One is not the Loneliest Number

This brilliant Dutch novel explores themes of loneliness and connection

It isn’t easy to write a compelling novel about loneliness, for the simple reason that loneliness is boring. It makes for something of a paradox: the feeling of aloneness, both literal and figurative, counts among love, loss, and taxes as one of those ineluctable human experiences. We need to read about loneliness in order to understand our own; we connect to the disconnected, which hopefully keeps us from jumping off a building when we get dumped, or when a loved one dies. Yet both love and loss involve dramatic action of some sort; aloneness, on the other hand, is generally characterized by stasis.

In “The Twin”, Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker has accomplished the difficult task of rendering the static solitude of his protagonist into something dynamic and readable. In a prose style unhurried but visceral (translated without a false note by David Colmer), he creates and explores a loneliness that any reader would recognize as his own.

The loner in question, Helmer works on his family farm somewhere in the Dutch countryside. Though he lives with his sickly father, whom he loves and hates in equally depthless measure, Helmer suffers from a terrible sense of loneliness, which springs from a wound decades old: the death of his twin brother, Henk, killed in a car accident when the boys were still teenagers. Henk was their father’s favorite, and after he died, Helmer was compelled by guilt into leaving university and returning home to work on the farm.

The novel begins more than thirty years later. Helmer has moved his father into an upstairs bedroom so that they don’t ever have to speak, and a hooded crow has taken up residence in a tree, a sure sign of the infusion of loneliness into every aspect of Helmer’s existence. Here’s Helmer hanging out with his one friend, Ada, who lives next door. As she talks, his gaze wanders towards the window and he ponders his sense of alienation:

It’s a Saturday, the sun is shining and there’s no wind. A clear December morning with everything very bare and sharp. A day to feel homesick. Not for home, because that’s where I am, but for days that were just like this, only long ago. Homesick isn’t the right word, perhaps I should say wistful. Ada wouldn’t understand. Not coming from here, she doesn’t remember days long ago that were just like this, here.

The main action of the novel begins when Riet, the woman responsible for the car crash in which Henk was killed, sends a letter to Helmer. Riet, who was Henk’s girlfriend at the time of his death, initially seems to be seeking out a romantic connection, but eventually reveals that she’s hoping that her son, a teenager with—who would have guessed?—emotional problems, can work on Helmer’s farm for a few months.

Over the course of this boy’s stay at the farm, Helmer finally reengages with the world around him. It is the pacing of this reawakening that is the real wonder of Bakker’s book, accomplished through an insight into his protagonist that renders even the hoariest concept fresh, and the most banal event revelatory. For example, it eventually becomes clear that Helmer is gay, yet no line is drawn between his sexuality and his loneliness. Instead, Bakker subtly links Helmer’s orientation to his relationship with his twin, whose sexual awakening with Riet eventually alienated the two brothers.

Particularly poignant is a flashback from Helmer’s youth that he is constantly reliving, the day his twin told him they could no longer share a bed. It is the figurative death that prefigured the literal one, a trauma experienced backwards and so healed when Riet’s son (who is also named Henk) slips into bed with Helmer one night.

Everywhere are these thematic ripples, quiet but resonant. Helmer keeps two donkeys, whose surface similarity provides a self-indulgent recreation of his childhood relationship with his brother. Midway through the novel, he almost drowns beneath a sheep, and is saved by Riet’s son. The hooded crow eventually disappears, but not before claiming its victim.

When a man from Helmer’s past finally convinces him to leave the farm behind, spiriting him off so suddenly that it practically feels like a deus ex machina, the reader doesn’t feel dissatisfied. Again, Bakker eschews the cliché; instead of ending the story when Helmer finds love, he goes a step further. Like everyone, Helmer still feels his loneliness acutely at times, even when he isn’t actually alone. In the final scene, Helmer leaves his lover in a hotel room and goes out to wander the empty streets and watch the sun set:

I know I have to get up. I know that the maze of paths and unpaved roads in the shade of the pines, birches and maples will already be dark. But I stay sitting calmly. I am alone.

I am alone, he tells us. Yet we feel the less so for that.

Ick. Just Ick.

Charlotte Roche is one of the most famous authors in Germany. Thomas Mann must be spinning in his grave.

