GAHA: Babes of the Abyss is finally finished, at least, provisionally finished: I am editing the manuscript to send out to my first readers. This implies I have more readers in reserve, which is true, but we are talking 4 people here and 5 people there. And grateful I am for having them! We would need two cars to get to a reading.

The past few months I’ve been reading source materials on the southwest and California, as research for the book. During the early stages of composition I did a lot of online research, and brought many books home for the library, but it was just enough information to feed the story, I hadn’t yet done the excessive reading I love doing for a novel. I read two books, one about Crazy Horse, and one on early exploration of the southwest by Europeans, from 1500-1846. In that book there was a reference to Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession. My Confession is a memoir of fighting in the Mexican American war. Chamberlain was 16 when he ran away from his New England home and headed west. Written in the years preceding the Civil War, it recounts in rollicking detail his adventures fighting, whoring and drinking, falling in love with not a few women along the way. At the end of the war he deserts his unit and joins up briefly with the Glanton Gang, a notorious band of terrorists who killed indiscriminately for profit and pleasure, selling scalps to Mexican authorities. He barely escapes their destruction, lives briefly in California and then returns to New England, where he marries and lives out his life as a colourful and prominent man in his community. The book is source for Cormac McCarthy’s incredible Blood Meridian. My Confession lacks that book’s literary power but is instead full of humanity, romanticism and bravado.

After finishing My Confession I was going to read the massive trilogy about the fall of Hungary by Miklos Banffy, but instead found a book I’ve always wanted to read by Blaise Cendrars, Gold. Gold takes place in the same years as My Confession and is also an exaggerated true story about an outsized figure, in the case John Agustus Sutter, the Swiss ne’er-do-well who deserted his family and came to America to make his fortune. He heads out west, knocks about the Pacific coast, heads to Hawaii and Alaska and finally lands in san Francisco Bay, where he founds a dynasty on a Mexican land grant called New Helvetia. In 1848 he is on his way to being the richest man in the world when Gold is discovered on his land. The discovery of Gold destroys him, and he spends following decades trying to recover his land and rights. He never does. The story gives Cendrars and opportunity to indulge all of his interests. There are paragraph long lists of the languages Sutter learns, there is a pipe smoking dog that does tricks, and there is Sutter, strutting like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. It is Cendrars first novel, but it reads like a masterwork. Oh yes, it violates all of our country club, MFA rules of good fiction writing. Bravo. Who needs them? The rules I mean. the book is extremely short, and, I was surprised to learn very close to the ‘facts’ at least in so far as they are available online.

One of the pleasures of writing novels is doing research, especially research I will never use. It is the saturation in a place and a series of ideas and events that energizes the story. One small detail that comes from reading makes the massive amount of work worthwhile. My mother-in-law, the great novelist Mary Anderson, once remarked that she always felt sad when she realized she wasn’t researching a novel.

In my review of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square I asserted that the protagonist’s schizophrenia was a literary, not psychological diagnosis. I will admit to a certain flippancy in the comment, but I was disturbed by the diagnosis, it was not what my understanding of schizophrenia is. But it may have been close. The idea that a schizophrenic has multiple personalities went out the window with Sybil, at least and has found other windows to jump out of since. But poor old George Bone, while presented as having two personalities, can be seen as having a single personality subject to two states. That would indeed be closer to a both psychological diagnosis and the literary facts, his behaviour in the novel.

It brings up a vexed thing. I am now writing a book about people whose behaviour is clearly psychopathic. And yet I want my protagonists to feel love and guilt, two things we are assured psychopaths do not feel. Recently I listened to Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath test. It was hilarious and disturbing, yes, but even more disturbing to me because no matter how much he plays with the problem of psychiatric diagnosis, and suggests that psychopathology is a creature of a definition, he also makes a persuasive case for the reality of the personality type. So much so that Macbeth, as if we needed a psychiatrist to tell us so, is a textbook psychopath. He feels no remorse. He is a narcissist. He kills. He is hungry for power. His actions appear to himself to be inevitable. But what about Bonnie and Clyde? Are they psychopaths? Certainly. But the film can hardly suggest it because the film requires romantic outlaws. Noir anti-heroes like Walter Neff and Frank Chambers commit psychopathic acts but are not psychopathic. They have feelings of empathy. They are not crowing narcissistic con men but depressed, self-lacerating losers in love with women. My 500 year in the future LA noir required three bad people to get worse without being psychopaths. I didn’t want to write Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer on Mars. It is not going to be Hannibal Lector in the year 2525. 

Nevertheless…I find myself eliminating feelings, insights, empathetic sensations from Bob Martin’s palette. Those colours don’t belong! I see-saw between the literary diagnosis, which is standard Noir, and a more realistic psychological angle. And it leaves me wondering if the literary profile of the killer even exists in the real world.

I can recognize Macbeth as a textbook psychopath, and Shakespeare, who is credited with creating modern psychology, even inventing the psyche modern psychology analyzes (I should not say psychology but rather psychoanalysis, a huge difference), actually believed in a humoural psychology. Even as he was exploring/creating the inner depths of the modern personality his theory was based on the Renaissance synthesis of Graeco-Roman philosophy and mysteries. It included in its grasp physiology, psychology, and cosmology. Alchemy is a branch, as is astrology. Robert Burton, Shakespeare’s near-contemporary (ten years separate their births) wrote the great psychological tome of this synthesis, the Anatomy of Melancholy. And Shakespeare himself was able to dramatize differing psychologies. Brutus is a Stoic who believes in fate, that character in some sense is destiny. But Edmund, a Machiavellian bastard, laughs at such notions. For him a man is sui generis. But then, this tells us nothing of what Shakespeare actually believed. Nevertheless, the prevailing, conventional theory of the time defined character types based on bodily humours: Choleric (yellow bile, hot and dry); Melancholic (black bile, dry and cold); Phlegmatic (phlegm, cold and wet); Sanguinary (blood, hot and wet), just as surely as today authors and others will tell you that the mind is made up of id, ego and super ego, that we project, introject and repress, and that there is a phenomenon known as transference and counter-transference..

Frank Norris and Emile Zola also believed that character was destiny, and their naturalism included the popular psychology preceded Freudianism. At the same time there was literary impressionism, the stream of consciousness of Henry James or Ford Maddox Ford’s accumulation of shifting, subjective details, which were more like a pointillistic account of the mind. This is closer to our own cognitive understanding.

I find modern psychologies disturbing perhaps because they are closer to the character as destiny view, as opposed to say, character as process. There is a Calvinist edge to the idea that we inherit mental illnesses like schizophrenia and psychopathology. Schizophrenia is believed to be highly treatable whereas psychopatholgy is a throw-away-the-key illness. Yet we do believe a psychopath can be made, if not un-made.

A question: aren’t all killers psychopathic, it is just the context that changes? Does the lone contract killer actually exist, a man in total control? Joey, of Joey the Hit Man, tries to convince us it is so, but Joey is a total psychopath. He only kills for money, sure, but he feels nothing. He abides by a code, but he has little impulse control. He understands order, and order maintained by violence, but in other areas, like gambling, he is out of control. He’s the real Tony Soprano, another lovable, redeemable (almost) sociopath.

Classical tragedy, as defined by Aristotle, has this Calvinist aspect. A plot is supposed to unfold like a trap. To the extent that character and plot mirror each other, there really can’t be another outcome once the thing gets going. The big bang of plot sets the parameters. It will end in death. Death is the mother of narrative! Death creates all that precedes it.

Still, going back to Shakespeare, it is easy to see that Iago is psychopathic, purely so, and a jolly, fun character because he has the actual hero as a foil. The play is about Othello and how a man like Iago can drive a good man to destroy the one thing he loves. Much is made of his motivation, but to me Iago’s motivation is clear: he was passed over for promotion. Edmund is also a jolly psychopath. One committed psychopath can do a lot of damage, but he doesn’t bring down the kingdom, Lear does. Lear creates the context where a monster like Edmund can thrive.

