The literature of empire keeps floating up from the verges of the British Commonwealth like buoys marking some drowned leviathan. It’s writing that plays on two counterpoised registers: the nostalgia of the native for the pre-colonial land, and the nostalgia of the colonizer for the mother country. From the former, the writer draws enveloping fantasies; from the latter, an elegant melancholy. You can see these forces at work in the novels of Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey and V.S. Naipaul, and you can see them, too, in Wayne Johnston’s new novel, “The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.”
Johnston is a Newfoundlander. Newfoundland — or, as one of Johnston’s characters calls it, perhaps more appropriately, Old Lost Land — is the oldest British colony, a hardscrabble island that for centuries was subject, as the book makes quite clear, to the idiocy of various crown schemes. It’s as much a character in the novel as India is in “Midnight’s Children,” and to invest it with this status, the author needs a figure commensurate with the history of the place. By using Joe Smallwood, a historical personage, as his narrator, he finds a way of weaving a dreamlike course between fact and fiction.
Smallwood, who led Newfoundland into the Canadian Confederation in 1949, was to Newfoundland what Huey Long was to Louisiana: a power-happy populist and a local legend. He came from a family famous in the area for making boots. A black boot-shaped sign inscribed with the word “Smallwood” hung from a cliff in the harbor of St. Johns, the capital, where he was born. As his father, a windy drunk, is wont to point out during the first hundred pages (which constitute a virtuoso treatment of the family’s downshifting circumstances), this is a boot on the neck of the family’s dignity.
Johnston intersperses Smallwood’s story with the journals and sardonic jottings of one Sheilagh Fielding, a sort of Newfoundland version of Dorothy Parker — acerbic, unhappy in love, ungainly, affecting a silver-headed cane as though she were an Edwardian dandy. Smallwood, on the other hand, is preternaturally little and light: a mere 95 pounds at the age of 25. Their respective heights suggest a familiar literary couple, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; but Fielding and Smallwood, one feels, should couple in the carnal sense. The dark comedy of the book is that they don’t. Frozen by pride, each avoids the wound to self-esteem that fucking would risk.
Johnston has packed this novel with so many brilliant set pieces that in the end they drain the energy out of the plot — something that doesn’t matter as much as you might think. This is one of those books you read to be wrapped in its landscape and its weather: the multiply indented coastline, the perpetually inclement North, the “land-oblivious, sea-generated wind.” In archetypal terms, a book is an island, too, a piece broken from the continent, apart from the main; its readers are enthralled castaways, searchers for footprints in the sand. New found land, indeed.
Stephen Dixon has done something very difficult in his career — he has mastered the voice of worry. This novelist has been devoted, from the very beginning, to the perfecting of one narrator, a male oversoul of the postwar American generation. His name in “Frog” was Howard Tetch. In “Interstate” he was Nathan Frey. Lately, in Dixon’s last novel, “Gould,” and in his newest one, “30,” he’s Gould Bookbinder, a writer, with two daughters, originally from New York and now teaching at some unnamed college. Sometimes Gould is plunged in grief, occasionally he is out of his head, and sometimes he is even happy, but as surely as the gnat is accompanied by its hum, Gould’s internal voice is accompanied by a periphery of nagging. His relationships to women are couched in terms of this — he can’t seem to approach the topic of sex without an awful tone of begging seeping in. We’ve heard this voice before, in comedians like Woody Allen, but the anger in that voice — the violence just held back — is always defused in comedy, enlisted in the invariable, detumescent arc of the routine. Here it is the whole world, and one feels the menace of its resentments and the fierce, guilty bliss of its affections.
