Raising the Dead
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
On Fiction Raising the Dead By Lynne Sharon Schwartz In literature as in life, the dead forfeit all privacy. They become prey to speculation, research and imaginative reconstruction. What the...
...Nor is hers the only child sacrificed...
...A naïve girl enchanted by Wesley, who defied her parents and her church to marry him only to suffer the inevitable disillusion, Sally raised her son in valiant poverty until she was rescued by remarriage to a wealthy older doctor...
...a delinquent gallery agrees to pay what is due on Alik's paintings...
...In reading there is no line at all, but a fluid skimming back and forth through a century punctuated by world wars...
...He scolds his compatriots for their racism and teaches them about black musicians...
...An unobservant Jew, he welcomes both the visiting Israeli rabbi and the Russian priest his wife invites in to baptize him—though he refuses the holy water, offering the priest tequila instead...
...When Henry returns from his tour of duty in Korea looking for the vanished Daphne, to whom he has been writing, he finds Ellen instead and they fall into a desultory affair...
...Throughout the narrative, Ellen invokes the various gardens, each one mirroring a facet of her dark and thwarted story...
...He has given Ellen, with prescience, his diary and other treasures, among them a book called The Gardens of Kyoto...
...Tucked within one of the gardens of Kyoto is a shrine to unborn children, to lost children, to children too soon dead...
...She captures the essence of disruption and displacement, the loss of language and culture, the bewilderment of a new urban chaos, and the persistence of life...
...his admirers pay his bills...
...Leithauser, who is also a poet, has always been ingenious and wide-ranging...
...Only the plucky Daphne, who cannot go through with a planned abortion, keeps her illegitimate child and also manages a professional life...
...translated from the Russian by Cathy Porter) is not dead yet, but he's going fast...
...But that requires a suffering consciousness, and Wesley is glimpsed only through the words of his survivors: his subtle, secretive ex-wife Sally (Luke's mother...
...Her vibrant older sister, Rita, is an indirect war victim too: She marries a soldier who returns from battle scarred and transformed...
...At 17 he is literary, precocious and lonely...
...His limbs lay meek and inert, neither dead nor alive to the touch, but in some transitional state, like setting plaster....' The most telling symptom is "an unendurable sense of dissolving self...
...Here indeed is "that comprehensive web of deceptions known as 20thcentury small-town American life...
...You speak...
...We need to feel their spell and relish their strategies...
...Tragedy barely brushes Alik, who generates exuberant life wherever he goes...
...Ellen never tells him she is carrying his child—another diffidence, another missed connection...
...Now he festers in a bleak Miami apartment, consoled by an enormous aquarium...
...For Wesley, despite his dashing good looks and gallantry, his secret early marriage and prodigious womanizing, is the least interesting character in the novel...
...Walbert's preoccupations are the loss of children, the damage war inflicts on young men—some of them hardly more than children—and the tragic consequences of missed opportunities, hesitations and diffident love...
...Key scenes, either remembered or imagined, recur in richer development, like symphonic themes...
...She does equally well by the supporting cast: his alcoholic wife Nina, a blade-thin, flaky ex-model...
...Leithauser may be attempting to reconstruct an era, the placid, repressed Midwest at midcentury—what Luke calls "that comprehensive web of deceptions known as 20th-century small-town American life"—but Wesley is less emblematic than vacuous...
...The first is her cousin Randall, whom she meets as a teenager on a family visit...
...Gorbachev apparently had a health problem...
...Even in exile, "He had built his Russia around him, a Russia which hadn't existed for a long time and perhaps never had...
...Conrad, portrayed in all his frank rage and wretched wisdom, his passionate ambivalence about his dead brother, is the real hero of this curiously uneven book...
...Tracing the narrative line can't help violating the novel's unusual structure...
...his voluptuous lover Valentina in her perpetual red bra...
...Alik loves New York almost as much as he misses Moscow...
...to an audience of one...
...Left to himself in their remote country house, Randall reads encyclopedias, writes poetry, and finds a hidden room which he imagines (correctly, as it happens) once sheltered escaped slaves...
...Nor does the "God's gift to women" argument, put forth by Luke in filial pride, fly nowadays...
...But where Berberova is dour and unforgiving, Ulitskaya is brisk, astute, brimming with energy and esprit...
...and the others who use his apartment as a crash pad while awaiting his death, from the Italian neighbor who reads Dante aloud, to the newly-arrived Paraguayan street musicians invited up for vodka simply to make their music stop—"the dance of death, Alik thought...
...In the motley group of mourners, unlikely lovers pair off...
...I don't think a wife can ever truly appreciate the pressures on a husband," is her father's response...
