Tim O’Brien: America Fantastica — A Novel. New York: Mariner Books, 2023.
Lorrie Moore: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home — A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2023.
Ayesha A. Siddiqi published a critical piece in Bookforum on the ideological limitations of Zadie Smith’s latest novel. It may be useful background reading for this letter. We’re dealing with famous writers, published by the five giants, who are touching on the political while still holding to certain aesthetic commitments. O’Brien and Moore do this in an interesting way, though ultimately perhaps these works may be considered A+ of Mid.
This duo of hot-of-the-press contemporary American novels are both very similar and very odd. They're both road movies in book form, and they're both concerned with conspiracy. They aren't experimental books, and yet the paranoia and ideological distrust of what “They” say, things I associate with the heyday of avant-garde writing in the States, are stamped all over these texts.
Not only are they road stories — picaresque novels, they're called — but their roads go from the city to the countryside (and back again in O'Brien's case), in any case, an acute need to escape from modernity, to nature, to peaceful being, and to the past, where these sort of novels were more workable.
Tim O'Brien has been publishing since the seventies, and his 1990 novel The Things They Carried is a seminal piece of war memoir-fiction.
I've known the latter fact for as long as I've known about literature, but O'Brien is still a reading lapse: I haven't read any of his work till now. America Fantastica is his fourth novel since TTTC, and the his first published in a decade.
It was a long picaresque narrative, a kind of antic-ridden road movie, like Smokey and the Bandit. But instead of Burt Lancaster and Sally Field, we have a very deflated couple: Boyd Halverson, a middle-aged disgraced journalist, divorced, ex-retail worker, who robs the Community National Bank in Fulda, northern California, and takes the teller Angie Bing along. They hide out in Mexico, then go north to Minnesota, where Halverson has a half-baked plan of revenge on the man who ruined him, namely his ex-father in law. Hot on their trail are the bank's corrupt owners, Boyd's ex Evelyn, Evelyn's husband's bodyguard, a dirty cop, and Randy, the funniest part of the cast, which spreads beyond this to include ex-cons and local cops.
Despite once being a reporter, Boyd is an out and out compulsive liar. Boyd Halverson isn't even his real name. He may be gregarious in some moments, but it's always fast-talking BS. He's a mediocre, middle-aged chud of a guy, who fits in the Trumpist demographic (in this novel Trump is only referred to as the POTUS). Boyd is like a single incarnation of the mythomania that is pervading our post-truth, fake news-saturated society. We read intercalary chapters that seem to “omnisciently” present such pathological falsehoods. “Nannies and city councilmen in Prescott, Arizona, denounced the devil's codex implanted in the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution; the Census bureau was refusing to count people with blue eyes; Grover Cleveland's skull was buried under the Watergate complex...”
It turns out these zany headlines are being fabricated by a couple of chuds working for the local Chamber of Commerce: it's created by and for losers.
Another huge difference between Boyd and Angie's small-time crime odyssey and the classic ones of Bonnie and Clyde or Queen and Slim is that by and large the police do not chase them. Officer Toby is too busy harassing Mexican Americans, and then only wants to get in on a robbery job himself.
This novel takes place across the year 2019, so why, I wondered, does it feel so retro? Even Angie wonders that about Boyd's personal style. Granted, Randy only gets on their trail because Angie sends a text — the most "millennial" one of the cast, especially her tendency to overshare.
Nevertheless, this zaziness is the surface of our contemporary imperialist society, dominated by monopoly and finance capitals. The dastardly Dooney, who ruined Boyd over a scoop exposing his faulty shipping line, in one scene explains this overwhelming structure of “coporate verticality” to his lover Calvin. There are horizontal holdings — various firms making different commodities under one ownership, plus distribution and selling everything, basically the retail-techno monopoly of Amazon.
And there’s more “verticality,” which in Dooney’s words means becoming the government when the government doesn’t do your bidding: iron triangles of regulators and legislators that are merely extensions of the corporations they’re meant to control.
“So where was I? Adam Smith had it dead wrong. You want competition, play lacrosse Play… What’s the most popular board game in America?”
“Monopoly,” Calvin said.
We go down and up and down the American west, cross-cutting through a bunch of farcical, madcap storylines, like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), for a world of people who think Covid and the lockdown was a government psyop. It would make a pretty good movie, I bet, or more likely these days, a 5-part miniseries. It's 450 pages long, and I was ready for things to wrap up coming around page 300.
Still, it's a fun satire old-fashioned yet topical, and it decently conveys some ideas about our national collective mythomania — our America Fantastica — or our disease of self-representation. At some point, we've staked personal meaning and self-actualization on public perceptions so much that we have to fabricate in big or small ways, like Boyd. Why does he have to say he scaled mount McKinley and survived brain cancer? The narrator would respond with a question: “Why risk failure when a fib was always conveniently at hand?”
If O'Brien was all-new to me till now, Lorrie Moore and my reading life go waaaay back.
