I Think You're Totally Wrong (10 page)

CALEB:
In high school I just read mystery, science fiction, and sports magazines, but I did browse our books and the
Nat Geos
. Not until college and wanting to become a writer did I read. I was getting into philosophy, Christianity.

DAVID:
Your book is definitely coming back to me. It deals with those three friends—Mark, Vince, and “you.” Still seems like it could be a good book.

CALEB:
You're misremembering a little. It was based on Mark and Vince, but I made them into one character whose dad's dead. Both Mark and Vince lost a parent in high school. You said about it, “I'm especially impressed by the narrator's ability to compress his meditations into startling aphorisms, and at crucial moments—sex, love, drugs, religion, nature, death—the prose is joyful, even ecstatic.”

DAVID:
That sounds like me.

CALEB:
You thought it should begin in Seattle, because the first part was slow.

DAVID:
Where was the first part set?

CALEB:
A small town. The story was set chronologically. You wanted the novel to begin after the father died. You wanted flashbacks.

DAVID:
I do remember that. I remember I wanted to steal that line of yours.

CALEB:
And I should have let you. Then I could have said, “Gimme a blurb.”

CALEB:
Last night I woke up at four a.m., thinking about your X factor. And mine. I'm fascinated by death, but especially killing. There's no more dramatic moment in life than killing,
or watching someone dying. But killing entertains us. Why? Answer that, and you get to suffering. And where we fit in. How do we stop suffering? How do we love? Are you familiar with Haing Ngor and Dith Pran?

DAVID:
Of course. In
Swimming to Cambodia
, Spalding Gray talks about how Ngor played Pran in
The Killing Fields
.

CALEB:
Both of them thought
The Killing Fields
tamed death, made it palatable. In
Silence of the Lambs
Jodie Foster finds skinned corpses in swamps, but that's okay. That's entertainment. You ever read
A Cambodian Odyssey
?

DAVID:
I haven't.

CALEB:
Haing Ngor's autobiography, told to someone or other. Ngor witnessed a Khmer Rouge cadre get angry because this pregnant woman wasn't working hard. The cadre took his bayonet, disemboweled her, sliced out her fetus, tied the fetus to a string, and hung it from a porch. There were about a dozen other small, shriveled, shrunken clumps hanging from the porch rafters, and until this moment Ngor hadn't realized they were fetuses.

DAVID:
There's nothing I can say.

CALEB:
In college I chose art before politics, but I changed. Politics, art, love, life—they converge. Brian Fawcett concluded
Cambodia
by meditating on Prince Sihanouk's words: “The Khmer Rouge withheld the basic human right to be loved.” This platitude scores a direct hit on my X factor.

DAVID:
I'm sure I sound like a complete asshole, but that's the problem: it's a platitude. It's not taking us anywhere interesting.

CALEB:
(handing David a manuscript)
This is “The Biography of Davy Muth,” a Cambodian woman, pronounced “Dah-vee” but spelled like Davy Crockett. She's been writing her autobiography for twenty years and recently asked me if I'd help. She lived in Phnom Penh, was a teacher, had four children and a husband who was a professor at a military academy. April 17, 1975, rolled around: over the next weeks she saw her husband loaded onto the back of a truck—last time she saw him. Her family then splits up: two of her children go with her sister and mother, and she takes two. They die—one executed, one poisoned. She doesn't hear anything about her family until January of 1979, when Vietnam invades. She goes to a refugee camp in Thailand, is reunited with her other two children. Thai soldiers rape Cambodians; she and her sister dig holes and hide every night. She finally made it to Seattle. Through her story I weave: Why do we kill? Why do we enjoy killing if we think it's fictional? Why are we fascinated with serial killers? Can this fascination lead to solutions? Can we develop empathy through imagination to finally arrive at action?

DAVID:
(looking at the manuscript)
That doesn't sound that far from my own Iraqi-Afghani-Vietnamese idea.

CALEB:
In your writing, you have a hesitancy to judge—a moral relativism that allows anything into play, and it comes across as amoral. You're so hesitant.

DAVID:
You have a much more public and political imagination
than I do. And I'd love to see if I can't burn your village down to the—

CALEB:
I—

DAVID:
Let me finish, Caleb. It's not as if you're a hugely right-on person who is out there manning the barricades, but you think of yourself as more politically engaged than I am. Okay. Well, I want to investigate that. Even though you're twelve years younger than I am, you remind me, in a way, of my mother and father. You probably think of me as—I don't know—neurotic, overly interior, solipsistic, whatever. But I find you extremely didactic, moralistic, polemical, self-righteous, preachy. Is that unfair? You say I'm hesitant to judge, but—hey—I'm happy to judge anything anytime.

CALEB:
You judge subjective taste issues: a book, a movie, a painting, but on moral issues, no.