On the subject of literary criticism, Martin Amis has written that “quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence.” But I’m going to quote “Wetlands” sparingly in this review. And that’s for your sake. I could explain why myself, but it’s probably more efficient for me to give you a sample: “I also love it when someone goes down on me while I’m bleeding. It’s kind of a test of mettle for the guy. When he’s finished licking and looks up with his blood-smeared mouth, I kiss him so we both look like wolves who’ve just ripped open a deer.”

Yep. I know. Yuck. (Just be glad you’re not Tim Mohr, the translator, who probably had to read that 15 times in the German, then try it out five or six different ways in English. Kudos, Mr. Mohr).

But let’s not be premature. After all, were not James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov both decried as pornographers in their time? Is not a single photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe likely to prove more viscerally disgusting than even the naughtiest bunch of words? Do not the films of Catherine Breillat receive critical plaudits, even though they invariably feature graphic sex and violence? As a fan of all the artists mentioned above, I would never knock something just for grossing me out. Important work is important work, whether it turns the stomach or not.

Yet my response remains: yuck.

“Wetlands” is the story of 18 year-old Helen, an unapologetic sex-maniac who is laid out in the proctology unit of a hospital for the entirety of the novel. Her injury relates to a shaving accident about which the less said the better. Over the course of a couple hundred pages, we are granted a close-up look at every part of Helen’s anatomy, but very little in the way of her character. Her parents are split up, and though she says time and again that she wants to get them back together, the reasons for this are never fully explained. Why did they divorce? Are they still in love? Do they love their new partners (alluded to but never described)? Helen doesn’t care. She doesn’t even know what her parents do for a living. Fine for her, but this reader would have preferred a little context.

The emotional hinge of the book is meant to be the revelation that Helen once came home to find her mother and brother passed out on sleeping pills in front of an open gas oven. But any pathos that Roche might have rung from this memory is ruined by her bathetic writing. When Helen tells her brother about the incident (he was too young to remember it), he gives a two-sentence response and leaves. Now, I’m not sure what I would say if I found out my mom had tried to kill both herself and me at the same time, but I’m willing to guess it would be a bit more dramatic than, “That’s why I always have those fucked-up dreams. She’s going to get hers.”

“Wetlands” is being touted as a novel of feminist liberation, but it ends up saying a lot less about gender than it does about mental illness (one reviewer compared it to Plath’s “The Bell Jar”, which is apt). Unfortunately, I don’t think Roche planned this. In interviews, the 30 year old ex-TV personality has said that her book was inspired by the wall of feminine hygiene products on offer at her local pharmacy. This isn’t surprising, as “Wetlands” reads far more like a polemic than like a novel. In a pinch, it might do for the syllabus of a Gender Studies or Psych class, but it hardly qualifies as literature.

Many thanks to all those who made this video possible, especially the fantastic friend and dastardly director Chad Peiken, the gorgeous gendarme Judy Courtland, the crafty cinematographer Kelly Jones, and the phenomenal photographer Suzan Jones! Woo!

Allons’y, Alonzo

Two French writers take on the notion would-be writers on the run. Only one gets away with it.

I wasn’t planning to review these two books together, as I happened to read them one after the other only by coincidence. However, they have so much in common—and their differences perfectly point out why one is successful and the other is not—that I felt reviewing them at the same time would only help to clarify my opinions about them.

First, the similarities. Both authors are French. Both arrived on the literary scene at the age of 25. Northombe’s first novel was “Hygiène de l’assassin”; in Zeller’s case, it was actually his third novel, “La Fascination Du Pire”, that earned him the attention of the literati. Both novels are about would-be writers (in Northombe’s case, herself). Both novels are about the notion of escape, of what it means when we choose to run. Both novels are sparing in their use of description, and eschew a serious plot in order to develop a character.

The characters thus developed are where these two novels begin to distinguish themselves. The protagonist of Zeller’s book is Julien Parme, a 14 year-old boy with a criminal streak and ludicrous literary aspirations. His narration evokes a Holden Caulfield raised on a strict diet of Hemingway: “I was afraid I’d get his voicemail, but luckily it rang. But it just kept on ringing. And in the end I got his voicemail. Shit. I hung up. He couldn’t have heard his phone because of the music. I tried a second time. He still didn’t answer.” Parme fascinates mostly due to his acrobatic evasion of self-awareness; he is the kind of kid who rails against bullies even while stealing cash from a half-blind old woman.

