Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This was our selection this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. We originally thought that this was the 40th anniversary of the book, but it turns out it was published in 1984, so technically 41 instead.
Two of our attendees (including one of our founders) had read this book decades ago, and wanted to see how it held up.
My personal opinion on that is that, while the cultural references seem dated (as all cultural references will eventually), there is a surprising amount of stuff in this book that not only has held up, but seems prescient today.
The writing style of the book is also a bit of its time, a certain snarky, snide, ironic posture. The narrator, Jack, a professor of Hitler Studies at a fictional midwestern university, flirts with self-awareness and emotional revelation, yet also pulls back, hides, and seeks safety in denial.
The form of the novel also is fascinating. It is in three parts of unequal length, with each part having a particular flavor and form.
The first is made up of very short chapters, mostly setting the stage as far as the characters and the themes go.
The second is the toxic disaster. That part is a single chapter, essentially a long-take that goes from the first to the last of the disaster, evacuation, and the aftermath.
It is also notable to me that the first part feels very disjointed: each character is alone, meeting only briefly for interactions. In contrast, everyone in the family is stuck in the same car and later shelter together. The feeling is continuity and unity.
The final part, the longest, explores both the aftermath of the toxic leak, particularly Jack’s belief that he is developing cancer, and his quest to track down what is going on with Babette, and to deal with that.
There are, in my view, three central occurrences in the book, all interconnected. The first, and the one which runs from beginning to end, is Jack’s existential crisis - a midlife crisis that manifests in a near-crippling fear of death, rather than, say a new sports car or mistress.
The second, which is the most external, is a railway accident which releases a plume of toxic chemicals. The family has to evacuate, and Jack is exposed to the toxin when he refuels the car.
The third is the question of what is causing the personality and memory changes to Babette, Jack’s wife. (Probably wife? Or just partner? The book hedges a bit.) What is going on with her?
The book covers a decent bit of intellectual ground, from a satire of academia to a look at domestic life in a very blended family. (Jack and Babette have a combined seven children from previous marriages, four of which live with them.) There is also plenty of musing on mortality, fear of death, religion and its absence, media sensationalism, and a lot more.
I should probably warn about spoilers here, even if spoiling a 40-year-old book is a bit difficult.
The ending is pretty crazy, somewhat unexpected, although in retrospect, there are specific moments that set the ending up.
While covering the entire breadth of our book club discussion is impossible - as usual, we had a great conversation about the book and its themes - I’ll try to at least cover the stuff I saw in it. If you live in the Bakersfield area and are looking for a club to join, check us out on Facebook and drop us a line. We welcome thoughtful people who love books, although not everyone finishes the books we discuss. It’s okay. Come and hang out and eat.
One of the first things I noticed early in the book, after a little smile at the ubiquitous station wagons - this was, after all, even before minivans, let alone SUVs and crossovers - was the way the book assumes the normalcy of middle-aged people who are neither skinny nor movie-star beautiful, and also assumes that they still find each other sexually desirable.
Neither Jack nor Babette is going to end up on a magazine cover….except in their professional capacities perhaps. But that’s okay, and the way the book handles sex (mostly non-graphically) is pleasantly normal. (I’d also add that nothing in this book would come close to winning a Bad Sex Writing award. And the reason is that DeLillo isn’t writing his fantasies, just normal human experience.)
The first intimation of Jack’s fear of death comes in one of Jack’s lectures on Hitler.
“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.”
There are moments in the book of real humor, often unexpected. One of them comes during a subplot where a pair of elderly siblings who Babette reads to get lost at a mall. They are eventually found, no thanks to the psychic the police consult. (She does inadvertently lead them to a handgun and heroin, though.) The fun of this is a certain line at the end of the chapter.
The police had consulted Adele T. on a number of occasions and she had led them to two bludgeoned bodies, a Syrian in a refrigerator, and a cache of marked bills totalling six hundred thousand dollars, although in each instance, the report concluded, the police had been looking for something else.
Any time the faculty hang out in the lounge and talk is a recipe for comedy. I thought this particular one, at the expense of my native state, was pretty good.