I will keep my characters true to literary life. I do need and want a psychological theory behind what I do, but I’m embarrassed by Freudian and Jungian understandings at this point. I suppose my real belief about the mind and how it works is pitched somewhere in-between traditional psychoanalysis (which appeals to my romantic, literary side, and is after all a scientistic continuation of traditional arcane mysticism) and contemporary cognitive/neurological/evolutionary understandings of the mind. Both seem to leave out something essential about human beings. The former is richer, because it includes in its portrait our portrait of ourselves, as accumulated in the wisdom traditions of the world. But things, as we know, can be very different from what they appear. That’s why we don’t have a Grand Unified Theory of mind yet.

Hangover Square

By Patrick Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton is a mid-century British author who was for a period a successful novelist and playwright. By the time of his death of cirrhosis of the liver, he was neglected. He had succumbed not just to alcoholism but to bitterness brought on by the failure of Marxism to deliver a revolution, hatred of capitalism and the modern world and weariness with life. His final novels were too nihilistic for the reading public but their reputation has benefited by renewed interest. He wrote the successful plays Rope and Gaslight, both of which were made into movies. His work has also been produced for television. In his obscurity he joins (in my mind anyway) other mid-century British novelists like James Hanley, Henry Green and Anna Kavan. Like Hanley he is a realist but like Kavan he writes from the extreme viewpoint of marginal, insane, criminal and intoxicated people. 

Hangover Square is considered to be his best work. The protagonist, George Bone, is a tragic stooge, too good for the brutal exploitive world he lives in. That is, the George Bone that is connected to reality. The other George Bone experiences periodic breaks with reality, described as schizophrenic (a literary, not psychological diagnosis), what his drinking companions call his dumb moods. The break is presaged by a click, or a crack, and the novel opens with such a click:

‘Click!…Here it is again!….

‘It was a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise. It was the sound which a noise makes when it abruptly ceases; it had a temporarily deafening effect. It was as though one had blown one’s nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead.’

In the bright, feeling world of color and being George is a sad but sweet alcoholic, infatuated with Netta, a beautiful, cold-hearted drunk who plays him for money. In the twilight world of his dumb moods he is plotting her murder.

Netta seems to have crawled onto the page from the world of Zola, transferred to Earl’s Court in London and updated to the eve of World War 2. I frankly was rooting for George to kill Netta, she is so vicious. Hamilton describes her face and body as having the qualities of ‘pensiveness, grace, warmth, agility, beauty.’

‘Her thoughts, however, resembled those of a fish—something seen floating in  a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly forward to its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation.’

Netta hangs out with Peter and Mickey, two moronic, fascistic barflies. Together they mock George but tolerate him for his money. George is a bit like Obama trying to woo Republicans: every time he thinks he has a chance with Netta, every time she is nice to him, he discovers that he has been used, and falls a little farther, a little harder into self-recrimination and despair. Here he is in a cab pleading with her to treat him decently:

‘“No, Netta, listen.” He put his hand on her arm and pleaded with her. “Do listen for God’s sake. You must be human somewhere. I know I’m a fool. I know you don’t care a damn about me. But if you agree to come out with me, can’t you even be civil? You just treat me like dirt—as though I’d done something wrong. I haven’t done you any harm, Netta. The only harm I’ve done is being in love with you…” His voice began to break, and tears came into his eyes as he went on…“What’s wrong with that? You’re civil to other people. Why can’t you be civil to me? Oh, Netta, do be kind to me. I can’t go on unless you’re kind to me. It’s all getting too much. Say something civil to me, Netta. Can’t you say something civil? I’m worn out. I’ve spent what I’ve got on you—I’ve tried to please you…Can’t you be civil? Can’t you look at me and say something civil?”

‘There was a pause. He looked at her and she looked out of the window. He waited for her to speak but she did not. In the faint hope that his tears and eloquence were moving her, he went on:

‘“What have you got against me, Netta—what harm have I done? If anyone else took you out, you’d be nice enough to them, but just because it’s me you treat me like dirt. You don’t treat the others like dirt—you wouldn’t treat Peter or Mickey like this. What have I done?—That’s all I want to know. I love you, Netta—but I don’t interfere with you. I only hang about. I’m harmless, aren’t I? Aren’t I harmless?”

‘“No,” she said, still looking out of the window. “You’re not at the moment—if you want the truth.”

‘”What do you mean, Netta? What am I doing?”

‘”You’re being a bloody, insufferable bore. And the more you go on the more boring you’re being. So won’t you shut up? I’m likely to be much more civil, as you put it, if you do.”’

He resolves to quit drinking and leave London, abandoning Netta forever. He knows she uses him, he knows she despises him, but he is helpless. So he bargains. He will quit drinking. He won’t call her. He starts to feel good and thinks, why not lord it over her? One last time! Each chapter records an episode more desperate than the last. And then there are those dumb moods which come upon him.

George is not friendless, and he has some money. One friend, Bob Barton, was a partner in a wireless business venture that fell apart. He leaves George and goes to America, never to be heard of again. They have a mutual friend, Johnny, who is an accountant with a major show business agency. Johnny recognizes George in a pub one afternoon and they renew their friendship. Johnny is a decent man who treats George well, but can’t stand the scheming Netta, who is infatuated with Johnny’s boss, a theatrical agent.

George comes close to escaping Earl’s Court a number of times, and almost goes to live with Johnny, after suffering a bout of flu. While ill Johnny visits him and they form a plan to move into a flat together in another part of town. But escape is not in the cards for George, no. The reader knows, even as the hope of escape is tantalizingly close, that George will eventually crack into a dumb mood and find the opportunity to kill his tormentors.

It is hard to place Hangover Square. It reads like a hardboiled noir book in many ways. I can imagine Jim Thompson writing the story but then it would lack the subtlety and depth of Hamilton’s prose, which plumbs the minds of his characters and fits a foul world around their empty, drunken souls. James Cain might also have written it, but George is more innocent than Walter Neff or Frank Chambers, who are driven by lust and greed. Chandler’s George Bone would have been sentimentalized, Moose Malloy with golf-ball sized buttons on his coat. And Hammett would have been too cruel. He would have hated his stooge.

Hangover Square is an unflinching character study. It renders the world through the red, sleepless eyes of a ‘schizophrenic’ drunk, whose excesses lead to regret and failed resolution. Suspense builds with George’s haphazard alternation of mood and proceeds by delay as George plans and forgets the murder of Peter and Netta. Pulsing in the background is the menace of war and Fascism. Hamilton, a Communist (though never a party member), explicitly shows that the resentments and violence of Netta and her friends are fueled by Fascism and, finally, a form of Fascism itself, with its love of empty spectacle and worship of war and hatred. Netta has no real feelings at all but she is attracted to Peter because he has been to jail twice, once for killing someone in a drunk driving accident and the other for assaulting a Communist during a pro-fascist rally.

One of the pleasures of reading mid-century fiction is the absence of academic, writerly technique. These writers had not yet heard of the fatwa against adverbs. They have no problem objectifying the thoughts and feelings of their characters, or triangulating viewpoints in the free indirect method.

The book is not without a certain grim humor, but the only irony is the irony of perspective, that George sees the world through two different minds, and can’t reconcile the two, except with a golf club. I saw the end coming, I hoped it would be different, but it was a steel trap that started to close on page one. However, I won’t give away the final 6 words, which are funny indeed. Hangover Square is a nasty piece of work, relentless, sad and true.

            So I went to Tony’s. The drive was terrifying. I came down out of the hills and the entrance to the freeway was a maze of stainless steel bladed walls and blinking yellow eye censors on retractable necks. By the time I reached LA Yaanga my knuckles had fused for lack of blood and I had cracks in my teeth. Troops of either side were laying in trenches and reinforcements. The only open route between downtown and the hills was closing down as I drove.

            I stood in the parking lot under the blue light poles panting. I had not been in since the war started. Inside I stared at a cobweb stockinged girl in Dorothy punks ringing up the points just to see if I cared and I didn’t. I sat. Tony ambled over and tossed down a coaster.

            “Bob. How’s it going?”

            “Get me a whiskey and a beer and I’ll tell you.”

            “Mekong?”

            “Rye if you have it.”

            Tony raised an eyebrow and left, returning with a dusty bottle of Kentucky Rye. “I hope you have cash.”

            “Let me buy you one too. Sometimes, for no reason at all, you have to drink the good stuff.”

