No Exit: Dawn Powell’s Dance Night

Dawn Powell’s Dance Night (1930), a not-too-long novel set in nonexistent Lamptown, Ohio, presents a brutal portrait of lonely lives in a small factory town with railroad tracks. Powell shows us the town and its people through Morry Abbott, a dreamy teenager who wants to get the hell out. Morry’s father, Charles, is a traveling candy salesman whose eye and itineraries stray. He doesn’t treat Morry’s mother, Elsinore, proprietress of the Bon Ton Hat Shop, very well, so Powell gives us this, early on, “Elsinore knew that Charles Abbot was a weak, blustering man, but after the day he first kissed her these matters receded, a curtain dropped definitely between her and his faults.”

Life in Lamptown is claustrophobic. Geographically, Morry and his mother live near Bill Delaney’s Saloon and Billiard Shop, Bauer’s Chop House, and the Casino Dance Hall. On the first page, Thursday night music from the Casino drifts to Morry as he reads Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Psychologically, things feel even closer: when Morry goes downstairs that same night, he runs into his mother’s assistant, Nettie, who threatens to tell Elsinore that Morry has been smoking. The tattling really picks up when someone discovers what Mrs. Pepper, the corset saleslady, does in her travels.

It’s not enough to say these characters have strained relationships built on unfavorable premises and unstable lives. Young Morry sees girls—like Jen, the girl next door who has come from an orphanage, and her sister Lil—as abstractions to hold onto, not exactly a surprise given the example his parents, one cheating in reality, the other in her daydreams, have set. The Abbotts are typical: escape is what everybody in Lamptown seems to have in common, whether they want to leave town, a spouse, or their social class. Most escapes are temporary, just sales trips, all-night excursions after the Casino, and/or drinking.

The highlight of Dance Night is a Thursday night dance scene toward the end of the book. Powell has brought the reader to the Casino before for dances, but nothing’s quite like this, with shades of red and plenty of drink, plus words like wicked, carnival, violence, witchcraft, wild, and circus. “Carnival” comes up, complete with its usual masks and reversals of everyday life, just before Elsinore leaves the dance hall, shortly before something truly terrible happens:

Her head was splitting with noise but she wasn’t sure if the noise was outside or inside, so many strange confusing thoughts crowded through her head like masked guests at a carnival, exciting, terrifying, shouting phrases they would never dare whisper under their own names.

Dance Night, which is heavier on psychology than plot, is worth reading if only for Powell’s descriptions of her characters’ thoughts and their obsessions so linked to carnival and escape. Her language is beautifully crafted and expressive, scary and lovely at the same time, and Powell succinctly characterizes Lamptown’s people through Morry’s aspirations for real estate development. Morry wants to build houses that don’t all look alike but his venture fails and another man tells him, “Boy, you might as well make up your mind now as later that people don’t want anything pretty, and damned if they want anything useful, they just want what other people have. You take these cement porches--” Grasping the mediocrity around him and his own failure, Morry realizes that “Nobody believed in the things you believed but yourself…” Then he starts wondering what to do with himself next.

For more:

Dawn Powell: The America Writer, by Gore Vidal (The Library of America) [Warning: This piece reveals most of the major plot turns in Dance Night.]

Margo Jefferson’s review of Dawn Powell at Her Best (from Steerforth Press, the edition I read… a nice find at the library book sale!), The New York Times Book Review, October 19, 1994. I particularly like this observation: “Actually, [Dance Night] is as close to musical theater as a novel can get: all the people have their own cadence and language; they move along through the stuff of their daily lives, then suddenly burst into action or fantasy as if they were bursting into song.”

Up Next: Su Tong’s Boat to Redemption.

Image Credit: Photo of Dawn Powell, 1914, uploaded to Wikipedia by DanielVonEhren.

When Hell Is Other People: Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude

Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, a very satisfying novel about British life during World War 2 that was first published in 1947, is one of the funniest and most melancholy books about communal dining and living that I’ve read in a long time. Hamilton focuses on a woman known as Miss Roach who has taken up residence at the Rosamond Tea Rooms in Thames Lockdon, a fictional suburb of London, after bombings in London.

