by Ed Simon
Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles.
There was a meme that circulated a few years back amongst the tweedier of the interwebs which roughly claimed that when it came to literature, great French novels are about love, the Russians focus on existence, and Americans are concerned with money. Like most jokes in that vein, the observation is more funny than perceptive, though it’s not really much of either. Regardless, there is some truth to the quip, one worth considering no more so than right now, the month that sees the centennial of that greatest American novel of upward mobility and conspicuous consumption F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” promises Fitzgerald through his narrator Nick Carraway, they “are different from you and me.” From Edith Wharton’s The Age of Mirth to Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, American literature has long focused on money, even if it’s under the guise of “freedom” (the former being a prerequisite for the later anyhow). Whether or not that’s the intrinsic, essential, integral deciding difference and definition for American letters is too sweeping a claim to make, for certainly there are Frenchmen not concerned with love and Russians of a lighter disposition, but for the four new American novels I read this month, and the single English novel concerned with class – which is just money baked for four centuries and dressed in a tuxedo and top hat – money was certainly the major topic of concern.
Sara Sligar’s deft and entertaining new novel Vantage Point, published this past January, imagines inherited wealth as the wages of a historic curse, returning to that earliest and most American of genres in the gothic. Vantage Point’s narrative is loosely based on Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, arguably the first example of the American novel and one that you’re unlikely to ever heard of unless you’re a specialist, for the simple reason that it’s more interesting than it is good. In Brockden Brown’s original, the titular Wielands are Pennsylvania gentry, cursed by the memory of their father spontaneously combusting in his library overlooking the Schuylkill as a result of his alchemical experiments, only a generation latter to be taken in by the nefarious machinations of a biloquist named Carwin.
“Something whispered that the happiness we at present enjoyed was set on mutable foundations,” writes Brockden Brown, “Death must happen to all.” That general mood of disquiet remains in Sligar’s work, along with the basic thematic concerns of Wieland, but Vantage Point is fortunately a work that you don’t need to be a specialist in early republican American literature to enjoy. Sligar has moved the setting of her Wieland family affair (though the surname remains) from just-outside Philadelphia to a bucolic Maine isle of taciturn New Englanders, and rather than the eighteenth-century her novel is set in a very contemporary moment where a postmodern Carwin tortures the family not through carefully deployed ventriloquy, but rather deep fakes and holograms.
After the tragic drowning of their parents, itself part of a long line of bizarre deaths that go back generations in the legend of the Wieland family curse, Clara and Teddy return to the ancestral estate of Vantage Point on the Atlantic coast. Teddy, the older of the two, is a Kennedyesque golden child preparing a run in the Democratic primary for the state’s Senatorial seat, while Clara has taken over the operation of the family foundation after her recovery from an eating disorder. Caught between the two siblings is Clara’s childhood best friend and Teddy’s wife, the working-class Jess. Teddy’s campaign is upended by the release of a graphic revenge porn video of his sister, recorded when she was at the height of her disorder and addictions, and which she has no memory of having been made. That campaign of harassment from an anonymous source involves ever more elaborate videos – and the aforementioned holograms – designed to drive both siblings insane. If all of that sounds a bit convoluted – and it is – that’s to be blamed more on the purple convulsions of Brockden Brown’s original than with Sligar’s modernization. Nonetheless, the conventions of Romantic-era gothic literature are difficult to transpose into literary fiction (if less so genre fiction, obviously). As a result, not all of the technical deus ex machina invented by Sligar completely work.
Regardless, the switching narration between Jess and Clara is an effective means of representing the fallibilities of memory and the sometimes-radical interpretive differences in subjective experience. Vantage Point, the turreted and mansard roofed mansion overlooking the Atlantic, is sufficiently gothic, and the periodic interjections concerning all the various members of the Wieland family who came to unpleasant ends (falling from things, into things, and in front of things) giving the novel a haunted aura. When Brockden Brown wrote his Wieland, it was partially in imitation of European models, all of those country estate tales about wealthy English aristocrats, and in the democratic eighteenth-century there was something frustratingly old fashioned about the attempt. By our current moment, where a handful of families control massive amounts of capital, we’ve fully become peasants withing a gilded aristocracy.
