Gotham Diary:
No One Tells Me Anything
10 October 2014
It’s Friday, and it feels like an ordinary day. An ordinary day! How wonderful that would be. I don’t dare trust it.
Besides, it can’t be all that ordinary. There’s packing to see to, and my head is perfectly empty. I was thinking, earlier, about the insult of the coming Congressional election, implicit in the fact that a few relatively underpopulated states will determine the political cast of the Senate for the next two years. The rest of us are chopped liver? It’s yet another example of how badly the idea of the American state (as in “New York State,” an entity about which I have never heard a single human being express either zeal or pride) has let down the reality of American politics. It made sense, arguably, to treat small but urbanized and economically integrated entities such as Rhode Island and Delaware as the senatorial equals of larger and richer states, but awarding the same privilege to vast Western wildernesses devoid of everything that is vibrant and attractive about civil society was a terrible mistake. It was assumed, when these territories were admitted as states, that they would fill up and prosper; the fifty years after the Civil War was the great age of boosters. But Wyoming and the Dakotas did not fill up, and now they run extractive economies rather like those of the underdeveloped world, only with shinier corporate outposts. It seems to me that any state with fewer people than the least populous borough of New York City ought not to be allowed to participate in national elections at all.
There’s little more to be said about that, though, except to ask, where are the leaders who will do something about it? They’re still young men and women, I expect. They’re currently under the impression that technology will solve our political problems. Give them ten years to be disabused of that idea, and hope that we really have the ten years to give.
Meanwhile, an ordinary day.
Who knew about Jenny Diski and Doris Lessing? Everybody but me? Lessing, who it seems took Diski in as a delinquent schoolgirl (and nuthouse alumna), is not even mentioned in Diski’s memoir, The Sixties. Is this autobiographical nugget something that Jenny Diski has decided to share along with her new cancer diary? I keep The Sixties right next to Lynn Barber’s An Education, salt and pepper even if I don’t know which is which. What they have in common — well, what An Education has in common with the disclosure of Doris Lessing’s “protection” that Diski has made in the current issue of the LRB — is the revelation of somewhat shocking secrets about the modern world, just as I remember it, before the gravitational force of respectability, the only thing holding that world together, began to dissipate irreversibly. We’re only now finding out how many surprising things went on before the cultural revolution. The only thing that’s not surprising about them is how discreet everyone was.
Sometimes, revelations are so astonishing that they create the need for phantom revelations that would be even more amazing. Such as: Doris Lessing was willing to take on Jenny Diski, with all her problems, because of an earlier, and very rewarding, experience doing the same thing with Mary-Kay Wilmers. Why do wingnuts get to have all the fun conspiracies?
Still a very ordinary day. Il faut vider le lave-vaiselle. (Ça se dit comme ça?)
Yesterday, at the endoscopy clinic, I began reading The Dog, the new novel by Joseph O’Neill that nobody seems to like. I’ve read none of the reviews all the way through, but the general discontent has been hard to miss. Everyone must have wanted another Netherland. And the kernel of O’Neill’s story is pretty much that of Dave Eggers’s recent A Hologram for the King, a comparison that does not immediately work in O’Neill’s favor because Eggers’s story is marinated in a very anxious despair. There’s something contradictory about anxious despair: anxiety betrays at least a measure of hope. It’s something like picking up two closely-spaced radio stations while driving across some basin-and-range state popluated exclusively by two senators, their families, and their retainers.
The Dog strikes an entirely different note. I would say that it is the note of Julie Hecht, only without the self-consciousness. The note of Julie Hecht, even without qualifications, is very hard to describe, and I shall not attempt it, except to say, perhaps, “Kafka in Nassau County.” O’Neill’s new narrator, who disguises himself as”G Pardew,” is strongly reminiscent of the anti-hero of the novelist’s first book, This Is the Life. The Dog belongs to the literature of corporate screw-ups. There is none of the mordant surrealism of George Saunders (pardon the non-sequitur) because, really, isn’t Dubai already surrealistic enough? I’m having a fine old time, anyway, or at least I was for most of yesterday, before a cloud of impending menace began to threaten “the dog’s” continued enjoyment of his Pasha massage chair.
After The Dog, I’ve got Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster. Irishmen in New York — the authors, I mean. Nothing extraordinary about that. Do they meet?
A friend writes to tell me the harrowing story of being locked out of her apartment. I have no choice but to scroll and scroll and keep scrolling until I reach the end, which finds her safely ensconced at home. Now I have to go back and be re-harrrowed. Something, it seems, went wrong with the batteries in the lock on the door. Yes — one of these newfangled electronic locks that Kathleen, for one, would expect to fail. But until the problem is solved, and in the process analyzed, one is left with the modern nightmare of suddenly, without any warning at all, becoming a non-person. Access to home or to credit is denied, just like that. Everyone else says, surely you must have done something wrong. It is horrible!
Ordinary days exist primarily to lull one into a complacency from which unexpected shocks can tear one limb by limb.
Anxious despair: Joseph O’Neill’s new novel might not be saturated with it, but I’m afraid that I might be.