In a subtle and well-aimed swipe at the inclinations of U.S. publishing, Vladimir Nabokov once referred to a reader who suggested Lolita be rewritten as the story of a young man seduced by Humbert Humbert in “short, strong, ‘realistic’ sentences like the following: ‘He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy. Etc.’”
For a period of some years, this was a style acceptable and even encouraged for a certain kind of writer: generally white, generally male, possibly working-class, hopefully alcoholic and depressed. The reasons for its abeyance are many, but one is surely the sense — I say “sense” because no one really knows what readers want — that we have had enough of that kind of writing and that there is a thirst for newer, more diverse voices. This perception exerts great pressure on the white male author aware of the imperative to “check his privilege” and acknowledge the greater struggles of women and people of color but who also has no real subject apart from his enthusiasms and the bad things that have happened to him. A reaction to this dilemma, a plea for continued relevancy, can be found in The Good Hand, a purported memoir of Micheal Patrick F. Smith’s time as a “hand” in the oil fields of Williston, North Dakota, at the tail end of the fracking boom.
That word, “purported,” is snarky, but it must be said that once the preliminaries are past — an aside on the omnipresence of petroleum products, a few words on the technique of horizontal drilling — an air of calculation soon overshadows the conceit that we are reading a plain record of an individual’s experience. Just days after his arrival, at a bar looking for work, Smith falls into a conversation with two men about how their fathers beat them with belts and switches. “This exchange,” he writes, “proves to be the first in a pattern of conversations that I have with countless numbers of men in Williston, often upon first meeting. The conversation can be boiled down to two short sentences: ‘What kind of work do you do? Man, my dad whipped my ass!’ I come to think of it as The Williston Hello.” The “hole in a man’s soul in the shape of his father” is for Smith the “defining feature” of every man he meets in Williston, and he details his own “father wound” with the sort of abject relish one sees sometimes at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where every speaker tries to top the destitution and depravity of the one before.
In Smith’s Williston, there is hardly a Dan or an Andy to be found. Everyone is Smash, Champ, Huck, or Porkchop. Everyone has been to jail or is the product of a broken home. Everyone’s clothing is stained or dirty. No one says, “Good morning”; instead, it’s, “You get any p—- last night?” Those who saw Jesse Moss’s moving documentary Overnighters and recall Williston’s tiny, quaint downtown surrounded by streets of single-family homes will wonder at Smith’s hellscape of dive bars and upturned cars populated by meth addicts and child molesters on the lam. There is no doubt the town has its rough side; its population more than doubled in the past decade, and the migration included many ex-convicts and addicts looking for a new start, but statistics fail to bear out Smith’s declaration that the crime rate there was four times the national average, and even in the worst period, between 2013 and 2014, it remained significantly lower than in most major cities.
The driving proposition of The Good Hand is this: There exists a class of men left hanging by society, men abused, men in search of fathers, rough around the edges but with good in their hearts, who have come together at the world’s edge to do the hard, dangerous work without which society wouldn’t function. As a cliche, this is not without power, but it buckles under cursory scrutiny. On a trip back to New York, Smith looks contemptuously at the patrons of a gastropub, thinking, “Look at them. Everything they enjoy. Every. Single. Thing. They get it from me,” and, twirling around on a dance floor, he shouts, “New York City, you are welcome!” Putting aside that his is an entry-level position that would be filled no sooner than he stepped aside, two facts remain salient: first, that the makers vs. takers dichotomy is and has always been a false one, barely relevant to the complexities of capitalist economies with supply chains spanning the globe, and second, that the Bakken oil he helps pull from the ground is not the lifeblood of civilization but a commodity subject to market conditions. Indeed, soon after Smith returned to New York, Saudi Arabia increased its oil output, cratering the price. North Dakota now has only 15 active rigs.
What one hopes for, from a book of this sort, is a view into an unknown world, but The Good Hand reveals little about life in the oil fields. We learn nothing about the major players, how the companies are structured, or the boom-and-bust cycles that govern the business. There is a lot of loading things onto and off of trucks and riding around with gruff men who crack crude jokes that arouse Smith’s indignation except when he views them as a sign of authenticity. He devotes much of the text to his favorite folk musicians, the grim history of his broken family, homages to the theater, where he found his own “tribe” of “ragged, damaged seekers like myself,” and treacly descriptions of landscapes where he feels “small … in comparison to the scale of the earth and sky.”
For nearly a century, a sophisticated body of film criticism has cast doubt on the credibility of documentaries; our approach to memoir remains naive by contrast. The memoir is either true or not true; when we find holes in it, the author is lambasted publicly and maybe goes on TV to cry and repent. I cannot say the things recounted in The Good Hand never occurred; I can only say that, were it a novel, I wouldn’t be able to swallow it, and this points to basic deficits in what Smith chooses to record and perhaps in his way of experiencing.
It is not that anything in the book is unbelievable per se; it is just all too pat. Circumstances dovetail perfectly with the expectations of a class of contemporary readers — the same people who rend their shirts over books and editorials about despair in the so-called heartland — but I suspect even the New Yorkers Smith so readily reviles will find a great deal of what he writes questionable. Did he really meet a Congolese man with multiple wives who was also the first black man his coworkers had ever known and who also sued his employer for calling him a racial slur one day after he saw Roots? Did he really get to tell off a know-nothing environmentalist a few days after returning from the oil fields? The convict with the “German Pride” tattoo beaten by the Nazis before the Muslims rescue him, the Bukowski-quoting stripper, the rednecks who say they’ve never met a Democrat, the Walmart customer who tells a Native American cashier, “If you can’t speak the language, then you better go back to wherever the f— you come from,” only to receive a tart comeuppance in English — are they real? If so, then either most of what Smith has experienced is cliche or he is peculiarly attuned to cliche in the way mediocre literature often is, sensing a core of truth in impressions derived from TV, the news, or hearsay with little concern for their relationship to broader realities.
“We put our lives on the line every day,” Smith writes. “We do it for money. For families. For dreams.” With such words, he toys with solidarity. Several times throughout his book, he hints that he just might have found his destiny. But after nine months on the job, he’s ready to pack it in. The revelation comes when a friend from the Rockaways reminds him he’s an artist: “Somebody has to tell the tale,” he thinks. This is surely so, but the subject demands a colder, less prejudiced eye, one better attuned to detail and less apt to see in the misery of others a cipher for private ordeals or an occasion for the display of virtues. Smith suffers under the contemporary misconception that experience confers wisdom, and trauma authority, and his determination to convince readers of his aptitude for the material pushes the material itself into the background. In this way, the subtleties are smudged, much that is essential appears left out, and the result is an R-rated Norman Rockwell vision of America.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