            Tony dusted the bottle with a damp bar mop and poured out two shots. He took the pencil out from behind his ear and bounced the eraser on the bar top, catching it between his fingers.

            “What’s it been, a year?” I asked.

            “Time in this place? Who would know,” he said, sipping the rye.

            “Ya miss me?” I laughed and downed the shot. “I’ll take another.”

            “No one’s been in,” he said. “Everyone is dead. To a child.” He shook his head and stared off. “First the Mexicans came and then the goddamn Rulers returned. Back and forth.” He pulled over a bowl of roasted pinyons. “Right outside these doors was a gallows. I live downstairs.”

            “Why didn’t they get you?”

            His eyes widened and he looked up the bar and rubbed his chin. “You know, some of us made it. I have provisions. I could stay down for days. They would clear out a barrio and move on. They were an army on the move.” He nodded and sucked his teeth and downed the shot. “Don’t get me started. It ain’t over yet. The Mexicans won’t hold this long. They’ll relieve Lord Otis. It was Ruler Tobor Ocktomann who screwed him. Why can’t they go back to the old way? It makes no fucking sense. LA Yaanga has been free for 40 years.”

            “Depends on what you mean by that, but yeah, it was better before Bard. He fucked it up with Mexico and that was it. It hasn’t been normal since.”

            “Ocktomann was live and let live. That culero prick who leads the Mexican troops–”

            “I don’t believe Proconsul Diego has any say about it. It goes to the Viceroy of Tenochtitlan. And he’s Aztlanista; he wants the Indian lands too. My mother will take Ruler over Mexican every time. Me? I don’t give a shit. I’ll tell you what, they both took it all from my people, and every Indian motherfucker who got ten bucks after that took two from us just because he could. So they can fuck themselves or not, I plan on making a living.”

            “I’ll never feel that way again. I’m with Junior now, Diego prick or not. So are the Tongva, to a person. Aztlan is my country now. Angelinos look south.”

            I had been away too long. “And what does being with Junior mean?”

            Jerry shrugged and looked at his hands, which were lying out flat on the bar. “Different things to different people.” He poured out two drinks. “These are on me.”

            “I’ve got a Ruler on my ass.”

            He craned his head around to look behind me. “You don’t look any worse for the wear.”

            “I don’t mean that. I mean is you count me in with Junior, if there’s any interest.”

            “There’s interest in Rulers.”

            “You mean like a violent interest?”

            “I don’t talk for anyone. It’s not my job. But I will kill any Ruler troop who comes in this place. And the humans who work for them are dust in my hands. I will kill them down to my dying breath. If I still had a son I’d pass it on to him and to his son. That’s what they took from me, three generations of my family. I’ll paint the walls with their blood. I’ll mount their heads on poles in the yard and leave them till the crows have pecked them clean.”

            A few days later I convinced Elma to go see the old lady. I was worried. They were moping. Morale was low, especially without the pool. Agatha gave them something to live for, which they seemed to need. And I got a house for practically nothing in return. It was a good deal and we were in the right place, out of the action. As far as I could tell, the line was holding north of Hollywood to south of Santa Monica. Going into Puvungna,or LA Yaanga was out of the question now. The frontier along the freeway, practically to Barstow was laid with razor wire bales and fire stakes. There were poison pits and roving mowers.

            We had to make our nut in Santa Monica now. The old lady was perfect.

            Life in Santa Monica went on as before. There were stores to shop from and the beach was crowded on weekends with big hats and bare butts. The street food is good too. Every time we went to Agatha’s I stopped off for a sausage and chili noodle salad at the cart on Sandero Luminoso Boulevard. Or Sa’s fish taco truck on 14th Street. Either of those I could eat at every day and not get tired.

            The old lady had indeed deteriorated beyond the state I had first seen her in. At the desk we were warned that she was not very responsive. They wheeled her in from her bedroom and we sat on the balcony overlooking the sea. She had a cup of water with ice and a straw which she would periodically grip and bring to her lips, slurping loudly. She was bent over. There were tubes in her nose for oxygen. She craned her face forward like a turtle and tried to stare at us. One eye was drifting and white but the other was intense and glaring, like the brightest star in the sky was alone in the eye. She whispered, “I hate this. Please. My lawyer.” She wheezed and lowered her head to the table. After a long time she lifted her head again and whispered, this time fixing her eye on Elma, “Dear angel. Stay. Stay. Have a drink.” This time she was able to keep her head up for a while. After another rest she said, “Irmela. Dear. How is your motorcycle?”

            Elma poured out a martini from the silver pitcher. “The onions or the olives or the twist?”

            I was about to answer when Agatha hacked. “Capers dear.” A hissing breath came out from between her teeth. “Please, don’t make me laugh.”

            “The caper,” Elma said and brought it to the table. “How will you drink this?”

            “Just throw it in my cup.” She clutched the cup and rattled it, and sucked down half the water.

            “Make mine onions,” I said, a little impatiently. I wanted a drink.

\           “I know what you want.”

            “I didn’t tell you, and you asked.”

            “But I knew then when she had the capers you would get the onions and not the twist.”

            “You just reasoned your way there?”

            “I do not know what these reasons are that you talk about.”

            “I’ll never get it fucking straight, I know, myotis, agony in my diaper.”

            The door knocked. Agatha lifted her finger and said, “Lawyer. Let him in.”

            In walked Abby Vonneniu and Dr. Oyub. Cue and cue ball.

            “Mr. Martin,” said Vonneniu. “Pleased to meet you again. You remember Dr. Oyub I presume?”

            “Agatha,” Oyub said. “Please tell me you won’t do this.”

            She hissed and shook her head. “Not die alone…please.” She was suddenly quite sicker than before. Her head went down face forward onto the table, resting on the tube protruding from her nostrils. Oyub was reduced to yelling into her ear, and she lifted one finger for yes and two for no.

            “So these are your final wishes then?” he shouted, bent forward. She raised one finger. “Do you understand what I am saying?” She raised one finger. “Is there any reason to suspect that you are insane or stupefied by illness?” She raised two fingers. “Let it be noted that she is of sound mind and body. Able to assent and dissent.” He stood upright and said to Vonneniu, “Very well. Let us proceed.”

            Vonneniu said, “In essence, because the de Marcoses predeceased Miss Kennedu, she retains ownership of the property and has the right to leave it to whomever she pleases, not being constrained by the prior will in anyway, and there being in addition no claims by descendants of the de Marcoses. Therefore the de Marcos estate now relinquishes any hold or claims on the property.” Oyub and Vonneniu shook hands and bowed slightly. Agatha raised one finger.

            Oyub, who was half a head shorter than Vonneniu, bent slightly forward and said into Agatha’s ear, “In consequence of which I move to file the last will and testament of Agatha Moar Kennedu, daughter of the Fifth Lord of Malibu and Hattie Carrol, her sole inheritance being the house at 145678459018 Topanga Canyon Spur Remote Plot 57, and the contents therein and metal and jewels sufficient for her keep; the terms of said will being modified to make Elma von Dorderer of 145678459018 Topanga Canyon Spur Remote Plot 57 the sole beneficiary of the estate. The executor shall be Dr. Tolmalok Oyub.” He looked at her ear and  wet his lips. “Are these the terms we are agreed to?”

            Agatha lifted her finger and hissed. Oyub leaned closer, as she attempted to speak while resting face down on the oxygen plug. “Hehhh” she said, and sat upright. “Yes,” her voice trembled, “Those are the terms. Huhh.” Down went the face again. She obviously had to have some strength in her. She didn’t flop forward but dropped slowly, like a leaf. Agatha was squeezing Oyub’s balls.

            “Now we have another document here, Elma, which must be signed as a condition of the will. Agatha wishes to go home, to the house the three of you now rent from her. She feels she would be more comfortable there. This is a contract between Elma von Dorderer and Agatha Moar Kennedu . Elma von Dorderer and Irmela von Dorderer agree to serve as Agatha Moar Kennedu’s private nurses. You will be allowed to continue as tenants, the three of you. Is this agreeable as a condition for becoming Miss Kennedu’s sole heir?”

            Elma looked at Irmela and they flexed nostrils slightly, and blinked. Elma said, “I can do that. I agree.”

