Of Death And Families In This New World

The 2002 National Book Awards Nominees

Three Junes, by Julia Glass
Gorgeous Lies, by Martha McPhee
The Heaven of Mercury, by Brad Watson
You Are Not A Stranger Here, by Adam Haslett
Big If, by Mark Costello

And then the buildings fell. And everything changed. Or nothing changed. Or perhaps it's just that we - the we who write things or the "we" who are influential enough in the publishing industry to choose the selections for the National Book Awards in any given year - have grown old enough, and watched enough of our friends or parents die, or have passed through the crucible of AIDS to the relative safety of the Cocktail, that death has become our dream and constant companion. And family our natural refuge. At least that's what this year's National Book Award nominees - and the choice of Julia Glass's Three Junes as the winner - seem to suggest about the state of our novels in the first year after 9/11, the first real year, one supposes, of the 21st century.

It is tempting, and not entirely misleading, to view this year's selections through that prism. Death abounds in these novels. An elderly Scot walks through the wreckage of Lockerbie, a young woman accompanies her insurance adjuster father to scenes of disaster-- fires, train wrecks -- and grows up to be a Secret Service Agent, charged with keeping an unnamed Vice-Presidential candidate safe from harm. Two characters die from cancer, leaving their children scattered across the globe and struggling to maintain some contact between their pasts and uncertain futures. A good southern man with relatively "enlightened" views on race is poisoned, specifically by his black maid, and more generally by the seeping rot of Southern racism in the 1950's. A religious undertaker brings a girl back to life by a sacred act of necrophilia. While in Adam Haslett's stories, fathers and sons struggle over and over with the handing down of bipolar disorder like some fierce, and somehow particularly American birthright. And the people who die, or who live in the hell of mental illness, do not die at all in these books, but live on as ghosts, as dreams, as memories, as drugged and emptied souls for whom the highs of mania remain the deepest and most bright of dark temptations.

These are on the whole rich books that, taken together, form a running meditation on death and resurrection They are, therefore, unusually and oddly Christian in worldview (and in a year when Phillip Roth , that most quintessentially Jewish of writers, was honored by the Committee with a lifetime achievement award.) But that too is American in the extreme, and very much a post 9/11 phenomenon. We live on resurrection fantasies in this country. We don't believe in the finality of death. We are already planning the rebirth of the fallen buildings. And Jesus on the Cross has never been an end for us, so much as a vehicle for dreams that led us across oceans to New England and deserts to Utah, and to a thousand other places, where we brought, paradoxically, such glorious dreams and so very much death. So here then, some musings on this year's nominees, and presumptively, some of the better pieces of fiction published by American writers this past year:

Gorgeous Lies, by Martha McPhee.

For my money, the best of the nominees, precisely because it is so finely grounded in the space between American experience and religion. The story is of Anton Furey, former Jesuit seminarian (kicked out because of a homosexual friendship that ended with the suicide of his lover), a brilliant charismatic, sexually profligate and undisciplined man, who grows up in Texas, marries a wealthy oil heiress, divorces her, marries a woman of more limited imagination and eminent practicality, who fathers two children with his first wife, another son with an Italian maid, who inherits three daughters from his second wife and fathers a last child, named Alice for his first love, who delivers him at the end of his life with an overdose of morphine. He is a Catholic, a devotee of Teilhard de Chardin, for whom he names the ramshackle estate in western New Jersey where he lives with his huge, amorphous family, his Brady Bunch, as viewed through Salinger and the peculiar enthusiasms of the sixties and seventies. His children, and the children of his wife, a precocious brood, a welter of competing emotions, over all of whom he presides, father, husband, lover, teacher, philanderer, dreamer, supposed writer of a book on human sexuality which never progresses beyond note cards and collages and dope-fueled musings, and yet, for each of his children, he is and remains, even cancer-ridden and dying in the middle passages of the book, a central spiritual presence. Each child is pictured, during and after Anton's life, asking the single question that we all, at some level, ask of our lovers, our parents, our god: does he love me? Does he love me? Does he love me?

Martha McPhee is a gorgeous writer. She crafts sinuous paragraphs that weave effortlessly between past, present and future, and that range from East Texas, through New Jersey to an India that is both real and an imagined place of safety and escape and otherness for Alice, the daughter of his second marriage, the glue that holds Anton's disparate family together. In the end, she feeds him morphine and runs away to an encounter with an off-duty policeman in a sleazy bar outside Newark Airport, who hears her confession and absolves her; and the story ends, with Anton's wife remarried, his book never written, his children scattered but not lost and Alice, a mother now, in a future Anton couldn't have dreamed but invented for her anyways inside his wayward heart. She lies, his daughter, atop his unmarked grave, whispering to the earth that holds his ashes, breathing and dreaming and remembering and so keeping him alive, knowing in her heart the answer to the question. "Yes," her father tells her from the grave. "I love you, babe." And so finds immortality.

