God's First Mistakes

by Richard Todd

NINETY-TWO IN THE SHADE
by Thomas McGuane
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $6.95

Heroic efforts in much intelligent contemporary prose go toward the avoidance of embarrassment. You can see a lot of self-protective hard work in the carefully wrought style of Thomas McGuane, the young author of two novels, The Sporting Club and The Bushwhacked Piano, that have won him a small but deeply appreciative audience. McGuane is alert to several varieties of exhaustion in the life around him, in fiction, and particularly in his themes. His themes don’t want to be reduced to a word, but if this were a seminar, we might call it “Aspects of American Virility.” The phrase belongs to L. E. Sissman, who recently praised McGuane in the New Yorker as “a more modern, more ironic Hemingway.”

McGuane’s man in Ninety-Two in the Shade is Thomas Skelton, whose situation at the start of this novel is that he’s “blown away” on drugs. By the close, he’s literally blown away, victim of violence in an absurd quarrel he has allowed to progress largely because it gives him a sense of mortality. Skelton is a dropout marine biologist who wants only to be a sport-fishing guide off Key West, as a way of keeping in touch with reality; the sight of blackfin tuna working bait has greater meaning than whatever he can learn through a microscope. He seeks a place within the seascape: he wants to be located, to feel between sea and sky, he explains, like a waffle in a waffle iron. But wholeness and surety are tough feelings to come by.

Skelton has trouble imagining a future, and his past is ambiguous too. He is the issue of a family that in three generations compresses a short history of the excesses and failures of American men. His grandfather is a psychotically “together” boor, who has exploited his way to millions of dollars and enjoys bizarre sexual frolics (trampolines, mops, and pails of soapy water are involved) with his aging secretary Bella. Skelton’s father is a fuddled, ineffectual fellow who has done such things as run an unsuccessful whorehouse and who, after a study of the world’s religious literature, takes to his bed, covered with mosquito netting, so that he appears to be in a bassinet. As for Skelton himself, “like so many of us Skelton had tried quite hard not to be crazy,” but not always succeeding, he “had from time to time lapsed curiously into not terribly human actions. Perhaps it was his sense of humor; but, well, anyway he seems to have done some barking.”

McGuane moves between grotesque comedy and moments of still perception. Skelton and his father enjoy a moment of sanity: “. . . mock serious, his father took up his violin and played the opening of Corrinne Corrina hillbilly style and beautiful. Skelton lit a powdery Dutch cigar and listened in a swoon of those sad clodhopper strains, dying day, newspaper boys yelling faintly as they filled their baskets; a swoon that was as much as anything a part of his more than trifling instinct for some kind of topographical perspective upon his own life, as against a vision of cycling chemicals in a closed system that somehow never explained the attrition of the things that ail you.”

I quote this passage for what seems to me both good and bad about it: its evocative and allusive qualities, and its cumbersome imprecision. McGuane has been much praised for his style and his style often is extraordinary in its easy elision of moods, its ability to render freshly subjects that breed ennui: drug experience and fishing, to take two examples from this novel. But an odd haze often appears in Ninety-Two in the Shade. Taken at long stretches, the prose has a refractive quality. The eye, like a stone skipped across a pond, bounces off the page before sinking into one of McGuane’s luminous scenes or images. Both the precision and the murk, I suspect, share a source: McGuane’s uneasiness with the heart of this tale.

Thomas Skelton, despite his druggy contemporaneity, is a venerable American hero—misfit, loner, man meant for a frontier that no longer exists, et cetera. Skelton is symbolically set in opposition to much of the darkness of American life: technology, materialism, violence. He lives—as in a post-technological dreamland—in the abandoned fuselage of a crashed plane; he flees “Hotcakesland,” the neon coast of Florida, for the sea, and he is done in by a depraved representative of American gun toters, Nichol Dance, another fishing guide. The action on which the book turns is, despite its Absurdist trappings, a sort of Western in which the black hat wins. After a bizarre quarrel— Dance sabotages Skelton’s first effort at guiding, Skelton sets fire to Dance’s boat—Dance, in effect, tells Skelton the town isn’t big enough for both of them, that is, he had better give up guiding. Skelton defies him and is shot.