            Irmela said, “Yeah alright. I can do this too. I love you Agatha.”

            “I think we all love her,” I said.

            Oyub said, “Without doubt.” He fixed his tie and gazed at the old lady. She was mouthing the words fuck you. “Is that it then?” Agatha raised two fingers. “What?”

            She raised her head laboriously this time and said in a frail whisper, “Proxy.”

            Oyub stifled a growl and said, “Ahem. The Proxy Document. This document appoints Elma von Dorderer medical proxy for Agatha Moar Kennedu. Agatha Moar Kennedu prefers to die at home. She wants hospice care at home. She wants moderate, not extraordinary measures to be taken in her behalf to the point of bankruptcy. What constitutes moderate and extraordinary measures is defined in schedule C of the end of life protocols manual. Do you agree to be medical proxy?”

            Elma looked at Agatha’s face carefully, her head turned slightly. “Is this what you want?”

            The old lady raised one finger emphatically, something I didn’t think could be done. But the finger shot forward from the knuckle and remained stiff and still. “Then I will do what be done.” Elma’s eyes welled up with tears and she dropped to her knees and took the old lady’s hand in her own. “I don’t know what I have done to deserve this. You don’t know what a bad person I am.” The tears coursed straight down her cheeks and her hair burned a ferocious gold. She lifted her head and said to all of us, “I will allow nothing to happen to her. In my hands she will be safe and comfortable, this I promise.” I looked at Irmela. Her face was blank. She looked like she was being fucked in a porno film. I thought, that old lady won’t make it a month. In three, four weeks she’ll die and I’ll own that house. And every inch of it legal, written and sworn to here in front of witnesses. Even with Oyub as executor. I didn’t go to law school for nothing. Elma was now my client and no gabacho puta madre lawyer in a motherfucking suit was gonna screw her out of her house and jewels. I was.

SO MUCH PRETTY 

Two things first: Cara is a friend of mine, and this review contains spoilers galore. I can’t pretend to any true objectivity then. But I will be honest, I felt some trepidation reading my friend’s book. It was not on account of her technical abilities as a writer. Our friendship is fed by a certain shared aggressive tendency, sarcasm, and the defensive postures of lifelong outsiders. But the heart of it is her power as a writer, a shared love of the language and the process of writing. So that wasn’t it at all. It was subject matter. I like all kinds of books, but I don’t read many contemporary crime novels and I prefer to read crime novels set either in the future or in noir demimondes.

Hoffman’s So Much Pretty is a crime novel set in upstate New York between the years 1993 and 2009. Upstate New York is a science fictional noir demimonde of course. Those of us who live here know Robert Kennedy wasn’t joking when he got it designated as part of Appalachia. The pathologies associated with the urban underclass are rampant in rural America, and the faces are white. AIDS, heroin, crack and meth addiction, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, Darwin Award style acts of mindless self-destruction, senseless arbitrary violence and industrial pollution are just part of the scenery. And so are obesity and self-righteous stupidity. People cling to their guns and bibles here, and also to their schnapps shots, gas leases, and ATVs.

Living in this demimonde are a significant plurality of ordinary, conservative middle class people who work in the universities and the few factories left, or utility companies. There are contractors. Lots of contractors. And a few old time farmers eking out a living on this difficult land. It’s useful sometimes to remember that the Iroquois were tough motherfuckers. Also living here are the professors who teach at these colleges and the counter culture. Radicals, crafts people, artists, intellectuals and religious nuts have been attracted to Upstate ever since Sullivan’s soldiers laid waste to the land.

This is the land of So Much Pretty, a book about the imprisonment, gang rape and murder of Wendy White, a bright, loving woman from a middle class family in Haeden, NY.

At the heart of the novel are the reporter Stacy Flynn and the brilliant child and young woman Alice Piper. Stacy Flynn is a reporter who moves to Haeden from Cleveland to work at a small puff-piece local paper. She is ambitious, in search of a big story, and she finds it when Wendy goes missing. Most people believe Wendy ran away, except for Flynn and Wendy’s family. This puts her in conflict with just about everyone, especially the former editor of the newspaper who wants her to continue reporting on pancake breakfasts, and to leave things like the ever present effluent of a factory dairy farm alone.

Alice is the child of Claire and Gene Piper, utopian radicals who move to Haeden when Alice is 2, to escape the complications and seductions of urban life and start an organic farm. The Pipers are doctors, self-absorbed and insular. On their land Alice enjoys a pastoral childhood. Her father teaches her to be an acrobat and she has the run of the farm and the barn with her friend and neighbor, Theo. Theirs is a relationship like Van and Ada’s in Nabokov’s Ada. They roam the land and play, well into adolescence, imaginative games that bewilder their peers. Despite their precocity they are not unpopular children. Alice is a star of the swim team; she is involved in the community and a brilliant student. She reads through her parent’s political library, but her take on the anarchist and radical ideas she is exposed to is shockingly different than what her parents intend. 

Wendy has taken up with Dale Haytes, whose family owns a factory dairy and are the richest people in town. The poisonous odor of the manure collect ponds pervades nearly every scene of the book. The Haytes are typical cornfed Americans, proud and obtuse. Wendy feels lucky to have fallen in love with Dale, Beverly and Jim’s oldest son. It is never made clear in the narrative whether it is Dale or his younger brother Bruce who kidnap her and keep her in a crawl space, beaten and drugged. Hoffman doesn’t dwell on this. She gives as much detail as is necessary to feel sick without exploiting Wendy’s terror.

Because it is told in a documentary style, with alternating chapters, the novel is slow to build up to what, in the middle, becomes a driving suspense story. The Pipers and the Haytes are types at first, easily identifiable. It is Wendy, Alice and Flynn who temper these types, who give them depth. Alice as she matures becomes a compelling intelligence, constantly probing her parents’ certainties. Her relationship with Theo grows as they grow and their world of Wind in the Willows accommodates their sexual feelings, which in turn become an enduring and soulful love. But Alice is a thinker, and she has a sense of logic and justice. She is not a romantic in any sense and she lacks the context of a complex world to test her ideas against. She is both morally consistent and a moral monster.

Wendy’s body is found dumped by a creek. Alice realizes then that she has been gang raped and murdered by a group of boys she knows at school. And she decides then that the only just thing to do is kill those boys, which she does, at school. She plans the murder well. Her arrest and escape end the novel. It is extremely unsettling to find myself rooting for a seventeen year old girl to murder 7 teenage boys, but Hoffman brought me to that point.

Much has been written about this novel and rage, including by Hoffman herself. I don’t find a lot of rage in the book. The characters experience hatred and rage, but the narrative itself is cool throughout. It shifts from point of view to point of view in a calm, meticulous way, laying out what is a common and unbearable tragedy both of our particular time and place and also of all time. It reminds me as much of Aeschylus and Shakespeare as it does the contemporary novel of female murder.

The book strikes an antithetical pose to our obsession with the serial killer. In America, the serial killer is denatured. We’ve turned this rare beast into our Dracula, fun and scary. I watch a show like Dexter and am sickened by it, though I accept it is entertainment: serial killer as literary device. And it works. Except that there aren’t a lot of serial killers out there, and those that are didn’t have loving step-fathers who taught them only to do what Alice Piper does, murder the guilty.

And even if I am rooting for Alice, Alice’s mother does not. Cara Hoffman might have been rooting for her, but her book does not.

If serial killers are rare, the killers of women are not. So Much Pretty makes the case, as Hoffman does in her interviews and blog pieces, that sexual assaults and murders of women, especially by men who know them, are common and unremarkable. Serial Killers are glamorous. Men who imprison women, rape and murder them live next door, and down the street, and the next street over. I didn’t really need or want a book to tell me this, and I expected that to be a flaw, but Hoffman doesn’t tell us this. She constructs, from life, an exciting, compelling crime drama that doesn’t infest itself with the sadism of the crime but rather creates a realistic social context for it, in the literary tradition of Dos Passos. Then all the power of her art is devoted to the narrative that unfolds with the horrifying inevitability of Oedipus Rex. And that art is considerable. For every sentence doesn’t burn with indignation but rather with the heat and glow of English molded to its purpose and lovingly burnished by a woman who knows the craft of writing is alchemy.

