(1991)
Election Day 1992: Voters in Wonderland
Is it too late to note the left-handedness of all three candidates? It left, so to speak, an eerie impression. Not because of the various primitive biases against left-handedness—that it is sinister, like the Italian word (sinistra), or clumsy like the French (gauche), or that it suggests a brain organized in mystery and improvisation.
No, mostly it was eerie because in watching the candidates it seemed we were viewing a reflection in the mirror, as if this were all taking place through the looking glass, and that Lewis Carrollean quality was unnerving, particularly given the people involved.
I guess I mean the American people—a phrase I hoped never to hear again, but there it is, and without a southern drawl, a Texas twang, or a Camp David scoff. The American people: so fickle and unimpressed. What do they want? As I watched them being courted these many months, it occurred to me that the three candidates really were suitors, that they had courting styles—attitudes and tricks.
They were trying to get a date—November 3—with the American people. Bill Clinton was the etchings man, the guy with the soulful but collegiate gaze, the curly mouth, such heat in the face and itchy restlessness in a suit it seemed his clothes would fly off him. At his place there were jazz recordings and art. “It’s time for a change,” he said, looking around the joint.
Ross Perot came straight to the front door and rang the bell. “I’m crazy about ya. That’s all there is to it.” The American people noted the adjective but were charmed. When he skipped town, for the wedding of a relative, they blew their noses and began seeing other men. When two months later he showed up again at their office, the American people phoned 911. (Of course, they misdialed and got 411: information, infomercial.)
George Bush promised safety: “I won’t drink and drive, not like you-know-who.” But the trunk of his car was locked—Panamanian drugs? Deposit slips from Iraqi banks? Copies of Hamlet? Of Richard II?
It was painful to watch them in Richmond negotiate the stools. The informal seating of the second debate was daytime-talk-show theater—Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue—and this staging, somehow paradigmatic of the entire campaign, seemed particularly uncomfortable to President Bush, Bachelor No. 1.
Stealing that vulgar format for a debate was a kind of beheading—and Bush seemed to know that. He arrived anesthetized. He was too proud to flirt. He threw in the towel and waved to his wife in the audience. Hi, honey! He was still trying to figure out how Ronald Reagan had gotten away with sitting around doing nothing, but when he, Bush, had tried it, he got nailed. It’s so unfair! Hi, honey!
Clinton remained hunched over on his own stool, but then rose like a torch singer when it was his turn, microphone in hand, giving himself in the style of Piaf or Garland to each questioner. A cross between a sweet cocktail and a legal pad, he bespoke desire and its difficult math.
Perot, meanwhile, used his stool as a kind of elevator shoe and seemed amused at his newly acquired stature. He worked up a running gag with the commander in chief. He had fun. Heck, look what he was doing: he was running for president!
But this was all taking place through the looking glass. In some other world. That Lewis Carroll world. Wasn’t it?
Is this longest and dreariest of courtships—the televised flattery, the bad candy, the shifting hairstyles—the future of presidential campaigning? I’m reminded of a remark made once by a transvestite-turned-transsexual. “When I was a transvestite,” she said, “dressing up like this was fun. But now that I’m a woman, it’s such a chore.”
In the world of Lewis Carroll, strangeness and vanity are laws of physics: Smiles linger in the air. Cakes are marked EAT ME, beautifully in currants. Turtles croon of their own soup. But after the election, whoever is our president is going to have to pass through the thick silver mist of the mirror, into our side, the American people’s side, the real side, of the room.
(1992)
Charles Baxter’s Shadow Play
Often when short-story writers go to write novels they get jaunty. They take deep breaths and become brazen—the way shy people do on wine. Donald Barthelme becomes mythic and parodic. Alice Munro boldly seamsterly (stitching novels from short stories). Andre Dubus asks us to reconsider the novella (as an equivalent form). Perhaps Grace Paley has shown the greatest bravado of all in simply not bothering.