Her story collections Self-Help (1989) and Birds of America (1998) are classics, and constant re-checkouts from the local library. Her dry yet felicitous third person stories made her stand out among writers who started publishing in the 80s.
And now she has a new novel, her first since A Gate at the Stairs (2019). And like O'Brien, it's topical stuff, set just before the 2016 Presidential Election, so it seems both were moved to drop some statements by these turbulent recent events (like remember when the Cubs won the World Series?).
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home starts with a letter from the nineteenth century, shortly after the Civil War, written in a lively voice by an innkeeper named Elizabeth, deep in middle America, addressed to her sister. She talks about her tasks, the lodgers who come through, and being a spinster. “Desire, of course, on my part has been shoed away by the Lord. Though sometimes I think I see it, raggedy, out back among the mossy pavers, like a child cutting across yards to get to school. One sees a darting through the gum trees and hickories that have come back from the winter's scorching freeze.”
But then we get a long third-person chapter with a hero named Finn, a laid off high school history teacher, who in 2016 is driving through Chelsea, Manhattan, to get to a hospice in the Bronx, where his brother Max is dying. I really dug these impressions of New York, a crazy place where the people yell in their bluetooth phones as if wilfully insane.
The smell of the city in morning, the mix of food and smog, triggered in Finn the trips to strange cities he had taken as a child; he had been made to be up too early, with his school groups, or his family, and now he could feel again the vague terror and strange adventure of a world happening simultaneously and separately from the world he was from. Cities seemed cobbled together from parts of other cities in other times.
The next 50 or so pages read like a wonderful, intense novella. Moore gets so much characterization out of the dialog, even with one of the characters recumbent on a deathbed.
We learn that Finn is grieving the end of a relationship with a troubled woman named Lily, who has taken off with some guy named Jack.
He was unable to love anyone else. He had tried. But always he missed her. He was like a dog, not seeing colors, chasing his own sepia-colored tail, sepia because it was all in the past, one's own tail when chasing it, was in the past, but hey that's where everything he wanted was.
Among other things, like whether the Cubs will win the Series and if Trump will win the election, Finn talks to Max about the conspiracies he used to teach his high school students. “Kids? Probably more than one crazed guy was in on this. Society pulls the trigger. [...] I'm not a denier of any tragedy, just skeptical about the cleanup crew. [...] You got to teach kids that if it adds up too neatly it probably isn't correct.”
John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on behalf of Confederate spies and rogue federal agents, JFK was a mafia hit, MLK was a Klan killing, we didn't land on the moon. These conspiratorial ideas are more ubiquitous than ever, in the O'Brien book as well, and they reflect not some absolutely new “post-truth” environment, but more basically how mainstream the distrust of our government has become.
And then, the novel breaks off in another, strange direction. Finn gets called back to the sticks: Lily has committed suicide. Out of emotional desparation he drives to the cemetary where he was hastiy buried, but she's standing in a field of fleabane flowers, as if waiting for him! Is she a zombie, a shade, a hallucination? Whatever's happening, she hops in the car with Finn and they go on a final journey. The only available clothes for Lily are her costume from her job as a therapy clown.
Then we cut back to Elizabeth’s letters, and we see how these elements intersect, although they don’t exactly “add up too neatly,” the way the official narratives do for Finn. The way Moore puts all these things into play is quite evocative, packed as it is under her slick-simple style.
There’s more to be said about how both of these novels are approaching America’s current political crisis. There’s widespread ignorance and irrationality from our “mythomania,” and there’s a macabre festival of old political questions, from the Civil War and Reconstruction, that were thought to be long-settled.
But it’s also a “retrospective” approach. I mean O’Brien doesn’t bring in deep fake videos or AI-generated revenge porn or other concepts to illustrate American mythomania. The protagonists of both go on long drives, away from Wi-Fi and the mediascape, and back in a familiar old-timey American landscape of scenic woods, strip motels, and quaint diners.
It struck me as a strategic way to avoid things that are hard to represent in conventional fiction, like text messages, chatrooms, basically our online existence that at this point is our second nature, or maybe just is our nature.
Americans have been escaping the city for a long while now. A telling passage in Moore’s book, from the first time Finn and an undead Lily hop in the car and drive off, suggests that these questions of crises (which in the Marxist perspective is indelibly linked to capitalist accumulation) are practically unavoidable. In the same moment our heroes evoke capitalism, they also reflect on science and quantum mechanics.
Lily shrugged. Or something like a shrug. “I guess death’s kind of a spectrum.”
“It would appear that way,” said Finn.
“Late-stage capitalism.” Whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. Maybe it meant that death really did cost money, that the afterlife like life continued to charge you for things. “Do you know about Schrodinger’s cat?”
He knew that it was about the dead and the living lying side by side. Instead he said, “That’s not the one where the telling of the thing destroys the thing?”
“No, cat’s aren’t much bothered by that.”
A final point in Moore’s favor: there’s an inspired line of love language. Would you ever describe your significant other’s farts as containing the “rustle of leaves” and “thawed frozen dinner”?