The Rosamond Tea Rooms, however, isn’t as pastoral as it might sound: Miss Roach has her own dingy-sounding room but at mealtime she must contend with the likes of Mr. Thwaites, a blowhard who loves goading her. Here’s what one tenant thinks of Mr. Thwaites: “Mr. Prest thought that the old man was a noisy, nattering, messy piece of work who ought to be in a mental home.” This observation sums up Hamilton’s arch tone; he’s unsparing with his characters, even Miss Roach, the most sympathetic, who is the recipient of all sorts of verbal abuse.

During the course of the book, Miss Roach, who works for a publisher and is (or maybe wants to be?) something of bluestocking, meets an American lieutenant from Wilkes-Barre and looks forward to a German-born friend, the comb-pinching Vicki Kugelmann, moving in at the Rosamond Tea Rooms. I don’t think it spoils much to say that neither relationship works out very well, particularly given the amount of cocktails—sometimes a gin and French for Miss Roach—everyone consumes at the local pub and the lounge at the Rosamond Tea Rooms. Christmas is especially hellacious. There’s lots of cutting, childish conflict in the book, psychological homefront conflict that parallels the horror of war.

Perhaps the most palpable effect of the war on the residents of Thames Lockdon is the blackout. Hamilton beautifully contrasts darkness with light, juxtaposing opposites such as crowds/solitude and even, far in the background but omnipresent and wearing on everyone’s nerves, Axis/Allies. On page one, for example, Hamilton first calls London a “crouching monster” then brings the reader to Thames Lockdon. “The conditions were those of intense war, intense winter, and intensest black-out in the month of December.” When an evening train arrives, though, Hamilton offers a phrase that initially sounds almost optimistic, “Torches came flashing on and going out like fireflies. These fireflies went away in all directions in an atmosphere which was one blended of release, of caution in the blackness, and of renewed painful awareness of the cold.” Miss Roach is among those fireflies (two bugs in one?), and she makes her way to the Rosamond Tea Rooms through a town whose architecture features “the jostling of the graceful and genuine and old by the demented fake and ye-olde.”

Miss Roach is, as I mentioned, the most sympathetic of Hamilton’s main characters, one of the slaves of his title, a person for whom too much contact with other people really is hell. She finds a bit of quiet and aloneness in the last book’s final pages, after seeing the afore-mentioned Mr. Prest perform at the theater. In one of the book’s key paragraphs, Miss Roach wonders “what exact motive Mr. Prest had in being alive—if, and by what means, this seemingly empty, utterly idle and silent man justified his existence…”

I particularly like that phrase because one might wonder the same about Miss Roach: though we occasionally see her read manuscripts and know she was a schoolmistress, Hamilton gives her a horribly unflattering name and seems to deprive her of a rich intellectual life. Miss Roach even grows increasingly petty as Mr. Thwaites and Vicki Kuglemann torture her more, even thinking Vicki “had always been a filthy eater, by the way, but that had been a mere detail.” Still, poor Miss Roach—a human spot of light who recognizes the difficulties of literal and metaphorical darkness, as well as the war—just wants to be treated with respect and left alone to face life’s real dangers rather than mean teasing, something I think most of us probably consider crucial aspects of existence that require no justification.

Disclaimers: The Slaves of Solitude was a gift from a friend who works in a bookstore. Thank you very much! I know the book’s publisher, New York Review Books, through discussions about translated literature.

Up Next: Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption.

Chejfec’s Narrated Thoughts in My Two Worlds

Thank goodness for introductions! After reading Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds, in Margaret B. Carson’s translation from the original Spanish Mis dos mundos, I wondered how to describe the book. My Two Worlds is a 103-page work that doesn’t quite feel like a novel or novella: a writer on the cusp of his fiftieth birthday takes a walk in a Brazilian park, remembers, sits, observes, watches a menacing swan paddle boat, and even has a cup of coffee. Filled with minutiae and meta-material but short on what’s typically known as plot, My Two Worlds is dense reading best taken at a very leisurely pace. It’s an unusual walk in the park.