...As Luke flies back and forth to visit her (his career in finance has yielded 400,000 frequent flyer miles), he comes to perceive his mother in new and startling ways...
...He is a self-deluded loser who can barely hold on to a job, who rails against social changes he doesn't understand, and whose amorous exploits dissipate into shabbiness and self-pity...
...In the most pungent scenes, Luke discovers his uncle Conrad, a nasty, witty, wonderfully drawn character...
...Such charismatic, Zorba the Greek-types are risky characters...
...Novels are full of delectable womanizers but Wesley, alas, is not one of them...
...Ruby passes it on to Randall when he reaches 13, with a letter revealing she is his mother...
...Fortunately Ulitskaya, a master of her craft, strikes the perfect note for the larger-than-life Alik (one of the delectable womanizers...
...Her life story is entwined with the lives of her loved ones who were destroyed by war...
...When Luke confesses that he plans to write a novel about his father— the novel we're reading, naturally—Conrad demands that Luke do him justice...
...It's just as well...
...He suffers from an obscure neurological ailment that even his Russian doctor friends (one of whom drudges as a lab assistant, unable to pass the medical boards in English) cannot diagnose...
...He's left his job, been dumped by his wife, and is taking an impressive assortment of "coping" medications...
...Ulitskaya does for 1990's Russians in New York what the great Nina Berberova did for 1920's émigrés in Paris...
...Here and elsewhere, Leithauser's insistence on Wesley's potent charms frays credibility to the danger point...
...Recalling the dead is also the impetus for Kate Walbert's elegiac first novel, The Gardens of Kyoto (Scribner, 288 pp., $24.00), which coheres more like poetry than conventional prose...
...exile may refashion the spirit but will not cripple it...
...his drab sister Adelle...
...Very soon he ends his own life in a veterans' hospital...
...The book opens with the innocuous obituary of the death of a salesman, Wesley Sultan, 63, solid citizen, husband and father from Michigan's Lower Peninsula...
...They descend as they came, their kimonos dragging...
...Turn on CNN...
...The novel's other epigraph is from the wall of a Pompeian brothel: Hie ego multas puellas futui...
...The Funeral Party is a gem of a book...
...The year is 1989 and another ending is under way...
...He knows as well as we do that, like every literary hero who seeks his father, he is really seeking himself...
...One friend even spies her husband in the televised crowd...
...As adolescents, Conrad and Wesley thrived and defined themselves through an intense rivalry: Conrad was equally handsome but smarter, a star athlete who went on to chase men instead of women...
...Energy and density seep off the page whenever he claims the foreground...
...It was impossible to make sense of what was happening...
...He turns on Rita, beating her and eventually throwing her fatally down a flight of stairs...
...Randall goes off to war, his father barely speaking a word of farewell, and is killed at Iwo Jima...
...Not that his kind of banality can't be made rich and strange— one has merely to think of Emma Bovary...
...All's well that ends well...
...Her appearance here is welcome and overdue...
...He is sly, too...
...Another casualty is the Army lieutenant, Henry Rock, whom Ellen and her friend Daphne meet at a college football game...
...documents and letters, many of them hidden, unread or unsent, hold the clues to mysteries...
...The decision was reached," Ellen writes, "that, given the gardens and temples, the city of Kyoto should be taken off the list of possibilities of where to drop the bomb...
...The incense burns to nubbins, flares, then dies...
...Randall never acknowledges her letter but bequeaths the book to Ellen...
...And so they bend low, whispering the names of the unnamed, of the never forgotten, lighting the half-burnt sticks of incense on the porcupined stone altar left by the ones who have come before...
...the mother he knew as a child was Ruby's sister...
...Ellen is infatuated, while Henry only seeks relief from the brutalities he witnessed...
...The narrator is Ellen, the youngest of three sisters from rural Pennsylvania...
...They've probably killed him by now' Alik said...
...His mother died young...
...The audience she so eloquently addresses is the child she gave up for adoption, as was the custom for single mothers in the 1950s...
...Irony of ironies, the group of exiles gathers around the TV to watch their homeland being dismantled...
...And without the least clamor or sententiousness, it is a powerful antiwar novel...
...The CENTRAL CHARACTER of Ludmila Ulitskaya's The Funeral Party (Schocken, 154 pp., $18.95...
...Ibsen's Ghosts, James' The Aspern Papers and Robertson Davies' The Lyre of Orpheus are notable examples of the genre...
...His gluttony is grotesque, his misanthropy invigorating...
...He captivates Ellen by teaching her, through reading aloud, "the art of dramatic presentation...
