Gotham Diary:
Continental
10 July 2014
Yesterday, I had a great and unexpected treat: the discovery, all on my own, of an admirable, arresting writer. I had heard nothing of Greg Baxter, or at any rate not enough to register. For that very reason, I ought not to have bought his first novel, The Apartment. But the photo on the jacket was enormously appealing, and, as jacket art goes, it’s evocative without being quite illustrative. A young woman in a red scarf appears to be crossing a bridge in a European city in the snow. “Europe” is signaled by the dolphin-based lantern that the young woman is about to pass and by the battlemented, cone-roofed buildings in the misty background. It is also signaled by a lack of specificity: the city could be anywhere in Europe cold enough for snow. In fact, the city is never identified, and I should not be surprised to learn that Baxter concocted it from bits and pieces of existing cities.
If the dust jacket drew me to The Apartment, I did not permit it to cloud my judgment of the novel itself. I read none of the copy, not even the blurbs. I read, instead, a few lengthy passages from the latter half of the novel. The writing was limpid and understated, its reserve betrayed by its thoughtfulness. Both passages appeared to be episodes, asides from a central narrative that I declined to learn about from the inside of the dust jacket. I very much wanted to discover The Apartment unaided.
When I got home, I finished the penultimate chapter of Roy Jenkins and opened The Apartment, just to have another taste. I began at the beginning, though.
It’s the middle of December, and everything is frozen over. I arrived six weeks ago with an old, worn-out pair of brown leather shoes. One night I walked around the city with a girl I’d met, and the next day I bought myself some lined, warm, waterproof boots. I threw the brown shoes away. I would have kept them for the spring, but I ruined them by heating them on the radiator at night.
I’m from the desert — a town with a small population. When I was seventeen, I left the town in the desert for a city in the desert. There were three million people in the city. There were a lot of straight, wide roads, and there weren’t many sidewalks. Though I lived and worked elsewhere more than I lived and worked in that city, I always returned — each time for a different reason. When I left six weeks ago, I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving. I just went to the airport one morning and got on a flight. I didn’t even really pack. I had a few books and half a dozen shirts and toiletries and some other things. I wanted to live in a cold city. I couldn’t say precisely why I picked this one.
This blend of detail and elision made an intoxicating cocktail, and I had no taste for anything else until I had swallowed the last drop, 192 pages later. I wanted to hear everything that this voice was prepared to tell me. I could tell from the sudden, unannounced departure from the desert city that it was the voice of a disaffected American male, wounded by meaninglessness but unlikely to whine about his pain. The contents of his suitcase attested to a self-respect that would make him a bearable first-person narrator. The way he talked about his old brown shoes led me to believe that he was more interested in the world than in himself. I wanted to see how far he could go without telling me who he was (his name, for instance) or where he was, without seeming coy or peculiar. Impressively, he went all the way to the end. I don’t mean to spoil the novel for anyone, but I insist on a distinction between divulging plot points and observing that an author has met his own challenge. Also, there was that girl. How did this guy deal with girls? How would he deal with this one?
On a deeper level, I was curious about the narrative structure. How would a story that began with such quiet firmness fill the pages? The Apartment, as a book in the hand, is on the small side, and the type is not fine. The Apartment lies in the marches between novellas and novels, the difference between which is one of scale, although not the scale of length. It is the scale, rather, that runs from complication to complexity. Proceeding from former to the latter is a matter of heightening the sense of internal consistency. A novel as complex as a fine novella would be monotonous; novels require the combination of elements that don’t completely fit — that provide relief, as it were, from one another. In a novella — and I believe that The Apartment is an excellent example of the form, at least as I define it — there is no relief, only amplification. What appears to be a change of subject is in fact a change in the lighting.