The story takes place over a little less than two days. Julien steals his stepfather’s cash card and embarks on a brief adventure. In spite of the boisterous tone with which the book opens (First line—notice the missing comma: “At the risk of surprising you I’d like to tell you about the incredible thing that happened to me last year.”), very little happens on Julien’s odyssey. He goes to a party. He runs into a teacher outside of the classroom. He feels up a girl. He almost runs away to Rome. His decision not to flee comes on the second to last page; the book ends with the end of the rebellion.

“Tokyo Fiancee” finishes on a similar but entirely opposite note. The protagonist, twenty-three year old Amélie Nothomb (Nothomb calls the book fiction, but that seems more like a legal precaution than anything else), has spent the novel being romanced by a Japanese man while living in Tokyo. Though she agrees to marry him, she eventually decides her freedom is more important, so jumps on a plane back to her homeland of Belgium, never telling him she’s not planning on coming back.

Does that make Nothomb sound a bit unlikeable? You don’t know the half of it. Though we’re never made aware just how much of the story is fictionalized, “Tokyo Fiancee” references its author’s novels, her heritage (Belgian writer who writes in French and was born in Japan), and numerous details of her biography. So when Nothomb’s “character” waxes poetic about her beauty, brilliance, and athletic ability, it’s difficult to hold back the incredulity. The cover of the book doesn’t help: Nothomb framed by the rising sun of a Japanese flag, gazing at us with the gamine semi-seriousness of a deservedly more famous French Amélie.

All this would be forgivable if the book were a pleasure to read, but this is not the case. In fact, the first two-thirds of “Tokyo Fiancee” might just be among the worst published writing I’ve encountered. Here are two short bits that follow one after another on the same page:

#1: “The next morning, the punctuality of the Mercedes was equaled only by its white sheen.”

#2: “Rinri had changed. His profile as a driver was no longer as immobile and impassive. His silence deepened, with an interesting awkwardness.”

Describing gradations of writerly error can be difficult. For example, to explain why Thomas Wolfe is a better writer than Tom Wolfe, it is necessary to go into the minutiae of style, which most people couldn’t care less about. Explaining why Nothombe is terrible, however, poses no problem at all. Consider the first passage. This is a car that has already been described as “magnificently white” “too-white” and “whiter than ever”. But punctuality cannot be compared to whiteness, nor can a car be punctual, nor is a white sheen the same as white paint.

In the second passage, we have “profile as a driver” standing in for “face.” And while that face is described as more emotive than usual, the character’s “silence” is said to have “deepened”. This is both a cliché and an inanity. How does a silence deepen? And what makes that awkward? And what makes that awkwardness interesting? And how is he less impassive but more silent?

Amélie Nothomb takes pains to portray herself as a free-spirited, deeply emotional woman. Julien Parme, on the other hand, initially comes across as a brutal, selfish child. So it’s ironic that Nothomb eventually betrays herself as a brat, while Zeller reveals Parme to be a sage. “So what if flight is not very honorable?” Nothombe pontificates at the end of her book. “It’s still better than allowing yourself to be caught. The only dishonor is that of not being free.” But Parme, at fourteen, returns from his adventure to face his mother, having recognized the cowardice of flight: “I took a deep breath to drive away my fears. And I got into the lift, hoping very much that she’d forgive me. That she’d forgive me for being who I am, and not someone else.”

So a story I wrote a bunch of years ago was just published on the amazing website, Untitled Books.

According to their website: “Untitled Books is a discerning new literary service and online bookshop that combines an authoritative selection of book recommendations with continually updated, exclusive editorial content.

The online magazine, features articles, author recommendations and interviews with big names such as Julian Barnes, Philip Gourevitch and James Frey, and champions the writers producing the most exciting work at the moment. You will also find articles, Q&As and new short fiction published on the site each month. Authors recommend their favourite books, what inspires them and who to watch out for. Untitled Books also aims to find, support and promote the work of up and coming and new authors. Every featured author’s work can be bought via the site, making Untitled Books an essential destination for readers and book lovers.”

