Remnants of Love
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing REMNANTS OF LOVE By Brooke Allen What is the primary human need? Is it food, sex, love? None of these, decides Leonard Schiller, the elderly writer in Brian Morton's new...
...the author is simply chronicling the death throes, and he does this with a cruel accuracy...
...Although Heather honestly worships Schiller the artist, her worship is intimately linked with condescension...
...She might carry him into the future...
...She has no taste for intellectual argument...
...That book also supplies the epigraph for Preston Falls: "So I saw in my dreams that the man began to run...
...nevertheless, she possesses an untouched innocence and unselfishness that the ambitious younger woman is unable even to comprehend...
...But some manage to muddle along fairly well despite their problems, like Leonard and Ariel Schiller...
...But as the novel progresses we realize that in her way she is almost as far beyond redemption as he is...
...The term covers a lot of territory...
...The Preston Falls house was Willis' fantasy, not Jean's...
...A true child of his generation, his consuming sin is irony...
...As a family they are finished from the very first page of the novel...
...Preston Falls is from beginning to end a repellent, masterful work...
...He wished he were alone in bed, reading Daniel Deronda!' Schiller's growing involvement with the slick young careerist is viewed with alarm by his daughter Ariel...
...Against his better judgment, he begins to succumb...
...The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them...
...Now she has cast herself Malcolm Cowley to his William Faulkner...
...She is a mess...
...The Bondo'd-and-primered cars up on cinderblocks...
...Heather enjoys their sexual encounter not in terms of erotic pleasure—she can hardly bring herself to touch his ancient, repulsive body—but because she sees herself as Lady Bountiful, a Florence Nightingale of sex, a "giver of life...
...Yet Morton plays some amusing variations on that theme...
...She looks upon Schiller as easy prey, and assumes that by appealing to his artistic and sexual vanity she will successfully take over his life, even in some sense become him, which is what she really wants...
...She was so young that it was almost as if she were an emissary from the future...
...but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, 'Life...
...There has been much talk in recent years about the dysfunctional family...
...Now, he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began to cry after him to return...
...Starting Out in the Evening is a pleasure to read, a neat Jamesian tale told with an original modern touch...
...Schiller, despite a hitherto single-minded devotion to his art, rejecting flattery and distraction with the asceticism of a monk, finds that he is not immune to the temptations Heather offers...
...Heather stumbled upon Schiller's two early novels as a teenager, and felt that their message of personal liberation and free choice spoke directly to her...
...But she can't let that thought take root," she keeps going through the motions of trying to discipline him with meaningless timeouts...
...The hiatus is preceded by a family Labor Day weekend at Preston Falls of such awfulness, and described by Gates in such gruesome detail, that we suspect there is no hope for this marriage, or indeed for the family members as individuals...
...Heather begins the thesis, then, with his blessing...
...Doug Willis (called simply Willis by everyone, including his wife Jean) has come to the conclusion he is living the wrong life...
...Everything is ironic but nothing is funny, and now, at the age of 45, he has become so irresistibly ironic that he is incapable of feeling any honest emotion: All he can see is "what crap everything was...
...He is fascinated and seduced by the community's gestalt: "The trailers...
...The ratty chalets and A-frames...
...In one of her few honest moments Jean realizes that "she's already lost him...
...Reading about the Willises' hellish Labor Day, we wonder why Jean doesn't simply leave her intolerable husband...
...Schiller is fat, flabby, decrepit, wrinkled...
...actually, she doesn't like to argue at all...
...Starting Out in the Evening is in some respects a literary analogue to All About Eve, with Heather as Eve Harrington to Schiller's Margo Channing...
...where he proves himself first-rate, however, is in his unswerving passion for his craft...
...Heather didn't merely want her teachers to teach her: She wanted them to single her out...
...He may or may not be second-rate as a writer (whether he is really any good is a question that Morton, cleverly, doesn't answer...
...Brian Morton writes of complex, serious issues in a light and charming manner...
...First he gets arrested for disturbing the peace, then his sleazy lawyer suggests that he do some drug running to pay off an outrageous fee...
...Others resemble the family in David Gates' new novel Preston Falls (Knopf, 368 pp., $25.00...
...The fact was that he wished she weren't there...
...He is a great writer, yes, but he needs her, the ideal reader, to achieve recognition...
...Apparent, too, is the eternal scorn of youth for age...
