In New Zealand, a cable from Diefenbach reaches Peters asking if he can come to New York and lend a hand in this horrible affair. What happens when Peters moves into the murdered girls’ New York apartment takes up the second half of the book.
I’ve seldom read a novel that’s offered up such rigorous and lasting pleasure. The people who populate this fine book will strike you not so much as characters but rather as common and uncommon men and women going about their lives, doing those things that may damn them forever—or that could raise them to something they might otherwise have not been capable of in this imperfect world, or in the hands of a lesser novelist.
Of course I won’t give you the novel’s ending. I can tell you that the plot turns, and then turns, and turns again. Until the last pages it has you, as they used to say, on the edge of your seat. For me, a discussion of the book brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s invocation: “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”
Vance Bourjaily is a writer of great gifts and originality, hard at work, as always, and in the fullness of his powers.
A Game Men Play by Vance Bourjaily. New York: Dial Press, 1980.
Fiction That Throws Light on Blackness
In a time when so much fiction is being written and published that doesn’t seem to count for much, it should be said at once that this is a book about something—and something that matters. It has to do with the nature and meaning of friendship, love, obligation, responsibility, and behavior. Big concerns. But this is a big book, and one that throws light on—I’ll say it once and without embarrassment—the human condition. It gives more than a passing glance at what Melville called “the blackness of darkness,” but it helps hold back that darkness a little. It asks, early on and with all seriousness, How should a man act? And it’s to his lasting credit that Yount has the intelligence and insight and very great literary skill to show us, page by page, the lives of the people who inhabit this fine book as they are revealed in all their glory and imperfection.
Fiction that counts is about people. Does this need saying? Maybe. Anyway, fiction is not, as some writers believe, the ascendance of technique over content. These days we also seem to be long on novels and short stories in which people are reduced to nameless or otherwise easily forgettable “characters,” hapless creatures who have nothing much to do in this life or, even worse, go about doing unthinking and uncaring things to their own kind. In fiction that matters the significance of the action inside the story translates to the lives of people outside the story. Do we need to remind ourselves of this? In the best novels and short stories, goodness is recognized as such. Loyalty, love, fortitude, courage, integrity may not always be rewarded, but they are recognized as good or noble actions or qualities; and evil or base or simply stupid behavior is seen and held up for what it is: evil, base, or stupid behavior. There are a few absolutes in this life, some verities, if you will, and we would do well not to forget them.
Except for a frame of a few pages at the beginning and again at the end of the book—pages in which an old man appears with his grandchildren in Elkin, Kentucky, in the summer of 1979—the action of the novel takes place during the summer and fall of 1931 in that same Kentucky hill town. The hero is nineteen-year-old Bill Music, who has left his parents’ worn-out farm in Shulls Mills, Virginia, to go to Chicago for a ninety-day course at Coin Electric. He had hoped to better his lot and earn a living as an electrician. But when he finds himself scavenging out of garbage cans because there are no jobs, he decides to give up his dream and head for home. Hunger forces him to leave the train just outside of Elkin. A mine guard named Regus Bone mistakes him for a “Communist” labor organizer, puts a gun in his face, and wants to place him under arrest. But Music is tired and hungry, and Bone, feeling sympathy, lets him recuperate a few days with him and his mother, Ella Bone. Music and Bone become friendly, and Music decides to hire on as a mine guard himself at the princely sum of three dollars a day.
It’s dangerous work being a mine guard. Mine guards carry guns, as do some of the miners. Music and Bone pull their shift together and look after one another. On their days off from work they build a pigpen, go coon hunting, build and set rabbit traps, chop down a tree filled with bees and honey. Gradually, a deep friendship develops between the two men. Meanwhile, Music has fallen in love with a young mother and widow named Merlee. After a few months, Music becomes tired and ashamed of being a mine guard. Bone has also become disillusioned. They turn in their badges. But there comes, as we knew it must, the inevitable and fatal conflict with the Hardcastle Mining Company goons. Bone is ambushed and killed. Music survives his friend. “And although he saw it come, the news of Regus’s death didn’t seem to reach all the areas of his understanding for months or even years afterward, so that it took a very long time to come to the end of his grief.”
Music will marry Merlee and stay in Elkin to build a life. He doesn’t go home again. Besides, “He suspects home is simply not a place at all, but a time, and when it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”
Lionel Trilling has said that a great book reads us. Somewhere in my twenties I read this and pondered its meaning. What exactly was the man saying? It sounded wise, learned, insightful, and I wanted to be those things. When I finished reading Hardcastle, this remarkably generous but unsparing novel, I was reminded of Trilling’s words and I thought, So this is what he was talking about. Yes. How true. This is what he meant, yes.
Hardcastle by John Yount. New York: Richard Marek, 1980.
