Stefan Beck Online

Canada

Richard Ford once shot a book by a woman who’d given him a bad review. It wasn’t a terrible review—it had its qualifications, even its moments of high praise—but that didn’t stop Ford from mailing Alice Hoffman her own ventilated work as a sort of underworld warning. When Colson Whitehead demolished Ford’s story collection, A Multitude of Sins, in the pages of The New York Times, Ford decided not to do anything rash. Instead, he waited two years for the chance to see Whitehead in person. Then he spat on him. Whitehead took this in stride: “I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford.”

Good one. Yet, given that Whitehead had already enjoyed his pen-is-mightier moment in the review itself, one can’t help an atavistic wish that he’d simply punched Ford’s lights out. There’s a point at which being the bigger man is as much a reflex as putting up one’s dukes. And it is precisely Ford’s willingness to be the smaller man—to indulge crazy impulses, to embarrass himself—that qualifies him to write a book like Canada, which is largely about how a single moment of weakness or folly can hurl one into unfamiliar country, with no hope of returning home. Fans of Ford’s excellent Bascombe trilogy know his flair for human frailty, human perplexity, but in Canada Ford mingles with a far lower class of men.

Canada might as well be a deliberate rejoinder to Whitehead’s review, which alleged that Ford was preoccupied with the tedious affairs and “lukewarm lust” of white upper-middle-class professionals. Canada’s hero is a child in Montana, a boy named Dell Parsons whose life is ruined by his parents’ decision to rob a North Dakota bank. Bev and Neeva Parsons, an affable, fatally optimistic southerner and his more circumspect Jewish wife, are no Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. They aren’t driven by a lust for adventure, nor are they even very much in love. (Their union is more or less the fault of getting pregnant with twins, Dell and his sister, Berner, during “one hasty encounter after meeting at a party honoring returning airmen” in 1945.) Only Bev is even properly a criminal; it is his ill-advised scheme, involving Indians and trafficking in stolen cattle, that lands the family in trouble with the wrong sort of people. Desperate times lead to where they always do.

We know from page one that the robbery will occur, but Ford takes his time getting there. Along the way, one develops a sense that fiction writers—Ford, at least—might make the best criminals. Ford’s elegant description of what goes wrong, a perfect inversion of what Bev and Neeva expect to go right, is summed up by Dell’s pitch-black comic insight: “My parents simply did not understand life in small prairie towns, where everyone notices everything . . . . As it turned out, my father wasn’t all that memorable to anyone in Creekmore—until it was time to testify against him, when he became very memorable.” This passage, and the list of missteps that precedes it, and the pages of snowballing panic and recklessness preceding that, suggest that Ford might enjoy a second career as a noir screenwriter.

But Canada is not a crime novel. Ford’s meticulous construction of the Parsonses’ brief and undistinguished criminal career is impressive, but only half the story. What becomes of Dell, his parents having been carted off and his sister having run away, is alluded to in the title: He must cross a border. The life he desired, the one he was on the cusp of having—school, chess, beekeeping—is behind him forever. Once Dell is smuggled by Mildred, a family friend, to Saskatchewan, where he becomes the charge of her bachelor brother, the novel takes on an almost numinous life of its own. In Ford’s telling, our northern neighbor is an uncanny hinterland, similar to America in trivial ways but forbiddingly different in others

[Mildred] said Canada had dollars for money, but theirs were different colored and was sometimes mysteriously worth more than ours. She said Canada had its own Indians and treated them better than we treated ours, and Canada was bigger than America, though it was mostly empty and inhospitable and covered with ice much of the time.

I rode along thinking about these things and how they could become true just by passing two huts marooned in the middle of nowhere.

Beyond this point of entry—from which there can be no return, lest Dell become property of the State of Montana—lies an experience that places Canada squarely in the line of Oliver Twist and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Dell’s keeper, Arthur Remlinger, a dapper and mysterious hotelier, and Charley Quarters, his man Friday, are Ford’s answer to Fagin and Sykes, to the Duke and the Dauphin. (The use to which they put Dell is unexpected and better left unsaid.) Ford has achieved something here that few authors can carry off—and, frankly, that nothing in his Bascombe books suggested an ability to do. He has written a book for adults from which any brave and curious child could derive a vast, if necessarily partial, benefit. This is a better thing, to be sure, than what we tend to get today: books for children from which adults imagine themselves to derive some nourishment.

That it might serve as YA literature the way books by Dickens or Twain do is not the main value of Canada, merely a measure of its quality. The cruel and immutable realities it unveils for poor Dell—that life turns on a dime; that people (even our parents) may not be what they seem or what we wish them to be; that we should be prepared for the unfamiliar—are our common lot. They should be learned early, and, sad to say, revisited often.

Viennese Waltz

Graham Greene famously divided his books into two categories: novels, and what he called “entertainments.” He wished from time to time to indulge an appetite for pulp, and it was only fair to let his readers know what they were getting into. The joke, of course, is that, being Graham Greene, he never wrote anything even close to pulp fiction. Nobody could possibly mistake Greene’s antic satire Our Man in Havana, which he subtitled “An Entertainment,” for, say, the adventures of Blackford Oakes.

