Lying With The Dead

Lying With The Dead, by Michael Mewshaw, is a bit like Faulkner Lite. It's a family saga, told by each of three adult children in turn, and the first narrator is presented as an idiot, full of sound and fury. The title is purposely ambiguous--are the children and their mother lying down and giving up on life after the murder of the father, or are they lying to each other? The novel is not hard to read (making it more like As I Lay Dying than The Sound and the Fury), but in the end, it signifies very little.

The second narrator, Quinn, introduces himself to the reader by saying that the role he was "born to play" is Orestes/Agamemnon in the Oresteia. The third narrator, Candy, introduces herself as a good daughter and sister who was always "a bit-part player in the family melodrama." She had childhood polio and says of her mother:

"sometimes she took Maury to Safeway with her and he spent hours jumping on and off the mat that opened the automatic doors. He wouldn't or couldn't stop until Mom gave him a good smack. She tried to cure me of polio in the same fashion, with a stinging slap to the face. 'Straighten up and walk right,' she demanded."

Candy initially reveals that Maury "did time," and Quinn tells the psychoanalyst he has been assigned to because of his anger issues that Maury is a "convicted killer," but it's not until page 54 that Quinn reveals that Maury is "'an Aspie,' an example of neuro-diversity."

Quinn's view of his brother is expressed in modern terms, but his parents' view of Maury actually seems to have been of an "idiot." Quinn tells his psycholanalyst that his mother was "a Penelope-like figure, struggling with three kids instead of a houseful of suitors, but I don't acknowledge her seismic temper" and he admits "that Dad's dead, but don't add that he was murdered by my brother." This last turns out to be one of the lies that their lives have turned on.

Quinn is the most interesting character, since he's always playing a role (which prepared him for his successful career as an actor). He sees his siblings from the outside as "a murderer, a limping old maid, and a...what am I? A cynic, someone not quite committed enough to identify himself as an agnostic."

So what happens when Quinn finds out that his brother is not a murderer and that the man he thought was his father, the man who died before he was even born, may not be his father at all? He listens to his mother say that "it's easy to claim you shouldn't live a lie, but sometimes lies are all that let us go on living," and then acquiesces to her request to kill her, even though he's the third child she's asked. He has inherited what he describes as his mother's "habitual desire to absent herself." By killing her, he frees his sister and brother, who each narrate a final chapter about how they'll use their new freedom. And Quinn is left saying that he won't do the Oresteia because "I've done it."

This novel will be published on October 6, 2009; I read an ARC from the local College Bookstore. My feeling that the story signifies very little comes from the difficulty of caring much about these characters. Maury is sympathetic, but holds everyone literally at arm's length. Candy tries so hard to please everyone that she has little identify of her own. And Quinn, who has always been good at shaping himself to whatever anyone wants him to be, is breaking down from trying to support the weight of each lie. If you've ever had to live with a lie, perhaps you'll feel more sympathy and get more meaning from this somber story.

My feeling is that people live with fewer lies, in this day and age. It would be harder to keep the family "idiot" locked up behind the gates of your house and garden, like Chance in Being There. Do you agree?

Postcards

I have a fascination with postcards. My father, who nurtured this fascination (along with our shared love of any kind of box), once sent me an entire series of postcards that were supposedly damaged by the claw of a wild beast, the tire of a speeding car, etc. His ultimate achievement arrived in a plastic bag with an apology from the post office.

Once, interviewing for a job, I met a delightful couple in McAllen, Texas (he's a professor and she's an artist) who share my love of tacky postcards. Their favorites are the kind that have multiple views of a place, so when I see ones like that, I put them aside to send to them. Right now I have one of Ohio, Missouri, Graceland, the Greater Columbus Convention Center, and U.S. Route 40. I also have a great shot of the highway sign for Ouachita National Forest Scenic 7 Byway and the heavily curtained interior of the Jewish Chapel at the U.S.A.F. Academy in Colorado. My other prize postcards include an exterior view of the Indianapolis International Airport, a photo of a "mechanical cotton picker," and a train labeled "Metro Link at Union Station" from St. Louis. The crown jewel of my as-yet-unsent collection is a photo of the exterior of the Kentucky State Penetentiary, Eddyville, Ky. I've been keeping these to send to McAllen, but they've sort of piled up in the last few years while I've been meaning to buy a postcard stamp.

Once you start talking about postcards, you find aficionados everywhere. One of my college professors asked us to send him a postcard after we graduated, one which imitated the message on a fictional postcard in a William Faulkner story entitled "Old Man." You put an x across the window where you supposedly spent the night and write "This is where were honny-monning at." I did this more than once, and sent the results to lots of people in addition to that professor.

