From Superman to Everyman
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction From Superman to Everyman By Brooke Allen Novelists can be roughly divided into those who go for the bigpicture, and those who dwell on the small one: the polymath who,...
...The narrator formally introduces himself a few pages into the book: "Good morning, it's 3:57 A.M...
...What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff...
...DeLillo, author of swaggeringly ambitious works (including Mao II, White Noise, Underworld), has been trying for more than two decades to synthesize a vision of contemporary American society in all its messy, insane, outrageous totality...
...Cosmopolis, like most of DeLillo's work, is a mixed bag, bursting with not-very-nourishing goodies...
...Eric's final realization that he is merely a frail, mortal animal seems surprisingly banal both in human and literary terms...
...For instance...
...regularly, light a fire to dispel the icy Maine chill, and sit alone in his living room savoring the joys of solitary contemplation...
...And it's worth it...
...All of A Box of Matches essentially amounts to this sort of exposition, for better and for worse...
...and I'm chewing an apple...
...Maybe A Box of Matches should be thought of more as a poem than a novel, since it progresses not from A to ? or even, to quote Dorothy Parker, from A to B, but only from A to A. It is an expression of love, no more or less—a desperate love, helpless to protect its object...
...But he keeps them rare and tantalizing, always segueing immediately into long riffs about the art of making coffee in the dark, or carrying dry cleaning home without the wire hangers cutting into your flesh...
...crammed with plasma screens thatpulsate with images, charts and data streams...
...And then I began to scrub, scooting over the smooth places and then ramming into the islands of resistance...
...I crèmed Fidel three times in six days when he is in Bucharest last year...
...None of these events is unusual for Eric, but this does turn out to be an unusual, even fateful day...
...He enjoys, or at least tolerates, several sexual encounters...
...Even Emmett's thankless chore of scrubbing a pan encrusted with the remains of baked macaroni is a subject for epiphany: "I got the water from the tap to a hot but not unbearable temperature and, having successfully felt forthe rough-sided scrubber sponge and the container of dishwashing liquid, I squirted a big blind C over the bottom, where the baked-on cheese was...
...Nevermind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before the eye...
...Sometimes Emmett thinks about his dead grandparents, his aging parents, and his children who are growing and moving little by little beyond his grasp...
...DeLillo's, the personification of global capitalism, represents the ego rampant, ever hungry, ever dissatisfied...
...This is what you bought...
...All wealth has become wealth for its own sake...
...After creaming Eric and being pulverized by his security forces, he relates some of his adventures: "You are living up to reputation, okay...
...The dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the Internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future...
...It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of prof its and vigorous investment...
...There's no more danger in the new...
...These brief forays are among the nicest moments in the book...
...Life is...
...My name is Emmett, I'm 44, and I earn a livmg writing medical textbooks...
...It is a triplex with a rotating room at the top, a meditation cell, a shark tank, a borzoi pen, and a collection of disturbingly opaque art...
...Leaving the limo only at odd moments, he orchestrates encounters with most of the significant people in his life...
...I felt a need to let out some private gas before I sat down, and because I didn't want to make any noise I paused for a moment and pulled on one side of my bottom—backside perhaps is a more delicate term—to allow the release to proceed without fanfare...
...Both now have new novels out that describe particular days in the lives of very different men who might be called representative of their time and place...
...They make me to wear a radio collar when I am in England, to safe the queen...
...Passing me by, passing me by...
...Compared with Baker, though, Updike looks like Dostoyevsky...
...What does this remind us of...
...He is not content, for example, to make his point through people and situations...
...Yet occasionally in A Box of Matches we get a faint, faint whiff of malaise, or sensed crisis, or, if nothing more, Emmett's barely voiced fear that he is failing to extract all he can from life...
...Certainly the limo is cozier, more customized for his special needs than the cavernous apartment...
...Track me like rare crane...
...in the Utopian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit...
...I quiche Sultan of f— ing Brunei in his bath...
...One hundred and four million...
...fitted out with "mode control" that sucks unpleasant odors out of the atmosphere...
...Eric seems to spend more time, however, in his stretch limo than at his home or office...
