Jonathan Miles

Bruce Chatwin was born into a middle-class family in Birmingham, England, during the flagging of that rusted city’s industrial prime — think Cleveland in the ’70s. So perhaps it’s no wonder that his earliest fantasies were escapist. “For Bruce,” Shakespeare writes, “Birmingham was always a place to leave.” And leave he did: first to London, where he went to work for Sotheby’s, the venerable auction house, becoming an expert on antiquities and Impressionist paintings while still in his teens; then to Edinburgh for a fitful stint at studying archeology; then back to London as a journalist for the magazine of the Sunday Times, back when, under the stewardship of Francis Wyndham, it regularly ran such highbrow and fabulously untopical theme issues as “One Million Years of Art.” But it was the leaving, more than anything else, that appealed to Chatwin; in his later life, home — no matter its ever-shifting locus — was always a place to leave. As one acquaintance put it, “He never knew where to be. It was always somewhere else.”

This isn’t the sort of outlook that enkindles marital bliss, but Elizabeth, Chatwin’s wife of 23 years, “was unlike most wives,” as Shakespeare understates. “Bruce’s actions” — meaning his constant flitting to more languorous latitudes, his moody if typically writerly demands for solitude and, most famously, his long and haphazard drift of homosexual affairs (which led to his death, at the age of 48, from an AIDS-related illness) — “would have caused most people to leave him, but Elizabeth did not.” The marriage was surely one of Chatwin’s more curious and curiosity-inspiring endeavors, considering that nearly everything he did seemed opposed to it; the portrait that emerges here is of a splintered but sturdy partnership, functional where it was necessary, nonexistent where it was not — a genuine entente, as one friend put it, that proved again and again resistant to the strains of Chatwin’s polymorphous nomadism.

Shakespeare’s powder-dry prose can sometimes plod on, step by step, like one of Chatwin’s peripatetic alter egos, yet the whole feels almost damply eloquent. There’s a reason: Among Shakespeare’s interviewees were Salman Rushdie, Gita Mehta, Susan Sontag, Barbara Epstein, Edmund White and the late Stephen Spender, to list but a few, and their trenchant commentary imbues the book with such an enameled luster that there’s no need for added sheen. Less glittery, but no less stimulating, are the voices of the numberless contacts Chatwin made in his zigzaggy forays around the globe — forays that Shakespeare retraced, as his acknowledgments reveal, to a dizzying degree; he tosses out thank-yous to hosts in France, Hungary, Italy, Greece, India, Nepal, Benin, Morocco, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and the United States (to list, again, but a few).

Shakespeare’s ultimate accomplishment, nonetheless, is in making Bruce Chatwin — that icy vapor who darted, often maddeningly, just behind his sentences — finally corporeal. Here is Chatwin in the flesh, the too-pretty blue-eyed Wunderkind stripped of pretense, stripped of myth but at last warmly and tremendously human. Several years ago, on a remote island off the southern Chilean coast, I stumbled upon a lakeside cabin Chatwin had briefly lived in. The cabin’s owner led me inside, where he had maintained Chatwin’s office just as the writer had left it; not a paper had been moved. It was startlingly austere, even heartlessly so, and I wondered then how Chatwin could have produced, in such a drab and angular setting, the fierce color and tinsel-like detail that filled his pages. But that, as I found in rereading, was Chatwin: a blazing but enigmatic intellect sparkling with tinsel and color but devoid, as Rushdie once said, of heart. For those of us who have yearned to see that heart, Nicholas Shakespeare brings us, with this moving and elegant biography, as close as we’re going to get.

At the novel’s vortex, with hammer in hand, stands John Henry, the semi-mythical 19th-century black railway worker whose triumphant race against a steam-powered drill cost him his life but transformed him into American folklore’s lushest metaphor — that of mankind’s noble if futile struggle against the soullessness of machinery. Orbiting John Henry’s story — thinly but marvelously told — are a panoply of others, the most essential of which concerns J. Sutter, a black freelance journalist too jaded “to pretend that there is anything but publicity,” who’s been reduced to covering, for a cheesy travel Web site, the cheesier unveiling of a commemorative postage stamp in a small West Virginia town.

