Assumption

I thought I'd add something about the book I'm reading today, Assumption by Percival Everett (Graywolf Press, 2011), whose work I've written about before. I'm just 50 pages in so far, but I'm enjoying it: Ogden Walker is a small-town New Mexico policeman, the son of a white mother and an African American father. Deaths are starting to pile up in the area, and Walker is trying to figure out what's going on. Straightforward enough.

What interests me about Everett's work so far is his protagonists, who are heterosexual males, not macho but not extremely expressive, educated and intelligent, with full inner lives. That last matters, because I've read too many male characters who seem dulled or apathetic inside, and who don't use the intelligence they're supposed to have. Everett's protagonists are people worth knowing.

Ogden's hobby, which he learned from his late father, is tying flies -- not fishing, but making the lures.

Ogden finally asked his father to teach him to tie, not so much because he wanted to fish, but because he thought the flies were beautiful. He was ten at the time and he still remembered watching his first colorful streamer develop in front of him. He recalled the way ti felt to trim the deer hair on his first grasshopper, the pieces of feathers, how much fun it was to dub the muskrat fur onto the thread with his thumb and index finger ... He no longer felt sad when he thought of [his father]. In fact, the thought of him helped Ogden relax. They had been close, for some reason not having the conflicts his friends had had with their fathers. He wondered if his present profession would have caused a problem between them, in spite of his mother's assurance. He wondered because he himself had a problem with it. He felt out of touch with his time, didn't like people his age. He wasn't like a lot of people who became cops, didn't want to be like them, but then Fragua and Paz weren't like that either. They weren't hard men; some wouldn't even have called them tough, but they did their jobs. Ogden wanted only to do his job [49].

This pleases me because I often encounter recommendations of fiction about men who aren't like this. They are either flat and dull and apathetic, or huge screaming open wounds inside while trying vainly to look tough. The women in their lives fail them, of course, but that's depicted as a failure in the women, not in them. Of course the world is full of such men, but the fiction I've read about them never seems to lead anywhere; worse, it's praised as exemplary. Everett is doing something that works much better for me.

Duality of Tastes

I owe Shirley Hazzard an apology. The Transit of Venus, which I just finished reading, is not as male-identified as I thought at first. But in fairness to myself, I was more than halfway through the novel before I had any reason to revise my assessment.

There had been a slight hint earlier, when one of the main character's coworkers rebels at the usual division of office labor: when a male administrator asks Valda to sew a button for him ("I am not handy with such things," he tells her), she complies, but a week later asks him to change her typewriter ribbon. "I am not handy with machines," she tells him guilefully. (This is in 1950s London, by the way.) He writes in her personnel file that "she tended to be aggressive over trifles" (141). Later "the queenly and long-limbed Valda" laments to Caro, the protagonist, how male supremacy contaminates heterosexual romance, but she also observes of her coworkers, "The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" (142). And then there's something just a bit ... odd. Queer, even:

For her part, Valda considered Caro as a possibility lost. Caro might have done anything, but preferred the common limbo of sexual love. Whoever said, "When you go to women, take your whip," was on to something deep, and deeply discouraging [143].

Valda disappeared into the background, but I should have known that in a novel as carefully constructed as this one, I hadn't seen the last of her. That episode had to be a setup for something else, and so it proved. Caro gets involved with an American man, and when she returns to the office one day after a long lunch, she learns that Valda has been tending to be aggressive again.

... Valda had refused to prepare tea or procure sandwiches at lunchtime over ever again. ...

"And is not that somewhat absurd? [asks the same administrator] The purveying of -- ah -- victuals being an accepted part of her functions?"

"By whom is it accepted?" [inquires Caro]

"By every woman here except Miss Fenchurch and, I now take it, yourself. Had there been a wider sense of unfitness, the girls would have expressed it generally."

"Most people have to have unfitness pointed out to them. At first there is usually only one person who does that."

Mr. Leadbetter had, as he was put it to his wife that evening, seldom been so vexed. "And do you not find this a paltry and and selfish attitude? The men in this office are, after all, forgoing the lunch hour altogether, remaining at their desks for extra duty. The girls are merely asked -- required -- to help them discharge onerous extra tasks."

"The men do nothing that lowers their self-esteem. On the contrary, staying at their desk exalts it" [192].