...And because Eric, in the manner of so many DeLillo characters, is essentially cartoonish, you approach him in a spirit of ridicule, unreceptive to the pathos with which DeLillo occasionally tries to endow him...
...Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around— nobody big, I mean—except me...
...There's no other kind of enormous wealth...
...Here that notion is personified by the harmless "pastry assassin," a Romanian who throws cream pies in the faces of the global society's more blatantly symbolic figures...
...It also contains a microwave, heart monitor and spycam, all voice-activated...
...I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be...
...The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998), into a baffled Everyman trying vainly to come to terms with imminent loss...
...He wants to be one civilization ahead of this one...
...It is enormous...
...You have something in you that's receptive to the mysteries...
...And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff...
...World financial markets are tottering, thanks to a suicidally daring move by Eric, and antiglobalization agitators are ubiquitous on his journey through Manhattan...
...Baker, on the other hand, has brought the art of navel contemplation to undreamed-of heights (and sometimes depths...
...Some readers will be entranced, but others will be irritated beyond endurance by the dogged insistence on pure matter...
...You paid the money for the number itself," explains Eric's so-called "chief of theory" Vija Kinski...
...Sometimes I think of a helmet with a set of plastic earflaps that I swivel down over my ears...
...The speed is the point...
...I drop from a tree on Michael Jordan one time...
...The number justifies itself...
...John Updike, Baker's chosen literary father figure (featured in Baker's superb U and I, the ultimate word on the Anxiety of Influence), has sometimes been accused of being a complacent sensualist whose soul is not tortured enough to qualify him as a major writer...
...he throws out, apropos of nothing...
...But I am kicked and beaten by security so many times I am walking dead...
...He has outbid Kane, to be sure, in the Faustian stakes, just as our own historical moment has outbid Kane's...
...his art dealer ("1 think you want this Rothko...
...His Faustian dreams are so outsizedthat one of his enemies remarks, "Things wear out impatiently in his hands...
...his doctor, who gives him a prostate exam in front of a female employee...
...On Fiction From Superman to Everyman By Brooke Allen Novelists can be roughly divided into those who go for the bigpicture, and those who dwell on the small one: the polymath who, Dickenslike, tries to cram all of life into his book, and the obsessed artist (Virginia Woolf, for example) whose object is the ever more perfect rendering of individual experience...
...and his wife of 22 days, a rich and lovely poetess...
...Money is talking to itself...
...The smart, sex-driven, slap-in-the-face young Nicholson Baker has grown, in this novel and its predecessor...
...I can fly, of course...
...He characterized the last decade of the 20th century as a time when multinational corporations came to seem "more vital and influential than governments...
...Few can match DeLillo at neat formulations of our bizarre cultural contradictions...
...A lot of Cosmopolis is fun to read on the same level as, say, the New York Observer: Just how gross can consumption become...
...Money," one of Cosmopolis' characters states, "has taken a turn...
...I suppose the point Baker is hying to make is that we actually devote 95 per cent of our thoughts to daily ephemera, therefore it behooves us to find the value in these objects and tasks we normally take for granted: Baker is the rare "saint or poet" who can rise to the challenge Thornton Wilder posed in Our Town and appreciate life's every minute...
...As early as Mao II (1991) he was positing the then perverse theory that the terrorist was one of the few genuinely creative individuals in a world where real political action took place at secret meetings between the obscenely powerful...
...I use the signals reaching each ear to guide me to where the crime or misery is...
...On the morning of this particular day—a postmodern parody, perhaps, of Leopold Bloom's little Odyssey across Dublin—Eric gets into his limo and heads across Manhattan in search of a haircut...
...On the upside, every detail is brilliantly observed, shot through with a visceral feeling for the physical and written with an indescribable, self-deprecating charm that is all Baker's own...
...That's all I'd do all day...
...Eric's apartment cost him $ 104 million...
...On the downside, the reader who is not a flat-out Baker-worshiper will wonder if he is ever making any point beyond his undeniably eloquent love letter to the seen and felt world...
...Baker's is gentle, content, introspective, an apparently ordinary man made extraordinary by his capacity to love life's trivialities...
...During those magic moments he reflects, "I am the world, or perhaps the world is a black silk eyemask and I'm wearing it...
