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.