It’s in this regard that Vantage Point is often the most successful, for Sligar has an admirable facility in describing the feeling of having no money when you’re surrounded by people who have everything. Jess, raised by a single mother on the mainland but fortunate enough to have married into money, now resides in the titular estate with its “Formal garden, informal gardens, tennis court, swimming pool, guesthouse, stables, deep-water dock, artist’s studio, canoe shed, servant’s quarters, and a separate building for cleaning the house’s many rugs and textiles, so he wouldn’t have to smell the lye.” The tragedy of Vantage Point isn’t the so-called curse, but rather Jess’ fantasy that she could ever really belong in such a place, and Clara’s belief that she could ever really leave.
British novelist Anna Hope’s Albion, released last month, features another eponymous country-house, but the Brookes who call it home have lived in this palatial Georgian, if now underheated and at times threadbare, mansion since before Brockden Brown had ever even thought of Wieland. The curse in Albion is also the wages of inheritance. After the passing of the paterfamilias Philip, a privileged aristocrat who once hosted a 60s music festival called “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic” amongst the rolling brambles of his estate, his children argue over who shall take control of Albion. The serious eldest daughter Frannie wishes to continue the rewilding of the thousand acres, continuing the environmental activism that reunited her with her once estranged father before he died. Milo, the perennial middle-child, rather envisions the estate as being the locale for a psychedelic rehab facility where the 1% can microdose on psilocybin and mescaline, the idea to bring a bit of Burning Man to Sussex. The youngest, Issa, is a do-gooder married teacher in inner-city east London hoping to reconnect with the son of Albion’s groundskeeper. Hanging over the coming funeral for the family patriarch is the arrival of a mysterious young American woman who may or may not be his daughter from his wild years of exile in New York City.
Albion is that most English of institutions, the pastoral country house gone to seed as family money has slowly been spent over the centuries, and North’s novel is in the tradition of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day in using the stolid form of the country house with its manicured gardens and restrictive hedges as a means of examining the British class system. Behind every great fortune is a crime of course, and yet Albion – its name redolent with the mythic origins of England itself – can’t help but seem a magical place, where the ”tapestries moved all around them, the embroidery alive with heavy, laden vines, and stags.” In the fight between Frannie and Milo, both content to imagine they best know how to save the world, we see aristocrats doing what they’ve always done – imagining they understand the rest of us while turning an Eden into an Albion.
New money rather than old is the burden in Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s effusive It’s Not the End of the World, and true to the conventions of the nouvelle riche it’s best not to consider wealth while overlooking the Atlantic, but rather to move westward towards the Pacific. California has always served as a place for mythic reinvention, the opposite of Albion’s conservatism, but in It’s Not the End of the World Parks-Ramage imagines the Golden State at the moment the sunshine begins to glow less brightly (if in large part because of all the smog and the smoke from uncontrollable wildfires). Taking place twenty years into an increasingly dystopian future, Korean filmmaker Yunho Kim and his artist husband Mason are planning a hundred-thousand-dollar baby shower for their surrogate as an apocalyptic pink cloud descends on Los Angeles, turning people into feral, zombie-like murderers.
That’s just a few of the things that afflict late-late-late capitalist America, governed by an even more anti-democratic, Christian Nationalist government and riven by hideous class inequity, environmental degradation, climate change, and technological surveillance. As Margaret Atwood famously said of The Handmaid’s Tale, everything which she depicted was something based in our current predicament, and while pink smog hasn’t turned folks into zombies yet, Parks-Ramage’s depressing vision is disturbingly visceral (I haven’t even mentioned that Chris Pratt is governor of California in 2044).
It’s Not the End of the World – to be published this June – can feel over-bloated at times, the novel encompassing not just disaster fiction and dystopian fiction, but also splatter-punk, cyber-punk, and even space opera. There is a fair amount of graphic virtual reality BDSM with a werewolf avatar, but that might be an issue of individual reader taste. At times the prose comes most alive, unfortunately, with Parks-Ramage’s lyrical descriptions of eviscerated bodies, torn apart men and women, crushed organs, sputters of blood, punctured eyeballs, individuals machine-gunned from drones. Far from making this observation due to mere squeamishness, I had a sense that the author doesn’t like any of his characters very much, and not just the narcissistic Mason whose company we’re clearly not meant to enjoy. We’re treated to the “splatter of Cord’s skull. An explosion of bone and blood and tendon. Smeared onto the white tabletop. Teeth protruded from the gore like gravestones.”
