Summer Reading: Last Flash: Post-War Shadows

BuschAnd, as August dawned, two novellas and a novel behind me – DeLillo’s Point Omega (post-Iraq), J. L. Carr’s  A Month in the Country (post- WWI), Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector (post-Civil War) – all leaving me wondering if you can have a war story (or a war recovery story) without a love story.  Depends, of course, upon definitions.

Busch’s novel of a brilliant financial manipulator, who was horribly disfigured while conducting his work as a sharpshooter during the hostilities, involves a lust story that is also a love story and a story of remarkable betrayal.  William Bartholomew, his face so damaged that he must wear a mask and eat behind a veil, lives amid the squalor of New York City’s infamous Five Points, but he moves among the great and powerful and patronizes an African American prostitute who has pity on him, but for ulterior motives, and not the noble ones she eventually admits to.

This plot line gains momentum and gravity as it braids with Billy’s newfound friend, a customs inspector referred to as M but whose references to the books he has written (including some about exotic islands and one about a great white whale) makes him anything but anonymous.  The book gains even greater heft through Billy’s memories of the war, not only the meticulous and expert performance of his own specialty, but also the results of massacres and atrocities perpetrated by both sides.

The Night Inspector is an exciting and horrifying book, spun in Billy Bartholomew’s voice, steeped in historical details and atmosphere, often (though not always) persuasive in its diction and metaphors, though sometimes the word play is intrusive, and I’ll admit that I often winced at the gore, and I don’t think I’m quick to wince.  Busch seems to have been especially fascinated with the sounds and smells of exploded and decaying human flesh, and I think he’s out-McCarthyed Cormac at times with both the sexuality and violence of the tale.  And yet, it’s hard to deny the hard-core reality of the wrenching scenes, even if they throw the tone of the novel off at times with their Bosch-like quality.

This is the story of the waterfront community exposed in the BBC America’s gritty drama “Copper” (which owes much to “Deadwood,” “Hell on Wheels,” “Justified”).  Busch weaves together the actual and the possible so skillfully that he can often work in the improbable with impunity.  It’s a story of urban America still steeped in the habits of war, all the characters wounded, nearly all both vulnerable and culpable.  And there are celebrity cameos – Twain, Dickens, Winslow Homer – and lots of discussion of morality and aesthetics, all rendered in the almost-convincing monologue of the protagonist.

Much as I appreciated (“enjoyed” would seem too casual here) the story of post-war NYC and the backstories of life at the front and in the heat of the hunt, I closed the book thinking that Billy and M so overwhelm the other characters that the novel’s balance is problematic at best.  The horrors of the on-going mystery’s conclusion and solution seem hastily contrived, impatiently concluded, but I find the book as fictional testimony of the war and its casualties moving and transformative.  It’s the kind of book which, warts and all, is likely to secure its own place in the pantheon of novels about the American Civil War, and the literal and metaphoric lessons concerning wounds to identity and integrity make it a worth the time and discomfort.

*
omegaIt’s hard to say much definitive about DeLillo’s enigmatic Point Omega, which takes cryptic turns, leaves its “plot mystery” (as opposed to the moral mysteries) unsolved and hinges heavily on the reader’s understanding of the frame device, which I admit to not fully understanding.  But it’s an afternoon’s worth of work that is also pleasure and left me with some conundrums that have refused to release me, questions concerning language and action, intellect and emotion, violence and form.  That frame?  Various characters visit a conceptual art piece in which, within a small room, the entirety of Hitchcock’s Psycho is projected on a wall, slowed down until the film takes 24 hours to reel out.  Various characters observe scenes, find surprising details and discrepancies, ruminate and are awakened and struggle with the shift in time frame and its attendant discoveries.  There is much gazing among spectators in the room, and gestures of contact are attempted.  Pace and expectation, however, are clearly explored in relation to brutal content.  Incongruities prevail.