Charles Baxter, whose three brilliant collections of short stories (Harmony of the World, Through the Safety Net, and A Relative Stranger) may place him in the same rank as the above writers, constructed his first novel in reverse chronology. First Light (1987), the hauntingly detailed story of a brother and sister from Five Oaks, Michigan, is an intricate unknotting, a narrative progression backward in time toward the moment when the boy, Hugh, first touches his infant sister’s hand. It is a strategy intended, no doubt, to make the genre Baxter’s own, as well as to show the inextricability of sibling ties. Now, in his second novel, Shadow Play, Baxter has returned to Five Oaks—a town of “prideful” lies, “sun-smelted” ponds, and “apples dry-rotting in the hot dust of the driveway”—as well as to the subject of siblings and inextricability.
Perhaps because he’s been here before, Baxter is more confident this time. In Shadow Play, the novel is no longer a form to be seized and remade, but a capacious place in which to move around. Baxter is looser, less strict. The narrative has not been trained; Baxter indulges it, affectionately musses its hair, lets it go where it may. The result is, paradoxically, both a more conventionally constructed novel and a more surprising and suspenseful book.
Shadow Play is primarily the story of Wyatt Palmer, a fiercely bright and artistic boy who grows up to find himself stuck in the most pedestrian of existences: by day a bored government bureaucrat, by night a tired husband, father, and homeowner. When a chemical company called WaldChem sets itself up in town and pressures the city management (for the sake of the local economy, of course) to look the other way as health regulations are violated, Wyatt is suddenly and precariously placed at the center of a drama involving ethical behavior in “postethical” times.
In a contracting economy, too many citizens of Five Oaks appear willing to make a devil’s pact: health for cash; lives for jobs. As assistant city manager, Wyatt would like to “notify the state that the on-site waste management guidelines and regulations and licensing restrictions are being violated.”
But the head of WaldChem is a high school buddy; Wyatt plays golf with him; he has given Wyatt’s wayward foster brother, Cyril, a job in the plant. And, as the city manager tells Wyatt, “the times are against you.” By remaining quiet and polite and helpful to those around him, Wyatt strikes a most unholy bargain—with himself as well as with the world. He is no longer his troubled brother’s troubled keeper; he is a member of the audience. As Baxter wrote in First Light, “No one knows how to do that in this country, how to be a brother.”
Not unlike Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” Baxter’s Shadow Play takes large themes of good and evil and primitive deal-making, and situates them in municipal terms and local ritual. He is interested in those shadowy corners of civilization in which barbarity manages to nestle and thrive. The America of this book has become a kind of hell. “The houses gave off a dingy little light, the light of I’m-not-sorry-for-anything, the light of Listen-to-me….That way you didn’t even need eternal fire.”
Shadow Play is also an examination of how the midwestern values of niceness, passivity, helpfulness, and just-going-along can contribute to the rot and demise of a community. When Wyatt’s foster brother develops lung cancer while holding down his custodial job at the plant, Wyatt is impassive. “They didn’t have to make WaldChem so dangerous, those bastards,” rages the dying Cyril. “They could have made it safer.”
“You smoked, Cyril,” Wyatt replies quietly. “You smoked cigarettes all your life.” It is a response so wick
ed in its neutrality that later “he stood in his own living room, repressing the impulse to scream.” “The verdict on him, he now knew, was that he was obliging and careless, an accessory.” When Wyatt agrees to help Cyril commit suicide (one is reminded here of a fellow Michigander, Dr. Jack Kevorkian), he has not only enacted the central metaphor of the book but effectively set himself up for a nervous breakdown, one replete with tattoo, adultery, arson, and a move to Brooklyn.
This last is no amusing little fillip; in the geographical paradigm of Baxter’s book, New York City is Eden as anti-Eden. Here the fruit of the tree of knowledge is not rotting in anyone’s driveway. There are no driveways; the trees were cut down years ago. The good fight has long since been waged and lost, and here one can live in something akin to aftermath if not to peace. As a boy Wyatt had memorized a map of the New York subway system, and as a young man he was an artist, a painter of shadow portraits; now, in New York with his family, he can resume where he left off before the heart- and hinterland so rudely interrupted him. He can attempt something un-midwestern, something like a coda, a twilit sequel; in unecological times, an ecology of hope and loss.