The novelist Dan Vyleta, who owes a significant debt to Greene, would run into the same problem if he set out to write an embossed-jacket potboiler. The raw materials are certainly all there: Vyleta, the German-born son of Czech refugees, holds a doctorate in history from Cambridge, and his work draws on a wealth of historical knowledge. His debut, Pavel & I (2008), is a spy novel set in Berlin during the brutal, brutalizing winter of 1946–47. His new book, The Quiet Twin, is a police procedural boasting Nazis, serial murder, and dark, shameful secrets. There’s even a rather unsavory mime, for good measure.

Unfortunately for Vyleta, but fortunately for us, he just isn’t a bad enough writer to ride this stuff to the bestseller list. It’s possible to read Pavel & I almost to the end without quite registering that it’s genre fiction. Espionage and violence are incidental to a more probing story about how human psyches bend or break beneath hardship. The central mystery is less fascinating than the Dickensian grotesques: Pavel, a decommissioned GI with kidney problems; Anders, the boy spiv who becomes his caretaker; Sonia, their upstairs neighbor, mistress of villainous Colonel Fosko; and Peterson, the unlikely narrator, a one-eyed operative who, tasked with torturing Pavel, instead falls under the spell of his quiet intensity.

Much of Pavel & I takes place in a tenement building, and almost all of The Quiet Twin does. The setting works to a different effect in each book. In Pavel, it creates an uncomfortable sense of waiting, marking time, hiding out—dull dread. In The Quiet Twin, the building is not in postwar Berlin, but rather Vienna in 1939. It will come as no surprise, then, that The Quiet Twin is about surveillance, paranoia, and the mounting fear that one doesn’t know nearly enough about the people with whom one is surrounded.

It is a fascist state in miniature, a nightmarish dollhouse in which everyone can look into every room. That isn’t to suggest that the tenants of Vyleta’s building are symbolic, or that their intersecting stories are in some way allegorical. They are real (if anything but ordinary) people whose lives have been disrupted, set on edge, both by the rise of the Nazi party and by a string of local killings. The most recent is the disembowelment of a dog belonging to one Professor Speckstein, a disgraced doctor turned Nazi Zellenwart, or neighborhood supervisor and informant.

The hero, so to speak, of The Quiet Twin is another doctor, 34-year-old Anton Beer, who operates a small practice out of his apartment and is treating Speckstein’s niece Zuzka for an apparently hysterical illness. One night, Speckstein summons Beer, gives him confidential files on the murders (“I have some influence, you understand”), and explains, “Somebody killed my dog. I have reason to believe they may be after me.” It turns out that Beer is not only a doctor but also a scholar of forensic psychiatry—not a great thing to be at a time when familiarity with Freud could invite unwanted scrutiny.

Soon everyone is an amateur investigator, and everyone is, as they say, a suspect. Zuzka reveals, a little too casually, her own penchant for voyeurism, showing Beer how her window looks out on the courtyard and into other apartments. In one lives 9-year-old Anneliese Grotter and her alcoholic father; in another, a mime:

[H]is face emerged, greasepainted, out of the darkness of the window: hung wide-eyed, unmoving, at the very centre of its frame, held up by neither noose nor neck nor block of wood. When [Zuzka] had first seen him, disembodied, it had frightened her and made her take him for a ghost. Then he had stripped one night, had peeled off sweater, gloves and tights, and hung them out into the wind, so very black that they cut deep holes into the fabric of the night. .  .  . [I]t was tempting to think of him as nothing but a face: paper white, with hairline cracks running through its cheeks where the paint had dried and flaked upon his skin.

Much of Vyleta’s description is written in a kind of morose, monochromatic poetry, and it would not be mere blurb-speak to say that it can be haunting. In this, as in many other scenes, we are reminded that not all watching is malicious or invasive; much of it is done in loneliness and desperation, boredom and curiosity. It is, nevertheless, curiosity that will get Zuzka into trouble: She learns that the mime keeps a woman confined to his apartment, and she sets out, like the heroine of a children’s book, to find out what’s afoot.

Though character is a greater asset to Vyleta than plot, he does craft a pretty topnotch story, and it wouldn’t be right to give too much of it away. It is enough to disclose the following: The stoic, tight-lipped Beer, whose wife has left him for obscure reasons, is hiding at least one fact about himself. Zuzka, who tempts fate by confronting the mime, escapes not wholly unscathed: Against the reader’s too-logical expectations, she falls for him. Anneliese Grotter endures something so shattering that the reader will be forgiven for wishing Vyleta would let just one ray of sunshine into his benighted city block.

The Quiet Twin (like Pavel & I) features a villain it would be too charitable to call larger-than-life: Teuben, the corrupt Nazi police inspector (was there another kind?) who engages Beer in a campaign of infuriating harassment and blackmail. In a book flyblown with misery, sickness, and existential horror—Graham Greene would be proud—one little domestic scene is almost too much to bear:

A child came into the room, nine years old, his hair jet black like his father’s. He had a milky and somewhat sickly complexion and was prone to coughs. Quickly, with light, rapid steps, he walked up to the seated man, pressed his face into the sleeve of his uniform, then began to clamber into his lap. Teuben was indulgent with his only living child and helped him to gain his perch. .  .  . “What are you reading, Daddy?” Robert asked, scanning the newspaper articles and the pages of notes Teuben had assembled on his desk. “I am reading about a girl only a few years older than you.”

