Gotham Diary:
Plotzed
11 June 2014

Nothing would please me more than to issue a pleasing stream of enlightened commentary about Joshua Ferris’s new, third novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, but I’m not that smart. I’m still digesting.

At the simplest level, this is a novel about a break-up. We’re told about the break-up at the beginning, because the narrator thinks it has already taken place. He is a dentist in his early forties, with a thriving practice just off Park Avenue. (Sixty thousand in billings monthly. Is that a lot? I’ll ask my dentist next time.) He has broken up with Connie Plotz, a beautiful girl ten years his junior, but she is still his “office assistant.” They broke up — and it’s never entirely clear who started it — over the dentist’s disinclination to marry and have children. The dentist is also, however, disinclined to move on. Connie is not so stymied. By the end of the novel, she has given him a good, much-needed push.

This brings us to a somewhat trickier level. Paul, the dentist, has a history. His parents were poor, largely because his father was bipolar. When Paul was nine, his father “sat down in the bathtub, closed the shower curtain, and shot himself in the head.” (41) Thereafter, Paul developed insomnia, caused by a dread of being the only person awake. He also developed a neediness that attracted him to pretty girls from happy families — or, at least, families that stayed together. That was part of the attraction with Connie. Connie’s big Jewish family appealed to Paul almost as much as she did. He thought about converting, but, as he doesn’t believe in God, that’s a non-starter. (Maybe I ought to stress it a bit more clearly: Paul is not Jewish. He’s not Italian, either, but I couldn’t stop thinking of my dentist, and wondering what he would make of this book.)

Otherwise, Paul’s life is all about loss and mortality. He watches Red Sox games compulsively, and cultivates a profound ambivalence about the team’s success.

Sometime in 2005, I told Jeff, the unlikely fact that the Red Sox had won finally sank in, and a massive malaise crept over me. I wasn’t prepared for the changes that accompanied the win — for instance, the sudden influx of new fans, none of them forged, as it were, in the fires of the team’s eighty-six year losing streak. They were poseurs, I thought, carpetbaggers. With this new crop of fans I worried that we would forget the memory of loss across innumerable barren years and think no more of the scrappy self-preservation that was our defining characteristic in the case of humiliation and defeat. (147)

As a dentist, Paul looks into his patients’ mouths and invariably sees bad going to worse. (Except when he doesn’t, in little “hurrah” moments that reveal his kernel of hopefulness.)

Thus we reach the mystery of the novel, which is why an alienated jerk who talks a lot about osteonecrosis and “the crap-ass Rays” is at all bearable. Paul is hardly the sort of protagonist with whom I should identify for two nanoseconds. “I’d been to the great Metropolitan Museum, that repository of human effort mere blocks from my office, exactly zero times.” Why, if he is such a compleat guy — a slightly kinky average sensual man with no meaningful connection to anything outside of himself except, arguably, an existential despair about the (im)possibility of meaningful connections — is he so funny? A hint to the solution of these conundrums lies somewhere in the following passage.

I’ve tried reading the bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the waters long enough, presumably you hit another stretch of firmament. I can’t say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark. It might not be. For all I know, the high-water mark is to be found in, say, the second book of Kings. Imagine making it through the first book of King! They don’t make it easy. I’ll tell you what amazes me. I’m practically always sitting down next to somebody on the subway who’s reading the Bible, who’s smack in the middle of the thing, like on page one hundred and fifty thousand, and every single sentence has been underlined or highlighted. I have to think there’s no way this tattooed Hispanic youth has lavished on the remaining pages of his bible such poignant highlighting so prominently on display here in the hinterlands of 2 Chronicles. Then he’ll turn the page, and sure the fuck enough: even more highlighting! In multiple colors! With notes in a friar’s hand! And I don’t mean to suggest he simply turned the page. Dude leaped forward three, four hundred pages to reference or cross-check or whatever, and there, glowing in ingot blocks, was the same concentration of highlighting. I swear to God, there are still people out there devoting their entire lives to the Bible. It’s either old black ladies or middle-aged black guys or Hispanic guys with neckties or white guys you’re surprised are white. Thousands of hours they’ve been up studying and highlighting Bible passages, while I’ve been sleeping, or watching baseball, or abusing myself carnally on a recliner. Sometimes I think I’ve wasted my life. Of course I’ve wasted my life. Did I have a choice? Of course I did — twenty years of nights with the Bible.  But who is to say that, even then, my life — conscientiously devout, rigorously applied, monastically contained, and effortfully open to God’s every hint and clobber — would have been more meaningful than it was, with its beery nights, bleary dawns, and Saint James and his Abstract? That was a mighty Pascal’s Wager: the possibility of eternity in exchange for the limited hours of my one certain go-round. (7-8)

This sounds almost like stand-up comedy, with its sharp but careful exaggerations and it projectively self-deprecatory rhetoric, but it is too fine for a noisy club. This is stand-up for quiet readers who will savor “superlong” and “hinterlands” and “my one certain go-round,” and relish “I’m practically always sitting down next to somebody on the subway.” Who will delight in the oscillations between carefree vernacular and deliberate precision. Paul’s way of talking shows him to be a sensitive, helplessly reflective guy who is also bored to death, because his sensitivity reminds him, over and over, that we are all going to go through some sort of bathtub experience in the end.

Copious discussion of the problem of the Bible at such an early stage in To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is perhaps almost as indicative as the title itself that our story is going to concern a perplexed man’s struggle with questions of faith and religion, and indeed it is, but in a manner quite free of transcendent impulses. Indeed, the impulses are all the other way. They are most searingly embodied in the character of Grant Arthur, a disaffected child of privilege, now an old man, who is the offstage architect of the ostensible plot, which ranges with agreeable implausibility over the repercussions of the Chosen People’s encounter with the Amalekites. Grant, like Paul, is drawn to the Jews, but much more powerfully and transformatively. Lest this sound pious and uplifting, I must insist that the tale of Grant’s youthful passion for all things Jewish, including the daughter of a rabbi, is delivered with all the exquisite aplomb of a fine old Jewish joke — only to shape shift, with startling chutzpah, into a Talmudic commentary on what it means to be a Jew, delivered, of course, by a gentile.

As a gentile, I can’t help noticing that I find Joshua Ferris to be a lot funnier than Philip Roth or Sam Lipsyte. Frankly, I don’t find either Roth or Lipsyte funny at all. There’s a sourness in their pawing at the grossness of physical life that kills the laughter. A sweet-breathed angel seems to be in charge of refilling the ink in Ferris’ pen. And Ferris is altogether unafraid of being heartwarming. Not that he is ever merely heartwarming. When the ball connects with the bat on the last page, contact is made with another great novel, one that sees baseball and cricket from the opposite perspective: Netherland.

And, as I wrote the other day, this is the book that gives us “me machine.” Joshua Ferris may have made it up, or picked it up; it doesn’t matter. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour just may put it in the language for good.

Daily Blague news update: “God and the World.”