My story is about the Milgram Experiment, has been sitting on my hard drive for many years. I’m so glad that it’s finally found a home, especially on a cool English site. Much thanks to Viola Fort and Untitled Books!

Here’s an excerpt:

Milgram
by Tommy Wallach

In the summer of 1961, Henrietta Ramsey took part in her first ever scientific experiment. It was advertised in The New Haven Register, and offered four dollars for an hour of the respondent’s time, plus fifty cents for bus fare.

Henrietta had never before considered volunteering for such a thing, though not because she had anything against the pursuit of knowledge or the process of scientific inquiry. On the contrary, all forms of progress appealed to her; she was a member of the ACLU, the NAACP, and would be instrumental in the eventual foundation of a Greater New Haven chapter of NOW. The very term ‘progress’ made her feel a shiver of pride, like when her husband, Victor, touched her back possessively in front of some business associate’s younger, prettier wife. No, the only reason Henrietta had not responded to the advertisement when it had first appeared a year earlier was because she was typically a very busy woman. A year earlier, she would not have had the time to involve herself in the pursuit of knowledge, or the process of scientific inquiry.

The summer of 1961 was different. For Henrietta, a personal solstice had set in; the days stretched out to unheard of lengths. Torpid lifetimes passed in the hours between breakfast and lunch, civilizations rose and melted into hazy histories during the afternoons and by the time dinner rolled around, the morning seemed as distant a past as childhood itself. For other women, perhaps this would have been tolerable. But Henrietta had reached forty-five without ever having experienced what was commonly known as ‘free time.’ (What was free about it? she wondered. Time always cost something; it took its bite out of the purse or the flesh, whichever was more vulnerable.) During her childhood in Madison, Wisconsin, she’d worked every summer, first for her family and then for a local restaurant that sponsored the most popular fish fry in the state. She’d studied hard in high school, and worked in a bookstore throughout her four years at the University. After graduation, she taught seventh grade English for a few years, until Victor came along and the two of them moved to Connecticut. Even after Catharine was born, Henrietta insisted on finding herself a part-time job. “Raising a child simply isn’t enough,” she would confide to other working women she knew, “God put me on Earth to help people.”

Read on…

Just wanted to do a little post on Smith Magazine, a really great website (and occasional book series) specializing in memoir, especially of the 6-word variety (After Hemingway’s famous “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”). The Smith editor’s blog named Brendan Byrne’s new lit mag The Orphan as one of the “Sites We Love“, and in describing the post, linked to my story there, Stalk. Thanks Smith. Your magazine is lovely and filling, like a rainbow combination at a decent sushi restaurant.

Basque in the Limelight

Bernardo Axtagas’s gripping political bildingsroman may be the first Basque masterpiece.

The characters of “The Accordionist’s Son,” the new novel from Basque intellectual and writer Bernardo Axtaga, would be outraged to know their story had been translated into English. In the book, translation is seen as a kind of desecration of language; one character solemnly buries old Basque words written on scraps of paper as if they were dead pets. Elsewhere, obsolete words are described as snowflakes melting “when they touched the ground of the new present.”

That defrosting present is where the novel begins, in 1999. David, the titular son, has just died at his ranch in California. By means of a somewhat tortuous plot device involving the melding of David’s memoir with another character’s partially-fictionalized memoir, the story soon jumps to the imaginary Basque town of Obaba, circa 1964. The Spanish Civil War has been over for decades, but its aftershocks are still being felt—especially by the younger generation. As the novel begins, David is just beginning to realize that his father, an accordionist ironically named Angél, was a facist.

Obaba serves as Axtaga’s Yoknapatawta, a rural area of the Basque country about which he’s written numerous times, including in his prize-winning book of short stories “Obabakoak.” In the past, Axtaga has used Obaba to tell stories of magical realism, but in “The Accordionist’s Son”, the town is the setting for an entirely realist political bildingsroman.

