Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (153 page)

The novel’s correspondence with the crime and the movie triggered consternation. As the journalist Joe Hagan put it, what Daniel Auster had gone through, was ‘not the sort of event any father would want his son to be involved in, and not the sort of story a father would want the world to spend too much time pondering. But now the world – or at least the New York literary community – can do just that, thanks to Ms Hustvedt’s new novel.’ On the face of it,
What I Loved
is less a
roman-à-clef
than a bunch of keys hurled in the face of the reader. Hustvedt, without conceding transcription, has confessed to the work being ‘emotionally autobiographical’. Auster, to whom the work is dedicated, denies all connection.

Hustvedt followed up with a more ambitiously designed work,
The Sorrows of an American
(2008). Allusions to Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
(1925) are invoked. In this novel about America, she investigates what she sees as an active ingredient in the national character – Scandinavian gloom. The narrator-hero, Erik Davidsen, is a recently divorced New York psychotherapist. He has also recently lost his father, Lars, a professor resident in what is recognisably Hustvedt’s home town (her own father died in 2003). In his loneliness Erik sets himself the task of putting his father’s papers in order. Of particular interest is his Second World War journal (Hustvedt used her own father’s journal, verbatim, for this inset portion of the novel). Among the meticulously ordered documentary remains, is a mysterious letter, which suggests a pre-marital sexual entanglement – and, possibly, an illegitimate relative. Uncovering this mystery forms a principal narrative strand.

Erik’s sister, Inga, is also in mourning – not merely for her father, but for her Jewish-novelist husband, Max. Max is pursued, after death, by carrion-feeding ‘biographers’ – a breed Hustvedt clearly loathes. Inga is writing a dissertation on the theme that reality can only be made sense of by stories – fiction. It is something Erik has perceived in his dealings with his patients, who can also only come to terms with their psychological problems by transforming them into narrative. Gloom is the climate of Hustvedt’s fiction: it hangs over her novels like a Scandinavian February in a particularly overcast fjord. Arguably, it eclipses the reader’s interest. Too much sorrow.

Hustvedt claims that her, and her husband’s work, have ‘drawn into’ each other. One could, tentatively, draw that conclusion from Auster’s 2010 novel,
Sunset Park
, a work which is – set against the background of his earlier fiction – strikingly un-Austerian and as strikingly Hustvedtian. The novel’s title throws back the ironic echo of the more famous ‘Sunset Boulevard’ – the Los Angeles address which (as in Billy Wilder’s sardonic movie
Sunset Boulevard
) incarnates the Hollywood Dream, which, Auster’s novel suggests, with dense reference to movies, has become the American Dream.

Sunset Park
, an actual place, is a run-down area of Brooklyn alongside a huge cemetery. Here it is that dreams die and American idols are buried alongside the nobodies who never made it. The story centres on a lost son/stepson. It is 2008. Miles Heller, who may or may not have murdered his stepbrother (even he is not sure), has drifted away from his publisher father, a character who has resemblances to Auster. His parents have broken up. His mother is a film and stage actress currently playing Winnie in Beckett’s
Happy Days
(Beckett, one recalls, is the author whom Lydia Davis cites as her principal influence). Miles’s stepmother is an academic, specialising (as did Hustvedt) on mid-Victorian fiction.

As the novel opens, Miles Heller is employed as part of a four-man ‘trashing out’ team in Florida. Their job is to gut foreclosed-on properties, so they can be sold at auction. The wave of foreclosures, following the 2008 Wall Street crisis has done to whole swathes of suburban America what the tornado did to Dorothy’s farm shack in
The Wizard of Oz
. ‘Each house is a story of failure – of bankruptcy and default, of debt and foreclosure.’ Miles, to the irritation of his workmates, photographs the sites which the ‘Dunbar Realty Corporation’ strips of all human identity:

he has taken it upon himself to document the last, lingering traces of those scattered lives in order to prove that the vanished families were once here, that the ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present in the discarded things strewn about their empty houses.