I didn’t read Enrique Vila-Matas’s introduction, also translated by Carson, until I sat down to write… I was happy to find this very apt description of Chejfec:

“But if I really think about it, Chejfec is someone intelligent for whom the word novelist is a poor fit, because he creates artifacts, narrations, books, narrated thoughts rather than novels.”

And there it was, a perfect description of the book’s genre, handily italicized, as if for me: narrated thoughts. Readers who enjoy micron-level meditations on life, often prompted by observations in the present that, in turn, prompt memory, will love Chejfec’s narrated thoughts.

Narrated thoughts isn’t one of my preferred genres—I tend to think of their narrators, including this one, as nudniks who want to tell me too much that I’ve already thought or read about before—but I have to admit that My Two Worlds contains some very, very satisfying passages and themes. And thoughts. A few rather random examples that play on my own memories, thoughts, and parallel realities but don’t begin to get to the complexity of the book:

Geography and Finding One’s Place: Our narrator mentions operating using “territorial intuition” but has difficulty finding the way to the park. I like the geographical metaphor for finding one’s place in life, particularly within the context of Chejfec’s overlapping worlds.

The Eternal Walker: The narrator refers to himself as “an eternal walker,” saying “to walk is to enact the illusion of autonomy and above all the myth of authenticity.” He walks for hours, finding tedium but…

He Also Finds the Past and an Alternate Dimension: The narrator thinks about his own life and history and the world’s history, presenting the reader with bits of both that feel to me like a hybrid of concentric circles and Venn diagrams. (Of course, I love Venn diagrams.)

The Impact of the Internet: I particularly enjoyed the thought that “The places or circumstances that have drawn my attention take the form of Internet links… On a walk an image will lead me into a memory or into several…” This makes me wonder about hypertext as a digital form of madeleines. (And reminds me that I really should read all of In Search of Lost Time... The shame!) I, too, find my off-line thought processes ever more influenced by digital habits. On a very prosaic level: I’m sure I’m not the only person who wonders what happened to autocorrect when she writes with a pen.

That Menacing Swan Boat: That damn swan boat, ridden by a girl and her father, stuck with me more than anything, impinging on the narrator’s space and privacy, as if following, spying. Neatest of all about the swan boat is that Chejfec links this imitation swan to real, live swans that the narrator remembers, earlier in the book: those swans are “so unpleasant that I had to retreat to a path several dozen meters away that led to an avenue that encircled the lake.”

Disclaimers: A big thanks to Chad Post of Open Letter (with whom I’ve discussed translated fiction) for providing a review copy of the book. Open Letter has signed two more Chejfec books.

Image Credit: SeanJC, via sxc.hu.

Up Next: Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude.

Perrotta’s Warmed Over Leftovers

I looked forward to Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, a novel about the aftermath of a rapture-like event known as the Sudden Departure: I found lots of promise in the book’s prologue, which mentions a feeling of rejection among people who weren’t taken away during the instantaneous, nondenominational disappearance of millions. After the mention of the Departed Heroes’ Day of Remembrance and Reflection and a heated argument in the first chapter, I expected lots of telling 21st-century conflict, maybe an apocalyptically angry religious right fighting with grieving family members over religion, memory, and news coverage. Alas, it wasn’t to be: The Leftovers fizzled out for me like Harold Camping’s doomsday warnings of May 2011.

Oddly, I think the biggest problem with the novel is its verisimilitude: Perrotta creates grieving, confused characters who numb themselves with typical stuff like agreeability, teenage sex and drinking, adult screenings of SpongeBob, and peculiar cult-like activity. The central characters are the Garvey family: father Kevin (agreeability), mother Laurie (joins Guilty Remnants religious group that limits talking, requires smoking), college-age son Tom (joins Healing Hug Movement), and high school student daughter Jill (drinks, skips school). None of the Garvey family disappeared, though Jill was with a not-so-close-anymore friend who vanished whilst YouTubing.