I’m not quite sure what to do with the fact that the prose is its best when Parks-Ramage is the most violent and disturbing, but here we are. From the polysyndeton to the metaphor, that quoted fragment is to my mind well crafted, but when it comes to everything else in the world he’s built, Parks-Ramage seems less interested. Nonetheless, there is a core of this novel that’s utopian, or at least gestures towards a utopia, as characters begin to imagine the possibility of a different world, free from the shackles of money and the way it serves to dehumanize us, to turn humans into meat. I just wish the author had intuited a bit more of that utopianism himself.
Brian Castleberry uses California to great affect in his novel released in March that’s appropriately titled The Californians. A braided narrative that ranges across three interconnected stories among two families that made their fortune through the film industry, The Californians interrogates America through the example of its single most representative state, the place where the nation dreamt itself into being. A German-born Jewish immigrant named Klaus Aaronsohn is bewitched by celluloid while growing up on the Lower East Side, transforming himself into the faux-aristocratic Klaus von Stiegl and quickly ascending the ranks as a directory at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer in the 1920s, before squandering his opportunity by founding an independent company to film his silent masterpiece Hans and Greta, based on the fairytales of his youth.
California, to Klaus, is a place of creation both cinematic and personal, where he could present himself not as the working class laborer in his uncle’s garment factory, but rather as a “mysterious genius who had worked alongside Murnau and Pabst… a man who wore a monocle and riding pants, who carried a cane, who was given to long silences as he considered the aesthetics of this or that image before him.” Decades later, Klaus’ granddaughter Diana, who has reinvented herself as Di Stiegel, is a darling of the Downtown Manhattan arts set, a collaborator with Basquiat and Schnabel who revolutionizes painting through a combination of photorealism and expressivism. In the current day, Tobey Harlan – the grandson of the actor who played in the gritty 1960’s noir series Bracket which was directed by von Stiegl during his final comeback – plans to steal three paintings of Di Stiegl for a billionaire cryptocurrency entrepreneur.
Braided narratives that follow multiple arcs at different periods of time across the entirety of a novel can be difficult to do, but at their absolute best, as in Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, they provide an opportunity to ruminate on the changing attributes of the self, the way that a person in the past can be a different character than the figure that happens to have their same name in the present. Castleberry does a remarkable job of constructing this family epic about the dangers of creation and self-creation, and even with a large assemblage of characters across a century the reader is able to not just keep some individuals separate, but to see how they’ve changed.
Adding to the narrative conceit of The Californians are a variety of found documents, from a paperback Hollywood tell-all to an article in The New York Times Book Review, which serve to both fill in narrative details and to simultaneously complicate the story which we’re reading, forcing us us confront how so much of self-creation is based in what we don’t say as much as what we do. A fantastic prose stylist, Castleberry’s The Californians is a very American novel, interrogating empire – and the wealth which funded it – at the very moment that the nation itself is in collapse. More than that, it’s an indictment of crude American individualism, evident not just in the monocle-wearing capitalist, but in the monocle-wearing artist as well (sometimes one and the same). In The Californians, the dictates of artistic creation are perhaps sublime, but they’re just as often also incredibly selfish.
Bad Nature, the debut novel of Ariel Courage, bends its arc towards California as well, the wonderfully unlikable narrator Hestor, a wealthy lawyer, making her way west to murder her father after discovering that she’s dying from uncurable breast cancer on her fortieth birthday. Travelling from Manhattan to Death Valley, Hestor picks up a drifter named John, a vaguely-Christian environmentalist whose been photographing superfund sites across the lower 48. Westward goes the course of empire, as does Hestor, who road trips through the spires of Chicago and the flatness of Oklahoma to enact her revenge on her dad, the exact sort of selfish artist more concerned with his own career than the well-being of his family when she was a child.
Critics will compare Courage’s protagonist to those of Ottessa Moshfegh, and there are convincing reasons for that, but ultimately Hestor is her own figure. Like Sal and Nick, Huck and Finn, Hestor and John set out on the road – and the two need each other just as much as those earlier characters. Courage has crafted an incredible first-person voice in Hestor, a cynical, dejected, misanthropic and often-hateful character, but not an irredeemable one, much like the country that produced her. “I wanted hills and mountains and rivers and lakes and basins and steppes and all the webbed asphalt American had to offer,” Courage writes. “It didn’t matter if it was irradiated and filled to spilling with lead and arsenic and scorched and parched or flooded and swept away. It didn’t matter if nothing could stop it from being broken and useless and degraded.” A clear-eyed evocation of the United States right now, this cankered and dying land, there is nonetheless something regenerative in Bad Nature, the possibility – however infrequently or how sleight – that things don’t have to be the way that they are.
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Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.
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