Transatlantic Quests
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction Transatlantic Quests By Brooke Allen Setting out to write a really long book nowadays— 700 pages or up—takes a certain amount of nerve as well as ego. The doorstopper novel was...
...to sleep with Jack, when they knew he was nothing but a homy boy...
...Freddy and Fredericka rivals Mrs...
...The Residences of Potemkin Village...
...Sent to reconquer Britain's former transatlantic empire, Freddy and Fredericka are parachuted into Paramus and begin their bumbling effort...
...Worried, Queen Philippa sends him and Fredericka on a mission during which, with any luck, they will develop into the monarchs the times demand...
...Jack's roles didn't always require him to transform himself from a man to a woman, but the potential remained obdurately a part of his character—an element of his noir thing...
...as the narrator acknowledges, "It was sorrow and boredom that drove Mrs...
...Jack Burns, who is searching for his unknown father and, simultaneously, for himself...
...Thus begins his long career with older women...
...In addition...
...accomplished at portraying others, he has not yet learned to play himself...
...Beyond dozens of one-and-a-half-storey houses scattered about the fields like giant pencil sharpeners was the silver-blue skyline of Philadelphia, as glossy and cool as a glacier...
...The old maritime tattoos, the sentiments of sailors collecting souvenirs on their bodies, had been replaced by tasteless displays of hostility and violence and evil...
...They were much cheered by this, and despite their discomfort and no shoes, they walked a good pace___ "They strode up to the Bank of Cherry Hill like conquerors...
...With a clear echo of Dickens' Great Expectations, perhaps a conscious one on Irving's part, Jack and William Burns embark at last on their own long-delayed voyage together...
...Still in demand for female roles in the drama classes, he heads for Hollywood after college...
...This gives us some clue to the absent William, for he is known to be covered in tattoos, a so-called "ink addict...
...This, it seems, explains Edward VIII's abdication: The bird refused to fly and "they made up all that nonsense about Mrs...
...And the old tattoos were always sentimental...
...Jack is pushed abruptly out of Alice and Leslie's new nest...
...And here is the heartbeat of the nation, as picked up by Freddy: "Being nowhere, on the way to somewhere, with music, on the open road...
...you didn't mark yourself for life if you weren't sentimental...
...It must be as smoky as hell, as bright with fire and sparkling with dangerous things as the land even the Norsemen dared not mention...
...Simpson to hide the secret...
...Jack's career as a movie star follows organically from his childhood experiences...
...Compassion does not help its objects, as Freddy points out: "Helping them helps them, maybe, if they can be helped, and if they are helped in the right way...
...Emma is another victim of adult sexual aggression enabled by a disaffected mother, and she and Jack form a tough emotional partnership that is strengthened when Alice and Leslie Oastler, Emma's mother, eventually become lovers...
...Didn't you know...
...All the rest is the baggage of Europe, sometimes well developed and extended, sometimes not...
...It is the tale of one man...
...Here is a typical Presidential candidate: "A lifetime of politics had taught him to seize any thronelike seat, to move toward the cameras, to get out of the limousine first, to stand on the highest step, and to find the best ray of light in a room, placing his head in it even if he had to walk like Toulouse-Lautrec...
...Jack's disaffection from his childhood and his mother is now complete, symbolized in the evolution of Alice's "art": "A new vulgarity exhibited itself on the skin of young men seeking to be marked for life...
...The body was like a photo album...
...The farcical Freddy and Fredericka might seem a radical departure for the author, who has taken a certain amount of abuse from critics for what they see as overheated, and unfashionable, romanticism...
...Alice seeks out women who have known William—music students, prostitutes, drifters—and pesters them for news of him while she plies her eccentric trade...
...It is a rare writer who can make you laugh out loud even once or twice during the course of a novel...
...Where's the door?' Fredericka asked, as only a machine and a car lane faced the street...
...From there he goes to Exeter where, as neither a budding scholar, businessman nor politician, he resignedly settles into his adult persona as perennial outsider...
...And you just don't have a feel for it.'" He protests that his ridiculous image is not his fault—"Photographers use special architectural lenses to make my ears seem big...
...In short—New Jersey...
...Sometimes, though, one rises to the challenge and it pays off...
...Hilda's he snags all the plum female roles in the school plays, portraying Dorothea in Middlemarch, Tess in Tess of the D 'Urbervilles, and the title role in that old Canadian chestnut, A Mail-Order Bride of the Northwest Territories...
...Jack is pretty in a markedly feminine manner...
...Irving saves his real bang for this quest, which has Jackrevisiting the scenes of his childhood with the experienced eye of an adult...