One thinks of the ‘dust heaps’ (i.e. mountains of human rubbish) in Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend
, the text on which Hustvedt wrote her doctoral dissertation.

After complications with his underage Cuban-American girlfriend, Pilar, Miles drifts back to New York where he joins a squat, until the heat cools, in a foreclosedon, but as yet untrashed, property, with three fellow drifters. Over the years of wandering he has become a connoisseur of the random vanities of human existence.
The novel contains long musings on star baseball players, and movie stars, whose careers were cut short by freak accidents. There is an extended central meditation on the 1946 William Wyler-directed, Oscar-winning movie,
The Best Years of Our Lives
(Miles’s fellow squatter, Alice Bergstrom, a body-obsessed Scandinavian-American is writing a Columbia dissertation on the subject). Wyler’s film, in the glow of victory in the Second World War, expresses jubilant optimisms about America and its post-war future. Where,
Sunset Park
enquires, did all that hope go? Trashed, is the answer, like all those Florida family houses.

Revolving ironically around happiness (whose ‘pursuit’, the Declaration of Independence promises, every American is entitled to),
Sunset Park
recalls the Beckett play in which Miles’s mother is starring. There are no happy days in America any more (‘happy days are here again’ was, of course, the campaign song of FDR, who dragged his country out of depression). Gloom everywhere. What strikes the reader of Auster’s other work is how different
Sunset Park
is from, say,
The New York Trilogy
. There remains the author’s irrepressible mischievousness (a character named Hertzberg, for example, walks across from
What I Loved
). The novel is different – looser, simpler, more story-driven – from anything the novelist has previously offered his readers.

A similar loosening is evident in Hustvedt’s
The Summer Without Men
, published in 2011, a month or two after
Sunset Park
. The narrative bursts on to the page:

Sometime after he said the word
pause
, I went mad and landed in the hospital. He did not say
I don’t ever want to see you again
or
It’s over
, but after thirty years of marriage
pause
was enough to turn me into a lunatic whose thoughts burst, ricocheted, and careened into one another like popcorn kernels in a microwave bag.

It is 2008 – around thirty years after Hustvedt married Auster, one may pruriently calculate. Mia Fredricksen is a poet-professor of creative writing at Columbia, of Minnesota-Scandinavian origins. Her husband is a world-famous scientist. Unusually, the narrative of
The Summer Without Men
is interspersed with cartoons of Mia. As the novel’s jacket photo confirms, they are witty representations of the author herself. There are, as usual, coy allusions to Auster’s fiction embedded in the story. And, of course, there is the author’s love of nominal anagram – as in Iris/Siri. Mia anagrammatises as Mia/I am [Fredricksen] or, more fancifully ‘am I Fredricksen?’

Mia resolves, during the marital pause, to return to her home town. Here she involves herself in two practical exercises in literary appreciation. She takes over a reading group for the ancient ladies of the town, among whom is her widowed
mother. And she runs a creative writing class for a class of pubescent schoolgirls. Literature, she discovers, can do more for her than any prescription drug. She recovers her sanity – and, it is intimated, her husband. The story is told with an economy and spareness which is something new in her work. It will be interesting to see how it further evolves.

Fancifully one can perceive a kind of marital duet. Or, if one stands a little further back – to take in the first Mrs Auster – a trio, all playing ensemble. It is a unique concatenation of novelists’ lives.

He could start a brawl in a Trappist monastery.

The date of birth is significant. If not, like his most famous character, Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight, 14 August 1947, Salman came into the world in the period when India again became India: simultaneously a very old and a very new country. Rushdie was born Muslim in Bombay (when Bombay was Bombay – he still prefers that name over Mumbai), a city in which ‘the West was
totally
mixed up with the East’. He was brought up in a home where English and ‘Hindustani’ – a ‘colloquial mixture of Hindi and Urdu’ – were spoken indiscriminately. Hindustani, he helpfully adds, is ‘the language of Bollywood movies’, that sublimely jumbled film genre. His grandfather had a reputation as an Urdu poet and imbued his grandson with a lifelong love of P. G. Wodehouse, a writer, as Rushdie mischievously claims, peculiarly congenial to the Indian mind.

