Lucking Out (33 page)

Whether or not a novel “holds up” over time means less to me than whether or not it
holds on
—if you can open any page and hear a voice coming through like a hypnosis countdown, initiating a one-on-one spell. When I think about the novels from the seventies, it isn’t the big kahunas that project staying power in my crabby affections, bashing best sellers such as Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
, whose prodigious set pieces were like the gargantuan meals in
La Grande Bouffe
, a grandiose glut with scatty arias of word-spew and a sprawling cast of characters with wacky, Dr. Strangelovian names (Lady Mnemosyne Gloobe, Lucifer Amp, Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz); Saul Bellow’s
Humboldt’s Gift
, which constructs a too-unwieldy, top-heavy, and monument-minded edifice for the tragic unraveling of the poet of so much/too much promise undone by insanity, Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz (who would become the subject of James Atlas’s moving biography); E. L. Doctorow’s
Ragtime
, a brilliant nickelodeon of a coup at the time, historical personages and fictional characters painted a bright enamel and set in pageant motion, but now something of a novelty item; William Styron’s
Sophie’s Choice
, a pretentiously sham Arthur Miller soap-opera exercise in moral breast-beating set in the Holocaust for maximum high-minded, grandstanding sensationalism; John Irving’s
World According to Garp
, that Rube Goldberg Grand Guignol contraption of castration, self-mutilation, brain damage, and radical gender reassignment that the literary establishment found life-ratifyingly uproarious (“We not only laugh at the world according to Garp, but we also accept it and love it,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the
New York Times
); even Norman Mailer’s
Executioner’s Song
, a half-great book that has the pared purity of a Japanese prose master such as Kawabata or Tanizaki in its mosaic account of the life of Gary Gilmore, but flabs up in the second half when it shifts to the media circus erected around Gilmore’s execution and includes a heap of special pleading for Mailer’s collaborator on the project, Lawrence Schiller.

No, the seventies novels that mean the most to me are the ones that expressed, distilled, and bottled a
mood
, mood being the most mysterious element in art, something beyond design and technique, the dark matter that permeates the grainy tilt of Robert Frank photographs, where roadside America seems viewed through skull sockets; the bleak winter of Robert Altman’s
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
and the rancid sunlight of Sam Peckinpah’s
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia;
the sonic dislocation and embracing estrangement of David Bowie’s
Low;
the God-abandoned destitution of some of the best
Twilight Zone
episodes.

James Salter’s
A Sport and a Pastime
has that for me, an erotic novel unsurpassed at recapturing that godly, awakening sense of two young bodies in bed being a new world unto itself, sealed behind shuttered windows that silence and hide the long white afternoons. “Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.” Sorrentino’s
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
, quoted above, crackles with caustic comedy steeped in a witches’ brew of coffee grounds, shed hair on the sofa, and grease spots of mediocrity, with a fine selection of impotence on tap (sexual, literary, you name it) and at least one wisecrack on every other page that will unstitch your scalp and brighten your doomy day, bitter apostrophes about the life of a poet in all its avenues to disappointment: “The real poet was obsessed with his poems, his life, an egoist, selfish, boorish, rude, crazy. A great, romantic thing, into the breach, kill me tomorrow let me live tonight! and so on. Long hair and flowing lips, falling on the thorns of life, tortured to death in stifling university jobs, the Great Soul Writhing Underneath. Swift, intense, and destructive affairs with female undergraduates, too many vodka martinis, Fuck the Dean! Fuck the Chairman! … Anything. Everything.” A frustration-driven novel, always glancing over its shoulder at the next nuisance to darken the doorway, with a mock lyricism that becomes the real impassioned thing by the end, as if it can’t help itself.
Imaginative Qualities
is the only metafictional novel I can read without feeling as if I’m moving furniture up flights of stairs, the only one most animated by animal human vitality instead of marching through a cerebral encyclopedia. Why Sorrentino orphaned this snaggled line of attack in so many of his later naturalistic-mode novels (which dug their naturalistic knuckles into the brow until the reader cried, “Uncle”) is one of those questions that, had it been posed to him, would have probably been met with a “gruff retort,” like provoking Nabokov by asking about all the damned doppelgängers in his emerald fiction. Be grateful for what we’re given, and don’t muddle criticism with backseat driving.