...The Prince, an intelligent man with more than his share of natural nobility, is hopeless at public relations, while the witless Fredericka can do no wrong with either the press or the public: People appear to think she can heal the sick and raise the dead...
...Having compassion for them doesn't do a bloody thing except perhaps for you...
...He and Emma, now a well-known writer, live together in a sordid neighborhood, "uncool Canadian gods in the city of angels," partners without being a couple...
...But the most interesting writers are always difficult to relegate to one category or another...
...No one has ever denied his extraordinary natural talent and bold lyricism, but he has been variously derided as a romantic, a fantasist, and a Rightwinger swimming against the cultural tide...
...It turns out that all heirs to the British throne have to undergo a secret test before they can ascend the throne: The royal falcon decides whether or not to fly for them...
...In the book's most astute and masterful passages, Irving demonstrates the mendaciousness of perception and memory, and the way Jack's early memories—no, all of our early memories—are "managed" by our parents...
...The fatal difference between Irving and his master is that in a Dickens novel the smallest components are thematically and even poetically tied to the central idea, rather than unnecessary and irrelevant...
...But Fredericka matures and mellows during her voyage...
...You have it and then you want to go to sleep...
...John Irving, a consciously "big" novelist in the tradition of Charles Dickens, has occasionally woven that type of spell...
...In the course of their perilous escapades, the Princess displays hitherto unsuspected qualities and the Prince (who has for many years been the sexual acolyte of his youthful sweetheart, the Lady Phoebe Boylinghotte) finally comes to love her...
...Too bad, because the underlying shape is frequently a very fine one...
...What had been so "wrong" with him that older girls and women immediately singled him out as their prey...
...On each of the building's sides was an automatic teller machine that whenever they passed was supposed to say, 'Welcome to the Bank of Cherry Hill,' but said, rather, .. .ank of Cher...
...Mer du Cheval...
...This is territory Helprin knows well (if for about five minutes back in 1996 Bob Dole sounded like a man of vision, it was due to the soaring speech Helprin wrote for him) and his observations do not disappoint as Freddy and Fredericka accompany candidate Dewey Knott to his Nebraska birthplace...
...here Helprin has managed it 30,40, even 50 times...
...Where are the people?' Freddy asked...
...Stackpole...
...a book too big to read comfortably in the subway, bus or bathtub is highly inconvenient...
...Freddy and Fredericka is chockablock with such delights, as the royal couple makes its way across the wide continent...
...His most reliable commercial asset is his tantalizing sexual ambiguity...
...It must be a vast place where power arcs from point to point like the whiplash of sparks...
...They hit skid row and have to take refuge at the Salvation Army, where they are given a chance to begin again as manual laborers...
...Freddy is a hapless middle-aged Prince of Wales, Fredericka his unloved consort...
...Freddy has failed this test three times and has only one chance left...
...Hilda's, a girls' school that accepts boys only in the lower grades...
...At 10 he is sent to Redding, an isolated, second-rate boarding school in Maine whose headmaster quite candidly admits that "Redding's first purpose is to prepare you for a better school than Redding...
...The skinheads with their biker insignia—skulls spurting blood, flames licking the corners of the skeleton's eye sockets...
...At the beginning of the novel Helprin stacks the deck against Fredericka, whose passions and interests—antioxidants, fringe theater, glossy magazines—are clearly the author's own favorite bugbears...
...His latest, Until I Find You (Random, 824 pp., $27.95), is in many ways characteristic: generous, sprawling, vivid, and, as with all his work, quintessentially masculine...
...That brought readers more or less what they have come to expect from Helprin: romance, poetry, history, honor...
...Hilda's girl seven years his senior...
...In those days," Jack recalls, "a tattoo was still a souvenir— a keepsake to mark a journey, the love of your life, a port of call...
...Nor can he, until he resumes his personal quest and finds his errant father at last...
...Previously, they "had never saved money or known anyone who had to, and had thought it a religious practice") They nearly decide to stay on in their blissfully anonymous lives forever, but destiny calls...
...Helprin has never been quite classifiable as a writer, and writers who are not classifiable make critics nervous...
...Alice and Jack give up on William and return to Canada when Jack is five...
...and Eau de Toilette...
...Jack would later wonder...
...even her world-famous compassion is seen as useless, if not actually phony...
...She urges Freddy to concentrate on his image and forget about speeches: '"Words don't matter any more,' she told him...
...But there has always been a wildly antic strain in Helprin's work, and now he has gloriously released it in this wonderful and bizarre fantasy...
...Indeed, they may not have been very artistic or esthetically pleasing, but they weren't ugly— not intentionally...
...Adkins and Mrs...