Teuben’s intentions toward the girl in question are far from pure. It seems that evil, wearing the greasepaint of banality, isn’t really so banal after all.

The mime, Otto, turns out to be the player whose motives are easiest to pick out in this goulash of neurosis, fear, and evil. He is also the centerpiece of some of the most beautiful, balletic passages of action and description in either of Vyleta’s books. One does not expect to read about a mime without being irritated. (Then again, Vyleta incorporated into Pavel & I those two great mainstays of hack comedy, the midget and the monkey, without straying an inch from high seriousness.) Two scenes, one in which Otto performs for soldiers departing to the front, the other in which he’s the entertainment at a dinner party of Nazi officials, are too long to quote and too good not to withhold. They must be read in context.

“I think my resistance to the Nazi era,” Vyleta said in an interview, “was partially there’s a lot of clichés these days around it. .  .  . I didn’t want to write something that felt exploitative of the period. In particular, there’s an element to the plot, the whodunit part, and even the serial murder part, that could easily become very schlocky.” So Vyleta wrestled not with the impulse to call The Quiet Twin an “entertainment,” but with the earnest fear that someone else might. There’s no danger of that.

In two books, he has shown that he can take milieux far removed from us—thrilling ones, horrifying ones—and use them, with care and decency, to examine the limits of just what a human being can bear. Never mind his improbable twists, his lurid tableaux, his Nazi evildoers. With apologies to The Third Man and Harry Lime, Vyleta isn’t interested in cuckoo clocks. Neither is literature.

The unheimlich maneuver

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the ability to order books online. One can avoid all manner of ghastliness. The public library usually furnishes whatever queer and misbegotten tome I’ve gone in search of, but too often it furnishes darker things besides—such eldritch sights as one might fear from a place with rules against “being less than fully clothed” and “misusing” the restroom “including [by] bathing.” Although used bookstores yield the odd treasure, I am by no means one of those antiquarians who finds himself, tentacles—er, spectacles—askew, intoxicated by a pungent bouquet of spores, molds, and fungus. Chain bookstores provide their own species of the unspeakable. Last time I went to Barnes & Noble, I saw a sign advertising Teen Paranormal Romance. As some might say: Oh my Elder Gods.

Back when “romance” meant an altogether different thing, these shelves would have groaned beneath the weight of books by Wilkie Collins, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Matthew “The Monk” Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, and Bram Stoker. Now it’s Stephenie Meyer, she of Twilight fame, and a clutch of parasitic imitators. It may seem that the uncanny is now the exclusive purview of teens and of those trying to make a fast buck off of them. Quite to the contrary, writers for adult audiences are still answering the call of the creepy, making inroads into the blasted heath of the collective unconscious. Perhaps there’s something in the air—the Mayan doomsday prophecy, or the more plausible threat of confrontation with a nuclear power that somehow, in the twenty-first century, still believes in “sorcery.” Whatever the case, the paranormal may be the new normal.

The Vanishers, the fourth novel by Heidi Julavits, a founding editor of the San Francisco-based literary magazine The Believer, is about psychic violence. Julia Severn, Julavits’s heroine, is a student at an institute for the development of psychic powers. She works as a stenographer for her mentor, Madame Ackermann, who seems to be undergoing psychic menopause. (I use this slightly irritating analogy only because it turns out to be the one Julavits intended.) Ackermann isn’t regressing—she’s falling asleep. Julia, whose job it is to take the minutes of Ackermann’s trances, instead makes them up, to protect her instructor’s feelings. Where Ackermann’s powers have waned, Julia’s have waxed.

Ackermann is psychically searching, at the behest of one Colophon Martin, for “a propaganda film commissioned by . . . Jean-Marie Le Pen . . . shot by an artist Madame Ackermann referred to as the Leni Riefenstahl of France.” Eventually Ackermann locates it—that is to say, Julia does, but lets her superior think otherwise. Julia’s deception is exposed by a chance error. Embarrassed and infuriated, Ackermann casts her into the outer darkness with a “psychic attack,” which is first manifested as a frightening vision of some escapee from the Poetic Edda. Then it gets physical:

In the beginning, an attack can look just like regular life. You wake to discover eyelashes on your pillow, bruises on your skin where you’ve never been touched. . . . An unceasing bout of acid reflux and an irritable bowel. Gums that bleed when you sip hot tea. Fingernails that snap when you push your hands through the sleeves of a sweater. The ghostly withdrawal of pigmentation from your cheeks. A rash on your torso. A rash on your hands. A rash on your scalp.

The flight from Madame Ackermann, and toward self-discovery, carries Julia into the gacked-out, surrealistic adventure portion of our program. After first leading a sort of cat-lady existence in Manhattan, Julia takes up with the titular “vanishers,” a group that helps people disappear from their lives in lieu of committing suicide. She is relocated to a sort of Magic Mountain-style spa, there to recover from her attack, regain her psychic strength, and, with any luck, fight back.