Dixon’s reputation has suffered from the continuing affection of the literary establishment for what is taken to be the authentic American voice. It is the old hickory voice that first comes out of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales” and tells us, as D.H. Lawrence observed, that “I am alone, a stoic, a killer.” Old hickory still speaks in Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, and after its infinite filtration through popular culture, is slyly parodied by Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon. But this voice has no place for women, other than as scolding Aunt Pollys — from whom our men must save their balls in some utter flight to the territories — or as sexual oppressors, Sister Carries who leave their men sucked dry; night battles with these are the staple of Miller and Mailer. Dixon simply detours around that whole complex. Gould’s relationship with his mother, and with his daughters, is as important to his existence as fucking his girlfriends; nor are any of these things subsumed to some central romance. Gould has more moods than randy. Which means that the full prism of gender relations is on display here. Dixon is an exception to the perpetual adolescence American male writers tend to foist off on their characters, and his voice sounds odd partly because it never falls into the usual tough guy strain — not even in “Interstate,” which deals with murder in a horrifically convincing fashion.
The “30″ of the title refers to the number of chapters in Dixon’s book. The chapters aren’t marshaled into the outline of one event, and they aren’t even chronologically coherent. They are related by a voice at one remove from Gould, in that quirky version of free, indirect discourse Dixon has made his own. The chapters have odd names like “Eyes,” “Ends” and “Shortcut,” giving them the air of entries culled from some naturalist’s journal, as if this book were field notes on Gould’s psyche.
The focus of each entry is Gould’s take on a memory or an experience. One’s idea of what is important in the standard story has to bow to that focus. In “The Wash” (a sub-story within ” Ends”), for example, Gould is doing his laundry in the basement of his apartment building in New York. This is a perfect Dixon setting, since it involves repetitive action and a host of those little urban events and traits he loves to depict: the collecting of change, the habits of elevators, the proximity of strangers. As Gould goes down to put his clothes in the drier he meets a woman. In the same casual tone in which Dixon has told us about Gould collecting his quarters, he informs us “they get engaged, married, have a child.”
In other words, they did what we usually read novels to find out about. But in this story Dixon is more interested in Gould’s laundry habits, so he tells us these other things only to mention, briefly, that they bought a washer and drier, and then he goes back to Gould in his apartment building, finding out that he doesn’t have enough quarters to do the drying, meaning he’ll have to go up the elevator to his room and get the quarters, unless, as he briefly thinks, he can borrow the quarters from somebody who has already finished his drying.
This is plain weird, but the style is how we know this is Stephen Dixon writing.
Here’s the beginning of one of the first entries, “Popovers:”
A girl … a young woman … a college student or someone of that age — when he was in college they were “coeds,” or maybe by then they were no longer called that, but even if they went to an all-girls school? — comes over to their table and says, “The seater didn’t give you menus?” and his older daughter says no and she says, “I’m sorry, I’ll get them in a flash — nobody make a movie,” the last in a movie tough guy voice … This is writing that has come out in its undershirt. Aren’t all those dashes, that puzzle over what to call the damn waitress, and the limp punch line, things that the writer goes through in the first draft? Sometimes it seems Dixon has deliberately chosen just the style that would drive the well-meaning reader away at first glance. Even when one sympathetically, and then admiringly, wades into the book, there are times when this refusal to settle on objects, description or even thought seems like a challenge, as if Dixon were gauging how much the reader can take. Add a penchant for paragraphs that go on for pages and a focus on the homiest details of domestic life — Gould’s wife Sally’s degenerative disease that confines her to a wheelchair, his oldest daughter’s proneness to accidents when she was 4, Gould’s sneaking lust (a focus given ugly rein in the “Popover” chapter and in other chapters exposed to the wintry light of Dixon’s resolve to hold nothing back) — and Dixon seems like the last writer one would recommend.
I do, however, recommend that you read him. Indeed, go out and get “Frog,” all 700 pages or so of it, and read that. OK. I know. All those pages. Read that eventually, is what I’m saying.
