Character Assassins
Queenan, Joe
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 21, NO. 12 / DECEMBER 1988 Joe Queenan CHARACTER ASSASSINS Today's short-story writers think life in America is dull, and so they fill their work with weirdos—the...
...In one story a husband gets transferred to Germany by his company, but you never find out who he works for or what he does...
...while the second consists of "seven allusive comedies," all of which are about academics...
...Bingo's Abattoir...
...another joker screwed up in the pinball machine business...
...It was a nothing job...
...Mostly, people in Paley don't have jobs at all...
...As Al saw it, there was only one solution...
...There's one doctor and one engineer, but he's out of work...
...The only two books by Joyce Carol Oates that I have ever read are Solstice and The Hungry Ghosts...
...Go-getters are particularly scarce in Beattie's world of disgruntled artsy-crafties...
...Indeed, finding out what kind of work the engineer is out of is a real rarity in Carver, where it's usually enough to say, "They were laying off at Aerojet when they should be hiring," and let the reader figure out what Aerojet is and who they were laying off...
...Visit a other hand, if you persist in churn- Huh...
...They'll also never figure out who opened all those enormously profitable franchises...
...Job descriptions...
...The children of this family are Bibi, Doody, Dodo, Neddy, Yoyo, Butch, Put Put and Beep...
...Amidst numerous references to excreta and vomit, the author does mention Byron, Marx, and Trotsky, which is appropriate because none of them had steady jobs either...
...Earl Ober was between jobs as a salesman...
...There's a cop, a painter's assistant, a rabbi, and more gradstudents than you could shake a stick at, though you'd shake it anyway...
...Not having a job isn't the only problem these charmers have...
...Read the Russians...
...Take that, Neil Diamond...
...Shoot some hoops at the Y. tions: If these writers say that the United perky bunch will say that their fic- Bathe more often...
...But not to get cheered up: When I went to the playground in the afternoon I met 11 unwed mothers on relief...
...I read Paley's Later the Same Day to see if job opportunities improved...
...His wife had just died...
...However, the pollsters never ask where the public ranks people who write for the New Yorker...
...Another word might be "stupid...
...On page 89 a real estate agent puts in a surprise appearance...
...I just don't think they're a legitimate subject for this much fiction...
...Hey, whatever happened to Beowulf...
...They can't find any engineers, physicists, systems analysts, economists, investment bankers, or even managing editors...
...Michaels's fiction bristles with whores, cops, rapists, rapees, junkies, burglars, and transvestites...
...Carlyle was in a spot...
...She'd made him get down in the dirt and plead for his life...
...Not even the transit authority would interview a character who says—in the first line of the book When my uncle Moe dropped dead of a heart attack I became an expert in the subway system...
...The really worrying thing is that fave raves like Beattie and Carver are only the tip of a very unpleasant iceberg...
...To quote one of Beattie's creathe function of good art: It's a lie...
...Somebody is in the crafts business...
...This does not come entirely as a surprise...
...Or Grendel, for that matter...
...Read such professionally depressing writers as Grass, Styron, and Solzhenitsyn...
...What we need today is a follow-up volume called Princeton, Virginia, Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, California, and Yes, Even Tiny Sarah Lawrence Hate America, because that's where these writers teach, or have taught, and that's where young writers are being rehearsed to write about this country as if it were a dump...
...Who's to blame...
...This is not unlike the guy in the Leonard Michaels story who buys a beauty parlor, only to •have a union bomb it...
...Of course, readers who love this union...
...Is there anywhere near as much piss/shit/vomit in your life as there is in Michaels's...
...In Iowa...
...With all this bitching and moaning to do, who's got time for details...
...Hanoi...
...Take up macrame...
...The first story features a Turkish waiter who rapes a co-ed who subsequently commits suicide...
...In this literary neighborhood, entrepreneurs get the shaft every time...
...drunk again and being abusive to Rae, their fifteen-yearold...
...He had to get rid of the dog without Betty or the kids finding out about it...
...Even when people have interesting careers, they are usually minor characters, and are often mentioned only parenthetically...
...That and the taxicab drivers who occasionally pop by to drive someone to the abortionist.fictional characters in the work of Beattie, Carver, Paley, and Michaels, whom I think of as a sort of club, in that readers who like one of the four tend to like them all...
...People may get their fingernails torn out in their books or get left to die in the gulag, but there's not much moping...
...And vice versa...
...T he other question is: Is this stuff 1 really a reflection of the society we live in, or are we all just slumming it...
...Go to ing out your sepulchral oeuvre, don't descending, and monotonous, but I ing too much time at those writers' an ACLU meeting...
...With the exception of Carver, who has a certain morbid charm, I hate this stuff a We all know that a gifted prose stylist can make diverting characters out of dirtballs and wackos, just as an artist can make plausible artworks out of industrial debris...
...a jilted lover bought shrubs...