It was startling to find that most critics had read The Vanishers as a book about, as Entertainment Weekly put it, “female competition.” I hadn’t noticed the jacket copy, which mentions “female rivalry,” nor had I taken much interest in the apparently central fact that Madame Ackermann looks just like Julia’s dead mother. While there is plenty in the book to support this reading, the author’s schematic intentions can only go so far before her real, subconscious subject asserts itself.

The Institute of Integrated Parapsychology is colloquially known as the Workshop. The ebbing energies of Madame Ackerman? “She was, in a word, blocked.” The writing samples—the automatic writing samples—of a student called Rebecca are, quoth the Madame, “stained glass windows unto the astral abyss.” Is that not a deliberate parody of blurb-speak? Are we in the realm of, as Julavits put it, “girl-on-girl psychic violence,” or is it more like the envy a writing student might imagine the professor feels for her special talents? It was so tempting to read The Vanishers as a fantasy of academic or artistic usurpation that I nearly missed the feminine component altogether.

It turns out I wasn’t alone in this thinking. Karen Russell, a young novelist, called The Vanishers, in a specially commissioned Amazon review, “a totally delightful satire of academia.” The Economist just comes out and says it: “The atmosphere is reminiscent of a Master of Fine Arts writing programme.” Many of the book’s allusions are literary, not occult: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, T. S. Eliot. There is, in the description of still another mysterious film, an emphatic nod to “the Entertainment” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The name “Julia Severn” itself belongs to a minor character in Jane Eyre who, despite her hair being naturally curly, is scolded for curling her hair.

These are the reference points of someone who loves literature. They are of a piece with the sense that The Vanishers is really about artistic, not female, rivalry. Regression, wherein the mind takes itself for a walk and returns with a story, is a perfect metaphor for the writing process. It is speculated at one point that being a lesser psychic than Julia makes Madame Ackermann feel “old, obsolete, sexually diminished,” but yoking the envy to age and physical decline is a missed opportunity. Beauty and sexual potency fade by design. Talent is different. You can’t predict who will have more of it, or why, or when. That chaos produces the only rivalries worth reading about.

Julavits has some annoying tics, some dud phrasings. “I fisted the note into a sharp star,” for instance, is probably not how I’d describe what I do to a decent percentage of the pages I read. But there is plenty of real imagination and intelligence at work here: “After a while you can begin to feel stalked by coincidence, or as though you can manipulate the world by expressing a narrative desire—this thread is loose, this thread inconclusive. It must be doubled back upon, it must recur.” That is the narrative impulse at work, in life as in art, in fifty words or less.

Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, like The Vanishers, contains an echo of Jane Eyre. Julavits borrows a name. Auslander borrows that grande dame of gothic literature, the Madwoman in the Attic. His hero, Solomon Kugel, has discovered an old woman in the attic of his farmhouse: “‘Jesus Christ,’ Kugel hissed, darting back from the boxes and raising the flashlight overhead as if to strike.

“‘Close, she muttered.’”

The woman is Anne Frank. Note that I didn’t say “none other than Anne Frank” or “if you can believe it, Anne Frank” or “though it pains me to say, Anne Frank.” I would have to be the worst kind of shill to pretend that this conceit is, at this late date, legitimately surprising, let alone shocking. A taboo is recognizably being violated here, but it has a kind of inevitability to it: the real surprise is that nobody’s done it before. This is all to say that just because an author appears to be trying to shock us in our shock-proof age, doesn’t mean the shock is the point. Critics of shock value tend to overlook this, in their paradoxical haste to prove their own unshockability.

So what is Auslander up to, if not a juvenile bid for attention? On one level, he is addressing the crushing, inescapable weight of history. If Flannery O’Connor’s South was “Christ-haunted,” it seems that Jews—and, if maybe to a lesser extent, all people—are “Frank-haunted” everywhere and at all times. Solomon Kugel, a man unusually prone to anxiety not only about suffering and death but also about their existential implications, has moved his wife, son, and mother to a blandly safe rural town called Stockton. And there in his attic is Anne Frank, the living embodiment of that eternal debate between hope and nihilism.

And I do mean living embodiment. In this case, Kugel is not Frank-haunted so much as Frank-harassed, because this is not a ghost, but Frank herself, a foul-mouthed crone. She has grown old and self-obsessed, filling Kugel’s house with the tapping of typewriter keys as she composes another bestseller. Eschewing the paranormal makes the premise nominally more plausible while making it vastly more unsettling. It also introduces thorny questions about martyrdom and myth-making, but I’m far from sold on the idea that Frank’s diary would be a less remarkable document had she survived.

Frank, who makes Kugel’s life miserable in other ways I won’t mention, is far from his only problem. Charming farmhouses like Kugel’s are being targeted by an arsonist. Kugel’s mother, born in America in 1946, is nonetheless a self-styled Holocaust survivor, constantly alluding darkly to “the war” and “the camps.” Needless to say, she is not about to let Kugel evict his unwanted houseguest.

If the Holocaust, the crazy mother, and the neurotic anxiety about death seem too easy, what Auslander does with them isn’t. He has, it seems to me, kept the elements of his story simple and emblematic so that he can use them as a framework for comic riffs and theodicean ramblings. The effect is akin to reading a very dark folktale that’s also a stand-up act that’s also, like Muriel Spark’s The Only Problem, a grim view from Job’s dunghill.