As McGuane is all too well aware, the story turns on tired conventions, and he undercuts them with his jumpy, self-aware prose. Thus, mocking and loving at the same time, he describes Skelton’s need to fish: “Thomas Skelton felt that simple survival at one level and the prevention of psychotic lesions based upon empirical observation of the republic depended upon his being able to get out on the ocean . . . not infrequently such simplicity was one of three options, the others being berserking and smoking dope all the livelong day.”

However much irony is applied, McGuane seems to have a wistful, if unwilling, attachment to Skelton’s doomed romanticism. I find myself thinking that McGuane should turn his formidable imagination to something other than keeping alive the themes he has inherited. One difficulty with a character like Skelton is that he depends too much for his fictive existence on his hatred and affections, on his code. (The comparison with Hemingway is apt.) I suspect the test for McGuane will come when he sets out to create a man who is not lighting out for the territory but trying to find his way into other lives, other heads.

SMALL CHANGES
by Marge Piercy
Doubleday, $8.95

Thomas McGuane and Marge Piercy ought to have something in common: both gifted young American writers, with solid accomplishments and a lot of praise behind them (Piercy is the author of two previous novels as well as three collections of poetry) and both plainly experienced on the hip edge of society. But the difference in their fiction is so striking that in some ways their new books suggest wholly different eras. The first thing you notice in Small Changes (particularly coming to it from the wary involution of McGuane’s style) is the extraordinary confidence that suffuses the prose. It is written with a moralistic insistence that recalls nineteenth-century novels. Beyond questions of individual sensibilities, I’d say there is a cultural explanation for the difference: Marge Piercy is writing about womanhood—about nascent, not waning, attitudes. She writes from an evident feminist perspective, and the book rides a wave of contemporary feeling that seems to free her from self-consciousness. It’s a mixed blessing.

Small Changes recounts the tortured young adulthood of two women who come from quite different pasts to Cambridge, where their lives touch. (It’s one of the difficulties of the novel that in fact the connection doesn’t go very deep. The women serve as symbolic Sisters, demonstrating the essential solidarity of female experience.) Beth: a lower-middle-class Wasp from Syracuse, whom we meet as a timid bride. Denied the college education she wants, she marries her high school sweetheart, who proves to be a lout, and in sudden bold desperation she flees to Boston, where, following an unsatisfying affair, she moves into a woman’s commune, and ultimately to lesbianism. Miriam: a Jew from Brooklyn, who spends a long while in the grip of an affair with the man who is her first lover (he had picked her up in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art), an affair that ultimately turns into a ménage à trois, the third being his best friend. They are louts of a sort, too. A talented and well-educated mathematician, Miriam gets a job with a computer outfit, shakes free of her lovers, and marries her gentle, intellectual boss—only to discover his capacity for loutishness. She ends up where Beth began, institutionalized in marriage.

The vision of marriage in this novel is no cheerier than you’d expect to find by raising the topic in a Los Angeles divorce court. Oppression. Entrapment. Amputated lives. Despair and desperation. That that contract holds some chance of communion is not an allowable idea. Miriam, awash in high hopes, says early in her marriage, “I can enjoy being a woman,” explaining that she’s learned to like cooking. It is an ironic prelude to the misery ahead. Not that woe is limited to marriage. Wherever they go in this novel’s world, women have two roles open to them: they may be prisoners or fugitives.

All the newly classic scenes of womanly suffering that we have read in memoirs of the past halfdecade are anthologized here. The anesthetic wedding night. (“They had made love finally, but where was the love they had made?”) The wife as unpaid servant. The secretary as sexual object. Dirty socks. Sexist rock lyrics. False moans of sexual pleasure. The discovery by the small-breasted that large breasts are no fun either.

If much of this material is programmatic, though, Marge Piercy’s voice has its strengths. What father, for instance, can emerge unshaken from this contemptuous passage: “He was what people called good with his children. He did try hard to teach them things, but he got annoyed if they were not interested. He grew more involved in the course of his exposition than in their reactions. His disappointment was crushing. Ariane was already learning to pretend to understand.” There is much else to praise in Small Changes. The energy of the book doesn’t all go toward polemic; events move along compellingly and the social reportage is acute. Piercy is at ease in the trendy computer company (where the air is full of lingo such as “LISP,” “compilers,” the “Fall Joint”), as well as in communal apartments.