...I did some work, signed the card for eight hours, went drinking with the nurses...
...If this is the case, as Emile Zola makes it out...
...Read the South Americans...
...We, as a people, have lost our way...
...Visit a West Indian bar...
...I also delved into the stories of their co-conspirators: Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, and Cynthia Ozick...
...No way...
...I couldn't find a job...
...This line sets the general tone of the collection: by page 29 we've had dog excrement, bald women, one death, two rapes...
...A few years ago somebody wrote a book called Harvard Hates America...
...Sandy's husband has been on the sofa ever since he'd been terminated three months ago...
...Or East Germany...
...They'll never figure out who bought all those season tickets, shojis, and minicams, or what the laptop computers were for...
...All they find are losers, drunks, wackos, addicts, failures, creeps, loners, schlemiels, and people who can't get tenure...
...The closest you come to sympathetic service sector employees are the Beattie characters waiting on tables while studying for their Ph.D.s in psych...
...I hate this stuff...
...Another story describes a man who works for "a company...
...Are the people at your parties all Beattie-like pinheads...
...T t is the year 2087 and the only I record of our civilization is the short stories of Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Leonard Michaels, and Grace Paley...
...He'd been in a spot all summer, since early June when his wife had left him...
...This is literary shorthand for "schmuck...
...In the first story in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, we learn that the narrator's husband had "a good job...
...So do the schools...
...Besides, who would hire them...
...I should point out that in polls of consumer attitudes, realtors are the only people who are more despised than lawyers...
...Party animals all...
...There are the usual poets and teachers, a lawyer, a grocery store owner, a gynecologist, and an "unmarried vegetarian sinologist...
...Okay, I suppose that teachers are a legitimate subject for fiction...
...The Times calls these stories "stunning...
...I was out of work...
...Beats me, but names like Zola (obsession with grotesques), Cheever (personal malediction on anybody who was more than five bucks ahead of the game), and Steinbeck (hokey lionization of people going nowhere fast) all come to mind...
...I worked a few hours a night for the hospital...
...Sorry, our marketing division isn't hiring this week...
...This blind man, an old friend of my wife's, was on his way to spend the night...
...The question is: Who cares...
...In Secrets and Surprises we come across a "gaunt psychology professor," a shrink, another shrink, a grad-school dropout who worked in an office, a home-ec major, a woman taking a crafts class, a chemistry teacher, a poet, a painter, a marionette maker, a waitress, a man who used to be an English professor, a guy who had been denied tenure and who was teaching a night course in photography, some people who had been in grad school together, an instructor, a person from Bard, a person from Antioch, a clerk in a boutique in New Haven, a woman who thought that "maybe going back to school was the solution," a professor, a modern poet, a woman with a grant, two teachers, and a musician...
...Listen to these hypnotically seductive opening lines: My marriage had just fallen apart...
...The woman was called Miss Dent, and earlier that evening, she'd held a gun on a man...
...The protagonists rarely have identified jobs, and when they do they are not good ones...
...There is a loony cop, a guy who runs something called JoMar Plastics, and an immigrant who works hard but ends up in an insane asylum anyway...
...When writers start churning out books of "allusive comedies" that only deal with university types, they're really pushing it...
...The question is: Who cares...
...given their dismal personalities, you wouldn't expect many of them to get heavily recruited for top management positions...
...I had a job and Patti didn't...
...So I was at a bar having a glass of beer...
...One man who seems to be running a successful business is a pharmacist, but a bunch of black people suddenly start picketing his store...
...On the board...
...I f Beattie is whiny, Carver funereal, 1 and Paley mopey, they are all a day at the beach (Omaha) compared to Leonard Michaels...
...You could never tell from reading Beattie that we occasionally have bull markets...
...Same difference...
...In Where You'll Find Me, it's more of the same...
...They were writers...
...They didn't...
...Contempt or indifference toward white-collar types is only one half of the equation...
...Oh-oh, a leitmotif...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 15 lot...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 Given the amount of.time spent lounging in parks, I couldn't help thinking of the running joke in Alfred Hitch-cock's Family Plot, where Bruce Dern has to keep leaving his wife Barbara Rush to investigate crimes by herself because he has to go to work and can't take time off, not even in a taut psychological thriller...
...He is not unlike the man who makes "a very good salary" or the man with "a responsible job...
...In Cynthia Ozick's The Cannibal Galaxy, the main characters are a private school principal, an "imagistic linguistic logician," and a supremely gifted artist...
...Join a us...
...Later in the book there are murders, abortions, men getting dressed up in panties, vomit, bombings, and the chimp with a monkey on his back...
...Two things I'll say for Carver, though: at least there are garter belts and office parties in his work...
...because a bunch of people doing this much raping and suicide-attempting don't have time for something as mundane as work...
...Indeed, in Michaels it's a bit pointless to ask the question, "What do these people do for a living...