...after persevering through 200 or 300 pages of seemingly gratuitous digressions and details, one is finally submerged in the novel's world and begins to feel like reading on forever...
...ank of Cher...
...What makes certain boys vulnerable to sexual abusers...
...A visible vulnerability, surely: A boy who has been abandoned by his father and whose mother appears lacking in a traditional maternal instinct will send out certain signals...
...It's like an orgasm, isn't it...
...No one understands or cares...
...They do the same for Michael Heseltine's eyebrows"—but she knows better...
...They walked around the bank like pilgrims at the Kaaba...
...Another major writer, Mark Helprin, has also produced a hefty new novel...
...At St...
...They are, in other words, transparent cartoon versions of Charles and Diana...
...But this motion, this ongoingness, this rolling, these hypnotic wheels, this particular glory, is exclusively American—their transcendence...
...so, too, does the formerly intransigent Freddy...
...It is time for the literary establishment simply to accept Helprin for what he is: a true original...
...the tattoos themselves didn't have to be good photographs...
...It's just pictures...
...Jack is roughly initiated into sex by a grotesque middle-aged woman, and as he makes his way through adolescence he takes up with other mature partners...
...Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans as a mirror of American absurdities...
...The Nuns at Aztec Pointe...
...Instead of enlightening the literati, Freddy and Fredericka will probably puzzle them still further...
...Chlamydia...
...Tracking down the people who had known him and Alice on their 1969 Odyssey, Jack uncovers a very different reality from the one his mother had presented to him...
...The doorstopper novel was developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, when there was no television or Internet or other technological creations to fill the long winter evenings...
...The Whammo Estate at Snake Creek...
...Jack was born in Canada in 1965 to an unwed tattoo artist whose professional name is Daughter Alice...
...He is enrolled in St...
...Here, for example, is the author's impression of the sort of names given to pretentious high-end subdivisions: "The Legends at Fox Innards...
...Eventually they get mixed up in the upcoming Presidential election, with Freddy making good as a speechwriter...
...But Jack is emotionally incomplete...
...Irving has also often been guilty of artistic overkill—of establishing his characters, launching his story, then—as though mistrustful of their potency—adding and adding and adding...
...Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Amsterdam—Jack sees the underside of each city and records it in childhood's shifting, unreliable memory bank...
...Leslie Oastler was simply someone who disliked innocence, or she held innocence in contempt for reasons that weren't even clear to her...
...Irving's sympathies are always with the young boy, but he is too good a novelist to turn his story into a simplistic case history of abuse...
...Where is the room?'" Helprin is wonderful at observing his own country through the eyes of an outsider...
...Today there are so many demands made on our rapidly diminishing time that we tend to do much of our reading on the run...
...Still, Irving is a skillful, powerful writer, and his novels are nearly always worth the considerable time they demand...
...He spends his early childhood being dragged by her from one North Sea port to another, hot on the trail of his absconding father William Burns, a church organist...
...In the District of Columbia, a native explains to them, there are only two kinds of people, "lawyers and soul brothers...
...Leslie, like Alice and Jack's various seducers, becomes one of the thieves of his childhood—"not that she necessarily meant to hurt him, or that she gave the matter any thought one way or another...
...It's not what you say, it's how you look...
...ank of Cher...' '"What does "ank of Cher" mean?' Fredericka asked...
...Instead of letting a single telling incident or detail indicate the truth of a character, he piles incident upon incident, detail upon detail, until the story begins to lose its shape...
...You can say anything you want...
...Where is the door...
...Anyone else sticks out like a camel in a funeral procession...
...It is sorrow, too, that fuels the novel's most fully imagined relationship, that between Jack and Emma Oastler, a St...
...The royals, buff and fit from all those ski trips to Davos and toughened by their Spartan boarding schools, perform remarkably well in this capacity and learn many new skills...
...After a hilarious encounter with a gang of drunken bikers, they proceed by motorcycle to Pennsylvania, where Helprin brilliantly depicts a typical American suburb as perceived by two people who have never encountered one in all their lives: "After wandering around the forest for a while they broke out into a subdivision shining in the now strong sun...
...One of the sustaining fictions of American life," Helprin remarks, "is that beneath the shifting scenery that has replaced his soul a politician has bedrock that can be detected by watching him on television as he walks through his hometown with his jacket off...
...Freddy and Fredericka (Penguin, 553 pp., $27.95) comes hard on the heels of The Pacific, a collection of short stories...
...The journey, told from Jack's point of view, captures the pearly luster of the region's fogs and chills in a dreamlike, visionary narrative...
...They are "to find a new Caernarvon in the most savage, strange, and unconquerable region of the earth...
Vol. 88 • July 2005 • No. 4