DAVID:
I think of myself, in fact, as trying to scrutinize each choice. Can you think of an example where I'll give someone too much benefit of the doubt?

CALEB:
You paint a picture of people taking advantage of their race—the NBA as reparation theater.

DAVID:
I would certainly write that book differently now.

CALEB:
Your interpretation of Fawcett's
Cambodia
was off. You wrote, essentially, “Brian Fawcett uses juxtaposition as a way to show that mass culture is as insidious as the Khmer Rouge.”

DAVID:
But in his email to us, he actually seemed to agree with me. Otherwise, there's no point to that book; there's no other way to make sense of the bifurcation of the page into media parables and war atrocity.

CALEB:
I just reread
Cambodia
. Your interpretation isn't so far off, but that just means that both you and Fawcett are wrong. Any Cambodian who lived through the Khmer Rouge would not think the invasion of McDonald's and Walmart and TV into their homes is so terrible. That's a Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky–level analogue. Absurd.

DAVID:
“When you ask me if I'm political, what you're really saying is, ‘Do you identify your critique of everyday life as a political one?' It seems to me a politics of consciousness and a politics of awareness are so lacking in most of what are considered to be political viewpoints that I'm not sure I want to call it politics. Before I can begin to discuss the kind of questions that people normally call ‘politics,' I would have to solve perceptual and mental and emotional confusions that seem to me to so surround every discourse that I certainly haven't gotten anywhere close to ‘politics' yet.”

CALEB:
Who's that?

DAVID:
Lethem.

CALEB:
Let's talk about
Human Smoke
.

DAVID:
Nicholson Baker is sympathetic to Quakerism, is essentially a pacifist. And he wanted to give himself the toughest possible case to make for pacifism: World War II. Most people would support the Allied effort to stop the Nazis.

CALEB:
Even Chomsky.

DAVID:
Baker doesn't, in any way, justify what Hitler did, but he wants to show you Roosevelt's and Churchill's warmongering, their death-dealing. The book is trying to show you that, finally, if Germans die, if Japanese die, if Americans die, if British soldiers die, it's all human smoke. We're all people. We're all mortal beings. That's the book, and it'd be hard to argue otherwise.

CALEB:
I'll argue otherwise.

DAVID:
You see it differently?

CALEB:
Baker showed the warmongering of the Allies, but the book doesn't say, “We're all human smoke.” Baker says that despite the degradation war brings, “we must fight. We must stop evil at all costs.” And that's the message.

DAVID:
It is?

CALEB:
In the final scene, two Nazi soldiers are outside a concentration camp. One takes a whiff of the ash in the air and says, “Ahh, human smoke!” This macabre image contradicts your forced metaphor.

DAVID:
You're right to focus on that paragraph, but to me you're reading it way too literally. If that's all he was saying, why would he even have bothered to write the book? Why did the book receive so many reviews that were beyond negative? The entire strategy of the book—interpolating hundreds of paragraphs, all from different sources—militates against your reading.

CALEB:
Baker illustrates the moral ambiguities of the Allies, but in no way does he make a case against World War II.

DAVID:
Jews in ovens. Jews as candles. We've been there a million times.

CALEB:
Six million times.

DAVID:
Baker is trying to take you someplace stranger and, to me, more interesting. Am I a moral relativist and are you a moral absolutist—is that what this is about?

CALEB:
I struggle with that myself.

DAVID:
I really like that line of Goethe's: “I've never heard of a crime I couldn't imagine committing myself.” To me, one way that human beings can become better, or at least that art can serve people, is if the writer or the artist shows how flawed he or she actually is. Basically, the royal road to salvation, for me, lies through an artist saying very uncompromising things about himself. And through reading that relentless investigation, the reader will understand something surprising about himself. I always come back to the idea that we're all bozos on this bus. If my work has value, which I have to believe it does, it's in the realm of helping—or more like forcing—other human beings to confront their/our shared humanity/flawedness. If every single person in the world read my books—

Caleb laughs
.

DAVID:
First of all, I'd be richer than that guy you know who wrote
The Art of Racing in the Rain
—

CALEB:
Garth Stein—

DAVID:
—which would be a very good thing. And second of all, people would not, I swear to god, go around killing one another, because they'd stop thinking that evil is “out there.” That's why it's so important to me to empty out Franzen. Everything he writes is in the service of fighting off any insight into himself and locating instead all shade and shadow elsewhere, out there, the next precinct over.

CALEB:
As opposed to evil inside.

DAVID:
You know it.

CALEB:
The common man will be evil. Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Stanley Milgram added the exclamation point with his experiments. Yeah, no duh, people are like this. Normal people will submit to authority and become sociopaths.

DAVID:
Right. And, boy, is Franzen always on his high moral horse. He, to me, is utter anathema, whereas Wallace, at his best, was always going deeper into himself, flaying himself alive in order for us to understand ourselves better. That's a pretty big fucking accomplishment.