Odd Jobs (119 page)

Jacobo Timmerman has written, in whole-hearted praise of
Curfew
, that in it Donoso “reveals that even those who fight against the dictatorship may be cowards and antiheroes. Most important of all, he shows that not everything in Chile is clear—there is also confusion and despair.… No individual act of political protest is more telling than the sad lives that Chileans are forced to lead.” Perhaps in Spanish the novel is more persuasive, less wordy and diffuse and slack, than in English; but in any translation the unhappy revolutionaries must quarrel and drink and seethe and drone in a political vacuum. Donoso, who returned to Chile in 1981, after an absence of eighteen years, generously credits the
personnel of the regime with “human complexity,” and perceives that the anti-regime forces can sink into “a hatred of all for all.” In his exposition, however, the regime has little face and less philosophy, and those who oppose it have no dream or memory of good government. How things came to this claustrophobic pass is not explained, nor is a way out indicated. What human virtue we see resides in the oldest characters, the two venerable writers, Fausta and Don Celedonio, survivors from a more gracious time; in the last chapter, they are taking care of the novel’s children, since nobody else will.

In Chinua Achebe’s novel, too, a fine writer’s spirits and prose appear to have been dampened by the politics of his country. The novel’s country is called Kangan, its capital Bassa, and its drought-stricken rebellious region Abazon, but Achebe’s native Nigeria and his painful identification with the Ibo cause in the Biafran war supply the blood that flows through his fantasy nation. The sorry condition of contemporary Africa is his subject; drought and the situation of women have been added, as major African concerns, to those of official corruption, regional division, and the continuing legacy of colonialism. Like
Curfew
, though at less length,
Anthills of the Savannah
seeks to encompass too much. The author’s first novel in twenty-two years, it shows signs of piecemeal composition and interrupted inspiration. Jaggedly told, from a multiplicity of viewpoints, it quite lacks the purposeful narrative flow of Achebe’s masterpiece,
Things Fall Apart;
its voices fitfully range from poems and myths to cocktail gossip, from almost unintelligible dialogue in West African patois (“You think na so we do am come reach superintendent. Tomorrow make you go contravene His Excellency for road and if they ask you you say you no know am before”) to equally opaque flights of literarese:

In some sentences, the words accumulate like sandbags being piled up by a weary worker:

Nevertheless, from the fractured telling a number of truths about Africa emerge. African educated elites are smallish, and power struggles can involve old friends. The three main male characters—Ikem Osodi, the crusading editor of the
National Gazette;
Chris Oriko, its former editor and now government Commissioner for Information; and Sam, now called His Excellency, the President of Kangan—were classmates, disciplined and influenced by the same English masters at a colonial institution called Lord Lugard College. As Chris remembers those days, “Ikem was the brightest in the class.… Sam was the social paragon.… He was the all-rounder.… He never failed once in anything. Had the magic touch. And that’s always deadly in the long run. He is paying the bills now, I think. And if we are not lucky we shall all pay dearly. How I wish he had gone to Medical School which had been his first ambition. But he fell instead under the spell of our English headmaster who fought the Italians in Abyssinia in 1941 and had a sword from an Ethiopian prince to prove it. So Sam enrolled in the first school cadet corps in the country and was on his way to Sandhurst.” The military proved to be the post-colonial path to power, but Sam has kept in touch with Chris and Ikem, and has shared some of his power, uneasily. Chris explains, “Ikem may resent me but he probably resents Sam even more and Sam resents both of us most vehemently. We are too close together, I think. Lord Lugard College trained her boys to be lonely leaders in separate remote places, not cooped up together in one crummy family business.”