Between the two scenes in the Psycho room, the story is simple, but inconclusive, a haunting long/short story of our time.  Filmmaker Jim Finley is the guest in an arid desert retreat of Elster, a shadow intellectual apologist for the Pentagon during the Iraq War, a philosopher brought in to give to the airy nothingness of Bush Gang aggressive policies a palatable intellectual habitation and a name.  De Chardin’s notion of the Omega Point, the extreme of intricacy and intensity, plays an important role as the two men explore war’s rhetoric and silences.

Jim attempts, unsuccessfully, to persuade Elster to speak on film, ex tempore and extensively, against a simple wall, to unfold his current thoughts on his role in the selling of the war.  As Elster resists and the pair bond, DeLillo presents the scenes in spare, hypnotic language, occasionally humorous, almost Beckett-like in the dialogue’s lack of progress.

The plot thickens when Elster’s daughter arrives – sexual tension, family dynamics revealed, regret and affection replacing rationalization but not reticence.  It was a rainy Sunday when I read the book, and the evocation of desert topography and atmosphere was sharp against the downpour.  The story’s puzzles and intimations became personal, and I found myself deeply engaged with the characters (whom some critics found puppet-like in their embodiment of ideas) and less frustrated about the unsolved mystery than challenged by Elster’s responses to the unanswerable.

Point Omega was not exactly entertaining or openly instructive, but it was full of shadows whose sources and movement are poignantly challenging, and its pertinence to the current (and continuing) political, aesthetic and psychological arenas seems undeniable.

Where does the love come in?  Both permeating and obliquely, but that would be telling.

*

month countryAnother rainy Sunday, and in a friend’s guest house I picked up J. L. Carr’s novella A Month in the Country (1980), which begins in a downpour.  The stranger in town/narrator is looking back on a quietly miraculous summer (not just a month) in Oxgodby, where a deceased benefactor has left a small bequest to the Anglican (but once Catholic) church for the uncovering of a painted-over mural in the chancel.  Birkin, this narrator, has recently returned from the trenches of WWI, and his stammer and facial twitches are more evident than the psychological damage he has suffered.

Birkin (Is it only American readers who will swiftly associate him with Lawrence’s Women in Love?) meticulously brushes and dabs, scrapes and dissolves toward the vast and eccentric ecclesiastical scene with its “wintry” Christ who promises justice but not mercy, he slowly assimilates into this variegated northern community.  His principle ally is Moon, another veteran, who is pursuing archeological evidence (primarily a grave) to discover the fate of a long-dead gentleman.  The story is full of suspense, but conjured and resolved through the small gestures of village life (with a touch of Hardy).  The vicar and his wife, the Colonel, the inquisitive Kathy Ellerbeck, festivals, Wesleyans, a drafty manse and secrets – is this beginning to sound Agathan?  It isn’t.  What I’ve omitted is an element of sensual eeriness that – again, very whispery – resembles Fowles’s The Magus.

In the seventies, I was wild for Fowles, and even with all its meandering portentousness, The Magus was the book that most haunted me.  (The film, with Anthony Quinn and Michael Caine, ought to be delicious but isn’t.)  In A Month in the Country (film not bad — Firth, Branaugh, Richardson), the setting is far from the exotic island Phraxos, and the protagonist is no randy Nicholas Urfe, but everything that makes Fowles’ juggernaut flame makes Carr’s novella simmer.

Primarily, the two works present a young man seeking his identity after a trauma, and the war that provides the trauma for Birkin is one of the two great conflicts that permeate The Magus.  In an era of catastrophic shell shock (or PTSD, if you must), such common denominators can emerge as the most important aspects of the story.  In both works, parallel searches for the truth of the present take the principles on symbolic journeys in dreamlike isolation.

What Birkin discovers is not a clear path or a clear past, but perhaps a masterpiece whose fate is yet to be determined.  Just such a minor masterpiece is A Month in the Country, re-released as a New York Times Book Review Classic in 2000 and was a Booker finalist, perhaps for the rain-sodden and soporific charm that made me want to turn from the ending, with Birkin as he “closed the gate and set off across the meadow” but back to the first page with its rural train debarcation and torrential rain.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.