And the freshness of the air, the near-silence, the amendment of suburban life, the immediacy (the nerves and senses were without porches) so set one’s self up in one’s heaviness and near-motionlessness of grief that, without warning, one’s physical self and temper felt the combat between grief and being suitable for entering the morning as irreconcilable. One grieved or lived. Going into the basement, getting one’s bike … do you know what it is to CHEAT on grief? To double-cross the dead? To refuse old love? The great inner hounds are baying with moodedness. All sorts of inner selfhoods are clutching at stillness. Parts of me are sitting on cushions, are motionless with grief … One moves in heavy and resistant air, in one’s mood, one’s own emanation. One can’t escape and move in ordinary glare-torn, dew-wet air, half grief-stricken. I mean the grief takes its places among the committees of the self, the congress of voting and squabbling selves, dealing and bullying, vetoing, bribing … And it tries to regain the tyranny it lost, to reestablish the monarchy of death (and whatnot) among the committees. And some nodule (or seed or pit) of self-and-will which is allied to light -- in spirit and in actual composition -- the flying knot of identity-in-the-motions, one is now this particle, now this wave -- is presidential; I live, heavily, reluctantly, with a stone in my belly and a certain overwhelming and crippling shadow in my spirit, a lament, and a huge, huge private force of regret, but one isn’t chained, overwhelmed, or entirely crippled. One limpingly flies along. One does not grieve openly for oneself -- parentless twice now, with affections frayed, toyed with, born and torn. I slowly force the observatory to observe the real moment, the present moment with its absence in it; but I am not absent from it. And the silent birds within, the boys, the children, child-selves and school-selves, sport-selves and the like, look, they look and see the alley, the tar-paved aisle that goes past the garages and ashpits -- and the glare, black-and-white, and made of revolving and perceptibly demarcated, powdery rays. The fire of the glare and the unfire of the shadows pick out bits of vines, of flowering shrubs, to make black-and-white flags under a wide gray sky without glare in it; the glare doesn’t penetrate it; it is a glareless roof for the revolving spikes and rods which change as the earth tilts -- which turn into a flood of whitish light beginning to be tinted palely as normal light is, which fatten and revolve and thicken and spread into a flood in the more and more lit alley, the walls and trees and ashpits, which are ignited with a glare and shadow in noiseless confrontation with light--
That’s a fairly typical paragraph, the emdash at the end leading into a subordinate paragraph before returning in the following paragraph to complete that thought. This appears on pages 36-37 of this 835-page “novel,” and it’s recorded here because it was the one that prompted me to scribble in the margin.
Dear god. Is it going to be 800 pages of this? Does he think he’s Proust?
I have this raw theory, quite stupid I know; but everything is a sort of flowering and receding whirlwind of nervous time at the edge of a future; everything, including me, a sort of clumsy calculating machine exploring the nature of event, of time, and of time unoccurred-as-yet, of the future.
Short answer: yes.
A Sort of Clumsy Calculating Machine Exploring
This is not a novel. I think that’s what turns me off the most. One of the “chapters” is about the narrator’s sister, Nonie. It’s 57 pages long and it is all over the map.
Am I saying, then, that Nonie was complex enough to be known differently as a fact or facet of nature and not simply an accident of my adoption -- a family accident -- an aberration?
Yes.
But then, in the flickering eyeliddedness of thought -- of private judgment -- the answer is no.
I start in innocence, and shallowly … I have been drawn in to saying these things … The shadows deepen around me in this garden … No: not quite, not quite that. In the shadowy afternoon, one says only that Nonie was not complex enough in regard to me: she was bad to me too often …
But then I am swept along in the current of associations, the slant-footed abruptness of simultaneities, or seeming simultaneities in the strange motions of the moments where I am drenched with the conviction that there is no point in lying about what people are … Why make yet more mysteries and lay up a store of future bad actions when there are real mysteries enough whatever we do? Without the false ones of sentimental maundering about what people are and what innocence is (a device, a technique, not an actuality except as a comparative matter)? Why not be sensible about these matters?