If African government is a “crummy family business,” it is also a chancy raffle. The author states, “In the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quite easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people’s shit in buckets on his head.” To those whom the caprice of the raffle has favored, “the people” are a distant reality, idealized and avoided. The President declines to meet with delegates from drought-stricken Abazon, and Chris’s
flight by bus into this province becomes a redemptive immersion in the suffering masses. He reflects, “The kind of people—local bourgeoisie and foreign diplomats—who sidle up to you at cocktail parties to inform you that Bassa was not Kangan are the very ones who go on behaving as though it was. Why? Because, like the rest of the best people, they have never travelled by bus out of Bassa on the Great North Road.” Embarked on the dusty vast plains, coached in talking pidgin and evading policemen, Chris rejoices as “the ensuing knowledge seeped through every pore in his skin into the core of his being continuing the transformation, already in process, of the man he was.” A parallel transformation, more ardently than convincingly described, is that of Ikem’s lower-class mistress, Elewa, into a pregnant “object of veneration” and a Madonna of national hope. The realer woman in the novel is Chris’s lover, Beatrice Okoh, a government official who has undergone the dispiriting ordeal of education and urbanization.

Though Sam, the dictator, is depicted as a schoolboy, his decline from good intentions into tyranny is barely sketched, as if Achebe expected us intuitively to understand the logic whereby an African government deteriorates, in a modern national setting, into graft, a blinding obsequiousness, and the panicky fiats of a power-holder who holds his power in the dark. No ideal of public service or noblesse oblige shelters high office from the rule of rapacity; everything devolves to the demonstration and retention of status. Chris, pondering the political intricacies of secretaries putting their bosses on the line to other bosses, wonders “why everything in this country turns so readily to routines of ritual contest.” An anachronistic old man who administers the healing kola-nut ritual tells his little audience of coup-survivors, “We have seen too much trouble in Kangan since the white man left because those who make plans make plans for themselves only and their families.” Such a stricture is more apt to be applauded by white men than by the black administrators and intellectuals of Africa’s many independent states, and Achebe deserves credit for facing the fact, however obvious it is, that post-colonial Africa has been no paradise. He seems more bemused and depressed than indignant, and, like Donoso in
his
political misery, offers as guide only a fond look back at the past, fetching up a gracious figure or two from the old, displaced hierarchies. Though a number of deaths occur in
Anthills of the Savannah
—with a casual suddenness somehow more grievous than Lopito’s strenuous dying—the end effect is not claustrophobic but strangely lively. Life, life persisting and seeking new combinations,
is what emerges from the near-cryptic shuffle of scenes, reminding us that this country of Kangan, whatever else it fails to be, is a collection of people, hopeful people. The kola-nut ritual asserts, “If something pursues us we shall escape but if we pursue something we shall catch it.” The novel takes its title from a phrase in a long prose poem of Ikem’s: “like anthills surviving to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year’s brush fires.”

V
OICES FROM THE
M
OON
, by Andre Dubus. 126 pp. Godine, 1984.

C
ONCRETE
, by Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by David McLintock. 156 pp. Knopf, 1984.

As a writer, Andre Dubus has come up the hard way, with a resolutely unflashy style and doggedly unglamorous, unironical characters. These characters have tended to live to the north of Boston’s urbane suburbs, in the region of Massachusetts bordering southern New Hampshire, from Newburyport to Haverhill, the city where Mr. Dubus now resides. The Merrimack Valley was the New World’s first real industrial belt, and has been economically disconsolate for decades; the textile mills moved south and then foreign imports undermined the leather and shoe factories. But life goes on, and life’s gallant, battered ongoingness, with its erratic fuelling by sex, religion, and liquor, constitutes his sturdy central subject, which is rendered with a luminous delicacy and a certain attenuating virtuosity in his new, very short novel,
Voices from the Moon
.