...As with Carver, jobs are kind of hard to come by...
...and I are on the front porch at Frank Martin's drying-out facility...
...Included in the line-up of can't-wait-till-I-meet-these-sweethearts was a woman "who's run through three husbands, changed her name, become a Scientologist, and is in a mental health unit," another woman who's hiding out from her husband's biker friends, a car thief, a guy who bounces bad checks, and an ex-con...
...Only four of them were whores, the rest of them were unwed on principle or because some creep had ditched them...
...Consider a New York Times review of Richard Ford's latest story collection, Rock Springs...
...Nobody enjoys the parties, and the women don't look good in the garter belts, but at least they make an effort...
...There is a surgeon—he had to help out with the miscarriage...
...Well, there are a few salesmen, a postman, a guy who cleans houses and babysits, lots of waitresses, a baker, and a hairstylist...
...The proletariat gets pretty short shrift here, too...
...Nor do we find out whether the guy from the stock club ever made any money...
...As in Carver and Paley, we never find out what he had to work late doing, or what the girl who worked in the office did in it...
...Gosh, where did Michaels get his exposure to all these horrors...
...Is everyone you know between jobs the way they are in Carver...
...needless to say, it's a walkup...
...The single group of professionals that does appear are doctors—mostly gynecologists...
...No, but he was affiliated with the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of California...
...Another story mentions a successful bookstore owner, but three years later he goes bankrupt...
...12 / DECEMBER 1988 Joe Queenan CHARACTER ASSASSINS Today's short-story writers think life in America is dull, and so they fill their work with weirdos—the sort of folk they met at those fabled writers' workshops in Iowa...
...There's an artist's model, somebody who works in an artist's supply store, a paramedic, a rock guitarist, an undergraduate at Penn, another model, a photographer's assistant, a pre-med student, and a screenwriter...
...But she wasn't in town...
...Here are some more crisp openers: J.P...
...It was a Bureau of Labor Statistics nightmare, beginning with Carver, whose three books of stories are a virtually uninterrupted paean to bozos...
...A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house...
...We never find out what it is, but he had one...
...The only characters who come close to having jobs in what those of us in the real world call the real world are a veterinarian, a guy who joins a stock club, and a "dad" who "had to work late...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988...
...Seems to me that if gloom is your cup of tea, you can do a lot worse than this crew...
...I hate it because it's boring, con- dreary, and predictable, they're spend- Burger King...
...Hit the bowling expect any sympathy from the rest of hate it even more because it subverts schools...
...The former has two characters: a teacher at a private school and an artist's widow...
...How did we reach this impasse...
...At the very end of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, I did come upon a VW mechanic, but after the "monkey addicted to morphine," paralyzed child hit by a car, .and "Miami bitch with gonorrhea," it was a case of too little too late...
...We all know that a gifted prose stylist can make diverting characters out of dirtballs and wackos, just as artists can make plausible artworks out of industrial debris...
...Belfast...
...On the theory that if you give a man enough petard he'll hoist himself on it, I backtracked to Michaels's earlier volume Going Places to see if a brighter, sunnier atmosphere had obtained...
...There is also a building where you can smell both piss and rape...
...There is a family nearly everybody knows," begins one Paley story...
...Try as they might, the social scientists of the future will never be able to figure out who ran the IBM System 360s, who designed the multi-purpose stadiums, or who got the unmanned space flights into orbit...
...Once upon atime, literature dealt with knights and knaves: the good, the bad, and the ugly...
...T know all this because I spent two I weeks doing a job profile of the Joe Queenan is a writer for Barron's...
...Now it deals with balding schmos who teach Creative Lit...
...Instead, they go to the park...
...you have to turn to Louis Auchincloss to find a world with fewer plumbers, ditchdiggers, locksmiths, or seamstresses...
...But if they say it was dull, all I can_ say is: Get help...
...IBM...
...Cultural anthropologists are in big, big trouble...
...Beattie isn't the only writer who overpopulates her world with eggheads...
...T here are no garter belts in the I work of Grace Paley, and no office parties either...
...They're in trouble because they can't figure out how a civilization renowned for its technological prowess, innovativeness in health care, and astonishing ability to create large sums of wealth ever managed to get rolling...
...I had another girl...
...You'll be pleasStates of America, circa 1965-1987, tion does tell the truth, faithfully antly surprised to find, as Mark Twain Why haven't you figured out that you don't was mean, venal, and avaricious, they describing the world as Carver & Beat- once did, that life is rarely as grim know the right kind of people...
...might get a few points on the score- tie & al...
...alley...
...L.D.'s wife, Maxine, had told him to get out the night she came home from work and found L.D...
...There's also absolutely no one in this fictional world who could do your taxes...
...The fictional characters they'll be encountering couldn't open a Coke...
Vol. 21 • December 1988 • No. 12