David tries in every way he can to come to terms with his father’s crimes. First, he rejects his own bourgeois lifestyle, retreating to the bucolic farmhouse of his uncle Juan. Later, he joins up with the Basque nationalists as a half-hearted terrorist. Finally, he allows himself to be wrongly convicted of betraying his fellow nationalists as a kind of penance.

The novel struck me as a variation on the theme of Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader” (which I reviewed here just a few weeks ago). In that book, one German woman’s war crimes stand in for those of an entire generation, and a young boy cannot quite escape the taint. In “The Accordionist’s Son”, the younger generation may be more active about their expiation, but they are no closer to finding peace. David is not an ideologue, or even an idealist. As a terrorist, his actions come across as desperate and unmotivated, as if he was merely carried along by the current of the times. It’s believable, but makes you wonder sometimes exactly why he was chosen as the novel’s protagonist.

“The Accordionist’s Son” works best in Obaba, where David bounces back and forth between the wealthy and the poor, the urban and the rural, the heirs of Republicanism and the heirs of Fascism. Particularly fascinating is Teresa, the daughter of another Nationalist. Though she falls deeply in love with David, he rejects her, because she represents the history he is trying to deny. Their scenes together run thick with tension both sexual and political:

The turntable began to spin, and the arm bearing the needle lifted automatically from its support. A woman’s voice emerged from the loudspeakers. It was a very slow, rather melancholy tune. “Who is it?” I asked. Teresa was still standing by the record-player. “Marie Laforêt.” She threw the record sleeve over to me on the bed. La plage. La vie s’en va. Those were the titles of the first two songs. Something fell to the floor, and I looked up. “I had a coin in my pocket,” Teresa said, her voice choked with emotion. She was naked. “I love you so much,” she said. These words robbed her of all her breath. “Come here,” I said, lying down on the bed.

The acoustics of this moment—the sound of a coin falling from a pair of pants removed in childish haste—are exquisite.

As David matures, growing into a revolutionary and then finding peace as a farmer (fulfilling Candide’s enigmatic counsel, after a lifetime of turmoil, to “cultivate our garden”), this light touch disappears. Jose, David’s lifelong friend, himself a Basque novelist, narrates the last section of the book, wrapping up the plot without adding much of nutritional value.

It’s a shame that David himself isn’t more interesting, but he’s lucky to be surrounded by a fascinating cast: his mother, the reluctant wife of a Fascist; his uncle, a Republican who risked his life to save an American during the war; Virginia, la paysanne, who loves David but leaves him when he becomes a revolutionary.

Thanks to them, and to the town of Obaba itself, “The Accordionist’s Son” eventually won me over. The novel brings to life a milieu rare in fiction (the book is described on its jacket as the first great Basque novel), one that would be worth reading about even if the writing were not so vivid. Like a literary Millet, Axtaga waxes lyrical about the rural life of Obaba without falling into a dull poeticism, never forgetting that the Basque country is “so green without, so dark within: a black province under the yoke of an equally black religion.”

An old college friend of mine, Brendan Byrne (RIP NYU DWP), has just started an online literary magazine for material rejected from other, more “respectable” venues. It is called The Orphan. According to Brendan: “The Orphan is a nascent webzine dedicated to publishing the otherwise unpublishable: marketless short stories, chunks of abandoned novels, beautiful photographic errors, bizarre brilliant blather, even first sentences impossible to expand upon… The net is wide. The first issue features work from Rudy Rucker and David Markson among others.” As if that weren’t enough, it’s been mentioned on Boing-Boing!

A song by one of my favorite piano girls, Fiona Apple. I would marry her. Right now. No questions asked.

Don’t Work the Night Shift

In this post-apocalyptic tale from Austria, the last man on Earth must come to terms with utter solitude.

The first novel about a global apocalypse was written long before there were nuclear weapons or Anthrax. In 1826, Mary Shelley published “The Last Man,” about a plague that wipes out humanity. Since then, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories have been a mainstay of genre fiction and film, from “The Day of the Triffids” to “28 Days Later.” Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend” was recently adapted into a film, as soon will be Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, “The Road.”

“Night Work,” the fifth novel by Austrian author Thomas Glavinic (though the first to be published in English), follows in the footsteps of the great apocalypse novels, with a noticeable difference. In most stories of this ilk, the hero eventually meets up with other survivors. In “Night Work”, however, the protagonist really is the only living creature left on the entire planet. The novel follows his slow descent into madness as he realizes the horror of total solitude.