In an interview, Auslander said, “We’re all looking for an answer, we’re never going to find it, and that’s plenty funny . . . the lengths that we go to, but we’re never going to find an answer.” I wouldn’t say Auslander is a writer of staggering philosophical or theological gifts. It would be fair to wonder if he has anything novel to say about the problem of evil or the nature of hope. Perhaps he hasn’t proposed a new theodicy or demolished some previous one. But this is a work of art, not a tract, and the glory of it is to show what it feels like to be a mere man, at the mercy of the cosmos. That joke will never get old.

“Funny books don’t win awards,” Auslander said in the interview quoted above. It’s time that changed. Mankind’s troubles refuse to budge, but we are reassured by cooler heads that, hey, at least it has been ever thus. That we periodically furnish ourselves with instructive examples of our failure, of which the Holocaust is one of the most potent, means even our stasis is a kind of decline. The more training we receive in What Not to Do, the less of an excuse we have when we do it anyway. At some point, good-hearted people like Solomon Kugel—who only wants to protect himself and his family—have a right to have a laugh and pronounce the matter hopeless. No wonder his funniest preoccupation is with last words. If you’re going to fret about how to respond to suffering, you might as well focus on the guaranteed kind:

[T]hough he hadn’t yet decided for certain what he wanted his last words to be, he had long known for certain what he didn’t want them to be: he didn’t want them to be begging. No pleases. Or nos. Or waits. Or please, nos; or no, waits; or wait, pleases. Or no, no, nos. Or please, please, pleases. Or wait, wait, waits.

Please don’t hurt me, Louis XV’s mistress begged her executioner as he led her to the guillotine.

He hurt her.

Kugel goes on to say that it isn’t the indignity of begging that bothers him. What he really wants is not to be in any position to beg. “You can’t beg a car not to hit you,” he says, or “a piano not to fall on your head.” The joke, or rather the punchline, is right there is the title of Auslander’s book. Hope is a form of begging; that it might not get you anywhere is a tragedy. That’s all, folks.

Now we must take leave of the gothic attic for a different kind of metaphysical terrain: the desert. I mean the desert of crashed saucers and Area 51, of Carlos Castaneda and Jim Morrison, of Point Omega and Burning Man. The desert where things get weird. And where things get embarrassing, if you aren’t careful. “There is,” Castaneda once wrote, “a crack between the two worlds, the world of the diableros and the world of living men. There is a place where the two worlds overlap. The crack is there. It opens and closes like a door in the wind.” I don’t think I’d try using that as a writing prompt.

Few writers could lead us on a vision quest like Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men and come back with their reputations intact. Thus, it is all the more remarkable that Gods Without Men is, in addition to being a time-traveling, shape-shifting wonder, exactly the kind of way-we-live-now book that Jonathan Franzen might wish he’d written. (The only way Franzen would write a book like this is if a magic cactus dictated it to him.) Autism, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, self-indulgent celebrities, crystal meth, Mormonism, social media, missing children, the Nancy Grace frenzy attending missing children—it’s all in here. Yet it’s all in here naturally, spontaneously, as though Kunzru is responding to signals in the ether rather than snipping out headlines.

One could say that the Mojave Desert is the main character of Gods Without Men—in the same sense that God is the main character of Brideshead Revisited—but the book’s more obvious protagonist is a banking quant named Jaz Marathu. In 2008, Jaz and his wife Lisa take their four-year-old son, Raj, on vacation to the desert, about as “away from it all” as you could get. They’re attempting to address their marital strife, though Raj’s severe autism is almost entirely to blame for it. While the family is visiting the Trona Pinnacles, Raj vanishes from his stroller. This is not, of course, a crowded fairgrounds or shopping mall. It would be fair to say the desert is the place where a momentary distraction is least likely to lead to this particular nightmare.

Yet Raj is gone, really gone. Over the weeks and weeks that follow, Jaz and Lisa go from being objects of pity to being objects of cynical or sensational interest to being, at least in the eyes of Internet cranks and cruel blog-commenters, suspects. When Raj is eventually found on a Marine base, during a training exercise involving a simulated Iraqi town, nobody can account for his long survival:

He was ten miles from the nearest public road. The kidnapper must have dumped him, though why he chose that spot and how he got a car there were complete mysteries. The Marine Corps perimeter security was considered state of the art. Heat sensors, motion sensors, aerial surveillance: the whole nine yards.

Making matters stranger, Raj’s autism seems to be in retreat. When he speaks for the first time, it’s as astonishing as if a verbal child had returned from the desert speaking Nahuatl while levitating. But this has to be one of the strangest, most tragic cases of “be careful what you wish for” ever devised:

His son was safe—that was miracle enough. He ought to be content, to give thanks, as Lisa did. But there were too many questions to be answered. The little boy happily lining up plastic dinosaurs on the kitchen table had been through something extremely traumatic. Until his father knew what that was, there would be a blank, an unknown on the map of their family. Here be dragons.

This was the wheel that kept turning in Jaz’s mind. Raj had come back and Raj had changed. Or, rather, Raj had come back changed.