By Henry Green

INTERVIEWER
When you begin to write something, do you begin with a certain character in mind, or rather with a certain situation in mind?
GREEN
Situation every time.
INTERVIEWER
Is that necessarily the opening situation—or perhaps you could give me an example; what was the basic situation, as it occurred to you, for Loving?
GREEN
I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.

The Paris Review

LOVING, by Henry Green, made a bunch of Top 100 Novels of the 20^th Century lists. And like Dawn Powell, Green has had a champion in John Updike. Many other authors have praised him. I found PARTY GOING to be unbearable, but I loved NOTHING, a book about an impoverished aristocrat man and woman tending to their children’s lives after the war, from a discreet distance. It makes a brittle but true comedy of reticence, and with high artfulness actually conveys the full range of human emotion and concern through ironic dialogue that says, well, pretty much nothing. It is apparent by the end that these two former lovers’ children might be half-brother and sister. What they are conspiring to do then is prevent an incestuous marriage without tipping their children off. Incest, avoiding scandal, indirection, changing status. These are the hunting grounds of the traditional novel, which Green explores with the tools of the twentieth century modernist. Green is an experimental writer. His novels alienate readers, despite their simplicity. Like Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Mann his writing is marked by style, he is pushing at language and all of the formal qualities of the novel. Unlike them his style is minimal. Green is the grand reductionist of the modern period. He does not, like Beckett, go in for grotesque phantasmagoria. Green’s world is ordinary, and the grotesque is suggested, hinted at. The absurd is everywhere concealed by the pitter-pat of conversation, meals, disagreements. His people are ordinary people, closely observed. But his method is highly artificial.

LOVING is his masterpiece, by all accounts. I have come to expect, from Green, a cockeyed use of dialogue and oblique perspective to render in fine detail a slight situation. The pleasure is in reading the unpunctuated but marked pauses and hesitations in the way people talk, their avoidance of saying anything direct, and his ability to convey the intention of what is said as if by magic. I do not think of him as a descriptive or poetic writer in any sense, and almost, as a writer who is not even careful. Yet clearly anyone who writes sentences as strange and free of articles as he does has to intend each syllable. These sentences have been worked over to appear to be the half-heard utterances of people on the tube or at the nearby table. So one of the genuine pleasures of LOVING is the occasional stunning paragraph of description:

“Raunce’s Albert, Edith, Kate, the little girls, and Mrs. Welch’s lad chose for their picnic a place just off the beach. While those children ran screaming down to where great rollers diminished to fans of milk new from the udder upon pressed sand, Albert laid himself under a hedge all over which red fuchsia bells swung without a note in the wind the sure travelling sea brought with its heavy swell. He could watch the light blue heave between their donkey Peter’s legs, and his ears were crowded with the thunder of the ocean.”

 LOVING takes place during World War Two in an English-owned, Irish country estate, a castle. It is told entirely from the point of view of the servants. Charlie Raunce is a Machiavellian butler who, at the novels beginning, succeeds to his position when the old and beloved butler dies. What follows is a love story, with gossip, about the doings of the servants. Charlie is in love with the housekeeper Edith. Edith’s younger housekeeper friend Kate is in love with O’Conor, the sole Irish servant, whom no one but she can understand. The cook pads the food bill to buy gin. Charlie finds the old butler’s secret books itemizing tips and various low level embezzlements. The cook’s nephew is up from England, causing havoc among the 200 peacocks. The owners are Mrs. Tenant, a widow, and her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Jack, whose husband is at war, and who is caught in bed by Edith with a neighbor. The servants are all English and wish to return to England but are afraid of being conscripted, and of the blitz. They also fear for their families left behind. Fear is a constant in the book. They are afraid of the IRA and of Ireland allowing Germany to attack England from its shores. And Mrs. Tenant is afraid of hiring Irish servants, so despite her suspicions of her household feels she can’t afford to lose anyone. And Mrs. Jack, who was discovered naked in bed with a man not her husband, is afraid the servants will tell her mother-in-law, rendering every conversation between them hilarious and awkward as the unstated seems to hover on each of their lips.

There is in all this the strong taste of decline. The castle is mostly shut up. There is only the one visitor, the man whom Mrs. Jack is having an affair with. They are in exile from England and from the past, though all are conscious of the tradition of service, and the importance of maintaining it as security against the chaos and violence of the outside world. In this sense the castle is a prison, and, also, with the beauty of spring, and the wandering peacocks and the flocks of doves in the dovecote, a magic castle in bent pastoral. And the love story, between Raunce and Edith, which develops gently throughout, is genuine. The constant irony that snaps at its heals never overcomes it. The humor of the book is deeply human, and subtly woven into every sentence.

A genuinely eccentric, individual style and purpose in the novel is rare, especially so now. Green did not need to make money from fiction, he owned a factory and came from an aristocratic background. He refused to participate in the literary life of his day, though he understood perfectly well what people were up to. His novels didn’t sell well and were ignored or disparaged by readers and critics, except for a few here an there. The Terry Southern Paris Review interview is marvelous. There is also a review article from the New Criterion (I know, fuck them, but it was a good article!). Writers like Green give me hope as a writer. Not much else does.

Jim Krusoe’s first novel Iceland was a devastating nightmare told in a beguiling and simple prose that promises, at the outset, to be an ironic, poppy story of obsession. It begins when the hapless hero discovers a beautiful woman swimming naked in a pool. They have sex of course, but the whole scene is rendered in such detail and color that despite any resistance, I at least shared the protagonist’s agony when the woman disappears. He spends the rest of the book searching for her, and his search does indeed lead him to an ice cave in Iceland. There is nothing in its beginning to hint at its conclusion. Each turn in the search ratchets up the frustration. The balance between the creeping sinister under current and chatty surface of his prose is maintained up until the final scene, when death engulfs all that has preceded. Iceland was perfect book.

Not so Girl Factory, though it is an enjoyable entertainment. Girl Factory begins when Jonathan, another hapless hero, frees a vicious, chess playing dog from the pound. He has mistaken it for a super dog he has read about in the paper and the animal immediately murders a child and escapes. This is just the first of several inadvertent murders. In this it resembles typical noir, though there is nothing hardboiled about Krusoe’s writing.

Jonathan works at a frozen yogurt shop in a strip mall, Mister Twisty. He is a directionless, vapid loser, a wounded romantic living in an apartment complex. Shortly after the botched dog rescue he discovers that his boss, Spinner, has a secret: in the basement of the store are women, preserved in glass tanks of acidophilus:

“…a tall cylinder with a sort of burnished metal cap and a shiny metal base, out of which stuck four silver fins, strangely like those of the V-2 rockets that fell on London in newsreels from the Second World War. Or, to use a more modern analogy, it resembled a seven-foot-tall version of one of those fancy Italian espresso boilers you sometimes see in trendy coffee bars, hissing and wheezing out phlegmy portions of java. Between the base and the cap were six feet of cloudy glass, or possibly Plexiglas…

“….there was a flicker behind the glass, and slowly the faint glow brightened to reveal the form of a young and actual and completely naked woman.

“The woman was blonde and somewhere in her twenties, I guessed, her pale hair floating like strands of egg whites in the mysterious fluid that surrounded her, her blue eyes open wide and slightly crossed, her nose straight and thin, her breasts white and symmetrical, her knees knocked, her feet slender, with bluish veins running along their tops down to her toes like mountain streams pouring out of a glacier.”

One of them resembles Jonathan’s first girlfriend. He becomes obsessed with these women, and when Spinner is murdered by assassins, and his widow Gertrude hands the operation over to Jonathan (so she can grieve with her new support group, Spouses Without Spouses), he sets about trying to revive them. It doesn’t go well. The spiral heads down.