And so on. Perhaps you're wondering why Caro had gone into Mr. Leadbetter's office in the first place.

"In fact I have come to give you my resignation."

His mouth opened and closed: like a horse with carney. "And may I inquire the motive?"

"I am going to be married" [193].

To her American, of course. It's a neatly done scene, but it's also the only time Caro exhibits any sense of politics, of any kind. Well, it is the Fifties, not a good time for politics in Anglo-America. Years later she becomes aware of oppression in Latin America, and briefly befriends a poet from an unnamed country (I'd guess Chile was the model, but the author is carefully unspecific) whose work she undertakes to translate into English. I'm not complaining because Caro doesn't start running guns for the revolution; what bothers me is the hermetic quality of Caro's depicted life. I think all this is due to Caro's personal alienation, not the author's: between "1952 and 1962 Hazzard worked in the United Nations as a clerical employee", and she later wrote two nonfiction books about the United Nations, so I assume she has a wider perspective on the world than Caro exhibits. Presumably her UN job was the model for Caro's job in London, which has some vague connection to international diplomacy. (Like Caro, Hazzard was born in Australia in the early 1930s and moved to England just after World War II.) The result is to make Caro mostly seem especially self-absorbed, rather than to put her personal -- romantic -- life into any kind of relief.

That episode did open up the book a bit to my mind, but then towards the end it is revealed that one important character is a Sodomite. He calls himself a "homosexual," but his function is more primitive than that: he opens up a moral abyss with the shock value of "the underside of my nature" and "me and my kind," so I think Sodomite is more apt as a label for him. You can almost smell the fire and brimstone as he tells his sordid story. It made me withdraw the goodwill I'd begun to extend to the novel, which never recovered from this detour. But "detour" isn't the right word, because it's clear that Hazzard intends it to be part of the main road of the story. The abyss then recedes into the distance, and heterosexuality triumphs -- I'm deliberately trying not to give away too much, though it's not a big surprise in context. But the ending rings false to me. I'm only really surprised that I had forgotten this episode from the previous time I read The Transit of Venus. (On the other hand, I also forgot that Frank Herbert's Dune had an important character named Duncan -- a more uncommon name in those pre-Highlander days -- until I saw the 1984 film version.)

Hazzard writes really well; it's her prose that carried me through the book's 337 pages. Her depiction of her characters' aging was interesting too. At the end, though, I was struck by the drabness of the world and people she created.

In the Room the Women Come and Go

I've been reading Shirley Hazzard's 1980 novel The Transit of Venus (Viking) -- rereading it, rather. I first read it soon after it was published, because of the rave reviews it garnered, but it made absolutely no impression on me. Hazzard writes very well, her prose is the main attraction, but I suspect I'll forget the book again right after I finish it. It reads like a Virago reprint of a novel from the 1930s or 40s, and indeed it's set (except a bit of backstory) in the 40s right after the end of the Second World War. The trouble is that it seems to have no perspective on the period, as one has a right to expect from a novel written, or at any rate published, thirty years later.

This passage, for example, from page 146. One of the principals, a young woman in her early twenties, is in a department-store tearoom overlooking Piccadilly in London, waiting for a friend to arrive.

Admitting only seemly sounds, the room sheltered none but the decorous. All tables were occupied by women. Waitresses like wardresses kept a reproving eye on performance, repressively mopping a stain or replacing a dropped fork. Something not unpleasant, a nursery security, came along with this. Yet in such a setting you might sicken of women -- sicken of their high-pitched, imperious, undulant gender, their bosoms and bottoms and dressed hair, their pleats, flounces, and crammed handbags: all the appurtenances, natural and assumed, of their sex. In such density they could hardly be regarded as persons, as men might be; and were even intent on being silly, all topics sanctified by the vehemence brought to them.

There is some validity to these observations, but exactly the same could be said of men in all-male environments, be they gay or straight, butch or nelly: in such density they can hardly be regarded as persons. I don't know much about Hazzard, but I get the impression from this novel that she's rather male-identified: the kind of woman whose friends are mostly male, who thinks of herself as above the fripperies and foolishness of most women. Or maybe not, who knows? The novel, so far at any rate, is highly gendered, a glimpse into the heterosexual lifestyle that makes me feel quite content not to be part of it.