...We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable...
...Emmett has decided to get up around 4:00 a.m...
...Indeed, as Baker ages his facetious humor seems to be morphing into a Salingeresque mournfulness...
...I have a wife, Claire, and two children...
...Eric seeks immortality, but not for him the uncertain immortality of art or the crude solution provided by cryogenics...
...But believe one thing please...
...Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time...
...Recalling a recent night on a sleeper train from Washington to Boston, he tells us, "I...
...He is strong on atmosphere, cultural noise and color, but weak on character...
...More interesting is his reaction to this discovery, a mental adjustment that ends the novel on a fine, sharp note...
...I want to take care of the world," Emmett says...
...It is museum quality video for the ages...
...Among current American writers, Don DeLillo and Nicholson Baker best exemplify the two types...
...There are holes on the outside of the earflaps that pick up sounds of distress from far away...
...No, "The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void...
...Eric Packer, the protagonist of DeLillo's Cosmopolis (Scribner, 209 pp., $25.00), is a 28-year-old currency trader and financial giant—the natural culmination of the "master of the universe" who began to crop up on Wall Street in the 1980s and was so memorably depicted by Tom Wolfe...
...prousted" or cork-lined against street noise...
...In an essay he wrote for the Guardian in Britain at the end of 2001, DeLillo looked at what he called "the ruins of the future" from a post-9/11 perspective...
...New York right before the wake-up call of September 11 achieved a kind of apotheosis of excess...
...Can the problem simply be that Baker is a writer of extraordinary technical gifts who doesn't have very much to say...
...Apocalypse and Götterdämmerung are in the air...
...He liked paintings that his guests did not know how to look at...
...Eric, when you scrape away all the contemporary glitz, is not much more than a feeble reflection of Citizen Kane...
...his chiefs of finance, security, technology, and theory...
...Every day's written meditation begins with the striking of a match for the fire: There are 33 short chapters, each representing a match, and then abruptly the matchbox is empty and the book comes to an end...
...At a guess, this sort of material occupies about 95 per cent of the text, with 5 per cent remaining for reflections on Emmett's family or himself...
...This is famous Flying Pie...
...Soon the baked-on atolls, softened overnight, began to give way: I pestered at the last one from the side for a while, smiling with the clenched-teeth smile ofthejoyful scrubber, and it was gone...
...It was a silent C: as one gets better at squirting out dishwashing liquid one learns how to ease off at the end of a squirt so that one doesn't make an unpleasant floozling sound...
...In A Box of Matches as in earlier Baker books, like The Mezzanine (1988) and Room Temperature (1990), the more banal the object or the process, the more interest and beauty the author, through his fictional personae, is able to draw from it...
...Salinger's feeling for evanescence and the loss of innocence is echoed all the way through A Box of Matches...
...instead he lazily invents a fictional theoretician, Vija Kinski, who acts as a mouthpiece for his own formulations...
...Eric drinks up the charged atmosphere with the elation of the natural brinksman...
...As the economy bubbled and bloated into its fin de siècle grandiosity, so did Eric...
...They put me in black hole until I am screaming from my eyes...
...I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all...
...While Eric has his eyes on infinity, the middie-aged narrator of Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches (Random, 178 pp., $ 19.95) finds that there is nothing too lowly, insignificant or quotidian to serve as a focus for his attention and affection...
...woke in my bunk and pulled the curtain to look out the window and saw that we were in the station in New York City, and I realized that I was passing through a very important center of commerce without seeing a single street and that something similar was happening in my life...
...In rich and trendy Manhattan neighborhoods testosterone seemed literally to rise from the asphalt...
...This is DeLillo at his wonderful best...
...I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all...
...The work was all the more dangerous for not being new...
...I am action painter of crème pies...
...But his worst is also on display in Cosmopolis...
...The principle is vividly illustrated in the novel by the electronic data strips that flicker high across the facades of buildings in Times Square...
...His is a religion of banality, beautiful banality...
...Cosmopolis is rich in the strengths and weaknesses of the author...
...Several figureheads of worldwide capitalism are assassinated during the course of the day, and Eric himself appears to be threatened by a murderous assailant...
Vol. 86 • March 2003 • No. 2