Krusoe is a comic writer. His books are experimental in the sense that they tug and play with conventional narrative, and at no time is the mystery serious, at least, the ostensible mystery of the plot. Again, as with Iceland, there is a sinister undercurrent. The deaths are real, and feel real. But the details of plot and character, the locale, the various shop owners, friends, neighbors that inhabit these books are loving parodies. Krusoe’s knives are not deployed against the novel, but against the illusions of certainty obsession brings to life. He plays with fictional convention like a cat with string. Jonathan has a neighbor, an old man, who pointlessly waters the bushes and lawn outside of the apartment complex. Jonathan on two occasions has extended conversations with him before going to work. For some reason, despite the fact that the hose and water are soaking his shoes, socks and feet, he cannot move but must recall, in some detail, his two disastrous relationships with women. Krusoe airs the device, points to it, laughs at it, but uses it. He can’t indulge this little piece of novelistic stage business without comment, but he is not hostile to it, he has no narrative ax to grind. Krusoe is a poet, so I assume some of this is the poet’s exasperation with the minimal demands of narrative structure. He is saying, ‘All right, I’ll do this, even though it’s stupid,’ but it is not a tedious, or tendentious and immature stance.

What is missing from Girl Factory in the end is the depth and despair of Iceland. Maybe if I didn’t expect this of Girl Factory I’d be a little more enthusiastic. But every novel doesn’t have to be an unanticipated journey into hell. Girl Factory is certainly an unresolved mystery, with hellish dimensions. It is an intelligent, entertaining tale told by an unreliable idiot. Its pleasures though are not those of sneering at the idiot, but rather of identity. Jonathan is, in his limited way, trying to engage his own shallowness, but can find no purchase around him to do so. Perspective in this case is impossible, as all the other characters are shallow idiots as well, and of course, they live in the capital of shallow idiocy, which would be California, USA.

          I knew Junior would be pissed, but I didn’t know how pissed. I didn’t sleep, I sat with a bowl of cocaine and the girls in the living room until the Priest showed up around ten one morning with contracts for the Air Stream deal to sign. The morning sun was shining up Irmela’s skirt. She wasn’t wearing underwear. It looked like her pubic hair was glowing in the dark. She was reading Thomas Mann in German. The Priest nodded at them and sat down on an ottoman.

          “So where the fuck you been?” he asked. “I thought we were working.”

          I couldn’t reply. There was no brain left, just snarls of fear. “What.”

          “Contracts. For the caterer, for the water truck, the cleaning company. I thought we were going to check the space out.”

          I had forgotten that. “Where is it anyway?”

          “In the Mojave.”

          “No, where?”

          “Lake Havasu. About six hours east of Barstow, near Needles.” He was giving me the Priest eye now, the one that thinks it knows, which it did. He knew my mother lived outside of Barstow.

          “Alright so we’ll go see her,” I said.

          He smiled and patted my knee. “It’ll do you good my son.”

          That night we drove up to my mother’s, over the mountains and through the desert. I knew the turns, I’d been taking them for 20 years. The headlights played across the dirt and stars smothered the sky. The girls dozed in back under a blanket. They wouldn’t be needing that during the day.

          “I can’t see at night anymore,” The Priest said, flicking ash out the window. I drove between the ruts of truck tires, which were just wide enough for the car, unless the side had caved in. Then I would lose the front tires to the wash and start to slide on the rocks and gravel. When that happens it’s a race against spinning wheels and bull dust to get back on the road again.

          The Priest, after a long silence said, “Well I heard about David. Did you think no one would notice?”

          “I don’t know what people notice, but they gossip like old ladies. What did Junior say?”

          “I don’t know what you hoped to gain by it.”

          I never thought Junior wouldn’t find out. I don’t remember thinking at all. There was something about Irmela I couldn’t shake.  She was hard not to look at and when she was away it was worse. The only way to stop seeing her constantly was to have her right in front of me.

          The real Irmela was nothing but complications that never seemed to end. It was like every little thing got sucked up into her story. But it wasn’t a straight story, it was a crazy one. Like her hair. I got to know all about Irmela’s hair. Every time it grew more than an inch she would panic and we would rush out to the store. We would get to the hair dye aisle and she would say, “What did I get last time?” and she would puzzle it over and gaze at me as if I knew. She would grab at the ends of her hair and try to look at it. “I don’t see the same colour. I think it was henna something. Henna Gold.” And whatever color she happened to be looking at, she would grab. Back home she’d run into the bathroom and dump it on her head. Then would come the shriek, the tragic shriek of pain when the two colors didn’t match and another layer was born.

          I watched them sleep in the rearview mirror, Elma against the door, Irmela’s head on her shoulder. “What is it about him and this guy? Fuck me, man. Fuck Him. David.” I shook my head. “Piece of shit. It was self defense. I’ve got witnesses.”

          “Uh huh. It’s a nice night. I like the desert air.”

          “It’s all right. Better than Long Beach. At least up here you can breathe at night.”

          “If you don’t die in the day.”

          “My mother, she’d live through a nuclear bomb.”

          We approached Barstow as the sun was rising and drove into long purple shadows towards trailers and mud domes glowing in the first morning light. Elma cleared her throat and Irmela sat upright in the rearview. The blanket fell away into her lap. “Are we there yet?” she asked.

          “It’s not far ahead.”

          Her trailer was on a block of half acre lots. Mail boxes stuck in the thorns with a dirt drive up. The lots on either side were empty, and across the way was a mud dome with two shacks and a goat pen. The air was still. We walked up to the door and I knocked and tried to see in through the porthole, where a light was on. Irmela and Elma looked back and forth at the desert and laughed. I guess the land was dropping the occasional Austrian joke.

          “Coming,” my mother said through the intercom, her face ballooning in the monitor.

          “That’s your mother?” Irmela asked.

          “She’s very beautiful,” Elma said.

          My mother is a lot of things, and beautiful ain’t one of them.

          “Your seeing into her soul,” the Priest said.

          “Give me a fucking break,” I said. “She’s OK for living out here in this shit hole. The water truck comes once a month. You don’t want to be here on the 28th.” The door opened. “Mom.” I hugged her.

          She said, “What are you, in trouble?” She laughed and gave me one of her big hugs and a kiss. “You lucked out, son, I just got done fixing some scones. I musta knowed you was comin.” She clapped her hands on either side of my cheek and we crowded down the spiral stairs into her living room. It was a dome chiseled out of rock and lined with adobe, painted to look like it was late in the day. It had a cool, minerally smell. There was a low stone table with a couch on one side and two chairs. The Priest and the girls sat on the couch and I took a chair. She brought in a plate stacked with scones and a crock of lard. “Now, the Priest I know, but who are your other friends, Bob?”

          “Elma, and Irmela. Should I get the coffee?” I asked.

          “No, it’s already on, it just it has to perc.” My mother was 53. One shoulder was humped and her knuckles were like knobs and her fingers were twisted like busted twine from carrying buckets and digging hard earth with a pick axe and hoe. She was missing her bottom front teeth and a couple of molars. Her hair short, and it was still black. She had a strong face, sun baked and wrinkled like an elephant.

          The smell of coffee was in the air. She put on her glasses and stood. “I’ve got powdered milk, but the coffee’s real. That new man down the way brings it in on his mules.” She brought the coffee and things in on a tray and set them on the table.

          Elma laughed. “What is mules?”

          My mother said, “Why honey, that’s the offspring of a horse and a donkey. It’s a sterile hybrid.” She poured the coffee out and passed the mugs around.

          Irmela took hers and said, “The mules is lucky,” and Elma glared at her.

          My mother sat down and crossed her feet out in front of her. “I don’t suppose I ever thought the mule was lucky. They beat the hell out of donkeys, they say. Me, I never owned no horse. or no mule or no donkey.” She shook her head. “Imagine a horse tied up in Long Beach.”

          “I’ve seen it,” I said. “Lots of horses in and out of there.”

          “Only since the Mexicans came. We drove trucks.”

          “We? They ran you out.”

          “They all run me out one time or another.” The coffee was good. “So what brings you out here?”

          “We’ve got a job.”

          “What kind of a job?” She looked Elma and Irmela over pretty hard.

          “There’s this underground Air Stream Trailer site Junior wants to throw a party in,” I explained. “He’s going to call it Silver Trailer Slipstream. It’s in Lake Havasu.”

          “Priest? What’s he talking about?”

          The Priest explained, “Air Stream Trailers are made of chrome steel. They’re shinier than silver, that’s all. They’re parked in underground chambers and the guests will wander from trailer to trailer. Each trailer will have a different activity.”

          My mother snorted. “I’ll bet. How do you girls fit in? Let’s have it, I know what goes on.”