Brautigan Serves Werewolf Berries and Cat Cantaloupe
The prose pieces that make up this uneven collection of prose pieces—it is not a “novel” by any definition of that word—range in length from a few lines to several pages. They are set in and around Livingston, Montana; Tokyo; and San Francisco. There is no ordering principle at work in the book; any selection could go anywhere and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. I think the first, and longest, piece is the best. It’s called “The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl and the Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia in Crete, Nebraska.” The other pieces have such titles as “Skylab at the Graves of Abbott and Costello,” “Five Ice-Cream Cones Running in Tokyo,” “Montana Traffic Spell,” “A San Francisco Snake Story,” “Werewolf Raspberries,” “A Study in Thyme and Funeral Parlors,” “Two Montana Humidifiers,” “What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?”, “Cat Cantaloupe,” “Chicken Fable,” “Light On at the Tastee-Freez.” You get an idea.
There are 131 of these, and some of them are really good, and they’re like little astonishments going off in your hands. Some are so-so, take them or leave them. Others—I think too many—are just filling up space. These last, the space filler-uppers, make you wonder. I mean you want to ask, “Is there an editor in the house?” Isn’t there someone around who loves this author more than anything, someone he loves and trusts in return, who could sit down with him and tell him what’s good, even wonderful, in this farrago of bits and pieces, and what is lightweight, plain silly stuff and better left unsaid, or in the notebooks?
Still wishing; one wishes there had been more to choose from. One wishes there had been 240 of these little things—or 390, like the number of Christmas tree photos; and then (still wishing) that the author had sat down with this good friend-trusted editor, and they had gone over all the pieces, looking at each piece as you would look at a poem, and looking at how many pieces stack up to make a book. One wishes that this imaginary editor-friend had been stern with the author now and again. “Look here, Richard! This one is just cutesy pie. And this one is finger exercise, laundry list jotting stuff. You want a good book? Keep that one out. But this one, now, this one’s a keeper.” And out of the 240, or 390, or even these original 131, maybe 90 or 100 had gone into the collection. It could have been a real book then, one filled with amazements and zingers. Instead, we have oh so many little reveries and gentle laid-back sweet notions that the author ha
s been blessed with and saved up to share with us. But they don’t need sharing, all of them.
Maybe none of this matters to the author. Maybe it’s simply that we are either tuned into his wavelength, or we are not. If we’re not, well, I suppose it could be said tough luck, so lump it. Or if our heads are where Brautigan’s head is at, then perhaps everything and anything goes. What matter? But I have to believe—I don’t have to believe anything; it’s just a feeling I have—that Brautigan wants to write the very best he can, and write for grown-up men and women as well as just the easy-to-please younger set.
So you can take this book or leave it. It won’t help you along any in this life, or hurt you, to read it. It won’t change the way you look at things, or people, or make a dent of any size in your emotional life. It’s gentle on the mind. It’s 258 pages of reverie and impression, and some sparkly gleamings, of things past and present having to do with the author’s life on “this planet Earth.”
It’s a book by Richard Brautigan called The Tokyo-Montana Express. It’s not his best book by a long shot. But he must know this.
The Tokyo-Montana Express by Richard Brautigan. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1980.
McGuane Goes After Big Game
Most of these essays are very good and a few are simply wonderful. Each has to do in some way with certain outdoor pursuits, chiefly fishing. In its highly personal depiction of particular landscapes, An Outside Chance belongs in the company of William Humphrey’s The Spawning Run and My Moby Dick, Vance Bourjaily’s The Unnatural Enemy, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It, even Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa. For the record, let’s call it a work of literature.
There are eighteen essays in the collection. They began to appear back in 1969, and they appeared off and on in magazines through the 1970s. They are, if you’re interested, a patchy record of McGuane’s life and interests this past decade while he was writing the books that established him as one of our better novelists. In an early piece called “Me and My Bike and Why,” McGuane is living in California and writing about the vicissitudes of falling in love with and then buying a motorcycle. There is an affectionate give-and-take going on with his wife.
In “My Meadow Lark,” set some years later in Key West, the author is suffering from “boat sickness”—a terrific yearning for a specially made craft called a Meadow Lark. The wife is still on the scene, still affectionate, and joined now by young Tom Jr. Still later, in a fine piece of work called “Roping, from A to B,” we find the author participating in a jackpot roping contest out in Gardiner, Montana. Tom Jr. is there in the grandstand watching his father perform. Tom Jr.’s mother is there as well, but she has a new husband. Tom Sr. has a friend in the audience, a girl “up from Alabama.”
“I don’t know what this kind of thing indicates beyond the necessary, ecstatic resignation to the moment,” McGuane says in another context.
Most of the essays detail various aspects of tarpon fishing, bone fishing, fishing for mutton snapper, permit fishing (permit being a mysterious hard-to-catch saltwater fish), rainbow and cutthroat trout fishing, and fishing for striped bass. One of the things I’ll take away from the book is the image of the author standing on a rocky point facing the Atlantic Ocean and trying to land a striped bass in the dark while holding a flashlight in his mouth. There is an essay about a hunting dog named Molly, and there is another that has something to do with grouse and pheasant and waterfowl shooting; and there is “The Heart of the Game,” maybe the centerpiece of the book—about deer and antelope hunting, meditation and metaphysics. Other essays include one about a horse named Chink’s Benjibaby; motorcycle racing; being a kid and hunting for lost golf balls to sell; the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club in San Francisco, where the casters have to watch out for the muggers—and a couple of essays about just messing around outside in general.
