By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff, 12/06/98
Tom Wolfe
"A Man in Full"
Say what you will about the man's
high-lit pretensions: No other novel this year is as funny, exacting, or cursedly
ambitious.
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Contemplating the millennium can be a cruel pastime for ministers of culture,
filling them with self-regard and a tendency toward pop revisionism. (Y2K
notwithstanding, it will only get worse.) As the light fades over the 20th
century, trend-spotters, journalists, and other ne'er-do-wells begin to make
even more lists than usual -- groupings of cataclysmic events, great leaps
forward, novels momentous but unread. I refer in particular to this year's
stunningly aggrandized contribution from Random House's Modern Library,
which nudged its editorial board into naming (and ranking) the 100 best
English-language novels of the century. Sales of "Ulysses,'' which headed the
list, no doubt enjoyed a brisk little field day, though I suspect few people
rushed out to get "The Magnificent Ambersons,'' unless it was to rent the
video. Then the Radcliffe Publishing Course, determined not to be outdone in
quasi-democratic literary pursuits, countered with its own list, including two
titles by (!) Ayn Rand.
Ah, well. This donnybrook was great fun for the arguments it inspired, among
them Richard Ford's dismissing the Joyce choice as (sniff) the triumph of
academic modernism. You will see no such fur-flying here, if only because this
list is both humbler (bookended around a mere 12 months) and more
grandiose (decided by a voting jury of one). First, though, to the year itself --
which promised much, delivered less, but still managed to slightly enhance and
advance the state of fiction.
It hasn't been the gentlest of times, what with Wal-Mart suing Amazon.com,
Amazon.com appropriating the palpable art of browsing, and Barnes &
Noble trying to take over the world. Certainly 1998 had its share of dramas,
amusements, and upsets. In an odd act that seemed part misguided hubris and
part bad taste, Pat Conroy snared the assignment of writing the sequel to
"Gone with the Wind.'' Gordon Lish, a master of hubris and bad taste in his
own fiction, was reported to have had more creepy control over Raymond
Carver's stories than anyone, including Carver, would have liked. The fatwah
against Salman Rushdie was lifted just long enough for him to exhale and lose
his British police guard; then a new edict announced he was still under death
threat, probably forever.
The complete Oxford English Dictionary went on line, making those of us with
old-fashioned, clutterbug libraries feel more Luddite than ever. Brit babe
Bridget Jones, Helen Fielding's fictional creation who can't find her pantyhose
or a boyfriend, grabbed her 15 minutes in the sun (and on the bestseller lists),
even if her diary did induce the mildly amused horror of half the women in
America. Tom Wolfe's long-awaited "A Man in Full'' enjoyed a seven-figure
printing and a National Book Award nomination before the damn thing was
even in the stores. Wolfe, who in those 700-plus rip-snorting pages lets his
own red dog off the leash, still couldn't stop the quieter animal of Alice
McDermott, whose upset win at the National Book Awards was a sweet
victory for literary fiction.
And that, really, suggested the kind of year 1998 was: full of big old novels
and graceful surprises, where the acknowledged masters had to make room
for the exquisite promise of newer applicants. Rarely have so many stars in
contemporary fiction published in one season; rarer still was the number of
disappointments from within that lofty realm. Russell Banks and Jane Smiley
both turned their considerable sights toward the Civil War, but their efforts
failed to sway this reviewer: Banks's huge novel about John Brown,
"Cloudsplitter,'' while passionately wrought, lacks the grace and inner
dimension of his previous work. Smiley's "The All-True Travels and
Adventures of Lidie Newton'' achieves an intelligently realized picaresque ode
to the 19th-century novel but just isn't very captivating. Richard Powers,
whose cerebral gifts can either dazzle or dismay, mostly accomplished the
latter in his commerce-ridden novel, "Gain.'' Anne Tyler wrote a Sweet 'n'
Low story in "Patchwork Planet''; Nadine Gordimer composed a morally
resonant but dry treatise in "The House Gun.'' In a misfire attempt to go
existential tough-guy, Martin Amis wrote a miserable little mystery in "Night
Train.'' Combining his sui generis brilliance with a gotcha subtext mirroring his
personal life, Philip Roth blended history and malice in "I Married a
Communist.'' And Tim O'Brien, who also ought to know better, created one
of the most unsavory characters in recent memory in "Tomcat in Love.''
All was not lost among such elevations: Toni Morrison's "Paradise,'' about
the emotional legacies of an insulated Oklahoma community, is a complex,
rhapsodic novel. William Trevor's inimitable sensibility hovers throughout the
chilling story of "Death in Summer.'' In "Damascus Gate,'' Robert Stone
wrote an intellectually rich novel about the madness -- religious, political,
emotional -- of modern Jerusalem. John Updike finished off his satin-smooth,
half-melancholy trilogy about Henry Bech, his Jewish doppelganger, in "Bech
at Bay: A Quasi-Novel.'' Cormac McCarthy completed his Border Trilogy,
on the mythic West of mid-century America, with "Cities of the Plain.'' And
Richard Price surely produced the most high-throttle novel of the summer with
his story of a child's disappearance in "Freedomland.''
Ian McEwan, who won England's Booker Prize this fall for "Amsterdam,'' a
smaller work, wrote a gorgeously creepy novel about obsession in "Enduring
Love.'' In "The Antelope Wife,'' set among Native American generations in
the Midwest, Louise Erdrich braided time and myth with love and tragedy.