His father was a briefcase-carrying, Cambridge University-educated (Literature), businessman. Theirs was a vexed relationship. Rushdie Sr took offence at the satirical depiction of himself in
Midnight’s Children
(1981). Salman ‘pissed him off’ further by observing he had tactfully left most of the paternal satire out. Their reconciliation is recorded in the touching last sections of
The Satanic Verses
(1988), a novel which Anis Ahmed Rushdie did not live to read. Salman, the only son, was, as he records, pampered by the women in the family. He recalls as a primal literary experience seeing the film of
The Wizard of Oz
. ‘After I saw the film, I went home and wrote a short story called “Over the Rainbow.” I was probably nine or ten.’

When asked what his great theme is, Rushdie answers ‘worlds in collision’. His upbringing is a bewildering series of post-colonial frictions. He, a child of the mosque, had his first formal education at Bombay’s Cathedral School. At thirteen-and-a-half
he was sent halfway around the world to finish his school education at Rugby, Tom Brown’s school. Hughes’s novel starts with an extended tribute to England’s ‘Browns’, who have been instrumental in covering the globe imperial red. It was not an entirely congenial institution for someone literally brown. Dr Arnold’s school still had its Flashmans, one gathers. Rushdie says he knew ‘everything about racism’ by the time he left Rugby; he found escapist relief in
The Lord of the Rings
.

Meanwhile, back in the subcontinent, his family was the victim of ethnic cleansing, forcing them to relocate to Karachi. Salman Rushdie was now a Pakistani. But if he felt he had roots anywhere it was two generations back in Kashmir. This is the region which supplies the beautifully composed prelude to
Midnight’s Children
. A continuously contested region, Rushdie ‘took it on’ at full-length in
Shalimar the Clown
(2005). Kashmir, he believes, is where the Third World War will start, kicked off by confrontation between the planet’s two most volatile nuclear powers. Those who question the prophetic powers of Salman Rushdie should be wary. His New York novel
Fury
(2001), with a dustjacket, chosen by the author, depicting the Empire State Building struck by lightning, came out five days before 9/11.
Shalimar
is a novel which the Western reader should ponder.

Rushdie went on to King’s College, Cambridge, where he was, he recalled, happy. It was E. M. Forster’s college. His views on
Passage to India
have never, as far as I know, been recorded. He read history – against his father’s wishes, who demanded something more practical – economics, for example. Rushdie Sr was appalled at the thought that his son and heir should be a writer: ‘A cry burst out of him: What will I tell my friends? What he really meant was that all his friends’ less intelligent sons were pulling down big bucks in serious jobs and what – I was going to be a penniless novelist?’ Whatever else, the author of
Midnight’s Children
was not destined to be penniless.

The subcontinent was currently wracked by war in which Rushdie was, by background, on both sides. He could have stayed on at the university – his third background – but, as the hero decides in
Fury
, the narrowness, infighting and ‘ultimate provincialism’ of Cambridge was intolerable. He went to London where he ‘futzed around’: it was an exciting decade, commemorated in the middle sections of
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(1999). Everyone of his age cohort was futzing. His first idea was to go on the stage – something, one fancies, which would have elicited an even louder wail from his father. His talent, he realised after a few performances, was inadequate (though the thrill is still there: he is always willing to do cameos for any film director who asks). He was broke, alienated from his father, living in a garret when – through one of his theatrical pals – he landed a job in advertising: the novelist’s equivalent to street-walking. All through the 1970s he would keep body and
soul together coming up with tags and jingles for the commercial world. Meanwhile, he was writing fiction in his spare time – ‘flailing about’, as he later put it.