Here is a poem about postcards:

Once I got a postcard from the Fiji Islands
with a picture of sugar cane harvest. Then I realized
that nothing at all is exotic in itself.
There is no difference between digging potatoes
in our Muriku garden
and sugar cane harvesting in Viti Levu.
Everything that is is very ordinary
or, rather, neither ordinary nor strange.
Far-off lands and foreign peoples are a dream,
a dreaming with open eyes
somebody does not wake from.
It's the same with poetry--seen from afar
it's something special, mysterious, festive.
No, poetry is even less
special than a sugar cane plantation or potato field.
Poetry is like sawdust coming from under the saw
or soft yellowish shavings from a plane.
Poetry is washing hands in the evening
or a clean handkerchief that my late aunt
never forgot to put in my pocket.

by Jaan Kaplinski, translated from Estonian by the author with Sam Hamill and Runa Tamm

I like the comparison of postcards to poems, like images you can save in a drawer for years until you get around to them.

There are places you can go where it's difficult to find an odd or tacky postcard--many big tourist destinations are like this, whereas a trip through Indianapolis or West Virginia can yield unexpected bounty (even if you don't do what I consider cheating, which is to pick out one of the cartoon pictures of an outhouse or whatever).

If you think about it, it's not that hard to pick out something to amuse a friend and parody "wish you were here" or even "this is where I spent my honeymon." I guess I really should be getting along to the post office to buy several postcard stamps, so I can send some of my backlog off to McAllen.

It would help me find a way to part with one or two of my favorites if you tell me about the best postcards you've ever seen.

Birthday thoughts

It's my birthday today. I turned 29 again--several years ago, I had to call my kids' attention to the fact that I turn 29 every year, as my mother did before me. In fact, before I can turn a "Jack Benny 39," as Gotu puts it, I'll have to get my mother to agree to age another decade.

When I was 8, I got a book that made a deep impression on me--so deep, in fact, that when I wake up on my birthday every year, I think of it. It's entitled The Wishing Tree, and it's by William Faulkner (a name that meant nothing to me at the time). This is how it begins:

"She was still asleep, but she could feel herself rising up out of sleep, just like a balloon: it was like she was a goldfish in a round bowl of sleep, rising and rising through the warm waters of sleep to the top. And then she would be awake.
And so she was awake, but she didn't open her eyes at once. Instead, she lay quite still and warm in her bed, and it was like there was still another little balloon inside her, getting bigger and bigger and rising and rising. Soon it would be at her mouth, then it would pop out and juump right up against the ceiling. The little balloon inside her got bigger and bigger, making all her body and her arms and legs tingle, as if she had just eaten a piece of peppermint. What can it be? she wondered, keeping her eyes shut tight, trying to remember from yesterday.
'It's your birthday,' a voice said near her, and her eyes flew open."

It's clear to me that this book influenced me in a way that later books can't (I've said repeatedly that if you haven't read Victor Hugo by the age of 12 or 13, it's probably too late). Everything that I do today is done with the consciousness that "the good Saint Francis had said that if you are kind to helpless things, you don't need a Wishing Tree to make things come true." And even if it takes until you're in your 40's for you to get a bird, it's just as pleasant.

Summer afternoon rereading

Ron and I believe in rereading books. There are books we like to immerse ourselves in seasonally, or every few years, or just once more. Why else would we own books? One of the books I like to reread is John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. We own a hardback copy of it, an old cassette version of the book on tape, which is what I just listened to in the car, and a DVD of the movie. When his newer book came out, The City of Falling Angels, I read it, and it was okay. But it doesn't have what draws me back to Midnight. I like the title, and the idea that whether something is good or evil can be decided by when it happens. This seems quintessentially southern to me. Southerners have fun alternating being mean and being nice, and blurring the line so you're less able to tell the difference.

Some of the kindest southerners I know have the sharpest tongues. One time I was listening to Ron's grandmother as she fixed lunch and went on and on about who was related to who else, and she unexpectedly finished up with "but, you know, he has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel." Then she turned around, put something on the table, and gave me a big smile. If you grow up in a southern family, the people around you can skew your sense of what is normal, and maybe what you can get away with. Think of William Faulker's A Rose for Emily or Flannery O'Connor's Why I Live at the P.O. Think of my parents, who enjoy my family and vacation with us at least every other year, but who have never come to a concert or a play my children are in, while they attended my seven-year-old niece's first piano recital this May and immediately offered her their grand piano.