* * *
—
One of Charles Baxter’s great strengths as a writer has always been his ability to capture the stranded inner lives of the Midwest’s repressed eccentrics. And here, in his second novel, he is at full throttle. The character of Wyatt’s mother is a figure of alleged madness, but—whether it speaks to Baxter’s talent or should be cause for this reader’s concern—the passages that give voice to her insanity are lucid, lovely, sympathetic: “She knew that birds sometimes agreed or disagreed with their names but she kept that information to herself.” “Angels,” she thinks, “were so vain, so pretty. They wore coral earrings and distressfully unassembled hats.” When Wyatt brings his mother to New York, and she finds the life of a bag lady a congenial one, Baxter treats this with a certain heartening dignity rather than a forlorn condescension.
He also gives much of the book over to the voice and point of view of Wyatt’s bright, quirky Aunt Ellen, who functions as a sapient observer of the world of the novel. She believes not in a benevolent God but in a God of pure curiosity; moreover, she believes she is writing the Bible of that God. “There is absolutely no love coming to us from that realm,” she says of the more traditional deity. “None at all. You might as well pray to a telephone pole.”
Aunt Ellen, even more than Wyatt, is the moral center of the book—hers is the most trenchant of the solitudes fashioned and recorded here. That Baxter can traverse gender and offer such a deep and authentic rendition of a woman’s voice and thoughts should not in itself be remarkable in contemporary fiction, yet still it is.
Because his work doesn’t offer itself up in gaudy ways for popular consumption or intellectual play (theorists and critics have failed to descend en masse with their scissors and forks), Charles Baxter has acquired the reputation of being that rare and pleasurable thing: a writer’s writer. He has steadily taken beautiful and precise language and gone into the ordinary and secret places of people—their moral and emotional quandaries, their typically American circumstances, their burning intelligence, their negotiations with what is trapped, stunted, violent, sustaining, decent, or miraculous in their lives. In writing about ordinary people he derives narrative authority from having imagined further and more profoundly than we have, making his literary presence a necessary and important one, and making Shadow Play a novel that is big, moving, rich with life and story—something so much more than a writer’s anxious vacation from shorter forms.
(1993)
Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
Margaret Atwood has always possessed a tribal bent: in both her fiction and her nonfiction she has described and transcribed the ceremonies and experience of being a woman, or a Canadian, or a writer—or all three. And as with so many practitioners of identity politics, literary or otherwise, while one side of her banner defiantly exclaims “We Are!” the other side, equally defiant, admonishes “Don’t Lump Us.” In The Robber Bride, Atwood has gathered (not lumped) four very different women characters.
Probably it is the subject of women that has most completely dominated Atwood’s novels (although for “women,” one might as well read “a medium-size variety of people in general”). That women are individuals, difficult to corral, a motley and uneasy sisterhood; that feminism is often hard going and hard-won, sabotaged from within as well as without; that in the war between the sexes there are collaborators as well as enemies, spies, refugees, spectators, and conscientious objectors—all this has been brilliantly dramatized in Atwood’s work.
The cruel Toronto girlhoods depicted in her novels Lady Oracle and Cat’s Eye, replete with vague, insensitive mothers and sadistic girls, are in their way feminist dystopias akin to the totalitarian North America of her best-known work, the futurist novel The Handmaid’s Tale. To restore the humanity of their cultural representation, Atwood’s writing suggests, it is women who must look at women in discrete and unsentimental ways. Too often men are in power or love or the dark or the doghouse or the fog. So the attentive Atwood looks. And the women she sees are deformed by their own niceness, or given to mischief or dreaminess or carelessness. In a sexist society they meekly but inventively improvise a life. Or else they pounce and grab. Some work hard. Some yell. Some hide, some march, some drink, some fib. Some bite the dust, the bullet, the hand that feeds them. Some rule the roost. Some count their chickens before they’re hatched. Goodness, what a richly hued tapestry of women the world has woven!