...The Friends of Freeland is a moral tale set in an imaginary island that resemblés Iceland, where he spent several years, and Equal Distance (1985) follows the experiences of a young American in Japan...
...At some point in middle-age, he let himself go and gained a couple of hundred pounds...
...Unassuming yet quietly dramatic, The Gardens of Kyoto gives full weight to the overlooked tragedies of ordinary lives...
...As Wesley's actual seamy life is revealed, successive chapters begin with penciledin emendations to the obituary, until the original is virtually obliterated by the truth—or a better-informed version of the truth...
...Evidently Leithauser was so taken with the notion that he has illustrated it in A Few Corrections (Knopf, 288 pp., $24.00), using the above as one of its epigraphs (more about the other later...
...You can, quite simply, visit the garden...
...The chain of owners begins with an emotionally destroyed botany professor, a World War I veteran who sought solace in the gardens...
...Irina and her surly daughter reconcile...
...enemies make friends...
...he gives the book to the glamorous Ruby during an ocean voyage...
...An unforgettable scene is the weeping Rita at her last Thanksgiving dinner, undressing to show her family her bruises...
...What the late so-and-so was really like is the sort of fertile question that tantalizes writers: a diary, a cache of letters or photos is discovered, maybe the will holds a surprising legacy, and we're off and running...
...The Great Gatsby is a not too distant relation...
...Brad Leithauser writes in his 1997 novel, The Friends of Freelanci: "Yes, there in black and white was the face of the deceased, and there as well were the life-statistics which said, finally, little about that life, and it occurred to me that a whole novel might be devoted to the rewriting of a single obituary...
...and his latest estranged wife, the superbly inane young Tiffany, mother of six-year-old twins...
...They are ashamed, of course: it is the reason they have come...
...There's a coup in Moscow...
...in fact, he was formally adopted by a kindly stepfather at the age of seven...
...All the while she never stopped loving Wesley, even seeing him secretly, albeit chastely, and lending him money for doomed quixotic ventures...
...He is a devotee of the Fulton Fish Market at dawn and the jazz clubs at 3 a.m...
...They watch in shock, but cannot or will not help...
...These characters reward Luke's quest, giving him a family and giving the novel its vitality: The provincial Michigan of Wesley's youth is easily upstaged by contemporary Miami— tawdry, blaring and colorful—where Conrad is eating and drinking himself to death, and by the lush French countryside where Sally, who grew up in the icy asceticism of the Dutch Reformed Church, is enjoying her retirement...
...a hidden altar, really, a worn stone on which women place azalea blossoms, or chrysanthemums...
...There was only one thing Randall insisted I remember about the art of dramatic presentation," Ellen says near the close of her story...
...his early love, Irina, who put herself through law school in California while plying her trade as a sequined acrobat by night and raising their daughter, now a morose adolescent who brightens up only with Alik...
...A math prodigy who became an investment banker, Luke is in a sorry state...
...And justice is done...
...The Japanese believe that to meet kami [spirits] there is no need to die and go to heaven...
...Alik, a Russian émigré painter, lies surrounded by an eccentric entourage in his hellishly hot loft in New York's trendy Chelsea (rent-controlled, although Alik hardly needed to worry in any case...
...It turns out that Randall's birth mother, Ruby, gave him up, not to please convention but to pursue a career...
...his scholarly father is austere and distant...
...Ulitskaya, a geneticist turned novelist who lives in her native Moscow, has also been published in Britain, France and Germany...
...The book, and the idealized young love it recalls, will haunt her life...
...It sounds gimmicky but works well...
...It is 1945...
...his ailing and bilious brother Conrad...
...Or better still, like a mobile array of reflecting images, a cluster of slowly revolving, mutually illuminating motifs...
...Later still we learn that this diligent researcher, who travels from Michigan to Miami to France on his "personal quest," is Wesley's son Luke, who had not seen his late father in years...
...His atrophy seems to signal the death of an all-embracing spiritual largess, here and in Russia...
...Far better to make no excuses: Wesley doesn't require justification, only vivacity...
...Not for some time do we realize that the narrator of A Few Corrections is implicated in the story: The word "'me," coming on page 31, is jolting...
...comes an urgent phone call...
...It is clear from Ulitskaya's tone that this is no tragedy...
...if they're not lovable they can easily be detestable...
...Alik dies as expected, and the aftermath is Shakespearean...
...Sally's breathless assertion that "Wes loved f_____" is hardly sufficient...
...The small book alluded to in the title describes the gardens of Kyoto, and is passed from hand to hand, linking the episodes...
Vol. 84 • March 2001 • No. 2