But fishing predominates and McGuane takes his fishing seriously. He’s talking now about losing a large fish: “it joined that throng of shades, touched and unseen, that haunt the angler—fish felt and lost, big ones that got away that are the subject of levity to nonanglers but of a deeper emotion to the angler himself.” And here is a description of the author’s state of mind while fishing in a beautiful, remote region of western Canada: “While it had lasted [the fish’s rise], all of British Columbia that existed had been the few square inches around my dry fly.” McGuane is a catch-and-release fisherman, but fishermen of any persuasion can share these feelings.
“Inevitably, what actually happened is indescribable,” the author tells us. Maybe this is true of most profound experiences. But McGuane has gone the distance in trying to describe those experiences.
In An Outside Chance McGuane’s batting .370 or better. He is not Ted Williams or Ty Cobb. Nor is he Ernest Hemingway. But he has written a good and true book, and I have a strong feeling “Papa” would have approved.
An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport by Thomas McGuane. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980.
Richard Ford’s Stark Vision of Loss, Healing
The surface action of this remarkable book can be described as follows: Harry Quinn, an ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, and his girlfriend, Rae—like Quinn, a drifter—are in Oaxaca, Mexico, after a seven-month separation, to try to get Rae’s brother, Sonny, out of prison. Sonny is behind bars because he has been apprehended with two pounds of cocaine in his possession. But with a smart lawyer, $10,000, iron resolution and some luck, the necessary document of release can be obtained and Sonny will be freed. Quinn and Rae will maybe pick up the pieces of their scorched love affair and go on to whatever grainy things lie in store. But there’s a hitch. Everyone has gradually come to believe that Sonny has “taken off” the people he works for. As the Mexican lawyer Bernhardt puts it: “They think he makes the deal and lets himself be arrested.”
So there are complications. The complications are serious and often ugly. Everybody wants a piece of Sonny. (One of his fellow inmates actually cuts off his ear as a warning.) Add to this the fact that what seems to be a small-scale insurrection is breaking out in the city; and the soldiers and police are responding with a ruthless yet almost indifferent repression. At times there is such pressure it seems impossible that normal life can still be going on in the city. But Sonny’s hope of release, his continued existence, in fact, is seen slipping away ever faster into a maelstrom of events that have gone out of control, so that finally his life seems to become a thing of no importance at all.
The Ultimate Good Luck is a page-turner of the first order, felicitously rendered in a prose style rare in contemporary fiction. Here is an example of what I’m talking about:
In Vietnam Quinn had made a minor science of light-study. Light made all the difference in the way you performed and how you made out, since everything was a matter of seeing and not seeing. The right distribution of eastern gray and composite green on the surface of an empty paddy and a line of coconut palms could give you a loop, and for a special celestial moment you wouldn’t be there at all, but be out of it, in an evening’s haze of beach on Lake Michigan with teals like flecks of gray space skittering down the flyway toward Indiana, and the entire day would back up sweetly against a heavy wash of night air.
On a deeper level, the book is a meditation on love and comportment between two ordinary but “marginal” people, Rae and Quinn. (Bernhardt believes “Everyone is marginal,” and there is plenty of evidence in the book to support this belief.) They are in their early thirties when they meet at a dog race at a Louisiana track, but both seem to be at the tag end of their lives, “wounded in their sex,” to borrow D. H. Lawrence’s phrase, unable to break through their own self-imposed barriers. They live together for a time in Louisiana, Quinn working seven-on and seven-off as a fitter for a pipe contractor while Rae stays in the trailer and listens to “mellowed-out music” and paints from magazines. They drift to California where Quinn works for a time repossessing new cars. Through a friend, he lands a job as a
game warden out in Michigan, a place where he hopes he can find a “clear frame of reference.” But in Michigan, Rae is desperately unhappy with the way things are going. At various points she cries out in frustration: “I couldn’t ever tell what the hell your life was in behalf of.… I don’t like the way you think about things. You look at everything like it disappears down a hole that nothing ever comes out of.”
“Do you love me?” she said. She had begun to cry. “You don’t like to say it, do you?” she said. “It scares you. You don’t want to need it.”
“I can take care of me” is Quinn’s answer.
That’s not enough for Rae, and she pulls out on him, and Quinn has a hard time with it. He comes to realize that: “when you tried to protect yourself completely and never suffer a loss or a threat, you ended up with nothing. Or worse, you ended up being absorbed right into nothing, into the very luckless thing you were most afraid of.”
At the conclusion of this superb novel Quinn and Rae have come full circle, and the heart slows and then picks up again as they move out and away from the circle. But throughout we have been witness to a significant and I think, finally, transcending arc of human conduct.
Ford is a masterful writer. In its stark vision of utter loss followed by a last-ditch healing redemption, The Ultimate Good Luck belongs alongside Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. I can’t give this novel higher marks.
The Ultimate Good Luck by Richard Ford. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.