Ten Years in the Tub (66 page)

I've been waiting to see how Jess Walter followed up last year's brilliant
Citizen Vince
, although I wish I'd had to wait a little longer—not because I thought his new book needed the extra time and care, but because he's not playing the game. Yes, it's perfectly possible to write a book every year—all you need to do is write five hundred words a day (less than a quarter of the length of this column) for about eight months. This, however, would only leave four months of the year for holidays, watching the World Cup, messing about on the internet, judging book prizes in exotic locales, and so on. So most authors keep to a much more leisurely schedule of a book every two or three years, while at the same time managing to give the impression to publishers that books are somehow bubbling away inside them, and that any attempt to force the pace of the bubbling process would be disastrous. It's a system that works well, provided that people like Walter don't work too hard. If the various writers' unions had any real teeth, he'd be getting a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

It doesn't help that
The Zero
is a dazzlingly ambitious novel, a sort of
Manchurian Candidate
-style satire of post-9/11 paranoia. Brian Remy is a policeman involved in the clear-up of an enormous structure that has been destroyed in some sort of horrific terrorist attack. To his bewilderment, he's taken off this job and put to work on an undercover counter-terrorist organization, a job he never fully understands—partly because the task itself is dizzyingly incomprehensible, and partly because Remy suffers from blackouts, or slippages out of consciousness, which means that he wakes up in the middle of scenes with no real awareness of how he got there, or what he's supposed to be doing.

This condition is a gift, for both writer and reader—we're as compelled and as thrillingly disoriented as he is—but where Walter really scores is in the marriage of form and content. Has there ever been a more confusing time in our recent history? You didn't have to be Brian Remy to feel that life immediately post 9/11 seemed to consist of discrete moments that refused to cohere into an unbroken narrative. And there were (and are still) pretty rich pickings for paranoiacs, too. Remy keeps stumbling into huge aircraft hangars filled with people poring over bits of charred paper, and one recognizes both the otherworldliness and plausibility of these scenes simultaneously. A couple of
books ago, Walter was writing (very good) genre thrillers; now there's no telling where he's going to end up. I don't intend to miss a single step of his journey.

Last month I read nothing much at all, because of the World Cup, and this month I read a ton of stuff. I am usually able to convince myself that televised sport can provide everything literature offers and more, but my faith in my theory has been shaken a little by this control experiment. Who in the World Cup was offering the sophisticated, acutely observed analysis of the parent-child relationship to be found Alison Bechdel's extraordinary graphic novel
Fun Home
, for example? You could make an argument for Ghana, I suppose, in the earlier rounds, or Italy in the knock-out stages. But let's face it, your argument would be gibberish, and whoever you were arguing with would laugh at you.

Fun Home
has had an enormous amount of praise ladled on it already, and those of us who love graphic novels will regret slightly the overt literariness of Bechdel's lovely book (there are riffs on Wilde, and
The Portrait of A Lady
, and Joyce)—not because it's unenjoyable or pretentious or unjustified, but because it is likely to encourage those who were previously dismissive of the form to decide that it is, after all, capable of intelligence. Never mind. We'll ignore them.
Fun Home
is still as good as the very best graphic novels, although it's a graphic memoir, rather than a novel, and as such can stand comparison with
The Liars' Club
or
This Boy's Life
or any of the best ones. Bechdel grew up in a fun(eral) home, and had a father who struggled with his homosexuality throughout his life, and despite these singularities, she has written (and drawn) a book whose truth is instantly recognizable to anyone who's ever had a complication in their youth or young adulthood. It's rich, and detailed, and clever even without the literary references.

Fun Home
is, I think, a great book, yet someone, somewhere, won't like it, and will say so somewhere. If you want to do some “straight talking,” do it about the environment, or choose some other subject where there's a demonstrable truth; Elizabeth Kolbert knows that there's enough hot air as it is.

April 2007

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece
—Jan Stuart

     
  
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City
—Jonathan Mahler

     
  
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
—James Shapiro

     
  
Essays
—George Orwell

     
  
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
—Michael Lewis

     
  
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer
—James L. Swanson

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece
—Jan Stuart