That the novel never resolves this question is the point—or part of it. For the story of the Matharu family is interrupted again and again by other narratives. We see the Mojave and its Pinnacles in 1778, 1871, 1920, 1947, 1958, 1969, 1970. We see their bewitching pull on, in turn, a Catholic missionary, an unhinged Mormon, an ethnologist studying Native Americans, a UFO cult leader, a new recruit to said cult, and a hippie commune that’s equal parts Arcosanti and Spahn Ranch. In the 2008–09 sections, a rock musician hiding out at the same motel as the Matharu family wanders into the desert and has a full-bore Lizard King meltdown. He’s the comic relief. Initially suspected of kidnapping Raj, he celebrates Raj’s safe return with a song called “The Boy on the Burning Sands,” telling the media, “In a lot of ways, the boy on the sands is me.”

Enjoying Kunzru’s facility with at least a half-dozen different time periods and idioms is a large part of the fun of reading Gods Without Men. True, none of these side stories is as emotionally engaging as the plight of the Matharus. But without them, we would be left with a spooky unsolved mystery, Southwestern Gothic with no real payoff. Instead, Kunzru’s variations on a theme show us how the spiritual mind operates on the natural, physical world. Did Raj come back and then change, or did he come back changed? The former explanation is certainly the parsimonious one—but the fact that an explanation like the latter can occur to us so readily is miracle enough.

I read César Aira’s Varamo months ago, so thinking about the book now is a bit like trying to remember a dream. That isn’t, however, entirely the fault of time and my poor memory. I vividly remember finding Varamomore dream-like than anything I’ve read before. Ever had a dream? Ever listened to some fool make up a “funny” or “crazy” dream and pass it off as real? (I could just as easily ask, ever read Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”?) The phony dream is usually pretty easy to detect, which is one of the reasons why dream sequences in books and movies are usually a bad idea.

The book begins with a third-class clerk named Varamo, a resident of 1920s Colón, Panama, receiving his pay in counterfeit bills:

He left the Ministry consumed by anxiety. . . . His bureaucratic mentality had prevented him from responding promptly, before he touched the bills, and now that he had put them in his pocket it was too late. . . . Like nearly all public servants, he didn’t do anything special to earn his salary, so he thought of it as a kind of gift, and all his instincts had told him to take the money, to keep his head down and his mouth shut.

This is indisputably a dream-problem. It even has its dream-solution, i.e., one that seems retroactively supplied, the way a dream will incorporate a real-life barking dog or ringing telephone. Where it goes is even stranger, though that will come as little surprise if one has read an article or two about Aira. His writing process seems designed to mimic dreaming. He calls it “fuga hacia adelante,” or “fleeing forward.” He doesn’t revise. He just accommodates whatever he’s written the day before, no matter (apparently) how surreal. If this sounds, to paraphrase Truman Capote on the Beats, like typing and not writing, keep in mind that it matters who’s doing the typing.

Varamo is accosted by a lunatic, a local character known to demand the repayment of imaginary debts. Varamo buys, though not with a counterfeit bill, “a piece of red candy in the shape of a die.” A few pages later, he notices that the candy is melting in his hand. He considers throwing it on the ground. His anxious concern for propriety is such that “a better solution presented itself in the form of a tall bush: he stuck the sweet onto the end of one of its branches. And there it remained like a kind of amorphous, fleshy flower, not so alien, after all, to the capricious forms that nature can take in the tropics.”

Here we are a quarter of the way through the book—pretty far along, but not even to the point where Varamo’s bizarre hobby is revealed.

On his table there was a basin, and in the basin was a fish about six inches long, one of those yellowish so-called mutant fishes from the canal . . . . Varamo had a large box, divided into various compartments, which contained flasks of acid, tubes, catheters, and instruments for cutting and piercing. . . . His aim had been to produce a fish playing the piano.

I guess it can’t be that bizarre, or else Google Image Search wouldn’t return any results for “Toad Rundgren.”

If I’m skeptical of Aira as an author, it’s only because he seems to have published (in Spanish) some eighty books along the lines of Varamo. As a creative technique, writing down one’s Dadaistic meanderings doesn’t strike me as very rewarding for the reader. But it works perfectly for Varamo. At the end of his day-long dream, Varamo doesn’t pinch himself, wake up, and find that his wallet is filled with real money after all. What he does is write the masterpiece of Central American poetry, called “The Song of the Virgin Child.” Varamo is actually a mock—but make that very mock—scholarly account of the day that inspired this imaginary opus. Varamo had never written a single line of verse prior to the incident of the counterfeit currency.

If Aira’s is really automatic writing, or even semi-automatic writing, it is suspiciously coherent. Varamo reads like propaganda for the idea that genius is 1% perspiration and 99% inspiration. Effective propaganda, I should add. I doubt good fiction is composed with a Ouija board. But one can’t read the literature of the uncanny—the unheimlich, in Freud’s marvelously suggestive German—without concluding that much of the time, fear and creativity are Siamese twins.

Drop Dead Healthy

In Memoir: A History, Ben Yagoda defines “shtick lit” as “[b]ooks perpetrated by people who undertook an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it.” He identifies Walden as the earliest example of the genre, which would seem to establish a respectable pedigree, but the word perpetrated leaves little doubt as to Yagoda’s opinion of more recent efforts. He can’t be alone in casting a skeptical eye on shtick-lit superstar A. J. Jacobs, the Esquire writer responsible for The Know-It-All (shtick: reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica in its entirety), The Year of Living Biblically (shtick: following every biblical injunction to the letter for twelve lushly bearded, annoying months), and now Drop Dead Healthy, evidently a reboot of Remar Sutton’s out-of-print Body Worry.