“The flow is constant,” Alfonse said. “Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
There is another cultural comment that is actually quite perceptive and prescient. It is definitely a thing, particularly in MAGA circles, to treat cities with fear and loathing for everything from the myth of out-of-control crime to cultural diversity.
It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns.
In many ways, that too is something that fundamentalist religion inculcates: the idea of the purity of the small town (which is bullshit on a stick - small town politics are the worst) and the inherent sinfulness of the city. Later in the book, after the toxic disaster, Jack follows up on the idea.
But over a period of time it became possible to interpret such things as signs of a deep-reaching isolation we were beginning to feel. There was no large city with a vaster torment we might use to see our own dilemma in some soothing perspective. No large city to blame for our sense of victimization. No city to hate and fear. No megacenter to absorb our woe, to distract us from our unremitting sense of time - time as the agent of our particular ruin, our chromosome breaks, hysterically multiplying tissue.
I do believe this is a factor in why MAGA is the way it is. Their own sense of decay, the way that urbanization has hollowed out so many small towns, the cultural stagnation of white middle America, is projected onto the city. Without that, they would have to stare into the void.
There is another hilarious passage where Babette reads the tabloid headlines. One of them seems like it could be a real one from the Trump Era - substitute him for the Japanese.
“A Japanese consortium will buy Air Force One and turn it into a luxury flying condominium with midair refueling privileges and air-to-surface missile capability.”
So many of the scenes in this book are weird one-offs that serve the themes, but not necessarily the plot. For example, the one where Jack and his weird professor buddy Murray (who is obsessed with Elvis) who have evacuated and are hanging around at the evacuation center, and having existential discussions. They run across a group of prostitute - hey, everyone has to evacuate - and a bizarre conversation happens, where they try to proposition Murray, who really just wants to talk philosophy. Afterward, Jack is curious.
“It’s none of my business,” I said, “but what is it she’s willing to do with you for twenty-five dollars?”
“The Heimlich maneuver.”
More poignant is Jack’s observation of his kids sleeping after the evacuation.
A random tumble of heads and dangled limbs. In those soft warm faces was a quality of trust so absolute and pure that I did not want to think it might be misplaced. There must be something, somewhere, large and grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining radiance and implicit belief. It was cosmic in nature, full of yearnings and reachings. It spoke of vast distances, awesome but subtle forces.
I had mentioned prescient passages. There is a scene in the supermarket immediately after everyone returns from the evacuation. The old people seem to be in a frenzy, a panic, a loss of coherence. Jack notes why - and remember, this was written before Faux News.
When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death.
Later, as Babette’s class for old people gets expanded beyond how to stand and walk to include eating and drinking, she notes another trait of human nature.
“Knowledge changes every day. People like to have their beliefs reinforced. Don’t lie down after eating a heavy meal. Don’t drink liquor on an empty stomach. If you must swim, wait at least an hour after eating. The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn’t grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I’m the closest they could find, that’s all.”
And therein lies in large part why my parents embraced the false prophets they did. That reassurance by someone who claims to be an authority that the ways they did things as a child are the only right ways possible.
Eventually, [SPOILER ALERT] Babette comes clean about what is ailing her. Like Jack, she is terrified of death. And, to treat it, she is trading sex for an experimental drug that is supposed to block the chemical receptors in the brain that cause fear of death.
This leads into another hilarious passage where Babette and Jack have this competition trying to claim their fear of death is worse.
It should be no surprise that neither of them act out constructively from this revelation.
Jack starts down a path that will lead to a violent (if bizarre) conclusion. He is incited towards his attempted murder of Babette’s drug dealer and lover by three events. The first comes from Babette, who unconsciously projects her fear of death onto inciting Jack to violence.
“You’re a man, Jack. We all know about men and their insane rage. This is something men are very good at. Insane and violent jealousy. Homicidal rage. When people are good at something, it’s only natural that they look for a chance to do this thing. If I were good at it, I would do it. It happens I’m not. So instead of going into homicidal rages, I read to the blind. In other words I know my limits. I am willing to settle for less.”
