Novel Efforts

PICKING UP A BOOK by A.S. Byatt is always a pleasing experience whether or not one feels any interest in the subject matter, for she is a consummate professional in a literary arena filled with careless amateurs. Her verbal skill and the economy and power of her prose are very rare. Here, for instance, is a description of the onset of extreme physical pain, from her new collection, Little Black Book of Stories:

How well this is said, and how briefly.

In the five stories that make up Little Black Book, Byatt explores the weird and even the supernatural. The opening tale, “The Thing in the Forest,” sets the tone: Two little girls are evacuated from London during World War II and find themselves, temporarily, billeted at an ancient country estate. Playing in the nearby woods they see a horrifying creature, a sort of giant worm. Their lives continue on their separate paths, each blighted in some way by what they have witnessed. When they meet again as middle-aged women, one of them muses on the apparition: “I think there are things that are real–more real than we are–but mostly we don’t cross their paths, or they don’t cross ours. Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours.”

A similar crossing of worlds occurs in “The Pink Ribbon,” the most affecting of these stories. James, an elderly man, spends his life caring for his wife Madeleine, stricken with Alzheimer’s. The pointlessness of her life and the pain and drudgery of his own are driving him mad; whenever he manages a brief foray to the shops he straightens his back, “breathing the outside air in great gulps, like a man who has been suffocating or drowning,” and he sometimes broods, “as anyone in his position occasionally must brood, he supposed, on what could be done, swiftly, with a plastic bag.”

But he dutifully goes through the motions, hardly remembering what Mado, as he calls her now that she has become mad, was like before her illness. One night he is visited by an attractive young woman who claims to be fleeing a mugger. She comes in for a drink; they talk; he is startled by how much she seems to know about him and his life. As the days go on and the woman’s visits continue, he comes to realize that she is a manifestation of Mado’s young self, begging him to set her free. Byatt’s weaving of these mysterious events into James’s repetitive, painfully prosaic daily grind achieves not just verisimilitude, but truth.

Byatt is one of the most intellectual of current fiction writers; her intellect is her greatest strength, but also, ultimately, a bit of a handicap, as is demonstrated by the collection’s central story, “Body Art.” Through the characters of a male obstetrician, a female art curator, and a young installation artist who becomes pregnant by the obstetrician, Byatt introduces and explores enough themes to fill a five-hundred page novel: religion, marriage, a woman’s right or lack thereof to control her own reproductive system, the relation of art to the human body, and many more. Byatt deals with her subject smoothly, as usual, and carries each of her many themes to its logical conclusion, but the reader follows with head rather than heart or gut, and the characters function more as puzzle-pieces for the author to manipulate than as credible beings.

Byatt’s neat, spare, cerebral technique provides a real contrast with John Gregory Dunne, who completed his last novel, Nothing Lost, just before his sudden death in December. Dunne’s work tends to be larger than life, sloppy, a colorful and entertaining reflection of the American scene he documented throughout his career, and Nothing Lost does for the high-profile courtroom trial what earlier Dunne books did for the seamy worlds of Las Vegas and Hollywood.

It focuses on the gruesome murder of a black drifter, Edgar Parlance, and the legal and media players that glom onto the trial of the two low-life whites who are his alleged killers. The trial quickly turns into “a major media event, bringing with it the usual suspects, talking heads prattling about race hatred and the phenomenon of what they insisted on calling ‘Terror in the Heartland.’ It was a heartland that existed only in their fevered imaginations.”

Dunne, who covered the O.J. Simpson circus for the New York Review of Books, certainly knew his material. It is effectively delivered by his narrator, the lawyer Max Cline, whose dry comments enhance the tale: “It is my own feeling,” Max observes of the relentless 24/7 news coverage of the Parlance case, “that life began going downhill with ‘You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.'” The trial takes place in the imaginary state of South Midland. Its capital, Capital City, is the quintessential Midwestern metropolis–think Sinclair Lewis’s Zenith eighty years on–run by a good-ol’-boy-and-girl network of lawyers and politicos who pursue shady agendas while pandering to a constituency whose first and perhaps only priority is the success of the local university football team.

Dunne’s cast of characters includes J.J. McClure, a quietly ambitious prosecutor; his wife Poppy, a glossy, in-your-face right-wing congresswoman whose own ambitions inevitably take priority over those of her husband; and Carlyle, a vapid teenaged supermodel who foots the bill for the defense of her half-brother, one of the killers, but simultaneously cashes in by producing a hip, condescending coffee-table book about the trial. All of this is fine satire and will strike countless chords of recognition with readers who have watched too much CNN or Fox. And which of us hasn’t?

But Dunne tried to make Nothing Lost more than satire: With his central character, a brilliant, beautiful, and rather tragic lawyer named Teresa Kean, he aimed to make it a serious novel. Only the most skillful writers have succeeded in mixing satire with serious, realistic fiction, and Dunne has failed this time; the outrageous Poppy McClure and the tormented Teresa can hardly coexist in the same story, and Poppy and her ilk inevitably win out through sheer vitality.

DUNNE WAS CARELESS, too, in his narrative technique–or perhaps he had simply not finished revising at the time of his death. He established a good narrator in the cynical Max, but then abandoned him in favor of the third person whenever he wanted to describe scenes to which Max was not privy: Rather than adding texture to the novel, these changes shift the focus almost randomly, giving the impression that Dunne just couldn’t be bothered to make much of an effort.

The reader would do well to skip the parts of the book that deal with Teresa’s banal angst and to dwell, instead, on Dunne’s marvelous command of modern America in all its garish glory. It was always what he did best, and on this level, his final work does not disappoint.

Brooke Allen is a writer in New York City.