Robert Nathan's outstanding review -
BODIES ELECTRICBy Colin Harrison.385 pp. New York:Crown Publishers. $20.
AS
misery loves company, literary despair rarely lacks an audience.
Approaching the end of this century, readers have for some reason grown
especially fond of angst, as they also did around the end of the last
century. But then we had "Sister Carrie,' "Jude the Obscure" and, less
dark but still gloomy, "The Golden Bowl." Our fin-de-siecle suffering
turns up in skimpier vessels filled with dime-store nihilism: the slick
ennui of Jay McInerney, the passionless murders and paid-for sex of Bret
Easton Ellis, the icy remorse of Donna Tartt's bored young monsters.
Any writer venturing into this territory should think twice. Hardly
anyone gets out unscathed, or for that matter with much good work.
With
"Bodies Electric," his astonishing second novel, Colin Harrison proves
the exception. He begins on the familiar terrain of jaded urbanity and
existential anguish. On an ordinary Monday evening Jack Whitman,
corporate executive, leaves his office and consumes a few too many
drinks. Unable to find a cab for the ride to his brownstone in Park
Slope, he settles into a subway seat with his Wall Street Journal.
Glancing up at the opposite bench, he catches sight of the tired but
beautiful Dolores Salcines with her adorable 4-year-old daughter Maria,
both as obviously poor as he is rich, and finds himself overwhelmed with
compassion contaminated by desire.
Even as Jack somehow knows
the worm is already eyeing the apple, he gazes at these stangers and
makes a fateful decision. He offers Dolores his card: "I noticed that
you might need something. . . . If I could be of help. . . . ." Though
Jack quickly forgets Dolores, moving on into the Brooklyn night, the
reader already knows: Jack Whitman has opened the wrong door. On the
other side lies doom. If only he had worked late that night, Jack later
tells himself. If only he had not been drunk and lonely, still mourning
his dead wife. If only, the reader thinks, he had not lived at the end
of the 20th century, yearning for his misplaced soul in a soulless
world.
Unaware of having set perilous events in motion, Jack
tends to his life at the Corporation. "Everyone knows the name of the
Corporation," he tells us. "Everyone watches the movies that the film
entertainment division pumps out. . . . Everyone reads the stuff that
comes out of the magazine division -- news, sports, money; and watches
the cable television division's stations; and buys the publishing
division's cookbooks, self-help books, celebrity biographies . . . and
purchases the compact disks and cassettes. . . . The levers are pulled
and the great trembling colossus of popular culture walks."
If
from this description you recognize a simulacrum of Time Warner, you may
recognize as well the author's larger ambitions. While he never strays
from Jack Whitman's tortured journey, chilling in its ineluctable
descent, Mr. Harrison weaves at the same time what may be the first
novel to use postindustrial, postcapitalist society as a character
itself -- the first novel, perhaps, to make literature from the Age of
Information. It is a leap George Orwell would have appreciated. The
Corporation in which Jack spends his life and substance is an expression
of raw power -- not to punish or kill, to restrain or imprison, but the
ineffable and more ominous power to shape consciousness. The
Corporation "is sewn into all of us, it has informed who we are and how
we see the world."
SUDDENLY, with Mr. Harrison as a guide, the once-familiar literary land of anomie seems a different country.
High
on the 39th floor of their headquarters, Jack and his colleagues are
conspiring to merge the Corporation with a German-Japanese conglomerate,
the better to capture every media market known to man, the better to
corral the right talent, hawk more records, movies, images. "We were
glad now that we didn't sign Michael Jackson a few years back," Jack
dryly observes. "The big money years are behind him and the freak years
are ahead. Someday they'll laugh at him like they laugh now at John
Travolta. Same with Madonna. In about 10 years she'll be a pathetic old
tart in her 40's and when she claws at her crotch it won't be pretty."
The
single hitch in the merger plan is the Corporation's chairman, presumed
to be an out-of-touch old fool who, for his own self-preservation, may
rally the board of directors against Jack and his fellow plotters. But
wait. Doesn't Sidney Sheldon do this sort of thing better? Can this
possibly be the stuff of serious fiction?
In Mr. Harrison's hands
it can, with a battlefield so exuberantly drawn and warriors so
believable that their greed and lust for corporate glory are the stuff
of madness. They glean their information from electronically pilfered
faxes, from overheard phone calls and even from the Corporation's
shoeshine man.