Guilt is not simple … Blame, therefore, ought never to be simple … Stories are not simple at all if they contain any truth in them … any truth in them whatsoever …
Fifty-seven pages of this. Nonie is this. Nonie is not this. Nonie is that. Nonie is not that. Dear god, I felt like screaming. Get to some kind of point already!
But getting to a point is not the point. Wikipedia tells me that Brodkey is a stylistic writer, known for his attempts to render sensation into language, and in this, his first “novel,” he seems far more interested in exploring than in telling a story. He is either simply “working it out” on the page -- in which case there is nothing here worth noting -- or, more generously, he might be celebrating the “working it out” as the moral foundation of fiction -- in which case there may be something worth noting, but not anything that resembles a novel. And, having suffered through all 835 pages, I can tell you which side of that argument I’d put my chips on.
Sex and Masturbation
Brodkey writes about sex. A lot.
It was both lighter and heavier than I had, when young, expected fucking to be. The second time is not passion, or is a different sort of passion. The terror of caring, was of caring too much and going hurtling along, a noble beast, or an ignoble beast caring too much -- for sex, for pleasure, for myself, for her. The wheels of the moments might then stick and one would go headlong into some then-to-be-obsessed-over-forever moment of loss of this rough forgiveness of this past. The fuck was like a board game with different things happening every moment, but the odds had been prepared, had been tampered with. And it was like a board game in that we were not exploring -- and hurtling -- along, with willful blindness and in an agony that it was real. It was like a game in the various ways it was not happening even while it was happening -- emotionally as well as in the way it touched on sexual depths and offered promise of release, of rising to the surface after the weight of the water and the breathlessness. In the act, you’re sort of painting a portrait of yourself, and of her, slapping paint on genital effigies -- no: that metaphor is impossible, since the genital is the brush. The hell with it. It is happening and it doesn’t mean all that much no matter what depths it reaches -- it is special, it is self-conscious and passionate, some, one is oneself, and one is something one has created. It is folly and swindling play and it is as serious as anything even if you think of it as merely biologically general. Some of it, much of it, has a thing, a quality of not meaning anything -- are you brave enough for that? It doesn’t mean there is no meaning anywhere or even that this is mostly no meaning. It means nothing even if you name it meaninglessness; and meaning lurks and recurs even if you say it doesn’t. Craven dust fucks craven dust. But then in the event’s happening comes a flash of its meaning something. Sincerity is coming round again. We aren’t in a story of no meaning. Yes we are. We are too chic to be sincere. But here is the blushing and ecstatic fool, physical and without time or knowledge for thought, the generous-souled harmdoer, the mean-eyed harmdoer. Who knows what all the shit that is in play here is? Rattle, buck, quiver, seesaw, subside -- and variation. What would we do if all this meant something truly? If the realities of being together overwhelm us? Ora, stage-managing, directing, creating us, actress-fucker, playwright-fuckee, said to me -- tacitly, silently -- that I was too fastidious … too careful … Ham it up … Be cruder, crueler, madder -- be without calculation … Don’t keep accounts … Don’t keep track of things so that you can give an account to yourself later … Do you remember a kind of ecstatic beginner’s rhapsodic brutality of romance, changeable, overexcited, unreliable, human? After childhood? In my version of it -- in my dressing myself in it (as in a red union suit) -- what happened, what she spied on, was that I jerked my hips in an ugly rhythm of assertion and of brute, sly-nostrilled pride. The Minotaur-beast is a runaway. The minus tower in her. Me. Dis. Dis dick … disdain … Hey, dis, dese … dem … Me. My dick and my gruntings ripsaw away. In the webbings of muscle of the not-a-goddess, the not-much-of-a-girl: in the beautiful mess -- her term for herself. Except that her will was like the prow of a liner with a huge curving wake of the possibilities of fullness -- in the webbings of muscle. That she loosened. And a slap -- in the slapstick of the moment -- or a threat would tighten her? Is this a peculiar curvature of love? Her reality extended mine -- my feelings in my back and in the back of my shoulders -- can you call those feelings? -- the small of my back, then my butt (as it was then), and the abdomen and thighs, upper and lower, and in my mind and in my eyes and in my feet, which were braced -- my reality continued on in a kind of hammock of responsive, responsively further extents of me and my body, mirrors and contained in her, permitted and impregnated by her with life, by her body and mind, her wriggling feet, her butt, her cleverness. I’m holding her. Oh, what a sea of effects. Of causes. Of things … Oh, what a rapidly flowing river. Of moments … I was violently shocked by the ugliness and her lack of simplicity, the lack of demure sweetness and of devotion -- by her not being in a state of grace -- and I was at home: shocked: scandalized: continuous in a great span of seconds.
