The Wrong Kind of Dislocation

The Wrong Kind of Dislocation

The Wrong Kind of Dislocation
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New books dissected over email.
April 16 2002 11:37 AM

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Dear Chris,

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From the little postlude that ends Spies, on Page 303 (in the galleys; I believe the pagination may be different in the published book): "So what did happen after that night? Nothing. Life went on. I got up the next morning as usual, so far as I remember. I went to school, and struggled to keep my attention fixed upon the algebra and history exams."

In context, I do think an ending that permits such a summing-up represents authorial dereliction. And when I say "in context," I'm referring simply to the dramatic expectations raised by the fiction itself. Most of the book consists of a gloomy, ominous impending, very artfully managed, a gathering sense that something unendurable is about to occur. That Frayn should nevertheless feel free to close with this bromic observation, this anticlimactic, New Yorkerstory style "and then everything was the same again, even though it could never be the same again" goes beyond disappointing. It constitutes an act of irresponsibility to his materials and to all the excellence that has gone before. And not just because it doesn't, as you put it, make us sit up and say, "Holy fuckin' bejaysus!" (Which I happen to say all the time, by the way; when my coffee's too hot, for example, or when my favorite TV show has been pre-empted by a presidential address.) Not because of that, but because the big scenes we are implicitly promised never appear.

But you and I do seem to be in general agreement about the book's merits. And this go-round, I want to pick up on one element we both especially admire, the folie a deux of those two social outcasts, Keith and Stephen. Frayn does something very subtle with this relationship and manages it with incomparable finesse. Although Stephen does not really fit the mold of classic unreliable narrator—and I mean the Stephen who is our contemporary, looking back on the book's events, not the 12-year-old Stephen whose extremely unreliable consciousness the older Stephen is attempting to recapture—he does have a few blind spots, characteristic and consistent, that permit readers to recognize things he never will. The most significant and the most telling is this: Although Stephen is so in thrall to Keith, and so much a victim of the social system that governs their relations that he can't recognize it and would never be able to act upon it, he is, at every stage, shrewder and more sophisticated than his domineering chum. It's no accident that everyone else in the novel assumes Stephen is the ringleader of the games the two boys play, even though such an idea is incomprehensible to Stephen himself.

He knows Keith can't spell, but assures himself there must be special rules that make the other's misspellings correct. He knows deep down that Keith's desperate imaginings aren't really real even while trying to persuade himself that he believes them, and even while trying—knowing in advance that Keith will of course dismiss these attempts—to justify them with further imaginings of his own. And he knows that Barbara Berrill (who I believe is 13, Chris, not 12; that one-year difference is huge in terms of what she comes to represent to Stephen) is absolutely right when she announces, in a passage you quoted yesterday, that Keith is horrible, that everyone else hates him, that Stephen's thraldom is uniquely his own. Of course, Stephen also grasps the spite that motivates this statement, but the reason he nevertheless feels it take hold inside him is that he also knows it's true, and knows that on some level he's known it all along.

He even senses the sexual undertones present in Keith's accusations against his mother, although he doesn't begin to understand fully what those undertones represent. "Something about bosoms" is the way he might put it. But he's nevertheless on to something crucial. Whereas Keith's cluelessness is almost infantile.

Thinking further about the book, as we've both had to do over the last couple of days, I have a growing sense that a very fine novel is partially undermined by an element that, taken in isolation, is executed in masterly fashion, and that yesterday I singled out for praise: its suspense. As a quiet, rather self-contained quasi-pastoral novel about friendship, puberty, and the ways friendship can be disrupted and scrambled by puberty, this book works, it resonates. That the disturbing element, the pebble in the stream, should be a parent's wayward sexual entanglement, seems entirely fitting as well. But the scale of anxiety Frayn deploys feels wildly out of proportion to the subject, even granting that we're viewing these events through the eyes of a child, and by the end it produces—or produced in me—a feeling of dissatisfaction, of the wrong kind of dislocation.

Still, there is much that is of very high quality in Spies, and I certainly wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. But a reader coming to Frayn for the first time might be better advised to start with Headlong. That's a novel I'd recommend without any caveat at all.

As always, it's been a great and provocative pleasure to talk books with you.
Erik