To remind us just how deranged they are, and to
symbolize, perhaps a touch heavy-handedly, that they are the truly
damaged people of the earth, their creator endows them with physical
disabilities. There is Morrison, the chief executive officer, who "had
lost half a leg and most of a hand as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam. . . .
Combat had shown him that we are merely walking bags of meat, and once a
man has decided that, all manner of brilliant scheming becomes
possible." There is Samantha, a lawyer with whom Jack once had an
affair, and who has a wandering left eye, made to wander even farther by
an incompetent surgeon. Finally there is Jack, afflicted by bile
shooting from his esophagus into his throat, a disease for which he
consumes endless quantities of pills and liquids.
Jack
particularly has reason to be ill. Son of a thwarted, disappointed
father, a doting but oblivious stepfather and a remote, shallow mother,
he somehow pieces together a life, only to see it shattered by the
squalor of modernity. Weeks before the birth of their first child, his
pregnant wife, Liz, is gunned down on a street corner, the innocent
bystander in a drive-by shooting, capturing a horror so frequent we
consider it a commonplace in both fact and language.
"I was
monstrous with the grief of it, homicidal for revenge," says Jack, but
revenge is unavailable. With fierce and ugly honesty, he chooses instead
to hate Wilkes, the suspected shooter, "by imagining him as a
ninth-grade dropout . . . in an outsized L.A. Raiders jacket who bought
the violent rap videos that the Corporation was selling by the
millions." But ambiguity triumphs when Jack learns that his wife's
murderer, himself later killed gang-style, "had been repeatedly beaten
by his father to within an inch of his life, causing certain learning
disabilities and year upon year of frustration in school." Jack cannot
forgive, nor can he easily hate.
The shooting of his wife becomes
the moment, like those moments in everyone's past, after which nothing
is ever the same, and the event that sends him into the subway toward
the enigmatic Dolores Salcines. Eventually, of course, Dolores and her
daughter reappear and take their place in Jack's life, her husband seeks
vengeance for Jack's turning them against him, the merger battlefield
grows chaotic and Jack, unsurprisingly, begins to lose his head, coping
with barely perceived questions that he knows best remain unasked.
Why
does he serve the Corporation? How far will he go to protect Dolores
and her daughter? Most important, as Walt Whitman, Jack's distant
relative, asks in the poem that gives the novel its title, "What is the
soul?" The excitement of "Bodies Electric" lies not in how the story
will turn out, not in the eruption of tragedy we sense from the first
page, but in how Jack finds answers to his questions.
The answers
lie in the American malaise, in a world where the rootless and the
dissatisfied turn increasingly violent toward the protected and
contented. "What is it," Jack asks, "that is so perversely fascinating
about differences in class? The poor, of course, study the rich, can
hardly avoid doing so in our culture, but the rich and well off and
'professional class' also study the poor, if only for comfort and morbid
fascination." But the poor do not often meet the rich, as they do in
"Bodies Electric," which underneath its troubled surface holds also a
troubled meditation on rage, poverty and power.
Along with his
narrative skill and the extraordinary sureness of his voice, Mr.
Harrison has abundant gifts for phrasemaking and the music of words. A
subway conductor's announcement emerges from a speaker "dismantled by
static into a protohuman chatter." Going to his office Jack passes "the
meager designer trees of Rockefeller Center" and in the silence of his
garden hears sirens and cars form "the underhum of the night." Standing
in the lobby of a seedy, once-grand Victorian hotel, Jack observes,
"Luxury is always in decay." When he watches a television beer
commercial and pines for the unblemished life on the screen, Jack
thinks, "In America, if no one knows you, at least the advertisers do."
Mr.
Harrison's publisher describes his novel as a "corporate thriller,"
hyperbole usually reserved for disposable entertainment. No doubt
"Bodies Electric" is a thrilling book, but to label it a thriller is
like calling "Hamlet" a murder mystery. At a time when the fiction of
unease gluts the marketplace, when brutality, not language, is the
medium of shock, when deracination as a theme seems at best corny and at
worst dull, Mr. Harrison's novel is a cause for celebration.
From
his heartless yet febrile corporation, from his hollow, broken men and
women, he has wrought a work of fiction as relentlessly bleak as any in
recent memory, making no peace with cheap hopes of redemption. A daring,
haunting book, "Bodies Electric" demonstrates that in storytelling as
in life it's not how far out you go or what you see out there, it's what
you bring back. Mr. Harrison has brought back a novel that serves one
of the essential purposes of fiction: to remind us of what we have
always known but forgotten, sometimes what we most want to forget.
Comments
Post a Comment