The Heaven of Mercury By Brad Watson

This novel too functions as a kind of riff on an American pop theme. If Gorgeous Lies has its roots in the Brady Bunch, then this book works off the vision of Andy Griffith's Mayberry: Mercury, a small southern town that exists only in our collective imagination, a place hued in black and white, where magnolia blossoms in the summer heat and everybody knows everybody else's business. Or thinks they do. The story concerns one Finus Bates, a newspaperman and radio talk show host in his later days, who lives eighty some years in the town, most of them in love with another man's wife, and who gradually evolves into the dreamy chronicler of his time and place. His beloved is Birdie Wells, whom he glimpses naked in the woods when she is fifteen years old, and who marries a man named Earl Urquhart, who loves her and cheats on her, and lives with a darkness and violence inherited from his father and all the Urquharts who ever hurt another man or mistreated a black man or woman. Earl hires a black maid for Birdie, and his father brings home an electric dummy of a black man, and they quarrel and his father sells it; and then a black man appears from nowhere to live with Creasie the maid and stays until Earl recovers the electric dummy and then the man disappears, leaving only a gold tooth behind on the kitchen table. And Creasie, convinced that her ghostly lover and the electric mannequin are one and the same soul, and who once was sexually assaulted by Earl's hard father, goes and gets a potion form her aunt in the ravine section of town where the colored folk live, and feeds it to Earl in his morning coffee and so makes Birdie a widow for more than forty years. There are other stories: an undertaker who finds religion in one act of necrophilia and who later marries a woman with a gift of taking herself to the point of death, and who finally one night slips away from him on the bathroom floor, as surely and mysteriously as his first lover rose up from the embalming table thirty years before and walked away into the humid dark wrapped in a sheet.

In this book, life and death are malleable and the line between them thin. There is a beautiful perception of Finus at almost ninety walking down the street, and seeing the long dead as luminous shadows at the edge of his vision. When Earl dies, he lies in the clay beside a woodpile, reaching for an axe and dreaming of the day his father killed his uncle in a knife fight. When Birdie dies, called by a nightingale, her ghost walks through a meadow, meets her grandfather, talks to Earl about his pain in their marriage, and slowly becomes a dream. And Finus too lies down at the end of the novel, deciding to slide through the slant of light that separates life from death. "Disappointments," Finus writes in the obituary of his own estranged wife, "flock to us like crows, and mock us from their perches on buildings or the flimsy swaying tips of pines, or flying over, a glimpse of black wing, and parted beak, or in dreams, caustic, ephemeral." Like life. Like death.

You Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett's stories are the product of prodigious talent. The cover photograph is of people descending a circular staircase: a downward spiral, and also a helix, like DNA. A perfect metaphor for the stories inside. In the first story, called Notes to My Biographer, an old man trapped in a familiar burst of mania, travels across the country to find the son who had been his closest friend and co-conspirator as a child and who, for his own unspoken reasons, allows the old man to go to dinner with him and follows him to a penthouse hotel room that neither one of them can afford. The young man breaks down, crying, and confesses to his father that he has the same disease, that he is required to medicate himself daily just to stay functional. In his crying he reveals how much he needs the understanding of his father; and yet his father, sick himself, is unable to reach far enough outside himself to give that understanding or that needed love. The boy falls asleep. The father strokes his head, then runs away, descending in one of those glass walled exterior elevators that rise up the outsides of American hotels. "I have always," he thinks as he descends, "found the profusion of lights in American cities a cause for optimism, a sign of undiminished credulity, which bears us along."

There are other strong stories in this collection. A young doctor confronts the horror of a woman's grief for two of her sons, one dead, one alive. A boy whose father has abandoned his family inviting homosexually charged beatings from a friend. And one curious story, which feels like the first story in embryo, about a boy who inherits the gift of foreseeing death from his father, who in turn denies the existence of the gift until it works to steal the boy's older brother and the father's first son.

Haslett's stories range from England to America, but all concern the ties, including those of mental illness, that bind families into a kind of dangerous safety. You are not a stranger here, the stories say, not in your family, where your pain is familiar and possibly given to you by those who love you most, and where love can't save you, but an endless credulity can bear you along.

Big If by Mark Costello

Mark Costello's Big If has been praised as echoing the work of Don DeLillo and, it shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of DeLillo's better work. In this novel, Vi Asplund and her brother Jens grow up in the shadow of a father who is an insurance adjuster and atheist. His small town is filled with dollar bills on which he has crossed out the words In God We Trust before putting them back into circulation. He takes his children on late night rides to the scenes of disasters, where, the Adjuster, he is treated with a respect reserved for the Angel of Death. He totes and figures, reducing death and destruction to the manageable algorithm of insurance values, figuring late into the night from a valuation book that he carries around like a secular Kabbalah. This is disaster in the fifties: something to be reckoned over, assigned a value and then placed in the background. A strategy which works for a society, perhaps, but makes Walter Asplund lose any belief in God, and undertake his odd and silent campaign to remind his neighbors that disaster lurks around every corner and there is no god to save you.