Jack has no idea of doing anything of the sort before this. But it plants the seed. Next, his father-in-law gives him a gun. Because everyone needs a gun in case of burglars, right? Finally, Murray, again talking philosophy, opines that the cure for fear of death is to kill someone. That way, they die, you live, fear of death conquered.
You can guess that this doesn’t end entirely well, although the ending is perhaps a lot more ironic and anticlimactic than anything.
A few more bits are worth mentioning. There is the scene where Jack takes his son Heinrich and Heinrich’s friend Orest (who wants to set the record for time in a cage with venomous snakes - perhaps his way of dealing with fear of death) out to eat.
I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities. He went at it silently and purposefully, loading up, centering himself, appearing to grow more self-important with each clump of starch that slid over his tongue.
As the book nears its conclusion, Jack’s paranoia about his exposure to the toxin grows more and more hysterical. His doctors say ominous things, but he still feels fine, and in fact may well have nothing wrong with him for decades, if ever. I like his line here:
“All this as a result of a byproduct of insecticide. There’s something artificial about my death. It’s shallow, unfulfilling. I don’t belong to the earth or sky. They ought to carve an aerosol can on my tombstone.”
Right at the end, as Jack receives treatment at a hospital run by German nuns, he discovers that none of them believe in an afterlife. They are all pretending to believe. Why? As one of them explains:
“Our pretence is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe.”
I want to end this post with a bit of my own thoughts.
In the end, I ultimately do not entirely understand Jack and Babette, although I very much see them as typically American. Ironically, as both my wife (longtime ICU nurse) and I have observed, those people who are the most religious seem the most terrified of death. And this isn’t limited to Christians or even monotheists.
One could have an interesting discussion as to whether religion causes fear of death, or whether people terrified of death are drawn to religion. But in any case, it is weird to me that those who most strongly believe in an afterlife and claim to believe in a loving deity are the ones who are the worst about clinging to life well beyond any reasonable situation. As in, full treatment of a person in their 90s with terminal cancer, because “God is going to do a miracle and heal them.” (Spoiler: God didn’t.)
At this time in my life, I am agnostic about the afterlife. I am not alone in this, even within the confines of those of us who consider ourselves Christians or religious people in general.
Many have expressed this doubt - or better yet, the impossibility of knowing. Qohelet says in Ecclesiastes, “All go to one place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal descends into the earth?”
Hamlet describes death as “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns…”
Rabelais calls the afterlife “The great perhaps.”
Whatever the case, whether something exists or not, we really cannot know with any certainty.
What we do have is a life. Our life. What we do with it is at least partly our choice.
I myself have chosen to live my life both as if this life is all I have, and with the knowledge that I may have to answer for my choices.
I find, now that I have rejected the fear-based and control-based belief in Scary Evangelical Hell™ that those two things are essentially the same.
To live a good life now, with the goal of furthering the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, based on love, equality, care, and the Fruit of the Spirit works for both those scenarios.
As far as a fear of death? Other than the usual human determination to not do things that will kill you, I don’t really spend time fearing death.
I haven’t, as so many people I know who have gone through this kind of existential mortality crisis, spent my life trying to find magic to extend life as long as possible. Rather, I have a bit of a “damn the torpedos” way of living (as my father-in-law put it.) I’ll go climb that mountain. I’ll play that concert. I’ll go camping with my kids. I’ll take that evening with my wife. In other words, I’ll live while I’m alive.
Carlo Rovelli, in his wonderful book, The Order of Time, puts it so eloquently. (Stay tuned for that review coming soon.)
I would not wish to live as if I were immortal. I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me…I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest. The sister of sleep, Bach calls it.
That is pretty much my own feeling. I have lived. While there has been pain, suffering, and struggle, and things I would not have chosen for myself. There has also been great beauty, joy, love, and connection. I have had the opportunity to play the greatest music ever written. I have stood on top of mountains. I have experienced poetry, and flowers, and cats, and the love of my wife and children. I have lived.
Really, the one fear that Rovelli mentions that is the most real is the fear of the absence of love. I wish to end my life knowing I loved and was loved. That, ultimately, is my goal, whether my atoms are absorbed by the universe or whether I find myself in the presence of the Divine.
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