I could not think about these structural matters until I finished reading The Apartment, but once I had done so I could think of nothing else. Stunned by the cohesive power of its form, I resisted the urge to analyze it — to index, with pen and paper, the shifts between central narrative and episode, between action in the present and action in the past, and to relate the shards of backflash in order to compose a coherent biography of the narrator. Perhaps I shall get to that someday; I really do want to read The Apartment again. Instead of taking notes, I contented myself with vague thoughts about WG Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Simply put, Greg Baxter has written a novel that is “Continental” in tone and sentiment. The unnamed narrator has been stilled by horrors in his past, and those horrors are not the melodramatic frights of popular fiction but the banal horrors of modern warfare. The narrator has not done anything unusual — for a smart American in Iraq. He has served as an intelligence officer, marking men whom he knows about but has never seen for death; later, he has returned for a lucrative gig as an intelligence contractor.
His anti-Americanism is expressed in impassioned interruptions of an otherwise reticent demeanor. Two instances, appearing two pages apart, sound a note of vituperation not often heard in American fiction. Perhaps it would be better to say that, unlike most anti-American fictional rhetoric, Baxter’s is not anti-humanist; he means to single Americans out for squalor. The heart of his darkness is an inability to come to terms with springing from its ashes.
My apartment [in the desert city] was just a few blocks from the football stadium, so near that on Sundays the roar of the crowd seemed like a great godlike breath tring to blow us over. I had not specifically sought a place by the stadium, but I liked living there, because it fed my hatred of the kingdom of ambitious stupidity, of the loud and gruesome happenstance of American domination. I hated that noise, and that stadium, and I hated everyone in it, and I sat for long periods on a couch I’d bought for nothing at a flea market, listening to the celestial ecstasy of the dumb luck of being born American. That collective whoop. I hated that country and every man and woman and child and bug alive in it. I had no idea what I wanted in life then, but I knew that I hated America, and I wished that it or I did not exist. And while I thought this, on Sundays, the stadium responded with great, ecstatic, dumb breaths. And when I went to my office, I dressed in a decent suit and put an American flag on the lapel. (122)
Two pages later, the narrator is driving to the desert town in which he grew up.
I really hated the place as a kid, and I had gone on hating it my whole life. In some ways I even recognized that what I really hated about America was the fact that I hated everything in proximity to this particular place, and the farther away I got, the less hatred I felt. (124)
The Apartment must be read in toto in order to appreciate the ferocity with these outburst rend its even tone. I was overwhelmed by the sense that I, too, should feel no less unpleasantly if I did not live on my island in that part of America that is least likely to bray.
Structurally, The Apartment resembles books like My Struggle. Into the more or less straightforward recount of the events of one day are folded recollections of various kinds, all of which intensify the narrator’s course through the present. Memories of Iraq are vivid but indistinct, like dreams. Encounters with strangers in and around the unnamed city suggest relocation rather than dislocation, offering the hope that the narrator will be able to refashion his interior with the help of a new language. Two episodes stood out for me because it was hard to believe that they had survived an American editor’s pen. They consist of nothing but conversational discourses, about Bach’s Chaconne and about baroque architecture.
There is the return to his desert village, elegiac in spite of itself. The reason for the visit is to reconnect with the memory of a childhood friend, a girl who died young of a rare disease. This girl from the edge of Texas (not named, but implicit) was haunted by her Slavic roots, and especially by a pair of Bosnian infants who somehow figured in her ancestry. This passion, cut short by illness, led to nothing but a stack of document boxes of interest to no one. It is a “Kafka-esque” story that has been twisted to make a point about America, as a land of people too shallow to develop characteristics that would hold anyone’s attention. And yet, also “Kafka-esque” is the sheer strangeness of American men. They seem to have been driven insane by opportunity (real or imagined.)
The Apartment is a smart book that wears its intelligence lightly. It presents the figure of an American in the process of escaping American provincialism without merely trading it in for blasé sophistication. Here, at last, a truly serious American appears in a truly European setting. I hope that there’s more where it came from.
Daily Blague fun update: Eloise at the Crowne Plaza.