DAVID CARKEET’S WAYS

This is not entirely Carkeet’s fault. There’s something in the genre of the novel that doesn’t love a joke. Apart from a handful of picaresque stories, beginning with Don Quixote and ending with The Pickwick Papers, there are scarcely any full-length comic novels that anyone would put in the first class of literature. The best work of nearly every humorist from Mark Twain to Damon Runyon was done in short stories and brief essays. James Thurber’s perfect story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” runs only five pages for a reason.

True, the end of the nineteenth century saw such great works as Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and Frank R. Stockton’s Rudder Grange, while P. G. Wodehouse stands outside any theory of comic writing, laughing at us. But as a rule the novel resists continuous humor. Even in books as good as Carkeet’s, the reader can feel an awkward tugging towards something that wants to be more than funny.

The hero of The Error of Our Ways is Jeremy Cook, an itinerant — and now unemployed — linguist who starred in two of Carkeet’s earlier novels. Jeremy has moved to St. Louis, where his new wife Paula Nouvelles has found a job in the linguistics department of a school much like the University of Missouri (where Carkeet himself teaches linguistics). Jeremy watches Paula grow quickly into a hard-edged spouter of cliches as she maneuvers her way through academic politics towards a better husband.

Through one of Paula’s colleagues, Jeremy comes into contact with Ben Hudnut, a St. Louis businessman who has built his “Crunch” nut company into a million-dollar concern. Jeremy’s interest is originally in the linguistic patterns of Ben’s three-year old daughter Molly (and the sexy shape of his wife Susan), but Ben’s troubles soon draw Jeremy deeper into relations with the family. One teenage daughter is starting to run wild, another is haunted by the knowledge that Ben had an affair ten years before, and a third seems to live for possession of a pet rabbit. Meanwhile, Ben’s nut distributors have put the crunch on Crunch, and his kooky, knock-knock-joke-telling secretary has just embezzled a quarter of a million dollars from him. “The Nut King of St. Louis,” as Paula observes, “has had his nuts cut off.”

Carkeet has the whole package of humor, including slapstick, as when Jeremy, attempting to connect a conference call, manages to bring the university’s phone system to its knees. But the author’s real strength is verbal humor, and having a linguistics scholar for a hero allows Carkeet room both to make his jokes and to have one of his characters professionally qualified to explain them.

This is familiar Carkeet territory: In Double Negative Jeremy solved a murder mystery at a children’s clinic by grasping what a child just learning to speak might mean by a doubling like “no-no.” In The Full Catastrophe he saved the marriage of the couple whose grammar he was studying by grasping that when the wife said “we” she meant only her husband and herself, and when the husband said “we” he included their child as well. In the same book, after a dinner discussion of the ways that English strings together prepositions, a little girl complains, as her father brings in the bedtime story she had expressly said she didn’t want, “What did you bring that book I don’t want to be read to out of in for?”

Carkeet has the eye to write a great serious novel if he wants. There’s a scene in The Error of Our Ways that made me catch my breath in admiration for the precision of its observation of family life, when Ben’s teenage daughters appear one by one and — in exactly the same cadence — ask the three-year-old Molly, “‘Is someone . . . playing . . . the running game?” Molly’s screams made her mother wince.”

And he has the ear to write a great comic work, if he’s willing to discipline himself to resist the novel’s pull towards something else. I Been There Before, for instance, is a virtuoso display in which Mark Twain is magically brought back to life in the 1980s and forced to eke out a living forging Mark Twain memorabilia — allowing Carkeet to invent new Twain stories and show off his ability to parody Twain’s prose.

But Carkeet, whose first novel was published almost twenty years ago, is a slow writer, and he must soon decide what he wants to do with all that talent. I Been There Before is unfortunately only a stunning display of virtuosity — and it stumbles whenever its author tries to make solemn comments on race relations. The Greatest Slump of All Time is a marvelous comic work about a National League baseball team suffering from mass depression — until its author suddenly begins to believe his disquisitions on depression and decides to end the humorous book with a realistically drawn suicide. The comedy won’t stand the seriousness, and the seriousness won’t stand the comedy.

There’s a sign at the end of The Error of Our Ways that Carkeet is done with his linguistics scholar Jeremy Cook. The time for that has come if Carkeet wants to deliver on his promise.

J. Bottum is a contributing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.