Full disclosure: I undertook the project of reading an A. J. Jacobs book with the express purpose of writing about it. My plan was to acknowledge, with a touch of self-deprecating humor, the unlikeliness of my enterprise: I know this seems like a crazy waste of time, guys, but just hear me out. . . . I’d suffer a few well-timed setbacks, and—this is de rigueur—get chastised by my wife for neglecting her, the kids, or my household chores. (I’m not married, but if memoir can massage the truth, why can’t reviews of memoir?) I thought about failing to finish the book. In the end, I may not have made it to my goal of 375 pages, but I did learn a whole lot about the value of shtick lit. Would I do it all again? Probably not, but I’m still glad I made the effort . . .  

Well, I did finish the book, and I did learn a lot about the value of shtick lit. The truth is, despite the warnings of Yagoda and others whose opinions I trust, I was never reluctant to read Jacobs. I find autodidacticism and self-improvement fascinating, and greatly to be encouraged. When I took up Jacobs, my hope was to defend him and his beleaguered genre from the cynics, the ones who can’t believe that anyone acts in a spirit of genuine curiosity or enthusiasm. I’d point out, too, that nobody is forcing them to buy shtick lit; if they have a philosophical objection to bogus projects undertaken expressly to be written about, they should make themselves useful and campaign to abolish the college essay. 

The cover photo of Jacobs mock-struggling to do a pull-up is a clue to the fatal flaw of this book. It is not going to be, as advertised, a “quest for bodily perfection.” It is going to be a litany of shortcomings, a chronicle of thwartings and chastenings. It will consist of Jacobs dipping his toes in a thousand different dietary and fitness fads and will read like a novelization of every health-scare story and dubious medical study that ever beckoned from a website sidebar or nagged you from your Facebook feed. And because Jacobs will flit from topic to topic, body part to body part, anxiety to anxiety, the reader will almost but not quite fail to notice that Jacobs isn’t accomplishing very much at all.

It’s not that I wasn’t expecting this. I’m familiar with the conventions of the genre. It just took seeing them at their most conventional to realize that they’re dragging the genre down. Paradoxically, Jacobs expended an astonishing amount of hard work to produce a book this lazy. In just two years, he learned to eat better, to lift weights, to reduce his exposure to environmental toxins, to run correctly, and so on. He shed sixteen pounds, or eight pounds per year—a little more impressive than it sounds when you consider that he must have gained muscle weight in the process. He cut his fat in half. He wrote his entire book on a treadmill, walking over a thousand miles in the process.

His labors culminate in conclusions any fool could have seen coming: “I’ll incorporate much of what I learned” and “I’ll follow fitness expert Oscar Wilde’s advice: Be moderate in all things, including moderation.” It’s not even really fair to call these conclusions, since they probably appeared verbatim in his book proposal. You aren’t supposed to criticize an author for not having written a different book, but what if the book he’s written doesn’t need to exist? What if everyone already knows that health fads are zany and that moderation is good? A book trading on such modest insights had better be mind-bendingly funny. A quick test: Jacobs is sold on skin care when he sees two guys—“leather jackets, Harley tattoos”—at Penn Station, talking moisturizers. Do you find this a) funny, b) funny but implausible, or c) so Shoebox Greetings unfunny that it doesn’t matter if it happened or not? 

Most of Jacobs’s humor is of the self-deprecating or auto-emasculating variety. “[A]s an experiment,” Jacobs writes, “I’ve been wearing my blue bike helmet as I run my errands.” Have you been, man? Is anyone laughing at this? Hack comedy is one thing, but what irks me is that someone gave Jacobs a great deal of money—he mentions his advance repeatedly—to challenge himself, and instead of doing that he’s screwing around with stuff like wearing a bike helmet in public. “Bodily perfection” implies that your forty-four-year-old carcass is going to scale Half Dome or complete Marine Corps boot camp. I don’t care that you ate a bushel of vegetables, tried on a CPAP, or submitted to the indignity of wearing Vibram FiveFingers sneakers. I’d like to see some results. As it stands, we don’t even get an “after” photo.

Jacobs’s crowning achievement is a modest triathlon: eleven minutes of swimming, thirty-three minutes of bicycling, and an unspecified amount of jogging, probably 3.1 miles. Here lies the problem with shtick lit: the pedestrian nature of its goals. When men get old and retire—when they become the target market for books making light of their Jacobs-like ineptitude—they tend to read a lot of biography. Why? Perhaps it’s because age, regret, and self-criticism conspire to produce a craving for real achievement, or at least for stories about real achievement. Most of us have been half-assing it since the day we were born. Self-deprecation has become a reflex, a preemptive excuse—which is why books like Jacobs’s will climb the bestseller lists and, let’s be fair, actually entertain the average reader. Yet if shtick lit is ever to live up to its promise, it’ll have to abandon its jokesy “points for trying” mentality and start attempting the impossible in earnest.

