Odd Jobs (120 page)

Yet Mr. Dubus’s willingness to brood so intently above his disturbed, divorced, mostly lapsed Catholics lends his survey an aerial quality, an illusion of supernatural motion, that reminds us of what people used to read novels for. How rare it is, these days, to encounter characters with wills, with a sense of choice. Richie and his father both muster their inner strengths, make resolves, and grieve over their decisions. The most threatening opponents, Greg believes, are spiritual: “self-pity, surrender to whatever urged him to sloth or indifference or anomie or despair.” In this book the streams of consciousness are channelled by mental exertion; the mind is a garden where some thoughts and impulses should be weeded out and others encouraged. An idea of purity beckons everyone to a clean place described by the epigraph:

Greg daydreams of walking beside an unspoiled Amazon, “where each step was a new one, on new earth.” Brenda renounces promiscuity, and Joan has walked away from motherhood, at enduring cost to herself; when the opportunity arises to “tell one of her children something she knew, and to help the child,” she seizes it, spelling out for Larry—who feels humiliated by losing his ex-wife to his father—the way in which the wound will heal and life will go on. For Jack Kerouac, another Franco-American from the Merrimack Valley, Roman Catholicism had dwindled to a manic spark, a frenetic mission to find the sacred everywhere; for Mr. Dubus, amid the self-seeking egos of secular America, the church still functions as a standard of measure, a repository of mysteries that can give scale and structure to our social lives. The family and those intimate connections that make families are felt by this author as sharing the importance of our souls, and our homely, awkward movements of familial adjustment and forgiveness as being natural extensions of what Pascal called “the motions of Grace.”

• • •

Motions of another sort, in another country and on another social level, are described in
Concrete
. Though short, the novel—the fourth by Thomas Bernhard to be translated into English—does not seem especially so. Bernhard’s particular contribution to the armory of the avant-garde, and a daunting one, was the elimination of paragraphs, so that the bitter pill of his writing is administered as steadily as an IV drip, and solid page follows solid page as if in an album of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings.

However, his sentences make lucid sense. Trained as a musician, Bernhard wrote for the ear, and in
Concrete
the voice of the narrator flutters on and on, unravelling in a fascinating comedy of self-incrimination. The narrator’s name is Rudolf, and he is writing these “notes,” it turns out, in Palma, on Mallorca. But most of the action (if you can call it that) occurs in Rudolf’s country estate of Peiskam, where his delicate nervous system is recovering from a visit by his sister and he is trying to sit down at last to “a major work of impeccable scholarship” upon the composer Mendelssohn. Rudolf, who lived in Vienna for twenty years, was active in musical circles there and may even have published a critical article or two but has long since retired to Peiskam, where he fulminates, takes medicine, stalls, and becomes more and more of a recluse, seeing on a regular basis only Frau Kienesberger, his housekeeper. He is, we eventually learn, forty-eight years old and for most of his life has been dependent on medicine: “I myself owe everything to chemicals—to put it briefly—and have done for the last thirty years.” A life so fruitless and self-indulgent requires money: “Basically I have no right whatever to lead the life I do, which is as unparalleled—and as terrible—as it is expensive.” His wealth is inherited, and rouses his prose to one of its few surges of enthusiasm:

Devotees of modern literature have met Rudolf’s type of neurasthenic, self-doubting, hypercritical, indecisive, and demanding personality often before—in the letters and works of Kafka and Proust above all, but also in the luxuriant nervous systems and imaginations of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann. These all, of course, got down to work, and it is doubtful that Rudolf ever will; but the artistic sensibility, and a certain power of fascination, are his. His diatribes have a swing to them—Austrian politics becomes “all the horror stories emanating from the Ballhausplatz, where a half-crazed Chancellor is at large, issuing half-crazed orders to his idiotic ministers [and] all the horrendous parliamentary news which daily jangles in my ears and pollutes my brain and which all comes packaged in Christian hypocrisy.” The suggestion that he get a dog to relieve his solitude prompts a magnificent caricature, not without truth, of the global dog situation:

Sudden aphorisms dart from Rudolf’s free-wheeling discourse: “Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophany.” “Everyone wants to be alive, nobody wants to be dead. Everything else is a lie.” His own maneuvers—changing rooms, arising at a certain hour—to minimize his discomforts and secure a foothold in which he can begin writing his book have the beguiling energy of Kafka’s nameless hero’s futile efforts to secure his “Burrow.” These movements and the shifts of his monologue suggest less Pascal’s motions of Grace than what Nathalie Sarraute described as “numerous, entangled movements that have come up from the depths,” and whose “restless
shimmer” exists “somewhere on the fluctuating frontier that separates conversation from sub-conversation.” Rudolf’s sister exists in his discourse as elusively as a sea-monster in deep waters: she first appears to be a vulgar ogress whom he detests, but as he goes on, and describes her active life as a real-estate agent among the very rich, we see her as a normally dynamic woman of a certain set and style, faithfully trying to tease and goad her neurotic little brother into something like her own health. He does not hate her; he loves her, with the resentful adoration the ineffective feel for the effective, an emotion given its classic expression in Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” Rudolf goes Kafka one better, however, in finally identifying with his sister, for all his protests against her: “We’re both like this: for decades we’ve been accusing each other of being impossible, and yet we can’t give up being impossible, erratic, capricious and vacillating.”