David Gates, acclaimed for the world-weary narrator of his first novel,
"Jernigan,'' returned with equally wry mastery in "Preston Falls.'' John Edgar
Wideman produced his usual mix of intelligence and passion in "Two Cities,''
set in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, while Barbara Kingsolver, in her vast story
about the former Belgian Congo, delivered her best novel in years in "The
Poisonwood Bible.''
Jane Hamilton's "The Short History of a Prince'' captures her lovable
protagonist -- a gay man who has returned home to the Midwest -- with
prismatic depth. Widely admired for her story collection, "The Family
Markowitz,'' Allegra Goodman turned her sights to a summer community of
Orthodox Jews in upstate New York in her first novel, "Kaaterskill Falls.''
Ethan Canin managed an excellent friendship between a dentist and a
self-destructive blackguard in "For Kings and Planets,'' while Dorothy Allison
followed a rock 'n' roll star home to Georgia in "Cavedweller.'' The Irish
playwright Sebastian Barry wrote a hauntingly mythic little novel about a man
trying to find his way in from the seas of exile in "The Whereabouts of Eneas
McNulty.'' And Daniel Menaker, beloved from his years as fiction editor of
The New Yorker, wrote an uproarious portrait of a Freudian shrink and his
mostly helpless analysand in "The Treatment.''
For the crowd who likes its fiction cerebral, the year also offered intellectual
bonbons from Peter Carey ("Jack Maggs,'' an homage to "Great Expectations''), Andrea Barrett ("The Voyage of the Narwhal,'' where science and self-awareness collide in the Arctic), Maureen Howard ("A Lover's Almanac,'' an ode to time and modernity), and Cathleen Schine ("The Evolution of Jane,'' where Darwin has a hand). There were new novels
from old favorites, most notably Joyce Carol Oates's "My Heart Laid Bare,''
John Irving's "A Widow for One Year,'' and Patrick O'Brian's "The Hundred Days,'' as well as the prolific Louis Begley ("Mistler's Exit'') and Beryl Bainbridge ("Master Georgie''). Edwidge Danticat revisited Haiti for the bracing truths of "The Farming of Bones,'' while Gayl Jones, in "The Healing,'' returned with her first novel in decades.
Some of the heroes were local in 1998, for New England had a pack of
authors making welcome appearances, among them Howard Norman's "The
Museum Guard,'' Elinor Lipman's "The Inn at Lake Devine,'' Eileen Pollack's
"Paradise, New York,'' George Packer's "Central Square,'' Roland
Merullo's "Revere Beach Boulevard,'' Jill McCorkle's "Final Vinyl Days,''
and -- oh, guv'nor! -- William F. Weld's "Mackerel by Moonlight.'' But most
of us can't succeed in (commercial) art and politics alike, so we are forced to
rely upon the mere sustenance of literature. Thank heavens, then, for the fine
harvest of 1998: for the creative challenges sought and met, the ordinary
moments exalted by such prose, and the splendid traces left across the sky.
To the richest legacies -- the finest fiction -- of 1998, we offer these grateful
accolades.
"The Hours'' by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22). In this
lovingly rendered homage to Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway,'' Cunningham
weaves the discrete stories of three women into a subtle and stunning
commentary on the power of art to influence and guide our paths. You get to
reread "Mrs. Dalloway,'' too.
"This Side of Brightness'' by Colum McCann (Metropolitan/Holt, $23).
Opening with the exquisitely realized days of a homeless man in modern New
York, McCann then cuts to the building of the subway tunnels at the start of
the 20th century. The novel feels both monumental and luminescent, with a
richness of physical and emotional detail that captures the span (and cruelty)
of history within one man's story.
"Charming Billy'' by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21).
Admirers of "That Night'' and "At Weddings and Wakes'' were thrilled when
McDermott won the National Book Award for this novel, which possesses
her usual stylistic resonance as well as her regard for the lure of the past. Billy
himself is an Irish-American raconteur of heart-swelling proportion, not least
because his story opens at his funeral.
"Evening'' by Susan Minot (Knopf, $23). However commendable her
previous work, "Evening'' is a quantum leap for Minot, returning to the
choices and passions of a woman's life through her stream-of-consciousness
memories on her deathbed. The novel renders these two modes of being --
the life lived and the death faced -- with equal authority, and with a beauty
that eulogizes both.
"Birds of America'' by Lorrie Moore (Knopf, $23). Shimmering with the
reality of contemporary America, this collection of stories is by turns hilarious
and profound; the dialogue is nearly always pitch-perfect, and at least two
stories are on their way to being classics. "Birds of America'' accomplishes
that task which is the ineffable joy of art: It makes your life feel a little bit
wider when it's over.
"The Love of a Good Woman'' by Alice Munro (Knopf, $24). Canada's
great architect of the short story (in her hands, a cathedral) has given us eight
powerful stories that owe their artistic mettle to Flannery O'Connor and
William Faulkner as well as to Chekhov. All set in the hinterlands of Ontario,
they are thick as stone, and just as strong, and they have at their dark center a
searingly truthful blend of chaos and grace.
"A Man in Full'' by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.95). Oh, that
Virginia Tory turned double-agent. Nobody in Atlanta can trust Tom Wolfe
anymore, nor should they: "A Man in Full'' is a scarily precise, epic portrayal
of Georgia-cracker provincialism -- the New South in all its failed glory and
comic disrepair. It also rides roughshod over the rest of contemporary
America, from its high-rise boardrooms to the inside of a California prison.
Say what you will about the man's high-lit pretensions: No other novel this
year is as funny, exacting, or cursedly ambitious.
This story ran on page C08 of the Boston Globe on 12/27/98.
) Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