The title comes from a poem by Michael Van Walleghen, mentioning “the several voices/Which have called to you/Like voices from the moon.” The voices, presumably, are the six characters whose points of view and interior monologues the reader shares in the course of nine chapters. The action takes place in one day, and its principal event is the announcement by Greg Stowe, the forty-seven-year-old owner of two ice-cream stores, that he intends to marry his twenty-five-year-old former daughter-in-law, Brenda. Along with Greg’s and Brenda’s, we get to
eavesdrop on the thoughts and perceptions of Joan, Greg’s first wife; Larry, Brenda’s first husband and Greg’s older son; Carol, Greg’s twenty-six-year-old daughter; and Richie, his twelve-year-old son. The story, really, is Richie’s; we begin and end in his mind, early in the morning and late at night, and two more chapters trace, as the day progresses, his inner turmoil over this confusing proposed change within his family. He has been living with his father, visiting his mother in the nearby town of Amesbury and often seeing his brother, who will now, he fears, shun the new household. Richie is a normal-appearing boy—“a lean suntanned boy … neither tall nor short”—with the heart of a saint; he likes horseback-riding and softball and cross-country skiing well enough, but the Catholic Church forms his deepest preoccupation and solace. He attends mass, by himself, almost every morning, and hopes to become a priest:

On a different plane of attraction from Father Oberti stands Melissa Donnelly, who is three months older than Richie and, at barely thirteen, one of the youngest temptresses in fiction since Nabokov’s Lolita. In the course of the never-violent events of this summer day—a day, like most, of modest revelations and adjustments—we see Richie’s priestly vocation just perceptibly erode. Though the novel bares a number of hearts, in a range of tough, detached, and even perverse adult attitudes, its supreme and presiding achievement is its convincing portrait of this benign male child, from whom the trauma of parental divorce and the instruction of the church have elicited a premature manliness. When his father asks him his opinion of the coming marriage, Richie merely says, “I want you to be happy,” and the gritty older man has the grace to blush and become momentarily speechless.

A dramatically versatile overview as in
Voices from the Moon
risks reminding us too much of the overviewer. Mr. Dubus has taken especial care with his three women, and has much to tell us about female sexuality
and, contrariwise, the female lust for solitude: Joan, having “outlived love,” rejoices in her manless apartment and the comradely after-hours company of her fellow waitresses. Carol and Brenda also live alone, but have not yet outlived love, and seem therefore a bit cursed; one of the novel’s theological implications is that in seeking relief from solitude we sin, and fall inevitably into pain. Joan reflects that “Richie had always been solitary and at peace with it”; so it is with a distinct sense of loss that the reader sees him, at the end, turn toward a human comforter. All three women, though assigned different attributes, are given neither much physical presence nor a palpable distinctness at the core; all three are too ready, perhaps, to train their thoughts upon the bumbling, rugged wonder of the masculine. Brenda fondly marvels at the way male friends never really talk about their lives, standing together at bars for hours, and how they fight “like two male dogs” and how “also like dogs they would not hurt each other.” And Carol, looking at her own father, comfortably sees “in his lowered face, and his smile, that look men wore when they knew they were bad boys yet were loved by a woman anyway.” For Dubus’s men, as for Raymond Carver’s not dissimilar quasi-blue-collar, sixpack-packing heroes, women tend to loom larger than life and to merge into one big, treacherous, irresistible lap. Carol, whose daughterliness cuts across the great sexual division, and Larry, who by a twist in his nature somewhat straddles it, are relatively cloudy stops in Mr. Dubus’s tour of the Stowe family. Of his nine chapters, too many end with an embrace, with or without tears, and sometimes the language becomes overemotional: “and in the sound of his expelled breath Greg heard defeat and resignation, and they struck his heart a blow that nearly broke him, nearly forced him to lower his face into his hands and weep.” The language can also wax abstract: “Because when you fought so much and so hard, against pain like this as well as the knee-deep bullshit of the world, so you could be free to lie in the shade of contentment and love, the great risk was that you would be left without joy or passion, and in the long evenings of respite and solitude would turn to the woman you loved with only the distracted touch, the distant murmurs of tired responsibility.” At the opposite pole, the simplicities of Hemingway intrude: “He crouched to lock the rear wheel and was very hungry and hoped his father was making pancakes.” And there is an excess of procedural detail, relating not to catching fish in the Big Two-Hearted River but to food preparation along the Merrimack: pancakes and bacon, tequila, lunch for the diet-conscious, vodka with onions and pepper—we
learn how to prepare and consume them all. These characters are well catered to.