My last observation is a little flighty, perhaps, but I will put it before you for what it’s worth. I’ve pointed out that the 30 stories in Dixon’s latest novel are joined together in what looks like a random sequence. The real chronological sequence within which Gould Bookbinder physically exists is at some distance from his mental life. Since worry is the dominant trait of Gould’s mind, it must bring with it a certain attitude toward time. In worry, the present is always too late, and the future is always too early. Time, in other words, is experienced primarily in terms of superlatives. (Of course, the worrier worries about that, since the worrier has a vague impression that there is some neutral time, some chronological time, with which he is out of synch.) Worry, the clichi goes, ages people. But absolute worry, ironically, frees one from age because no issue is ever resolved.
Dixon’s ploy of shuffling these chapters so that one thing does not necessarily precede another is animated, perhaps, by this dim insight into Gould’s thinking. It pays off in “The Place,” the final subchapter in “Ends.” Gould is shown breaking through the compulsion of mood to actually touch that moment in which time does assume its grand neutral flow, regardless of the tasks by which Gould measures it. That moment possesses a grave beauty of a high order. It is here that we feel Dixon’s risky stylistic gambit edge us into that serenity for which we wait, in art, and which is, after all, the only reward for our long patience.
“Bone by Bone” completes Peter Matthiessen’s Everglades trilogy. In the first novel, “Killing Mr. Watson,” we meet Edgar J. Watson, a shrewd and gentlemanly businessman whose sugar cane plantation produces the best syrup in Florida. Watson can tolerate and produce violence of a level even more intense than the pretty high level his Everglades neighbors can live with. He blames his overseer when the mangled bodies of two of his workers are discovered near his plantation, but in the end everybody believes Watson ordered the killings, and in the year 1910 his neighbors finally gun him down.
The story is mulled over again, like a recurring nightmare, in the second installment of the trilogy, “Lost Man’s River,” this time in the form of an investigation of the events mounted 50 years later by one of Watson’s sons. The “what’s that sound in the dark” spookiness of the first book is a little displaced here by the proliferation of plot lines. “Bone by Bone,” the new and final novel, comes at the story for the first time from Watson’s point of view. Unfortunately, the hard-bitten vernacular of “Killing Mr. Watson” finds no equivalent in Watson’s own account. He writes in the style of an educated Southerner of his day, an orotund rhetoric derived (as Mark Twain pointed out in “Life on the Mississippi”) from reading Walter Scott; only his dangerousness rescues his circumlocutions from coming across as mealy-mouthed. But his language never has the artless plaintiveness of the first book.
Right off the bat something makes us stumble over the narrator’s “I,” since the success of the preceding books depends largely on our seeing Watson externally. But Matthiessen gradually disarms our objections. He takes us back to Edgar’s childhood, showing a boy caught between his father’s beatings and his mother’s hysterical provocation of them. The brutality gives rise to Edgar’s alter ego, Jack Watson — the J. of Edgar J. This Jack is the side of Watson that at 13 gets the hickory stick out of his pa’s hand and thrashes him to within an inch of his life. Later, Jack plays 19th century schizoid to Edgar’s ambitious bourgeois.
Since, as readers of the previous books, we know the story, the novel sometimes seems to be trudging through old business, and when it isn’t — particularly in the middle parts, with Watson going to Arkansas and then escaping from jail there and returning to Florida — it often seems to be piling up events for their own sake. But the latter half shifts back toward the eerie energy of the first book. One of the cool, scary things about “Killing Mr. Watson” was not knowing whether Watson was as bad as his neighbors painted him. Hearing the story from Watson himself, we know pretty much what he did and didn’t do. Yet Matthiessen has Watson tell enough lies to keep us off balance.
The tougher task, at which Matthiessen succeeds intermittently, is showing Watson’s inability to make sense of himself, so that what we know never completely trumps what we suspect. The book’s final episode finds him so bewildered that he can no longer distinguish what he’s willed from what he hasn’t. As he leaves his place for the last time, on his way to his fateful encounter with his neighbors, he kills a doe, intending to eat it; but “the flesh smell seeped into my sinuses, and after that, I could not get the taint of it out of my lungs.” That image applies to the whole trilogy: The taint lingers after it’s done.