Are you exhausted reading that? I was. And that’s one page out of 835. Brodkey is literally masturbating on the page -- here, perhaps, intellectually; but later, fifteen pages later, still in the same “scene,” somewhat pruriently.
“Christ,” I mutter, and pat and lightly slap her haunches until she tentatively, tremblingly tightens -- coerced by curiosity and good sportsmanship as much as by sexual impulse, if you ask me -- and, see, this within the tight cuntal clasp -- and clapping (sexual, and horrible, and final) of her historical abandonment to the truths of what it mean to satisfy the wills and longings of able and wellborn and monied men and boys and now me, and who knows what others as well -- and within the liquidy, deathly sticky sexual rhythms (such as they were) of her flesh and her pleasure (such as it was) is the incalculably cruel thing of the extraordinary trespass in her of my shareable and slightly far-off (in my head, in my balls, in the small of my back) pleasures, taken from her and burning or reflectant (like Christmas tress ornaments in front of a fire) in relation to the extraordinary and abominable pelvic lovelinesses of her, of us, of love, of lovemaking, pelvic loneliness still present -- still we are of different construction, she and I -- the whole thing abominable with sexual smells and secrecy and a sense of maybe having gone too far even if we did stop short and of youth and too much looseness in her and too much playing around in me and a wild, and wildly racking oiliness and the jerk of far-away (loosened) inward motions, the fisherwoman’s jerking net, in which my fatherliness is trapped, and the surface motions -- ah, what a joke: the pelvic loveliness, pelvic loneliness, the not inconsidarable loveliness of the marvelous head and marvelous hands and wonderful shoulders and marvelous voice and wonderful mind and too big but yet admirable butt and the lovely, lovely, miraculous ladyish musculature and the marvelous inventiness toward daily life -- all of it -- rolling downhill -- while I ascend toward orgasm again.
There is just so much. What’s important? What isn’t? I can’t tell. Should I be dogearing every single page? Or throwing the whole volume into the trash? It has to be one or the other, right?
I’m Jewish
And finally, for me at least, this.
“You think that’s so impossible? Who knows. They were a pair of cold fish. They carried on -- Wiley don’t ask me questions -- I can’t talk and answer questions … I’m Jewish …”
There is a lot of Jewishness in this novel -- with Brodkey often using it, as he does above, as I kind of code language. As something that appears to explain but in fact, at least to me, explains nothing.
I felt heroic -- in a way -- and odd-footed, an insect or a cripple -- I had the feeling she felt as something flying around oddly like light inside her skull and absolutely (and Jewishly and mirroring) known by her -- and pathetically in regard to -- what?
Jewishly?
The imagery of her touching me through the prick, the prick of the Jew, is scary, the van boy who thinks he is so smart …
The prick of a the Jew? Evidently there is a Jewish way of fucking. But it’s not just Jewish that’s used this way.
Taut and faintly hulking shoulders and tautly backwards-curved spine -- and she bore me along and she bore with me with extraordinary Gentile cruelty-companionship: she-loved-a-fool.
You know, companionship, in that unique and cruelly Gentile kind of way.
Johnno held his body very stiffly -- with a Catholic heaven-and-hell elegance -- not of money, but artful in a private way.
Jew. Gentile. Catholic. They are all used as if they were adjectives whose meaning we all understand. Harold. Your book is cryptic enough. Maybe next time go for the universal?
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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