          “Don’t sweat it mom,” I said. “They’re with me.”

          “So where are you from then? It ain’t LA.”

          Elma said, “We are Austrians.”

          Irmela said, “They’re lucky because they can’t fuck and make children. It ends with them.”

          My mother said, “What you bring into the world ain’t yours.”

          “It’s like I said,” I said, “it’s some Junior thing.”

          She sucked her teeth and shook her head. “You ain’t got no choice about that, son.”

          “Duh,” I said.

          She chuckled, and said, “Ain’t you saying duh to me.”

          “Can I show them the tunnels?” I asked.

          “Alright, let’s go.” We put on head lamps and walked in a stoop down a long stone tube and into a large chamber. Off of this were four more short spurs with terminal chambers. None of them were furnished and some were unlit, but they were all vented, and there were hatches to the surface. The headlamps played off of our faces and the walls. There were flashes of Irmela and then of Elma, as if I were blinking them in and out of being with my eyes, like Jeanie.

          We left around noon. The walk to the car was dangerous. It was 69 degrees and getting hotter. You can feel your brain boiling at those temperatures. My mother smiled and waved from the door as we drove off. The car was cooler than outside but not much and the air conditioning was slow. We started to sweat. By the time we got to the park the car stank and we were fighting. It had been a six hour drive over Route 66, a dirt track in the Mojave. We blew two tires and were driving on autofill. The girls were useless, and even the Priest cursed god when the third one went.

          “You bastard,” he cried, pulling off the road onto the shoulder, which was just the decaying bank of dirt left on the side of the track when the grader last went through. “I sometimes think God is a fucking lizard.”

          Irmela said, “In some places they believe he is a microbe.”

          “I’d like to know where that is,” the Priest said. He climbed out of the car. We all joined him. The sun burned the earth. There wasn’t even a buzzard in the sky. I suppose we might have lain out there dead for six hours before anything came along to eat us, except maybe ants. “Man hasn’t worshipped a grasshopper in 3 million years,” said the Priest as he rummaged around the trunk. “Here,” he said to Elma, handing her a flash poncho. “It will keep you cooler.”

          Her face looked like it was going to ignite. Her eyes were dry and red. Elma said, “She makes things up.”

          The Priest handed Irmela one. “No,” she said, indignant, not even wilting a little, but vigorous, as if she were hydrated by the sun. “I read this in a magazine about Mars. They have these there too.” She unrolled her flash poncho and fastened it around her neck. It looked like a foil burka.

          “Don’t I get one?” I asked. It was hard to see with sun goggles on.

          “No one said anything about Mars,” the Priest said. He stuck his head deep into the trunk. Stuff moved around. Out in the desert the light blasted the color out of things. It was a pale expanse of creosote and stone, the road cutting through it into the hills.

           Flies crawled around on my face. My nose hurt from breathing. “What the fuck,” I asked.

          “Calm down,” he said. There was a gargling noise in the bowels of the car and then a rhythmic shudder shook its rear end. “Ah!” He removed his head and faced us. “Fixed.” The flat tire started to hiss and slowly inflate. “We’re lucky it’s not a tear. Let’s go.”

          There was a mule cart with a mule team tied up in a corral and a composite entrance pod with pole electronics. Spaced every few feet in the desert were low bell vents turning together like a bunch of egg beaters. We got out.

          “What’s this?” Irmela asked.

          “The installation site,” the Priest said. “Bob, you can see now what a pain in the ass this will be? This is the one entrance. There are a couple of hatches, but nothing with a lift or even decent stairs.”

          “Whatever the fuck,” I said. The entrance was wide enough for two abreast, and there was a landing where you could stage to load the lift. “I don’t see how Junior is going to get a thousand people down that hole, I don’t care how wide a spread it is under ground.”

          We came out about five flights down. Spread out for acres was a fleet of Air Stream Trailers, shining and glinting in the light of naked incandescent bulbs hanging by a wire between each one. The pattern repeated in all directions, for as far as I could see, except for the door to the lift.

          “Where do we go?” I asked.

          “I don’t really know,” the Priest said. He headed into it, maybe three trailers, and we followed him. When I turned around it was as if the space had closed in behind us. In every direction now it looked exactly the same, there was no in or out.

          The Priest laid out the floor plan on the kitchen table of one of the trailers and we got to work plotting out where things would go. We thought of it like tents in a carnival. There were food trailers, sex trailers, gambling trailers, drug trailers. There would be an animal trailer, and of course, several bathroom trailers, bathing trailers, shopping trailers, trailers for mirrors, bravado trailers and sadness trailers. Trailers for music and trailers for silent prayer. By the time we were done there so many trailers, so we knew how many staff we’d need. The vendors, the water, the ice, the food, the animals, the prostitutes, the casino, the sanitation, all were arranged for, with deliveries beginning two nights before and continuing 24 hour hours a day until it was done.

          “Let’s get out of here,” I said, when we had finished.

          “This is quite a budget,” the Priest said. “Biggest ever.”

          “I’m glad it’s not our nut that’s in it, cause I think it could blow.”

          “It might could do, it might could do.”

          Elma said, “Are you going to talk business all day?      We have not had any fun yet. You said it would be fun.”

          “That’s just what you say when you’re going to go and do business and you want a woman to come along. You say it will be fun. You say you won’t be long.”

          “I hate when you look at me like that and use that tone of voice,” Elma said.

          “If you were me you’d hate him all the time then, and you wouldn’t fuck him at all,” Irmela said.

          “Why, so you could?” I asked.

          Elma looked at me strangely and said, “You are the first stupid man I have ever been with. I keep thinking that you are pretending.”

          “Yeah, so you see right through me. So let’s go out for dinner.”

          “I won’t eat rattlesnake.”

          Irmela said, “Rattlesnake. I haven’t seen anything juicier than a biting ant.”

          “We saw that dead rat thing,” Elma said.

          The Priest led the way through the maze. “How do you know your way out of here?” I asked. “And don’t fucking tell me god leads you.”

          “What do you take me for, a heretic? I know where I stand with God, and it’s not here. The trailers all look different. But you know, there aren’t so many of them. They just put in holographic mirror mazes.”

          “They have those in Amsterdam. This whole place is very Amsterdam,” Irmela said.

          We took the lift up to the corral. The Air Stream Trailer room had been cool the way only deep rock can be cool. Cool radiated off the walls and the low ceiling. And the trailers reflected cool. But the entranceway was suffocating. I gagged going in it.  Not only had the sun been roasting it but people had added their gas to the walls over the years and it smelled of vaporizing sweat and alcohol. It was almost a relief to walk out into the dry air, until I was blinded by the sun and blowing dust. I didn’t see the cars. I didn’t see Junior standing right there in sun goggles with gila monster boots, a blast vest and hat, so he looked like the tin man.

          “Bob,” he said. The air cleared around him. Jorge was standing there with a baseball bat.

          “Junior.” I started to shake.

          “I warned you off them.”

          “I didn’t know you got to do that,” I said. “I thought who I ran with on my off hours was my own business.”

          “I’ve got a lot of busniesses you don’t know about. Like David’s business was my business.”

          “Am I supposed to know that?”

          “You were told, it was clear.”

          “You don’t know what that guy was doing.”

          “I showed you what that guy was doing. You and me, we’re done. Now get out of here. You don’t work for me anymore.” He turned away and got into the car. Jorge smiled and bounced the bat on his palms.

          “How are the flies treating you my friend? The conechichihualli?”

          “Not bad, culero.”

          “Jorge,” yelled Junior from the back seat. “Let’s go.”

          I was expecting to be shot. Getting fired didn’t seem so bad. What I was losing was his protection. I was an outlaw. There’d be no past between us from now on.  Wherever our paths crossed, there’d be no heart in it. There was only business now.    

          “Well,” the Priest said. “What now?” 

          “Whatever the fuck,” I said. “Won’t someone think of something?” I laughed. “Let’s get high in the car.”

          “At last,” Elma said. “I thought it would never end.”

          “Oh, it just ended,” the Priest said. We got in the car. “We can’t blow too many more tires.” He started up and I passed around a warm bottle of gin. “Do you have anything to smoke?” I asked.