Same with Don DeLillo. In recent years DeLillo must ask himself the cosmic question, “Why go on?,” his later novels greeted with a fish-face without a trace of affection for everything he’s done before, beating him up with his own achievements (
Libra, Underworld
) instead. His
Great Jones Street
of 1973 doesn’t have the cybernetic density and conspiratorial mesh of his corporate-gnostic-algorithmic probes into power, chance, and paranoia, but its hungover mood evokes the exhaustion and pissed-away promises of the post-sixties, a psychological dehydration requiring a sequestering with none of the skin tingle of
A Sport and a Pastime
’s incognito air. I know, sounds like fun, and the novel’s charcoal prose can read like a coroner’s report: “I took a taxi past the cemeteries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” And yet its sense of time and place (I love that the novel is named for and set in an actual street with no mythic overtones until DeLillo endowed them) hooks me each time out: “I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the window ledge.” How such passages recall rooms and views from my own past, as if my Horatio Street and St. Marks apartments had merged into one. I sometimes wonder if
Great Jones Street
might not be more highly esteemed if DeLillo hadn’t dubbed his rock-star narrator Bucky Wunderlick, a Pynchonesque moniker that’s hard to take seriously for a mystique-ridden Jim Morrison–like lizard king in self-exile. I can’t see the name Bucky without thinking of Captain America’s kid sidekick, one of the residua of having grown up religiously consuming Marvel Comics.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I found true fruition in book reviewing and taken up literary criticism as my sole vocation, setting aside childish things. I bet I’d be
real
bitter now. Staring out the screen door like Tommy Lee Jones in a bad mood, having long been farmed out by whatever magazine employed me and wishing I had drunk more so that I could write a sobriety memoir. Writing as deskbound craft, profession, and calling already comes pre-outfitted with so many diaphanous veils of solitariness that word-delight alone—the pleasure of all the billiard balls clicking and emptying into the pockets—doesn’t compensate for an audience that doesn’t answer no matter how nicely you call. I never felt this way writing about television for the
Voice
, even though television watching was considered then (less so now) a sedentary, light-bleached act of inanition that
The New Yorker
’s former TV critic Michael Arlen once compared to masturbation, which would presumably make writing about television like masturbating with both hands, no one’s idea of heroism. There was always a sense of a larger audience out there, a fandom of fellow anchorites who watched
The Rockford Files
(James Garner as the perfect low-overhead, corner-cutting L.A. investigator for a recessionary time—a Lew Archer who can’t step out of his trailer home without some cheap hood harassing his sideburns);
Kojak
(with the lollipop-sucking baldie detective who looked like a Ban Roll-on deodorant whose show even Lionel Trilling confessed to watching); Tom Snyder’s late-night
Tomorrow
show, where the host’s cigarette smoke ribboned the moody tension on the set, so different from the decompression chambers of studios today; the local Stanley Siegel talk show on WABC, where the Me Decade host bared his neuroses and had a regular segment on Friday mornings when he discussed the week in review with his actual psychotherapist (Siegel’s national moment landing when a discombobulated Truman Capote appeared as guest and slurred, “We all know a fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room,” and a “Southern fag” is “meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met,” as a prelude to venomizing Princess Lee Radziwill, with whom he had had a planet-fissuring falling-out); SCTV, the comedy ensemble whose satirical genius flickers intermittently today in the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, absent the sketch revue; and Uncle Floyd, the New Jersey kiddie-show host with a puppet sidekick whose magicianship with minimalist stagecraft made him the Ernie Kovacs of the punk-decade mutant brigade (when the Ramones were guests on the program, they felt right at decrepit home). Writing about certain shows week after week (to the point where a few
Voice
editors got fed up with my recurring favorites) was like writing about your friends, the latest chapter of what they were up to. When I flick back at the book reviews I did in the seventies, I sometimes wince at the nasty incisions I inflicted on writers when I crossed the line between cutup and cutthroat (I won’t quote examples—no need to re-inflict wounds). But what really retrospectively bugs me was when I got prescriptive, telling writers what they should have done, where their true gifts lie, the road they should take to get onto I-95 to reach Delaware by dawn. I recoil when I see reviewers doing it today, acting like talent management agents for some literary Almighty.