In adulthood, Vi Asplund joins the Secret Service and finds herself on body watch for a Vice Presidential candidate. Like her father, she finds herself in the disaster limitation business, and the center of the book is filled with stunning riffs about the arcana of bodily protection from assassination: how each agent creates a moving, circular zone of control, with all the zones converging to create a dome of safety around the Protected - a dome which works in the climactic scene of the novel, when the Vice President is successfully defended from an attack by a man whose head is blown off by a sniper and who leaves an explanatory note of startling, but predictable incoherence. Her brother meanwhile, lands a job writing computer code for an interactive game called Big If, which consists largely of creating new monsters for children and games-playing adults to confront in a landscape built from mathematics. It is the mathematics that attracts him, the beauty of the millions of lines of code required to create his latest project: the creation of a teenaged monster, acned and gigantic, the image, Jens supposes, of his own audience, the kids who play Big If, writ large. So Jens creates false monsters in the image of the kids who play them, while Vi Protects and watches a man's head blow apart in front of her, and the reader is left wondering if the Big If that traces itself from Walter's meticulous crossing out of the word God on Eisenhower era currency to the present isn't Yeats' own late musing "What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" For the Asplunds, father and children, the beast is perhaps Jens' creation, a mindless thing, shaped like a human, slouching over an imaginary landscape, and millions of children hunched in front of computer screens, bent on virtual destruction. And no God to save us. No God in whom to trust.

Like DeLillo, Costello gives us a well imagined landscape, paranoid and rich in American detail. At the same time, his characters never fully come alive for this reader (a complaint I often have with DeLillo) and so the book is, in one sense, a tough read because of the narrative distance between the author and his creations. It is likely, of course, that this is a chosen tactic, that Costello is moving his characters about like characters in Jens' game. The book ends in mid stream, with Vi being asked to turn around, just after the assassination attempt and the reader is left wondering whether the invitation is to turn back and look and try to understand the arc of the novel, the long sweep of disaster that has been America over the last half of the twentieth century. Or that maybe she is simply being asked to reboot and start the whole ugly game all over again. It is a powerful, ambiguous image to end on. My personal favorite from all of these books.

Three Junes by Julia Glass

It won. It is the best written of the nominees, from a pure sentence structure point of view. Ms. Glass has a quiet immersive style that allows her to plumb some remarkable emotional depths in a very muted prose, appropriate for the emotionally reticent Scottish family around whom her story revolves. The book works less well for me as a novel, though, than as a triptych: three loosely related stories that feature overlapping characters, seen from varying perspectives, like three symbol-laden pictures from the life of Christ in a medieval church. Her church is very modern though. The family's home is not far from Lockerbie, and early in the first story, the father walks through the crash site and picks up a souvenir, a tube of lipstick, which he caries with himself as a secret memento mori until the day he dies. A central character, Fenno, is a gay man, living in New York just after the peak years of the AIDS epidemic. He loses a mother to cancer, a lover to the inevitable. Glass captures particularly well the ephemeral nature of New York gay life in the nineties, full of near and approximate families based on love and sex and too many shared experiences of death. This world -- Fenno's world -- is the central image of the triptych, bookended by two ambiguous portraits of more familial loves.

In the opening section, Fenno's father Paul, (the man who picks up the lipstick) is on a post-bereavement trip to Greece. In the unfamiliar sunshine, he finds himself reflecting on his long marriage to a strong, flinty woman whose passion for her collies outpaced, at times, her love for him. There is a powerful image where he joins her after a whelping, stealing up on her as she stands at the sink to slide his arms around her. He believes she is washing her hands of blood from the whelping; in fact she is drowning two malformed puppies. Later, there is a bedroom conversation between Paul and Maureen in which Paul's willful obtuseness over the fact the Fenno doesn't "fancy women" and Maureen's clear-eyed understanding of that fact, also limns the entire nature and truth of Maureen's affair with a neighboring collie breeder, who, like Fenno's later lover, dies too young. In Greece, in mourning, Paul conducts an ineffectual flirtation with a young woman, Fern, who ends up sleeping with the tour guide.

In the last section, Fern, now married, widowed and accidentally pregnant, spends a weekend at a gathering in the Hamptons where Fenno and one of his brothers appear. She rides back to New York City with them, and the book closes with her calling her lover, the father of her unborn child, on a cell phone, running in her heart to embrace him as she and Fenno emerge from a dark tunnel into the golden sunlit canyons of New York (where the buildings will someday fall). They look at each other, and there is a moment of understanding between them, a shared knowledge "like the setting of an anchor on a harbor floor, and she reads on his face what she imagines to be the same recognition and pleasure she feels: Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be."

Perhaps that is the proper coda for this book, for these books, for this strange, unsettling time of ours. If only, these books and writers seem to be saying, if only we can find our anchor, then the deaths and disasters that are mounting up on us like age may be endured, understood, weathered, and we may be, like the characters in Haslett's stories, borne along, to family (however flawed) and however ephemeral, by love.

§ § §

Walter Maroney is a lawyer who lives in New Hampshire. He reads constantly, writes when he is able to, and is currently at work on a novel tentatively titled, "The Survival of the Religious Impulse After the Failure of Apocalyptic Prophecy." He understands full well that the book will never see print under that title. Walter is married to a wonderful woman named Karen and their two sons, Eli and Zeke, are the holiest things he's ever done.

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