The cause of the apocalypse is never discovered; all we know is that it occurred on the 4th of July (for Glavinic’s sake, I’ll choose not to read into that selection). What little drama the novel proffers is spurred only by our desire to know if Jonas will maintain his sanity. As a reader, however, this “last man” contrivance inspires an even more chilling question: Do I really have to spend an entire novel with just this guy?

As an interior decorator living in an upscale apartment in Vienna, Jonas doesn’t come off as the typical hero of a post-apocalypse novel. It’s a good thing there’s nobody left who needs saving, because Jonas would not be the man for the job. Instead, he spends the majority of the novel engaged in two tasks, often simultaneously: recording things on video cameras, and philosophizing. At its worst moments, “Night Work” comes off as 375 pages of mulling over the old “tree falls in a wood” riddle:

Jonas had pictured that sunquake, yet no one had been there to witness it. The sun had quaked in solitude. At magnitude 12. Neither he nor anyone else had been there. Nobody had seen that quake, just as nobody had seen the robot land on Mars, but it had happened just the same.

Thankfully, he is occasionally prone to less shallow thoughts. In one particularly fascinating passage he contemplates the myriad uses of a personal oracle:

Question: Which well-known woman would have fallen in love with me if I’d dome something? Answer: The painter Mary Hansen, if you’d spontaneously, without saying a word, presented her with a lucky charm in the foyer of the Hotel Orient, Brussels, on the night of 26 April 1997.
Question: Who would have become the best friend I could ever have had? Answer: Oskar Schweda, 23 Liechtensteinstrasse, Vienna 1090.
Question: How often has Marie cheated on me? Answer: Never.
Question: On whom would I have fathered the nicest children? Answer: Your masseuse, Frau Lindsay. The two of you would have produced Benjy and Anne.”

When he’s not thinking, Jonas is filming. Somehow, though televisions produce only static and the internet is one big Address Not Found page, all of the world still has electricity. At first, Jonas merely sets up cameras all over Vienna to see if anyone happens to wander through the frame. Soon enough, though, he has begun filming itself at night, while he’s asleep. Watching the tapes, Jonas discovers a version of himself that exists only while he’s sleeping, and whom he confusingly dubs “The Sleeper.”

At first, The Sleeper seems harmless enough. He stares at the camera, winks, or simply disappears from sight. But when he begins wearing a hood and driving a hunting knife deep into a cement wall, The Sleeper becomes a symbol of Jonas’ madness. While driving to England, in the hopes of locating Marie at the house where she’d been staying that weekend, Jonas is taken over by The Sleeper. He is constantly passing out (because The Sleeper isn’t really sleeping at all during the night), and when he wakes up, he finds himself hundreds of miles from where he was before, or else missing teeth, or locked in the trunk of his car. The Sleeper is a truly original monster, and the best contribution that “Night Work” offers to the vocabulary of apocalyptic fiction.

There are other great moments in the book — such as Jonas watching a wall of television monitors in the middle of a square, or the numerous evocations of silence, and the way in which it is both peaceful and oppressive — but they aren’t enough to propel the novel beyond the limitations of its genre. “Night Work” is ultimately doomed not only by the repetitiveness of a one-man show, but by Glavinic’s refusal to grant us meaning. It is the danger of allegory, or of hinting at allegory. Is Jonas representative of something? He has to be, to make the novel resonant. But what? Man’s inhumanity to man? Our fundamental solitude in this world? The inevitability of death?

“Heaven and hell,” Jonas tells us, are “subjective forms of expression for the past self.”

Good to know. But a character needs depth to back up deep thoughts. Ironically, by taking away all the people but one, Glavinic has made that final one all the more unknowable. Consider this quote from the late John Updike’s “Deaths of Distant Friends”: “The deaths of others carry us off bit by bit, until there will be nothing left; and this too will be, in a way, a mercy.” In a world with no points of reference, Jonas becomes alien, a stranger. After I finished the novel, I put the book down and went to sleep. The night did its work. By morning, I could barely remember who Jonas was.