When I was a teenager, I invented a game called "dead body." My friends would take me to a dark corner somewhere and dump me out of the car. I would lie there perfectly still, listening for any comments. Although we usually picked a place where someone could see the "body," few people evidenced much concern about what they'd just seen. My adolescent sense of the absurd was satisfied by the apparent lack of reaction from bystanders. Well, my adult sense of the absurd is always satisfied by reading about the Lady Chablis, the black drag queen who delights in shaking people up and seeing what happens. One of my favorites of her antics is when she convinces her white boyfriend's parents that she's pregnant, and they give her some money to pay for an abortion:

Chablis clapped her hands. "I took the money them white folks gave us to murder their unborn grandchild, and I bought that color TV sittin' over there and that videocassette player too. And with what was left over, I went out and got me the raunchiest little sequined dress I could find, so in case they ever do find out who I am, I can shake my ass in their face and tell them 'thanks from the bottom of our interracial baby's dead little heart!'"

I like all the characters, from Luther Driggers, who takes flies out on pieces of string, tries to make glow-in-the-dark goldfish, and makes people nervous by talking about putting poison in the water supply, to Joe Odom, who gives "historical" tours of every house he finds to squat in, whether it's historical or not. And, of course, I like the story of how the police came in and had a party in Jim Williams' fancy house on the way to arresting him for murder, and then they all got on the stand and swore they'd followed police procedure. Plus his story has a bang-up ending, what with the voodoo queen who reveals his apparent lack of feeling for the boy who died and the way he dies himself, at the end of the book.

The preface to my book on tape adds to all the absurdity by revealing that John Berendt first went to Savannah because he noticed that the price of an airline ticket to that city was the same as the price of a fancy dinner in downtown Manhattan.

Rereading the stories in this book is as fun as sitting around on the cushioned glider swing on my great-aunt's shady screened-in porch in Jonesboro, Arkansas, listening to the older folks tell about the doings of their friends and relatives. It doesn't matter if you've heard the stories before. Everybody's still gonna laugh and slap their knees for a while, and then they'll gather themselves up slowly and a few of them will turn on lights and notice where the kids have gone and a few will make their way back to the kitchen to bring out some supper.

Perspectives

When I was in college, I saw the play Rashomon, which tells the same story from four different perspectives. Recently I saw the movies Vantage Point and Atonement, and they show the same events from different characters' perspectives. This has been much more common in the novel, as it's less jarring. One of the first novels I read that did this almost as well as Faulkner does it in The Sound and the Fury is Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It not only tells the same events from different perspectives, but it moves the characters through time and adds events while letting each character (members of a family) have his or her say. The mother gets her turn first, both because she tells about events before the children were born and because otherwise you might see her as the children do. (One of the things this novel conveys is how little we can know of our parents as people.)

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has one of the best beginnings I've ever read:

You should have got an extra mother, was what she meant to say, the way we started extra children after the first child fell so ill. Cody, that was, the older boy. Not Ezra here beside her bed but Cody the trouble-maker--a difficult baby, born late in her life. They had decided on no more. Then he developed croup. This was in 1931, when croup was something serious. She'd been frantic. Over his crib she had draped a flannel sheet, and she set out skillets, saucepans, buckets full of water that she'd heated on the stove. She lifted the flannel sheet to catch the steam. The baby's breathing was choked and rough, like something pulled through tightly packed gravel. His skin was blazing and his hair was plastered stiffly to his temples. Toward morning, he slept. Pearl's head sagged in the rocking chair and she slept too, fingers still gripping the ivory metal crib rail. Beck was away on business--came home when the worst was over, Cody toddling around again with nothing more than a runny nose and a loose, unalarming cough that Beck didn't even notice. "I want more children," Pearl told him. He acted surprised, though pleased. He reminded her that she hadn't felt she could face another delivery. But "I want some extra," she said, for it had struck her during the croup: if Cody died, what would she have left?
...."I don't know why I thought just one little boy would suffice," said Pearl.
But it wasn't as simple as she had supposed. The second child was Ezra, so sweet and clumsy it could break your heart. She was more endangered than ever. It would have been best to stop at Cody. She still hadn't learned, though. After Ezra came Jenny, the girl--such fun to dress, to fix her hair in different styles. Girls were a kind of luxury, Pearl felt. But she couldn't give Jenny up, either. What she had now was not one loss to fear but three. Still, she thought, it had seemed a good idea once upon a time: spare children, like spare tires, or those extra lisle stockings they used to package free with each pair.

As a mother, I sometimes worry that my love for my children will be overtaken by the intensity of my fears for them. But I've internalized so many of the lines from this book that when I tune up to that pitch, I remind myself to be more like Pearl's daughter, who is "learning to make it through life on a slant. She was trying to lose her intensity." It's a part of my continuing effort to not turn out exactly like my own mother, a person generally acknowledged to be (as I am, as my daughter is) a formidable person.