All that agreeability, uncommunicativeness, and avoidance might reflect real ways people grieve and handle stress, and they may show how people, survivors, depart without departing because they wall themselves off from their friends and family. But it’s tricky to propel a novel with inertness and inertia, particularly when the reader knows an angry-as-hell character like Reverend Jamison, who wonders why he wasn’t worthy of being whooshed from the earth, is lurking around town, ready to reveal the sins of the departed. Yes, Jamison breaks the story of Nora Durst’s husband’s affair but there’s no showdown, and Jamison gets very little ink.

I think my other biggest problem with the book is that the narrative voice felts a pinch too snarky, ironic, and/or smug for the book to generate much empathy for the characters, their situations, or the human condition, even though I had no trouble believing everyone hurt. The novel didn’t quite feel like satire, either, and absurdity would be an even bigger stretch. The tone felt out of balance, and I came away with the impression that Perrotta backed away from the edginess and riskiness he’d begun to establish in the book’s early pages.

Tension does develop—finally!—in the book’s last 50-75 pages, when [mild spoiler alert!] we confirm what we suspect about Laurie’s Guilty Remnants, a couple doesn’t quite make it, Jill starts to sort things out, and Tom finishes his job escorting a teenage mother who’s given birth to a baby fathered by the head healing hugger. Perrotta frenetically jumps between subplots then neatly ends the novel with something resembling a clean slate. Maybe Perrotta intends it as a final cliché in a novel filled with predictable turns? Whatever, as they say. I was indifferent by the time I got to the end of this readable but disappointing book: I was ready to move on with my reading life, finish mourning The Leftovers that might’ve been, and search my shelves for a book I’d enjoy more.

Disclaimers: I received an advance review copy of The Leftovers from St. Martin’s Press at BookExpo America. Thank you!

Up Next: Patrick Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude.

Bad to the Bone: Greene’s Brighton Rock

The front flap of my Penguin Classics edition of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock uses appealingly dark—and, it turns out, accurate—words like murder, menace, tawdry, apathy, and evil to describe the novel. Though saying teenage criminal Pinkie Brown “worships in the temple of evil” might sound a bit melodramatic, it’s not an unfair characterization, given Pinkie’s Roman [Catholic] background and criminal transgressions.

Pinkie, a.k.a. the Boy, is a teenage gang member in 1930s Brighton, England. Through the course of the novel, Pinkie is involved in the afore-mentioned murderous activity, a knife fight, and a not-quite-legal marriage, which he arranges so a very young waitress, Rose, can’t testify against him. Mix that with the afore-mentioned Catholic upbringing, Latin quotations, some cruel cuts at Rose, and talk of mortal sin, and you end up with a lovely mess of moral confusion.

I particularly enjoyed the contrasts that Greene creates in Brighton Rock. On one side, there’s the prideful Pinkie, who carries a boulder of a chip on his shoulder because he’s so young and easy to humiliate: he can only dream of being the older, wealthier criminal boss Colleoni. And then there’s the sybaritic Ida Arnold—she of big bosom and little religious faith—who knows the difference between right and wrong and, sure she knows the truth about a death, pesters Rose and Pinkie. Rose, by the way, has no use for Ida’s right and wrong, preferring “stronger foods—Good and Evil” and making some surprising choices.

I should note that Ida loves her alcohol and doesn’t mind a good tip on the horse races, particularly if the winnings can fund her search for the truth. Here’s Ida, whom I described as “a carpe diem kind of gal” in a margin note: “The éclair and the deep couch and the gaudy furnishings were like an aphrodisiac in her tea. She was shaken by a Bacchic and a bawdy mood.” On the next page: “She bore the same relation to passion as a peepshow.”

In the end, Pinkie gets what he deserves, a fate that fits the nihilistic worldview of a boy-man who wanted to be a priest when he was a small child but ends up a murderer as a slightly larger child. Perhaps the front flap is more right than I’d thought about Pinkie worshiping at the temple of evil: at one point he tells Rose he hasn’t changed over the years, saying, “I’ve never changed. It’s like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you’ll still read Brighton. That’s human nature.” Brighton Rock candy, a note in the back of the book explains, is sold in stick form and always says Brighton inside, no matter how you break it. (A photo)

Up next: Not sure… but likely Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds.

Image credit: “Aquarium, Brighton, England,” from user Durova on Wikipedia’s Brighton, page.