The book begins with a set-piece description of Beth’s wedding, for which, her mother says, “We haven’t cut any corners. This is no hole in the wall at the courthouse or in the front room. . . .” Even as you accede to the accuracy of the scene, you wonder at the chilliness of the author’s portraits of those who perpetrate this awful show. What is absent in this novel is an adequate sense of the oppressor (and his allies), for one thing; and beyond that a recognition that there are limits to a world view that is organized around sexual warfare. It’s hard not to think that Piercy feels this, knows that much of the multiplicity and mystery of life is getting squeezed out of her prose, but her polemical urge wins out.

The book ends with the appearance of a new character, to whom Miriam is about to lose her husband. The younger woman, herself divorced, reflects that Miriam hasn’t tried hard enough, and she resolves: “Her first marriage had been a disaster, but she thought her second had to be better, with her so willing to work and work at it, unlike some women.” How that irony is savored! Marge Piercy gazes down at these hapless characters with the fingerwagging authority of George Eliot. The novel doesn’t justify that gusto, though I imagine it’s an agreeable feeling.

REGIMENT OF WOMEN
by Thomas Berger
Simon and Schuster, $8.95

Certain feminist simplicities seem to have gotten to Thomas Berger. You can imagine a moment some months ago when Berger went to one too many of those dinner parties at which a reasonable voice says that the world would be a better, a gentler, a fundamentally more human place if only women held the power. Did Berger murmur something about Madame Nhu? Regiment of Women sounds as if it were begun in the hangover of such a conversation: it is the work of a man who wants to say, “Wait a minute. . . .” Although this is not nearly so rich a novel as his Little Big Man (with which it shares some devices), it is subtle and comic.

Berger envisions a time, a century or so hence, when women govern. Men characteristically serve as secretaries, or charpersons, or “mattresses” (male mistresses). Some eunuchs are created for heavy labor. The family has been abolished. Sexual pleasuring is accomplished by women wielding dildos. (Men who can’t derive gratification this way are counseled by psychiatrists.) Reproduction occurs in state-supervised facilities, through the use of artificial wombs. To produce the necessary sperm, men are drafted to serve a six-month “sperm term,” during which they are marched about like recruits, and are periodically attached to something like a milking machine. It is from one of these camps that Georgie Cornell, reluctant men’s liberationist, escapes along with a rebellious woman, who has transvestite leanings—loves dresses and makeup. The government has exploited her perversion by making her a spy, but she turns on her superiors when they try through therapy (playing with guns) to make her into a more feminine woman. The two flee in disguise: he in women’s clothing (a lieutenant’s shirt and trousers) and she in men’s (a skirt and blouse). In a stolen car they make their way through the polluted and unsightly Northeast to Maine, which is still relatively unchanged: the pipesmoking woman game warden greets them with a “maanin,” as does the woman in the plaid hunting shirt who owns the general store. In the woods, they discover the forgotten ways of prerevolutionary sex, presumably to forge the start of a new society of liberated men.

When you begin this novel it seems highly improbable that Berger can sustain what appears to be a single joke. But he does, because the joke is more complicated than it looks at first. On one level, the book spoofs radical feminists by imitating and hyperbolizing their vision of society, with reversed roles. (Office life in the new world is as grim as ever: women pinch their male secretaries, who snicker at the pomposities they must type: “What doodoo.”) But the humor always cuts two ways. Helped along, no doubt, by the reader’s natural distaste for transvestitism, Berger plays upon the American male’s current anxieties about his role.

I’d recommend this book—in preference to the Piercy novel, or the work of such feminists as Germaine Greer or Michael Korda—to readers who would contemplate sexism. The nicely ambiguous close of the novel suggests that in the society of liberated men, man may yet again live to be called the oppressor. Georgie Cornell, who in his first sexual encounter fears that he has raped his mate, warms to his new role, thinks he’d like to “be boss once in a while,” and reflects that “he was the one with the protuberant organ.”

I don’t mean to give Thomas Berger the last word in this discussion— Regiment of Women is a playful book, a useful corrective to singlemindedness. Berger himself shuns the last word, which he gives to Nietzsche: “Woman was God’s second mistake.”