TV defied such dispensing morning-after pills to those involved. It was a collaborative push following its own set of tracks, and nothing a critic said was likely to lodge and peck inside its creators’ brains for years after, building a nest. Even the sharpest dig didn’t have the palpable impact of being spat at by a stranger in the street, to use one of Sheed’s analogies for how a novelist feels having his latest work speared in print. In the seventies, before HBO, Showtime, AMC, and the networks built supertanker series with multichambered
Godfather
novelistic character bibles (
The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, The Wire, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
), television was more antihierarchical, prestige-resistant, and alien to putzy pretension. It didn’t have any of the auteurist mystique and pantheon aura of film criticism, and to this day no collection of TV criticism swings the clout of Kael’s
I Lost It at the Movies
and
Deeper into Movies
, James Agee’s
Agee on Film
, Andrew Sarris’s
American Cinema
, Manny Farber’s
Negative Space
, or the roundups of Otis Ferguson’s reviews for the
New Republic.
This was freeing for me, this acceptance of transience. It kept me balanced and responsive, not having a canon to lean on. I remember getting a report from a friend about a conversation he had with one of the
Voice
’s top theater critics who nosed up at the sound of my name as if it might trigger his hay fever. “Wolcott can be funny,” he conceded, “but it’s easy being funny about television. It’s not a medium that makes many demands.” “How
dare
he call me facile!” I fumed with the pretend ire I so enjoyed in P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster novels when this was related to me. I would have gotten more upset if it weren’t for the fact that he had a point about TV requiring less deep-sea drilling and rock quarrying than theater-opera-dance reviewing. I couldn’t pretend I was propping up any of the pillars of Western Civ when I descanted on
The Ropers
, the spin-off series from
Three’s Company
that co-starred Audra Lindley in a succession of misguided muumuus and Norman Fell, whose lips were caulked with a chalky white substance, no one quite knew why: a sitcom that I always mention when I feel my friend Elvis Mitchell could use a laugh. But being facile is harder than it looks, no one survives long as a chuckle bunny in print, and it wasn’t all party tricks. I had to ladder up to a higher diving board to do justice to Paul Winfield’s magnificent Martin Luther King in
King
, Dennis Potter’s breakthrough lip-sync musical
Pennies from Heaven
, and the epochal miniseries
Holocaust
, because that was part of the job, being able to work at different altitudes.

My model was the Australian multi-talent Clive James (poet, novelist, literary critic, celebrity profiler, TV host), whose television column for the London
Observer
was as hilarious and high-wire an act as Kenneth Tynan’s theater reviews had been in the sixties for the same paper. I stole from James as if copping his dance moves, mimicking his mimicry of anchormen and bogus dialogue, and later flew with him up to meet Pauline at her house in the Berkshires, an airsick excursion he described in “Postcard from New York” for the
Observer:
“We flew through a storm all the way. Lighting his cigarette one-handed, the pilot did a no-sweat Buzz Sawyer routine while his co-pilot made a great show of understanding the map. The aircraft behaved like a pair of underpants in a washing machine.” As the plane came in for a landing, we looked out the window and saw the hills adjacent the strip full of summer-dressed people gawking upward. “What are they doing out there on the grass?” I asked, to which Clive replied, “Waiting to see us crash.” Once we arrived at Pauline’s, we chased away the jitters and relaxed before going out to dinner, Pauline and Clive standing and sipping wine while I sat on the couch, drinking cola. Somewhere between sips, Clive reflectively remarked, “I feel old enough to be his father.” “I’m old enough to be his grandmother,” answered Pauline. “Pa! Grandma!” I cried, throwing open my arms as if discovering my long-lost kin.