Like John Henry, who the postage stamp honors, J. is engaged in a race of his own: He’s trying to smash a dubious record for attending press junkets, having made it to at least one per day for the last three months, a jag he is “too unwilling or too scared to break.” Not unlike blasting railroad tracks through mountains, this line of work entails its own physical hazards — one of J.’s fellow junketeers, for instance, lost an eye to a finger, Stooge-style, while leaping for a free cocktail, and J. himself comes perilously close to a very real if also metaphorical end when he chokes on a “stern and vengeful” plug of gratis prime rib.

These contrapuntal narratives, with their chafing together of the Industrial and Information Ages, are almost always pitch-perfect. Whitehead, a former television critic for the Village Voice, brings a serrated wit to his depiction of the junketeering life; his wickedly precise portrayal of a Manhattan publishing party — with its clinking glasses and banal, disjointed chatter — shudders with a grandly satiric frisson. But Whitehead, pendulating between John Henry’s feats and J.’s, never once settles for an easy, false nostalgia; hero and hack walk side by side through their paralleled worlds, equals in their fight against their respective mountains. As another character puts it: “We make our own machines and devise our own contests in which to engage them.”

Less perfect — and what fainter criticism there is I do not know — are the stories festooning the novel’s periphery: stories of briefly glimpsed bluesmen, folklorists, songsters, stamp collectors, hoteliers, even Paul Robeson; stories of lives touched, however softly, by John Henry’s legacy. Darting in and out of the novel, these flyaway tales alternately rev and sputter the narrative engine. The oblique light they shed on Whitehead’s central metaphor isn’t always revelatory, but then the metaphor itself isn’t exactly revelatory, either. As a young J., upon first hearing about John Henry in grade school, longs to ask his teacher: “Mrs. Goodwin, if he beat the steam engine, why did he have to die? Did he win or lose?” In Whitehead’s extraordinary hands, a nation is contained in that question.

Olivier’s sons, worried for their father’s safety after the random murder of his best pal and chess-opponent, are committed to spiriting him out of South Africa, but Olivier won’t submit. After all, he argues, he has Magrieta, his petulant black housekeeper, to look after him, and also Antje of Bengal, the ghost of a 17th century slave executed for the poisoning of her master and lover’s wife. To appease his children, nonetheless, Olivier agrees to take in a lodger. Enter Tessa Butler: 29, caustic and carnal, “with dirty feet and a smudge on her cheek,” and “nowhere else to go.”

“I won’t cook, I won’t keep house, I won’t sleep with you,” she tells him. “But I can be around.”

From their first conversation — “the large easy loops, the repetitions and variations and divagations, the sudden changes of direction” — Olivier is in love: madly, deeply, as if all the illusions and allusions in his books had shuddered to life in one blinding instant. His father, Oliver recalls, “in one of his more exuberant or desperate moods,” would “go out in the veld and sprinkle brandy on the daisies to make them drunk so that they wouldn’t feel the pain of shriveling up and dying,” and, for Olivier, Tessa becomes the brandy, the final drunk pleasure. Tessa allows him all this, even revels in it, though her motives are never quite clear, perhaps not even to herself.

Like every great novel, “The Rights of Desire” teeters occasionally on the cusp of sentimentality, but there is also comedy here — after a botched attempt to navigate a condom, in heady (if vain) anticipation, Olivier tries to flush it down the toilet only to have it keep returning to the surface “like the corpse of a saint” — and no small measure of genuine poignancy. When the harsher realities of the outside world — and the very literal ghost of South Africa’s dusky past — invade Olivier’s geriatric amour, he is forced to step from the flat, sheltered world of his books and memories into a world made round by blood and desire. It is a world rendered brilliantly, ambitiously and humanely by Brink; this novel, chiseled and rigorous, feels as durable as desire.

Dangerously thin, dressed in a pleated black dancer’s skirt with black leotards below and tight black ribbed shirt above, Amber appeared torn between death and disco.

The cop was squinting at the Polaroids so intently that it appeared the developing process was of telepathic origin.

But, even more than these, Durkee calls to mind the early Barry Hannah — rattling his lingual sabers, jitterbugging on the edge of absurdity, lobbing lit firecrackers at his startled audience. “Rides of the Midway” is a manic, sloshed, whiny, fizzy, horny, noisome and wondrous novel.