Night Vision

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean​—armed with nothing more than a camera, a flashbulb, and a police-band receiver. Before Law & Order, HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, and the “eight million stories” of Jules Dassin’s Naked City, there was the wandering eye of Usher Fellig. Born in 1899 in Zloczew, now in Ukraine, but then part of the Austrian Empire, Usher was renamed Arthur by the immigration men at Ellis Island and renamed again by the New York Police Department, whose officers stood in awe of his seemingly clairvoyant nose for the action. The first time was to make him American, but the second time would make him immortal. Fellig himself took to stamping his work “Credit Photo by Weegee the Famous.”

“[A] photograph is a witness,” said Roland Barthes, “but a witness of something that is no more.” Weegee, who at one point estimated that he’d shot 5,000 murder scenes, put it another way:

The easiest kind of a job to cover was a murder because the stiff would be laying on the ground. He couldn’t get up and walk away or get temperamental. He would be good for at least two hours.

The International Center of Photography, which holds a massive collection of Weegee’s photographs, films, and memorabilia, has mounted this exhibition (“Weegee: Murder Is My Business”) made up primarily of his crime-scene photography from 1935–46. A huge model revolver, like the one that hung outside Frank Lava Gunsmith at 6 Centre Market Place, greets and warns the visitor. Weegee lived one door down, at No. 5, in a squalid room, reproduced at ICP like an impeccably detailed Natural History diorama.

Weegee cared for nothing but his work. According to one writer, he subsisted on a diet of “Campbell soups, Heinz vegetarian baked beans, [and] Uneeda biscuits.” With his monster-movie looks and rumpled clothing, he resembled exactly what he was, a man who worked all night, slept little, and saw things nobody wants to admit wanting to see.

Even Weegee’s most cheerful snaps, a number of which ICP throws in for balance, take on a darker cast when considered in light of his subtly perverse humor. His postcard-perfect shot of the jam-packed Coney Island beach, an inexhaustible visual interpretation of Emma Lazarus’s “teeming shore,” looks like nothing so much as an ant-encrusted cruller. Another photo, of a policeman admiring the rescued kittens in his hands, makes the viewer laugh, then cringe. The picture is a powerful, if perhaps accidental, depiction of vulnerability. For every kitten saved from a tenement fire—

“Boss, this is a roast.” Fireman’s code, Weegee learned, for a blaze with fatalities, and he captured these from the outside in. “I ran into snags with the dopey editors,” he recalled. “If it was a fire, they’d say, ‘Where’s the burning building?’ I says, ‘Look, they all look alike.’ ” So he’d forgo the blaze itself and instead photograph the tenants lucky (or unlucky) enough to survive. In one photo, two women, a mother and daughter, writhe and shriek as though still trapped inside. The elder, clutching her makeshift headscarf, might as well be the Madonna at the foot of the cross.

They are losing their loved ones. We are witnessing something that is no more, seeing the fire more clearly in their eyeballs than in any more literal-minded image.

Weegee had a flair for the unspeakable. He was willing not only to catch people in their worst moments but also to get this down to a science. He had permission to use a police radio—in fact, he was the first civilian to enjoy this strange privilege—and he outfitted his vehicles, whether Fords, Chevrolets, or rented ambulances, with darkrooms so that he could get a quick turnaround. On the payroll of tabloid dailies like PM, he saw the whole world through the noose of gallows humor. Many of his pictures are self-contained punchlines. One fire he deigned to shoot in the person of the building itself only because that building, sprayed with high-powered jets, bore the advertising slogan SIMPLY ADD BOILING WATER.

Weegee anticipated Diane Arbus with glimpses of New York’s wild side: transvestites, a diapered, beer-swilling midget called the “Bowery Cherub,” necking moviegoers in cockeyed 3-D glasses—but it’s the murders for which he’ll really be remembered. Expired gangsters, Murder Inc. hitmen, bodies crumpled against bloodied pavement, dazed cop-killers on their way to central booking—and so to the chair. A discarded suitcase, with and without the hogtied corpse found inside. Nothing was so disturbing that it could discourage the cigar-chomping voyeur from inspecting it, not even a cluster of rubberneckers, none older than 13, grinning in the carnival atmosphere of a murder scene.

Of a favorite shot, he said,

I arrived right in the heart of Little Italy, 10 Prince Street. Here’s a guy had been bumped off in the doorway of a little candy store. . . . The detectives are all over, but all the five stories of the tenement, people are on the fire escape. They’re looking; they’re having a good time. Some of the kids are even reading the funny papers and the comics! There was another photographer there and he made what we call a 10 foot shot. He made a shot of just the guy laying in the doorway. . . . I stepped all the way back, about a hundred feet. I used flash powder, and I got this whole scene—the people on the fire escapes, the body, everything. Of course the title for it was Balcony Seats at a Murder.

Among the many artifacts on view at ICP, courtesy of the curator Brian Wallis, the one most faithful to the Weegee experience is a check stub from Life magazine, thirty-five dollars for “two murders.” Blood money? The model of Usher Fellig’s shabby quarters lies waiting to rebuke anyone who’d accuse him of exploitation or opportunism. Part of his working night was spent looking, having a good time. The greater part was spent translating human frailty into a vocabulary any dope could understand. If that’s a crime, we’re all accomplices.