...Willis can play the "badass outlaw" there, drive around in a "hillbilly shitheap par excellence," j am on his guitar and forget that he has taken a wrong turn in life...
...But suddenly Schiller, who has long since resigned himself to an obscure end, is offered new hope of literary immortality...
...She will "discover" the lost master, elevate his reputation to the level it deserves, and thereby elevate her own reputation as a literary critic...
...He is attracted to Preston Falls partly because it is very unlike the suburban blandness he despises, and partly, of course, because it is un-Jean...
...It comes in the unlikely but alluring form of a 24-year-old graduate student named Heather Wolfe...
...In this skillful work the author of the highly praised 1991 novel Jernigan gives us a brilliant depiction of a life—or lives—gone out of control...
...It was strange to think that his work meant something to anyone that young...
...Better yet, it is directly threatening to Jean...
...Heather is taut, trim, glowing with youth and energy: "Just glancing at her made you feel as if you'd inhaled a hit of pure oxygen...
...Likewise Schiller, doddering and susceptible as he may be, is no easy victim...
...How appreciative is Schiller...
...That her takeover of him might be complete, she also attempts a sexual conquest, with predictably half-baked results...
...When Jean and the children go back to Westchester County after Labor Day, Willis' life remains far from the idyll he had hoped for...
...She is as different from Heather as it is possible to be...
...eternal life!'" Occasionally, remnants of love between the Willises can be glimpsed, but we don't hold out any real hope for their future...
...Willis' chronic dissatisfaction and compulsive sarcasm have worn his marriage to the breaking point...
...None of these, decides Leonard Schiller, the elderly writer in Brian Morton's new novel Starting Out in the Evening (Crown, 325 pp., $25.00): It is recognition, "the need to make a mark in the world...
...At 71, after two heart attacks, he has adopted a distinctly valetudinarian demeanor...
...Not that he knows what his real life should be, but it is certainly not the one he has in Westchester County, where he is Director of Public Affairs for Dandineau Beverages, bottlers of Sportif and various flavored iced teas...
...Writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," the author observes, paraphrasing Shelley, "and Schiller was the most unacknowledged of them all...
...Willis goes along with the plan, but fear of arrest triggers the incipient paranoia that has been lurking beneath the surface all along, and he loses what is left of his equilibrium...
...life...
...The snarling dogs coming at you until their chains stopped them short...
...Willis spends great hunks of time secluded in the farmhouse reading, appropriately enough, The Pilgrim's Progress...
...reading the psychiatric literature on the subject, you suspect that according to current definitions it applies to virtually every family in the world...
...Ariel would rather watch Oprah than read a book, including a book by her father, much as she loves him...
...Once a dancer, she has now descended to the rank of aerobics instructor...
...The kids retreat into their own worlds: 12-year-old Mel into secretive silence, nine-year-old Roger into fantasies about guns and violence that become increasingly creepy...
...Though "amazed and grateful that this young woman was touching him," the widower who has outlived his adored wife by some 30 years "had the sense of being asked to return to an arena that he had been glad to quit...
...He and Jean have agreed that he will take a twomonth leave of absence from work and spend the time in seclusion at their upstate farmhouse in Preston Falls...
...She recognizes herself, with distress, as a 39-year-old adolescent, and longs for a child, a husband and a life...
...Heather "had always had a love of learning, a love of knowledge, but it was always an embodied love: She desired this man's learning or that woman's...
...Heather is no villain, she is merely earnest, pleased with herself, and ignorant...
...The wandering chickens...
...And he can drive Jean crazy while he's doing it...
...His relentless grip on the least appealing elements of human nature is reminiscent of such contemporary virtuosos of nastiness as Philip Roth and Joseph Heller...
...On the few occasions when her children still try to elicit straight answers from her—particularly about their future as a family—she is not equal to the effort of giving them...
...Once he was fairly well-known, a respectable member of the postwar group of New York Intellectuals, crony of the likes of Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, but his four novels have now fallen out of print, his name out of circulation...
...In Schiller's own case, this drags him into extremely murky waters...
...She might keep him alive...
...She has spent so many years trying to be the liberal, enlightened, '90s mother that she has killed her spontaneity as effectively as Willis has killed his...
...she has worshiped him for years...
...Willis' rage and narcissism make him blind and deaf to anyone except himself...
...The dead raccoons and the roadside litter...
...in fact, it goes into free fall...
...he makes his characters ridiculous but never inhuman, and never entirely unsympathetic...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
