Reality Hunger (60 page)

My view of the book is that, staging itself as an anthropology of the 1960s, it’s mainly interested in using that theater as a way to get at the endless American dilemma—dream of self v. dream of community. Emerson v. Thoreau. Freud v. Marx. (Freud and Emerson win in a landslide.) Which couldn’t be more germane to the current horror show—fanaticism in the putative service of justice. Virtually every character is locked into his or her own, somewhat rigid definition of the just and true, but the book isn’t; the book is as nimble-footed as it could
possibly be, and so page by page it’s showing us the way to nothing less than intellectual and psychic and emotional freedom (not happiness, but freedom). You’re brave in your willingness to believe—let your characters believe—in a variety of religions and then patiently dismantle each of these hope havens (nevertheless acknowledging their necessity). The ending is perfect, in that way—illusions overthrown, but somehow the living live on.

There’s no higher praise in my lexicon than to call something an essay, an
essai
, an attempt at understanding, and each of the ~74 sections reads as a dramatized essay about illusion (subset America). There are different kinds of fiction by which people maintain order—marriage, drink, law, money, the web—and what the book does is pit Tom (Sawyer?), (Huck?) Finn, and Chick against this civilizing order. They know that each world one invents is an illusion, whereas the people on the opposite side of the waxwings think the illusion they’re inhabiting is somehow “reality.” I’m making the book sound more allegorical than it is, but it constantly rhymes stranger/danger with land of illusion; that’s its braiding action: American society encourages (requires?) each person to specialize in the insane rhetoric of niche marketing, which that person then thinks is the world. This is the opening book in one trilogy, but it also closes another trilogy, and I see this book in close relation to
Bad Land
and
Passage to Juneau
. In
Bad Land
, they and you discover that paradise is dust. In
Passage
, you study chaos theory, only to realize your life has its own riptides. In
Waxwings
, all life on land seems to be a constant whirlpool, an illusion-making machine, and the characters the book sympathizes with know this, revel in this.

All season long, the Red Sox had the rational calculation (via Bill James) of bullpen by committee, then in the eighth inning of game seven, Grady Little went with pure instinct: go with the godhead. This may seem like a bit of a stretch, and a painful one at that, but to me that’s what the book is about—two different kinds of memory: rational memory and instinctive memory, and the way one (sex instinct) of necessity overrides the other. Many of the reviews emphasized how this is a delightful novel about a H’wood childhood, etc., but in my reading, you’re using this memory machine only as a way to get at how every self is split (cf., for instance, how part 2 is a clear rereading of part 1), how every image can be flipped, and especially how celebrity iconography plays into that. The photo at the very beginning and the photo at the very end beautifully evoke the inhuman perfection of the house, the quite human disquiet on the boys’ faces. You’re relentless in what you’re willing to get to about the relation between sexuality and maternity, sex and imagination, e.g., the amazing visit to whorehouse and porn film therein. All of which is to say that I think of this book as (not to put too fine or famous a point on it) your
Tempest
—your meditation on the simultaneity of creation/destruction in the remembering imagination and your extraordinarily serious grappling with the psychic sources/sores of that imagination.

I see the movement of the poems as a working out of the narcissist dilemma. The speaker moves from American narcissism to universal luck. The book feels so lived-in and hard-won. I love your willingness to be wrong, dumb, blind, embarrassing.

