Truth and Consequences
Can the New Yorker's fiction issue do justice to a real multiple murder?
By GARY KAMIYA
Much noise has been made lately about the rise of confessional narrative -- stories that read like fiction, but are largely or completely autobiographical. Some critics -- including Salon's Laura Miller in a recent essay -- see this trend as reflecting a failure of imaginative nerve. Others, more sanguine, regard it as a salutary expansion of the story-telling impulse.
In his introduction to The New Yorker's summer fiction issue, literary editor Bill Buford places himself squarely in the latter camp. Taking issue with those who fear that "writers of nonfiction have taken over the business of storytelling," Buford argues that the best writers still work in fictional forms. "What is much more interesting," he goes on, "is that storytelling has taken over the business of writing. A crucial assumption of modernism -- that because narrative distorts reality it should be abandoned -- has itself been abandoned." Echoing the great critic Frank Kermode's classic study "The Sense of an Ending," he asserts that "stories...protect us from chaos, and maybe that's what we, unblinkered at the end of the twentieth century, find ourselves craving."
Buford's assessment of our fictional moment is accurate, but the new hegemony of storytelling may have a darker side. With regard to fiction, the return of the story was probably inevitable: the programmatic nature of most modernist anti-fiction condemned it to a readership made up mostly of academics. And few will mourn the remaindering of Alain Robbe-Grillet's collected works. But modernism, for all that it led to a dead end, embodied a certain aesthetic discipline that it would be unwise to throw out. It demanded that the author maintain a healthy distance from his or her emotions -- an impulse that can be sterile and overly intellectual, but that also serves to check bathos, sentimentality and me-ism. These treacly qualities, already excessively present on the literary landscape, may become even more prominent as the cold gravitational pull of modernism fades into the distance.
As for the incursion of fictional style into autobiographical writing, it has without question produced some superb, sui generis writing -- such as the potent reporting found in Granta, the Cambridge-based literary journal Buford edited before coming to The New Yorker. But writing about real events using the techniques of fiction can also be aesthetically and even ethically troubling -- as Jo Ann Beard's strange, powerful and creepy piece in this issue, "The Fourth State of Matter," demonstrates.
Buford writes that Beard's piece, and a fine essay by Tim Parks on the Sisyphean nature of marital fidelity, were "deliberately added to this special fiction issue of The New Yorker for what they reveal about the narrative process." What Beard's piece reveals is that when a talented writer uses sophisticated literary narrative techniques on real, personal tragedy, she can leave the reader with a very queasy feeling.
"The Fourth State of Matter," which appears under the heading of "Personal History," opens like a short story, written in a smoothly literary, detached yet poetic, courageously pathetic, utterly sincere style. "The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She's on the shoreline, barking. Wake up."
The collie is waking Beard up because it is dying. Upstairs, squirrels have taken over the spare bedroom. Beard's husband has vanished: his confused, ignoble whinings ("'Please? I think I might be freaking out,' he says. 'Am I ruining my life here, or what? Am I making a mistake? Jo?'") are heard on the answering machine from time to time. (It was never safe to anger a writing mate, and in the new, by-the-way-your-penis-was-tiny literary climate, it's positively suicidal to piss off a scribe.) Beard's life, in short, is a car wreck, and we observe the metal buckling and bones shattering in slow-motion close-up.
She finds some solace at her job as editor of a space-physics monthly, where she talks with her colleague and friend Christoph Goetz. One of the things they talk about is plasma, "the fourth state of matter" after liquids, solids, and gasses. "'Plasma is blood,' I told him. 'Exactly,' he agreed."
A friend comes over to get rid of the squirrels. The "vanished husband," who we learn has accidentally shown Beard a roll of condoms, calls. The mood of semi-resigned desperation hangs over the tale as it inches forward.
Goetz's office in Iowa City is home to a research team that includes a Chinese graduate student named Gang Lu. Lu comes in to talk to Chris and other members of the physics team: Bob Smith, Linhua Shan. We enter Gang Lu's mind (why? our reader's antennae go up -- but not far enough): "He's sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it...He stares at each person in turn, trying to gauge how much respect each of them has for him...In each case the verdict is clear: not enough."
The collie continues to deteriorate. As Beard leaves work one afternoon, she passes Gang Lu as he comes in. He says nothing to her. "At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life."
Gang Lu leaves the Friday afternoon seminar briefly. When he returns, he pulls out a gun and shoots Chris Goetz in the back of the head. He shoots Linhua Shan through the forehead. He shoots Bob Smith, who has tried to hide under the table, in the hand and chest. Lu goes downstairs, shoots the department chairman in the head. Then he remembers Bob Smith, shot only in the chest. He returns. Two young scientists are trying to help Bob. "The two young scientists leave the room at gunpoint. Bob closes his eyes. The eighth and ninth bullets in his head." Lu shoots Chris and Linhua Shan again in the head. He goes downstairs and shoots the administrator, Anne Cleary, in the face. He shoots her receptionist, a student working as a temp. The police come. Lu shoots himself in the head.
Beard learns about the deaths. She looks into the mirror. Her husband visits. She is alone again. She lies next to the dog. She looks at a piece of amber that Chris brought her from Poland: it contains bits of fly wings. The story ends.
It's a shocking piece, and one executed with undeniable artistry. Yet for all of its literary skill and harrowing honesty, Beard's piece seems to me to somehow cast a wrong, almost indecent, light on its dreadful subject. Perhaps it's too literary: it feels so much like a short story, with its subtlety, control of tone, and sense of inevitability, that the obscene reality of the murders itself becomes doubly obscene -- because it's been shrunk down, made part of someone else's narrative. The awesome power of artistic narrative confers ownership, with paradoxical results: by narrating the story of the murders aesthetically, Beard succeeds in making them far more vivid and concrete than a standard journalistic account would -- but she also moves them into a realm of stories, a realm in which they are just one more story, possessed of no greater weight than any other tale.
A piece like this leaves the reader no easy answers. There's a part of us that admires Beard's honesty, but also a part that wishes that she had not written the piece at all, or at least had left her writerly persona out of it. There are times, as Czeslaw Milosz has written, when practicing literature seems like an obscenity in the face of horror. And there are times when the modern age's obsession with honesty and authenticity and confession seems the most brilliant and fatal of temptations -- as if the ever-expanding, ever-deepening self was swallowing up the world itself.