That this should in any way still be news tells us something of the condescension and categorical thinking of that world. In a recent introduction to the Paris Review anthology Women Writers at Work, Atwood remarked that the editors chose to bring together fifteen diverse writers, “over what in some cases would doubtless be their dead bodies.” She went on to write, “ ‘Why not a gathering of women writers?’ the editors were asked. Well, why not? Which is not quite the same as why.”
In The Robber Bride, we meet three friends from college—Tony, Charis, and Roz—and their common nemesis and classmate, the beautiful, evil Zenia. Men in this novel are on the sidelines only. In this game they are the ante, the chips, but not the players themselves, not really even the cards. Men are marginal, symbolic. As texts they are hack, minor, obvious, predictable. It is the women Atwood is interested in. She wants a challenge. She wants to have fun. As with the fairy tales requested by Roz’s daughters, she wants women in all the parts.
“Who do you want [the Robber Bride] to murder?” asks Tony, the storyteller of the title’s revised Grimm tale. “Men victims, or women victims? Or maybe an assortment?”
The girls “remain true to their principles, they do not flinch. They opt for women, in every single role.”
Tony is Antoinette Fremont, a war historian and a professor at a Toronto university. She teaches and researches the history of war, while Operation Desert Storm mobilizes abroad. In her cellar, using peppercorns, lentils, and Monopoly pieces for the various armies, she sets up dioramas of ancient French battles. She is happiest “in the company of people who had died a long time ago.” Her friend Charis tells her such an interest in war is “negative” and “carcinogenic.” One of her university colleagues tells her that in not focusing on social history Tony is “letting women down.” The History Department, Tony thinks, is “like a Renaissance court: whisperings, gangings-up, petty treacheries, snits and umbrage.”
Tony’s “stronghold” is her house, where she lives and studies, childless except for her husband, West. For Tony, “war is there. It’s not going away soon….The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when language fails.” Besides, wars have their upside: while they’re occurring, the suicide rate always drops.
Tony’s point of view begins and ends the novel. By giving such strategic po
sitioning to this character, Atwood announces and reinforces her metaphors and themes: that victimhood comes in all forms; that evil is a fact though not outwittable; that fighting fire with fire may have, for observers, its aesthetic and intellectual appeal.
Atwood braids two other characters’ points of view into the narrative. One belongs to the half-zonked but psychic Charis—a New Age earth mother who in the 1960s “drifted through her university years as if through an airport.” Charis believes in breathing exercises and teas and juices. She believes you can refuse to participate in certain emotions.
“I like hamburgers but I don’t eat them,” she says.
“Hamburgers are not an emotion,” says Roz.
“Yes they are,” says Charis.
The other point of view is Roz’s. She is the founding editor of WiseWomanWorld, a successful women’s magazine that has not entirely lost its social conscience. Roz sees to it that the magazine gives generously, if wearily, to charities: “Hearts, Lungs and Livers, Eyes, Ears and Kidneys.”
Roz, Atwood tells us, “has her own list. She still does Battered Women, she still does Rape Victims, she still does Homeless Moms. How much compassion is enough? She’s never known, and you have to draw the line somewhere, but she still does Abandoned Grannies. She no longer goes to the formal dinner-dances, though.”
Raucous and irreverent, during her marriage Roz was also indulgent, vigilant, and wise. She checked her philandering husband “for rust spots, the way she would a car.” She hoped that if he started to go bald he wouldn’t “get his armpit transplanted to the top of his head.” She sees the problems of her life mostly as narrative ones. Together, she and her therapist try to “figure out what story she’s in.” If they succeed, “they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending.” Though perhaps the fairy tales are right, she thinks: “No matter what you do, somebody always gets boiled.”