Debra–
Here we are, two professional writers describing our admiration for an author who refuses to dumb himself down, and yet you tweak me for alluding to Jane Austen? What’s that about? That’s my first question. My second is: Did you really give briefings about the B-1 bomber? Wow. That’s so cool.
I want to start today with My Pafology, Erasure’s novel-within-a-novel. My response to it, like yours, was a lot more complex than Everett may have wanted. It isn’t merely the most consistently funny thing in the book; it’s also, as you suggest, a better piece of writing than it’s intended to be. For all its extravagant, intentional badness and excess, it has an energy and freedom and swagger the surrounding parts often lack. As if, because Everett is parodying something he despises, he no longer feels constrained by notions of literary respectability and can just go ahead and write. It’s liberating. And as a result, his novel is skewed in interesting and unexpected ways. Imagine how puzzling Der Meistersinger would be if Beckmesser’s “Preislied” contained the most beautiful music in the opera. That gives some idea of the effect this novel has on the reader.
Now, this may have been a miscalculation on the author’s part, but it’s an exciting miscalculation, one that vivifies the novel, gives it some unexpected creative tension.
And much of My Pafology is very good indeed; as parody, of course, but also with its own idiosyncratic merit. The title alone is a richly layered joke. The first layer, of course, is the crude, Amos ‘n’ Andy-like substitution of an “f” for a “th.” But whereas that joke might be crude when spoken, it’s a different sort of joke in print, with a different sort of point. Anyone who knows the word “pathology” at all knows it isn’t spelled like that. And it’s not, in any case, a word that would be in Van “Go” Jenkins’ vocabulary. And it certainly wouldn’t be the way he would characterize his own life; it’s the way a bourgeois outside observer would characterize his life. The joke isn’t about mispronunciation, in other words, it’s about slumming. That’s a hell of a lot of resonance to get into two words.
This same inside-outside double vision informs much of the mock novel’s humor. Take the following exchange:
“Yo mama look like J. Edgar Hoover,” Yellow say.”What he look like?” I ax.”Yo mama,” Yellow say.”Fuck you,” I say.”Fuck you,” Yellow say.”Fuck you,” I say.”Fuck you,” Yellow say.”Fuck you,” I say.”Fuck you,” Yellow say.”Fuck you,” I say.”Fuck you,” Yellow say.”Fuck you,” I say.”Fuck you,” Yellow say.”Fuck you,” I say.”Fuck you,” Yellow say.”Fuck you,” I say.”Fuck you,” Yellow say.”Fuck you,” I say.”Fuck you,” Yellow say.
The meticulous repetition of this idiocy–as if the exact number of “Fuck yous” matters–made me laugh out loud. As did Van’s fantasy about the names of all the children he intends to father: “Avaricia, Baniqua, Clitora, Dashone, Equisha, Fantasy, Galinique, Hobitcha, I’youme, Jamika, Klauss, Latishanique, Mystery, Niggerina, Oprah, Pastischa, Quiquisha, R’nee’nee, Suckina, Titfunny, Uniqua, Vaselino, Wuzziness, Yolandinique, and Zookie.” I actually laughed out loud again as I typed them just now … the names themselves are a series of small hilarious explosions, the fact that Van bothers to come up with them in alphabetical order is a bizarre and inspired notion, and the whole exercise gives his character, devised largely as a blank collection of gangsta attributes, a sudden wistful specificity.
If only the rest of the book were so good. But I had problems with it on the level of the sentence, the level of the scene, and the grand level of narrative strategy.
The level of the sentence: Everett’s narrator is meant to be a first-rate literary scholar; the entire mechanism of the novel depends upon our accepting that premise. And yet his prose is self-sabotaging. It’s bedeviled by an intermittent klutziness that’s intrinsically inelegant and positively undermining in context:
“She yelled at the driver in front of us who had stopped in a manner to her disliking.” Can anyone devise a worse way to construct this sentence?
“Linda was already in the bar when I arrived. She wrapped me up in a hug and I remembered how much like a bicycle she had felt in bed.” Huh?
“My sister had taken my compliment about her automobile as an offense.” Well, maybe she had taken offense at his compliment, or maybe she’d taken his compliment as an insult, but I doubt she had taken his compliment as an offense.
“For all the surface concern with the spatial and otherwise dislocation of Van Go, there was nothing in the writing that self-consciously threw it back at me.” Somebody help me out here.
The level of the scene: Everett has created a potentially interesting nexus of relationships for his narrator, but the moments of high drama, the moments that ultimately justify the invention of these relationships, are handled lazily, even–absurd as this sounds when applied to a writer with 13 books to his credit–amateurishly. I’ll take as emblematic a single scene, one you also mention in your post today, the scene in which Monk’s romantic relationship with Marilyn ends. What destroys the affair is his appalled reaction when she casually mentions she enjoyed reading We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. This could have been an intensely convincing scene if Everett had given it sufficient room to play out and calibrated its progress more artfully; the way something relatively trivial–someone’s unthinking reaction to a minor work of fiction–can begin to expand in meaning to suggest to someone else every conceivable personal incompatibility, every imminent mutual incomprehension; it’s an idea that contains the potential for extraordinary drama. But as written, quickly and cursorily, it’s made to seem, rather, like nothing more than literary snobbishness on Monk’s part. And this sort of … I’m almost tempted to call it authorial abdication, happens far too often. Perhaps because My Pafology is what really engages Everett’s creative energy?
The level of the narrative: Essentially, Everett has constructed a craftsmanlike first act, one that efficiently does everything a first act is meant to do, but thereafter he forgoes structure altogether. And it’s a shame, because he’s built a first act sturdy enough to support an impressive edifice. All the interesting developments he bothers to include–My Pafology’s success, the author’s imposture as an ex-con, his serving on a jury to determine the year’s best fiction, his appearance on Kenya Dunston’s (for which read Oprah’s) show–all happen too late, don’t build to anything beyond themselves, and more or less dribble away. Instead, for far too much of the novel’s middle, we are given uninteresting (and sometimes unintelligible) speculation about identity, consciousness, and literary theory. It’s a waste of time, of space, and, most of all, of story-telling potential.
So … here’s my final question for you, Debra. If you and I were Ebert and That Other Guy, should we give Erasure a thumbs up or a thumbs down? What do you think? I say thumbs up, because the book raises important issues usually ignored, and in the process reveals a provocative and original talent at work. But I say it reluctantly, and with misgivings, because this is a book that could–that should–be much better than it is.
Cheers,
Erik