Set in the ’70s in the skankier, preacher-riddled portions of south Mississippi, the action begins when 10-year-old Noel Weatherspoon, playing Little League ball for the Standard Oil Red Sox, shatters the collarbone of the opposing catcher and sends the poor tyke into a coma. This collision, however haphazard and incidental, launches the decade-long spiritual unraveling that constitutes the bulk of Durkee’s story: Noel plunges headlong into drugs, pornography, voyeurism, sex with a watermelon (leading, it begs mention, to a family supper worthy of the Portnoys), mercy killing, more drugs, vandalism, adultery and so on.

It’s an extravagantly hedonistic spiral, to be sure, but not one wholly nihilistic; underpinning the novel’s deft and toothsome hilarity is Noel’s hopped-up and half-witted grab for theological autonomy, a Baudelairean effort to escape the prepackaged salvation championed by his Billy Graham look-alike stepfather and church-soaked community and to find God — or, less concretely, whatever designer propels this “darkly spinning” world — on none but his own terms. Noel’s effort is a vital, almost-involuntary one, as vital and involuntary as this coarsely graceful novel feels — as vital and involuntary, that is, as the truest art.

Chief counsel for the defense was Frederick Barthelme, or Barthelme the Younger, as John Updike is fond of referring to him, who laid out minimalism’s merits in a 1988 New York Times Book Review essay titled “On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Beans.” He passed along this advice to his fellow pecked-at minimalists:

Tell them [the naysayers] that you prefer to think you’re leaving room for the readers, at least for the ones who like to use their imaginations; that you hope those readers hear the whispers, catch the feints and shadows, gather the traces, sense the pressures, and that meanwhile the prose tricks them into the drama, and the drama breaks their hearts. Just like old times.

By now, of course, 1988 seems like old times; and while these sorts of aesthetic wars are never actually won, so to speak, it’s safe to say that the bells have indeed tolled for minimalism’s reign over American fiction. Thus, the publication of “The Law of Averages,” a mostly retrospective anthology of Barthelme’s short fiction, presents us with a grand opportunity to peer backward, with the slight cushion of history and without aesthetic rancor, at what Barthelme — and by extension the minimalist ethos — was able to do: that is, whether the prose does the trick, whether it can still, two decades later, break our hearts.

In the spirit of things, the minimalist answer is this: Yes. Barthelme’s stories, it’s true, travel negligible distances — emotionally, geographically and physically — and never so much begin and end as start and stop. At times they suggest Philip Glass’ opera “Einstein on the Beach,” during which the audience was encouraged to wander about; one could step out into the lobby for coffee and a cigarette and return confident that nothing much had happened in the meantime. Because, in Barthelme’s world, nothing much does happen: A middle-aged white man almost, but not quite, makes a connection with one of life’s mysteries — or at least with a woman, who often, for Barthelme, embodies life’s mystery. The “almost” is important here, because Barthelme’s characters aren’t awarded those connections, no matter how often they’re glimpsed, even, in fact, when such connections are more or less forced upon them. In Barthelme’s stories (“Pupil,” “Instructor,” “Violet”) women are always dropping their clothes in front of startled men, or teen runaways or female college students are knocking on the apartment door; the men, in response, shrivel.

That Barthelme’s hapless souls are aware — keenly aware — of their missed or nonexistent opportunities casts a gloomy, half-tragic shadow over these stories. Barthelme’s characters were conditioned to expect more of life. “What am I cooking?” the narrator of “Cooker” asks his wife. The answer is lamb chops. “This makes me feel better,” he says dryly. “Lamb chops, and suddenly the world is new, a place of mystery and possibility.” The only epiphany, then, is that there are no epiphanies. “I stood for a minute there on the blacktop,” says another narrator, “arms crossed, scanning townhouses across the street for a clue, a movement, anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing.”

This sounds, of course, like the grousing of one of Barthelme’s detractors, bemoaning the lack of clues, or movement, or anything extraordinary. But I’d like to return to Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach” for a moment, because I think there’s a corollary here. Andrew Porter, reviewing Glass’ opera for the New Yorker, wrote that “Glass’ score may be incantatory, but it is not lulling … a listener to his music usually reaches a point, quite early on, of rebellion at the ‘needle stuck in the groove’ quality, but a minute or two later he realizes that the needle has not stuck; something has happened. Once that point has passed, Glass’ music becomes easy to listen to for hours on end — or so I find. The mind may wander now and again, but it wanders within a new sound world that the composer has created.” Change a few words and Porter could be reviewing Barthelme.

