Giving up in America
Peter Ackroyd
Earthly Possessions Anne Tyler (Chatto and Windus £4.50) Amateurs Donald Barthelme (Routledge and Kegan Paul £3.95) Two Ravens Cecelia Holland (Gollancz £3.95) An American comedy group, the Firesign Theatre, have invented a game-show called Give It Up! in which contestants exchange items of enormous personal value in return for a cash prize; for a chance to be locked inside the Whirlwind Silver Dollar Tunnel, they must give up their four family cars, their grandparents and even their rich friends. It would be a difficult choice for any of us, and Anne Tyler's new novel confirms just how acute that difficulty can become. The earthly possessions of the title belong, in a troublesome sort of way, to Charlotte Emory. She has a house, a husband, two children, and she dreams continually of leaving them all behind, Then it happens, the fantasy takes on an unpleasantly human form: at the beginning of the novel she is kidnapped by a bank-robber, Jake Simms, and begins a long flight across America.
With the present, denuded state of the realistic novel, this sense of the narratoras-victim (of circumstances, of some brutal act or even, in the last resort, of the novelist) is inevitable. In Earthly Possessions, for instance, it means that Charlotte can stay a marginal, wraith-like figure and that the possessions themselves — that world of external objects in which she has to live and move — are thrown into much sharper relief. The novel is dominated by meaningless signs and objects (the visored hats of drum majorettes, tins of Old Dutch Cleanser, badges which say 'Keep on Truckin'), and by the objects which people turn themselves into as they, too, become each other's possessions.
In a world which has become shallow and repetitive to the point of seeming mechanical, people assume the roles of objects as a form of camouflage. Charlotte, in fact, has adopted her father's profession as the town photographer, and her neighbours pass before her in a variety of absurd poses: 'A hoodlum type, really, but in his pictures, with that light on his cheekbones and Grandpa Emory's fake brass sword at his hip, he took on a fine-edged, princely appearance that surprised me every time. He wasn't surprised, though. He would study his proofs the next day with a smile of recognition, as if he'd always known he could look this way. He would purchase every pose and leave, whistling.' The pathos of this is considerable, and it can be infinitely extended. Jake and Charlotte are pictured together on the bank's hidden cameras, in some kind of dramatic tableau. It means that Jake will never really be able to escape, however fast he runs.
Almost everyone in the book is trying, in one way or other, to run, to step over the limits as though they didn't exist — to leave the planet. But this freedom is not real. Earthly Possessions is dominated by images of confinement: Charlotte's husband, Saul, is a preacher who wears his religion like a shroud; Jake has stolen money to save his baby from being born in prison, and he too wants to break free: 'But I was just so anxious to get going, you see. Just so desperate to leave'; Charlotte feels nervous in enclosed spaces, which means that she has been edgy all of her life. But the world hangs on to them; possessions, even photographs of themselves, bind them to the earth: 'They were keeping me here forever, all the long, slow days of my life.' And if you think this sounds novelistic — the writing, after all, is assured and lyrical — you have caught the one false note in the book.
There are, in fact, two tones in the book and not even the most astute juggler could keep them both in the air at once. The novel is at its best when it evokes a world which is like a hollow replica of itself, when it is alien and mysterious, sending out signals which cannot be deciphered. But then there is a novelistic and realistic tone which transforms what is really hallucination into a number of wry, entertaining stories — calming the narrative down, making it softer and less precarious. It might have been reassuring fifty years, but that air of sophisticated realism has now lost its naturalness and has become somewhat thin. It has also become derivative.
And so Earthly Possessions becomes a much less interesting novel when it describes Charlotte's relentlessly eccentric family life, when it deals with Charlotte's mother dying of cancer, and when Jake's pregnant girl-friend joins the fugitives in the role of little girl lost. At these points it takes on the spirit, and sometimes the content, of a thousand film scripts. It also means that Anne Tyler, by diluting the force of her inspiration which was original and strange, leaves the book inconclusive and unsatisfying. On the one side there is a strange and recalcitrant America, full of signs and signals which are puzzlingly opaque — and then, on the other, there is a narrative which proceeds easily from a violent opening to a peaceful conclusion. But that isn't good enough, at is best ErirthlyPossessions is a clear evocation of an external world which is full of objects and rituals that stifle the human will. At its worst it is just another well-written, elegant and vaguely pessimistic New Yorker story.
The same restlessness, or ambiguity, of tone invades the work of Donald Barthelme. I have written critically of his last book, The Dead Father, and so it comes as something of a relief to note that Amateurs — a collection of short stories (and some of them very short indeed) —marks an increase in his powers of invention and observation. Barthelme is essentially a mimic; he can copy the tone of the most recent development in the 'avant-garde' just as skilfully as the lowest Texan demotic. But when there is a cacophony of sounds and styles, as there is now in America, it is very easy to retreat into a gnomic elegance which reveals very little.
Here, in Amateurs, one story adopts the mannerisms of a board-meeting where the 'minutes' become elongated and harsh; in another story, Bathelme cuts up the order of two different narratives so that they face each other in some kind of unspoken cotnmentary; and then in a third he takes off on a flight of metaphors which encircle 'the end of the mechanical age'. Ever since I read Basil Willey and came across the expression 'as the century wore on', I have always treated historical generalities as a joke. Donald Barthelme makes fun of them, too, and this can bring out the best in his writing. Some of the stories in this book are very funny indeed, and many of them are skilfully executed. But the final effect is like that of drinking a low-caloric beverage: it's fun while it lasts, but it doesn't last very long.
These problems of tone, on which many American writers are now wrecked, never intrude too much into the work of historical novelists. In a sense, they are the last of the realists. The ground is fully prepared for them: it is only in historical fiction that both 'characters' and 'story' can spring fully armed into the narrative. Cecelia Holland is one of the most interesting historical novelists, and at her best she has a perceptiveness and an imaginative flair which resemble that of Thomas Kenneally. Only Americans and Australians, it seems, have any real sense of European history. In Two Ravens she carries on with her incursions into the Dark Ages as Bjarni, an Icelander, crosses the sea to England and the court of William Rufus. The adventures are conventional enough, but the strength of Cecelia Holland's rather abrupt and unsettling prose is to keep the narrative moving at all costs. In a sense she is tonedeaf because she is so certain of her medium and its potential effects; her prose is straightforward since its main purpose is to recreate — in an imaginative and not in a conventionally fanciful way — the daily life of eleventh century England. In a sense this effort of recreation is the device of all realistic fiction, but it is only in the work of Cecelia Holland and a few others that it still remains valid.
Previous page