          Irmela said, “Give me your KreteK. I have hash and opium all mixed up.”

          “Who’d you blow for that?”

          “No one. I played pinball. I don’t have to give blow job to make money.”

          “Well that’s a good thing,” I said. “Cause we’re going to have to go out and make some money.” I handed her the pouch of Kretek and she made cigarettes with opium and hashish.

          “What do you mean?” Elma said. “I thought you were a lawyer, a real estate guy. You always have money.”

          “Yeah well I always had work. See, a guy like me doesn’t save anything. I live on my earnings. We do. You gotta help bring it in. But I wouldn’t put you out to work like that greasy-headed dick David.”

          Irmela said, “You have a chip on your shoulder.”

          “Aw come on now, can we just fucking focus for a minute here? We just got fired. That’s what that was. So let’s get our asses going. We gotta pack up the house.”

          Elma said, “You’re going to lose your house?”

          “Who said it was my house?”

          The Priest rumbled into a laugh.

          Irmela said, “You said it was yours. Why would we not think it was yours?”

          “Gee I don’t know why. Maybe because I wouldn’t believe what anyone told me about themselves? Like when you said you were from Montreal.”

          “We didn’t say that.”

          “Well, whatever. The fuck. Azerbaiijan. I don’t even know where that is. It might as well be Mars. Jerusalem.”

          “You lied,” Elma said, pronouncing her verdict to her shoe. The roof of the car started to thunder as the road deteriorated. Gravel washed beneath us. The front grill sucked in the dirt cloud and dust started to come in through the vents.

          “Of course,” Irmela said. “But he did help us with David.”

          “Yeah, I didn’t have to do that. And look where it landed me. You should feel bad about that. It’s all your fault. You’re why I’m here!”

          “So get rid of us,” Irmela said.

          “Yeah I just tried that. Didn’t work out did it?”

          “When do we have to leave? Where will we go?” Elma asked.

          “It depends on how much money we have. It ain’t exactly a rental. It’s more like a borrow, until the owners come back or it sells, see? I just live in the place in between. With Junior against us, it won’t last. I own a pod on Goyaałé St., in Puvungna.”

          “Puvungna? Where is that?”

          “Long Beach. It’s tight.”

          They nodded and stared out the window. No one talked for several hours. The Priest said, “If it’s money we need I think I know a way.”

          “What,” I said. “Your insurance scheme?”

          “What if it is?” he asked. “So what. It will work. I have the patsy, all I need is the girl.”

          Elma said, “I knew this would happen. Every man is a pimp, the priest most of all, because he whores the virgin mary.” She spit.

          The Priest’s voice dropped. “There’s a man, a sailor in the charity hospital. They’re treating him for TB and AIDS. He won’t last long. I believe if we paid him, he’d marry someone. We tell him it’s a marriage for papers. You guys are Austrian. It’s perfect. We  take out a life insurance policy on him. He makes you the beneficiary. When he dies, we split the pay out.”

          “I don’t know,” I said. It was a shade too close for me. But these were desperate times. “I mean, who’s gonna insure a guy like that?”

          “That’s just it. I know the doctor’s schedules. He’s in The Gallows, I work with them when they have need of an extra knife. I’m clean.” He held up his hand to display the clean nails. It trembled. “I’ll sit in the doctor’s office while he’s at lunch and you bring the sailer in. His name is Detreuil.”

          “So you examine Detreuil, sign off that he’s healthy. What happens when he dies? The cause of death, TB or whatever, that’s gonna show up. No adjuster’s gonna buy that. He’ll know the doctor was in on it with the wife.”

          “Don’t worry, when he goes I’ll be there. They don’t want to care for these cases. They’re happy if I do. The cause of death will be acute pneumonia. Then he goes to the incinerator.”

          “And who writes the policy? Does Detreuil have to sign?”

          “Of course you’ll write the policy.”

          “Not with Junior.”

          “So we go to Tijuana and take out a policy there. Or San Francisco.”

          Elma said, “I would have to marry him?”

          “That’s the idea,” I said.

          She looked out the window and we drove on silence.

GYULA KRUDY: SUNFLOWER

SUNFLOWER is a novel of deep nostalgia, written in 1918 by the great Hungarian novelist, journalist and storyteller Gyula Krudy. Set in the Magyar homeland, it narrates in long meandering dreamlike passages a year in the life of its heroine, Eveline. Eveline lives in a divided world, that of cosmopolitan Budapest and the country estate she has inherited. The novel begins when her would-be lover Kalman, a city rake, robs money from her bedroom while she sleeps and escapes through the garden. It is an intensely erotic scene, and eroticism suffuses every syllable of this book. Gyula is obsessed with women, with women’s bodies, with the smell of women, and he is obsessed with language. The two are intertwined with the Hungarian countryside such that each appears to be the reflection of the other and the three sinuously wind their way through the readers mind.

Eveline decides to remain at her country estate and not return to the city. She is in love with two men, Kalman and a local aristocrat, a relative, Almos-Dreamer. Her friend from the city, Miss Maszkeradi, joins her. Miss Maszkeradi is a sarcastic, cynical young city woman who sleeps with whomever she pleases. But the binary invoked here is not that of virgin and whore so much as cosmopolitan and country aristocrat. This is Eveline’s dilemma, whether to remain on the land of her ancestors, with Almos-Dreamer, or the city, with Kalman and Maszkeradi. There follows not a story so much as a series of imaginary and pastoral flights of surreal language invoking the erotic life of this vanishing province. (After World War 1, when this book was written, Hungary would be dismembered, and this division, this amputation, would fuel Hungarian politics through the coming decades, into the holocaust). A local reprobate, Pistoli Falstaff, attempts to seduce Maszkeradi, and falls in love with Eveline. The novel follows Pistoli for a long while, and narrates the genealogy of Eveline and Almos-Dreamer. It descends into bardo consciousness. The sentences pulse along, drifting like pollen on a breeze.

SUNFLOWER is of course decadent and perverse. Here is a Mr. Burman, one of the many lovers of Eveline’s great eponymous ancestor:

Mr. Burman never, not once, let on what an awful lot he knew about the clandestine amulets on necklaces concealed under women’s garments. For his afternoon naps at home his head reposed on a silken cushion stuffed with female hair, curls that women bestow only on especially favored lovers; he had also collected in his apartment such mementos, such as ladies’ shoes, forgotten petticoats, unforgettable hosiery, shifts, handkerchiefs, and hat feathers….

Krudy was born in the region where the novel is set, Nyiregyhaza. He lived in Budapest, where, like Pistoli, he was a compulsive drinker, womanizer and gambler. But his imagination is engaged by the home of his childhood, not the city that provided him with his livelihood. He is compared to Joseph Roth, but other than both being gamblers and drunks, they seem to me to have little in common. Both invoke Central Europe before The Fall, both are subject to nostalgia and sentimentality, but the world of Joseph Roth is harder, and the narration one of inevitable decline without solution. Krudy simply suspends time and enters the past through a vivid, sexual imagination. His drunkards are not the weak dissolution of a complicated but true aristocratic tradition; they are rather the symbol of that world’s vigour and refusal to knuckle under to hypocrisy. The violence and arbitrariness of that world are not so much ignored as seen at a distance, for his perspective is always that of the seducer or the seduced, and the love triangle, the adulterous affair, the seduction of a young maid by a decrepit, freebooting liar, the cuckolding of old men, and the acquiescence of old men to gout, decay and cuckoldry are is his subject, as well as the changing seasons. It reminds me other hermetic worlds, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, of course, but also Georges Bernanos’ hellish world of peasants in Mouchette. Mouchette is a tragedy and its heroine a martyr. The sexual current of her life is rape, lies, cruelty and abuse. Yet Bernanos’ also imagines an elementary pastoral setting, while hewing to the harrowing facts of Mouchette’s world of despair, a world without mercy or love. Another hermetic, sexual pastoral, Rikki Ducornet’s The Stain, more surreal, seems to take place in contiguous territory. I am also reminded of Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, for Nyiregyhaza is also at times a land of the dead. Ghosts and memories drift freely in and out of the minds of the characters. But the novel is devoid of Rulfo’s politics. Sunflower, unlike these other books, is a comedy.