Nothing much happens in Barthelme’s stories, yes; but something happens in the reader’s mind and, more important, keeps happening. In that respect, Barthelme’s stories aren’t so much stories as they are moods. A newspaper or hamburger wrapper skitters across a deserted intersection and your heart starts to crack. At times the effect is inscrutable; as one narrator says, speaking of the Dallas skyline: “I couldn’t tell whether the lights were strange or it was fabulous architecture,” which mirrors the bewilderment these stories can foment. The effect can even be irksome — the weight of these seemingly weightless stories has the power to cloud the sunniest of days, even to wound, in a way reminiscent of Dostoevski or Kafka. Is this really the world I inhabit? you wonder, peering up from the page. And the answer leaves you desperate.

The novella suits Harrison. Not for him the constricted focus and pinprick epiphanies of the short story; even his sentences, with their roundabout subjunctive clauses and hydra-headed coils of thought, cry out against containment. And though he’s penned his share of novels, most recently 1998′s “The Road Home,” Harrison’s glibly wounded narrative voices seem better suited to the unbroken intensity that the novella form can provide. Not surprisingly, then, his three previous collections of novellas — “Legends of the Fall,” “The Woman Lit by Fireflies,” and “Julip” — are considered by many to be the brightest stars in Harrison’s galaxy of work.

With the publication of “The Beast God Forgot to Invent,” those stars gain dazzling new company. The title novella, set in Harrison’s native Michigan, takes the guise of a written report to the Alger County coroner — a report that, like the life (or rather death) it purports to describe, goes beautifully haywire. The narrator, Norman Arnz, a 67-year-old commercial real estate broker and rare-book dealer, is the quintessential Harrison narrator: Overbrimming with prickly opinions and runaway anecdotes, Arnz presents less a narrative of his pal’s drowning death than a cranky treatise on the pitfalls of civilization. His pal’s drowning followed a motorcycle accident that served to decivilize him. For one, the injuries had turned him weirdly primal, prompting him to flee society for something resembling a cave man’s rough-hewn life. For another, he’d lost his capacity for visual memory. (As Arnz explains, “Joe’s very least problem was boredom because everything he saw he saw for the first time, over and over.”) As a daily explorer in terra incognita, then, Joe had taken it upon himself to “re-map the world” before his disappearance one night into Lake Superior. For Harrison, this is slightly less than terra incognita, recalling as it does past thematic forays, but my noting this shouldn’t be construed as carping; Harrison approaches his ideas like a sculptor chipping away at an unseen ideal.

Other familiar territory is visited in “Westward Ho,” the collection’s second novella. Harrison’s Brown Dog, a ne’er-do-well Michigan Indian, first appeared in an eponymous novella in “The Woman Lit by Fireflies.” Brown Dog is Harrison at his comic best: A hapless, rambling, vulgar antihero, Brown Dog is nothing less than the Don Quixote of the Upper Peninsula. In this latest episode, Brown Dog trails a stolen bearskin to Los Angeles and falls headlong into that city’s skanky stew of screenwriting rummies, plasticky starlets and lecherous bigwigs. Harrison’s wit — caustic, coarse and utterly charming, like that of a crazy old goat of an uncle spouting stories from afar — is as whetted here as ever; you hardly notice the fervid intelligence clicking away in the background.

Yet the collection’s final entry, “I Forgot to Go to Spain,” glows brighter than even these two novellas combined. “I Forgot to Go to Spain” recounts the impromptu effort of a well-heeled, 55-year-old author of “Bioprobes” — “those hundred-page intrusive biographies that fairly litter bookstores, newsstands, [and] novelty counters in airports” — to reunite with a woman to whom he was once married for nine youthful days; along the way it occurs to him that he’s never fulfilled an early ambition to see Spain. But banal summary won’t suffice here. To crib a line from the narrator: It’s “our dreams and visions that own true significance, not our petty … details.”

The novella all but boils over with dreams — dreams of literature, love, loss, of all those epic L-words that too few writers seem brave enough, in these chilly times, to address on anything but ironic terms. “I Forgot to Go to Spain” is imbued with all the gravelly melancholy of a Tom Waits ballad, but it never once, despite that swarm of L-words, forces sentiment; the autumnal passion that drives the tale is never less than tactile. I could go on — about the casual lack of geometry and astounding texture of Harrison’s prose, about the delicacy of his characterizations — but why? “I Forgot to Go to Spain” is above my twerpy praise. It’s simply thrilling to see a writer reach for the sky and actually grab it.