And, just when the reader has resigned himself to another Beckettian study of total inertia and claustrophobic captivity, Rudolf manages to get himself out of fogbound Peiskam and to Palma. There he describes the scenery, the relative warmth, his agonies of recuperation after the adventure of the flight, and a story told to him over two years ago, during his previous visit to Mallorca, by a stranger, a Bavarian named Anna Härdtl, whom he and a local friend met on the street. Her tale, of a young woman’s rather pedestrian misadventures with marriage and an ill-advised appliance shop, was as relevant as a shaggy-dog story to Rudolf’s normal concerns, but he listened and now relates it, briskly and circumstantially, in his normally self-obsessed “notes.” On his present visit to Palma, his memory of Anna Härdtl causes him to visit the local cemetery, where all the tombs are of concrete, giving this book its title. The hardness of Palma concrete contrasts with the soft fog and musty furniture of Peiskam, and, though Rudolf ends in his usual, typically modernist state of “extreme anxiety,” he has been brought, for an interval, to think of somebody else’s troubles.

These two small novels of slight movements within the heart yield morals that are modest, even bleak. “In the end we don’t have to justify ourselves or anything else,” Rudolf writes. “We didn’t make ourselves.” And, in
Voices from the Moon
, Joan tells Larry, “So when I’m alone at night—and I love it, Larry—I look out my window, and it comes to me: we don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.” Relief from what Ibsen, in
The Wild Duck
, called
“the claim of the ideal” is being prescribed. “Oh, life would be quite tolerable, after all,” Ibsen’s Dr. Relling concludes, “if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal.” Clearly enough, Rudolf’s ardent wish to write a great “life” of Mendelssohn is preventing him from getting the first word onto paper; perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being. But have the people of
Voices from the Moon
been trying, except for Richie, to lead “great lives”? Joan’s statement has this context: Larry is a dancer, and his mother has just asked him why he doesn’t leave the Merrimack Valley and throw himself at New York. He won’t, she knows. So, since more people, through humility or inability, must live in the Merrimack Valleys of the world than on the heights, she says what she can, which isn’t much—for what does it mean, really, to “understand” and “survive” your own life? Religious resignation without religion is cold comfort. Traditional preachments promised a better life, an afterlife, or a Messiah-led revolution. Joan promises nothing, and Mr. Dubus promises little more, though he does imagine Richie lying on his back on “the soft summer earth” and feeling himself sink down into a normal human life, still “talking to the stars.” But, then, Richie is only twelve, years short of such concrete realizations as “Everyone wants to be alive, nobody wants to be dead. Everything else is a lie.”

P
ERFUME:
The Story of a Murderer
, by Patrick Süskind, translated from the German by John E. Woods. 255 pp. Knopf, 1986.

T
HE
E
NCHANTER
, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov. 127 pp. Putnam, 1986.

There are no monsters like European monsters; they need Gothic nooks and crannies and the icy swirls and trompe l’oeil of the Baroque to give them their nurture and setting. Patrick Süskind’s
Perfume
takes place in a beautifully researched yet fancifully ominous eighteenth-century
France; its monstrous hero, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born in July of 1738 into the redolence of the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris—“the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom.” This is a fragrant era:

Amid this crush of odor, the infant, delivered by his reluctant mother beneath the gutting table of a fish stall, is twice freakish: he himself is odorless, and (it will develop) his own sense of smell is preternaturally keen. A kind of olfactory superman, he rises from this humblest of beginnings amid the fish offal to become the greatest perfumer in the world and from there to distill, out of the aromas of slain adolescent beauties, a perfume so captivating that its wearer could rule the world.

Could, but of course does not, for history, until this brilliant fable by a young Munich playwright and former musician, bears no trace of Grenouille, whom the author ranks, for moral deformity, with de Sade and Saint-Just and Napoleon. Like the creator of any superman, Mr. Süskind has some trouble generating significant obstacles to his hero’s progress: with his fabulous nose Grenouille can detect a thread of scent a half-mile away, can sniff his way through the dark, can mix masterly perfumes with the ease of Mozart scribbling divine melodies, and in the end can subject an enormous crowd to his will. He also, we are asked to believe, can entertain himself for seven years of utterly eremitic life in a cave on an extinct volcano, drugging himself with symphonies of remembered scent. True, he is a superman fearfully handicapped at the outset; since his refusal to die at birth exposes his mother’s previous, successful attempts at infanticide, she is soon beheaded, and the orphan is cast on the
mercy of a world that finds his bent body, inarticulate speech, and lack of human scent repulsive. Though his name means “frog” in French, the tick—“the lonely tick, which, wrapped up in itself, huddles in its tree, blind, deaf, and dumb, and simply sniffs, sniffs all year long, for miles around, for the blood of some passing animal that it could never reach on its own power”—is the creaturely image most frequently associated with Grenouille as he and his monstrous talent mature under a succession of harsh caretakers and taskmasters. The casual squalor and brutality of ordinary eighteenth-century life forms one of the tale’s subtexts, and its opening portrait of the crowded, smelly, disease-ridden ferment of Paris (“Paris produced over ten thousand new foundlings, bastards, and orphans a year”) plausibly blends with its unfolding savageries.