The target of Melanie Thernstrom’s
The Dead Girl
is, I think, an interesting one: the dead girl is her friend but also, of course, herself;
Investigation into the Death of Logan
is an investigation into the death of many things, not least of which is your own psyche. One of the great passages is when we learn that your sister has two children, one brother has two children, and you and Donald don’t have children. With the death of the father, the world seems to stop for these two sons, especially you. The book beautifully interweaves fiction and nonfiction, history and memoir; all the categories have gotten emptied out, as how could they not be when the authority figure of the father has been erased? Even the fact that there’s relatively little of your own writing per se (and instead mainly quotation) is interesting; it’s as if you can’t assume author/ity role in absence of your father. I really admire your willingness to talk about the violence within yourself and within your family: it’s a military family, drawn to war history and to the invention of gun-related gizmos. The book is a detective story on at least three levels: first, it’s quite suspenseful as to what happened to your father (was he the victim of friendly fire or was he murdered by Vietcong or did he commit suicide?); second, the interior drama of the state of the family, especially you and how you’re coping or not coping with all this information, all this knowledge; third, it’s a meditation, I think, on knowledge itself. I’m making this all sound rather arty and dry, but the book has tremendous courage, great honesty, vulnerability, power. I feel like I finally got to know “you”: you unveil yourself layer by layer. A while ago the imaginative thing—the supposedly great thing—would have been to write a “novel about Vietnam,” but I just feel in my bones how little I could read that. Now the great thing, the courageous thing, is this—this weird
memoir as history/history as memoir, this laying oneself open as an historical text, this reading of history as a wound to the self.

The title starts out meaning “I’m doing well,” then it comes to mean “Well, I’m not sure how I’m doing,” and then by the end of the book it comes to mean “I’m at the bottom of the fucking well, as is everyone.” That’s why “It was wonderful how cool people could be” is such a brutal last line: the book has demonstrated exactly the opposite. I think of each of the separate stories here as stanzas in one long tone poem, a lyric meditation on the doomed human animal. In the first story, “someone had been fouled,” and while referring nominally to the game, it really refers to “fouling” in the sense of fouling your own body and in a more cosmic sense the feeling that there’s a deep metaphysical foul that can’t get made up. The book is trapped in an endless feedback loop—this is related to the addictions of sex and drugs and belief—and it has the effect of making everything feel extremely echoic: sounds and tones and themes constantly recur. You relentlessly investigate the ways in which people posit a belief in something and the way that belief crashes, self-destructively, but also because it’s just the nature of things. People invest in, say, a game, a body (your own or someone else’s), a drug, and this hope always turns to nothing, or at least it never delivers the drug the way you thought it would. The high changes or becomes a low or fucks you up in a way you hadn’t counted on. An example of this is the wonderful moment when for once someone actually gets what he wants—scores the winning basket—but it gets called off because it’s after the buzzer. It’s endless, this not getting what you want.

I think without a doubt it’s your best book—your most ambitious and synoptic. I could, I fear, write a long essay concerning the very conflicted feelings that the book engendered in me. I find that I love arguing with it and, true to my fashion, tend to question my arguments. I want to put up a quasi—chamber of commerce defense of Seattle v. your definition of it as Loserville, but I suspect that I need to believe in this simply as a way to convince myself that I’m living somewhere that has freed up rather than stunted my work. Nevertheless, I think of Seattle as the capital of conventional ambition foresworn and, in its place, a deeper, stranger, more powerful ambition substituted (q.v. that essay of yours many years ago about the BBC film crew not getting Seattle, in which you explained how Seattle presents to outsiders a façade of Sleepytown USA in order to keep the world at bay as it goes about creating successes according to its own, more idiosyncratic and exacting standards). A crucial line is about Brewster as “East-Coastern, trite.” So much of East Coast groupthink is, in my experience, hopelessly truistic; what Seattle represents to me is separation from that, quirky rejection of the status quo. At its worst, this translates into people who don’t have a clue; at its best, it’s James Acord. As someone who grew up in California and moved here from New York, I’m probably doubly guilty of imposing my imported vision of Seattle. If Seattle is locus only of ambition abandoned, then why is nearly every chapter devoted to someone who managed to succeed, and succeed gigantically—Cobain, Gates, Bezos, Schultz, McCaw, et al.? Your book has a beautiful thesis that makes extraordinary sense of 150 years, but in so doing, doesn’t it exaggerate somewhat? E.g., didn’t Curt Warner just fumble? Certainly he didn’t “willfully” fumble. And this is where the
big break comes for me: that “willfully” is very much
your
“willfully.” It really is a love story: your willed, “self-pitying” version of Seattle. It’s not meant to be literal or accurate in a strictly sociological sense; it’s meant to be true to what you need to be true—best read as a deeply personal document of a narrator’s obsessive love for a city in private, subjective, and metaphorical terms.