll tell you what the human soul is,” a character in Galápagos says. “It’s the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right.”
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Although not as moving as, say, Slaughterhouse-Five, Galápagos does have moments (of father-son vis-à-vis) that bring a glug to the throat. And although more wobblingly cobbled and arrhythmic comically than Breakfast of Champions, Galápagos can be as darkly funny. Vonnegut asterisks the names of characters who are going to die and, after their inevitably gruesome deaths, kisses them off with the elegiac “Oh, well—he wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.” Early in the novel, he even puts Captain von Kleist on The Tonight Show, and what follow are the best laughs in the book.
Vonnegut’s work long ago broke ground for such writers as Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Tom Robbins—all curators of the rhetorical and cultural non sequitur. But Vonnegut’s grumbly and idiomatic voice has always been his own, unfakable and childlike, and his humanity, persisting as it does through his pessimism, is astonishing, seeming at times more science fiction than his science fiction. As for his suspended concern for the well-made, big-brained novel, Vonnegut has opted to zoom in directly for the catch, the idea, the oracular bit. His books are not only like canaries in coal mines (his own analogy) but like the cormorants of the Galápagos Islands, who, in their idiosyncratic evolution, have sacrificed flight for the getting of fish.
(1985)
Malcolm Bradbury’s Cuts
Henry Babbacombe, the writer-protagonist of Malcolm Bradbury’s new novel, Cuts, has no need to search for Eldorado; it has come looking for him. Eldorado is a British television company aiming to ensure its solvency and future with a blockbuster “miniseries” (accented, perhaps, on the second syllable, to rhyme with miseries). In its previous effort, “Gladstone, Man of Empire,” Eldorado lost its leading man, a famous and venerated old actor, when he was required to appear before the character of Queen Victoria in the nude and playing the ukulele. It was “fictionalised verity,” explained the Eldorado Head of Drama Plays and Series. “You take real people and events but you’re not slavishly bound to actual facts.”
In such fiscally tight times, Eldorado Television can afford no more ukuleles. It wants a drama with “love and power and tenderness and glory, and a lot of mountains in the background.” It wants “love and power. Past and present. Tears and laughter.” It wants “love and feeling, ancient buildings and contemporary problems.” It wants “contemporary reality, strong hero, elegant locations.” It wants “something that’s art, but is also life at its deepest and most telling.” It wants “a lush foreign location where you can get malt whisky.” It wants “epic.” It wants “tragic.” It wants “cheap.”
In a quaint and decorous moment, Eldorado decides it also wants a writer—someone brilliant and postmodern, with a “decidedly bushel-hidden light.” Someone with a rumbling stomach. That week, it so happens, Henry Babbacombe’s agent is sleeping with an Eldorado executive, and it is suggested that Eldorado give Babbacombe a try.
As for Babbacombe, he desires no such thing. He lives contentedly and alone in a tiny northern hill village, where he teaches evening classes called “Sex and Maturity in the English Novel” and the somewhat more popular “Fiction and the Farm.” During the day he writes obscure, Beckettian novels in the garden shed of his backyard. His workday includes the consumption of high-fiber cereal, the writing down of his dreams, and, at six o’clock, the preparation of “a simple salad.” If he feels isolated and in need of cultural diversion, he whistles, usually something classical. When he is summoned to the glass high-rise of Eldorado Television, he is baffled but he goes, bringing with him on the train a pile of student essays on Middlemarch.
After that, circumstances conspire to urge Babbacombe into accepting Eldorado’s offer. He is more wined than dined at a long lunch where every course is served with kiwi fruit, including a scarlet rack of lamb and a “gorgonzola pâté…laid out so beautifully it was a pity to disturb it, as indeed it proved.” When he returns to his provincial university to discuss with the head of his department the possibility of a leave of absence, Babbacombe is given a grim speech about university financial problems. Already the college has had to rely on private endowments in an unprecedented manner, as in “the Kingsley Amis Chair of Women’s Studies.” The chairman, whose problems before the cuts had always been either of fornication or of plagiarism, is now obliged to get rid of two staff members. He has already resorted to sending colleagues out on dangerous errands in the hope that they will be run over by buses. As dedicated a man as the French structuralist who named his daughters Langue and Parole has already left. A Shakespearean professor has retrained as an airline pilot.
Henry Babbacombe has given his chairman the perfect opportunity. The chairman must consider the impact of crass television work on the reputation of his faculty. The chairman himself “would never dream of hiring out [his] mind for vulgar profit.” In fact, his department has generally refused even to publish books, “naturally preferring to transfer their thoughts by word of mouth to the two or three people who are fit to understand them.” Envy and budget cuts team up, and Babbacombe is fired from his academic Eden—his life of quiet eccentricity and bold indifference to reality, his world of sooty Gothic buildings papered with announcements of essay competitions on “whether there should be a third sex.” He is plunged instead into the dark farce of a scriptwriting career.
What ensues is riotous if predictable misadventure. In the world of script collaboration, Babbacombe is the prototypical literary naïf: a country cousin, sans feck, sans hap, sans hope. Without his knowledge or consent the setting of the series switches continents weekly. Eldorado personnel begin the rewrites before Babbacombe has finished the “writes.” Eldorado titles Babbacombe’s script “Serious Damage,” and truly it is that. His literary ambitions in abeyance, Babbacombe, wooed wit
h kiwi fruit, becomes a kind of emissary of his own incapacitated self, a venturer if not adventurer into the heartless illogic of commercial television. It is a world that believes all problems are problems of “notional casting.” It is a world in which an obscure Beckettian novelist is asked to work up a totally spurious death scene, and does so, setting a new “standard in rigor mortis.”
To add injury to insult, the urban landscape Babbacombe encounters is one wrought by privation, privatization, moral calamity. Lovemaking is “staccato and short….It was wise not to touch someone who might have touched someone else who in turn had touched someone else….Sex was being replaced by gender.” And tenderness is pruned to tender wedges and slivers of the diminishing national pie. Says the omniscient narrator of Cuts, “The only pleasure left to make life worth living, if it was at all, was money, poor little paper money, which was trying to do all the work.”
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Malcolm Bradbury is the author of an impressive array of critical works (including books on Evelyn Waugh and Saul Bellow) and of the novels The History Man and Rates of Exchange. What he has given us in Cuts is once more a depiction of man as historical performer, this time in a satirical romp through Thatcher England. “It was a time for getting rid of the old soft illusions, and replacing them with the new hard illusions.”
Bradbury has milked his title for all it is worth, and it is worth much. If he has left us feeling a bit severed at the end, it may have been one cut too many, but we get the authorial joke. There is so much fun, fury, and intelligence in this little novel, one can forgive its insistent cartoonishness or those rare moments when the wit is less rapier than spoon. If the insidious world of television as literary subject or sociological context manages by its very nature to preclude the writing of great literature, that would be this modest book’s point. Bradbury has succeeded in doing what the social satirist must do: to amuse trenchantly, leaving in the throat “a strange taste rather like a rancid kiwi fruit.”