The Man Who Wasn't There by Pat Barker

Colin Harper leads a dual life: He is, most importantly, a fearless fighter in the French Resistance movement, smuggling messages under the noses of the ruthless security of the Nazis, sometimes dressed as a woman to facilitate his brazen, death-defying tasks. At more mundane times, he is simply a twelve year old British boy, born during the Second World War and now raised by his mother who works nights as a cocktail waitress in a not very reputable working class bar. Colin, left on his own every night with only token overseeing by another single mother in the same boarding house, wanders the streets of a war-ravaged British town scarred by the air-raids of the recent war, one part of himself constantly on the lookout for his unknown father, the man who wasn’t there, and the other on the alert as he transforms into the famous Gaston, freedom fighter par excellence, risking his life daily in his struggles to overcome the evil Nazis.

This is the minimalist skeleton of Pat Barker’s superb little novel entitled, The Man Who Wasn’t There. I initially picked up this book simply because Barker seemed to have stolen my title for a novel, and I wanted to see if she had done the title justice. Perhaps I also vaguely recalled the enthusiastic recommendation of a few students and reader friends who were shocked that I had not yet read any of Barker’s work. You readers will already know of her work via her Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road, the latter of which won the Booker prize.

She is a writer of incredible talent. Without once breaking out of character or showing herself as the omniscient author in the background, Barker manages, simply by telling the tale of this boy and his wonderfully imaginative life, to say so much about childhood, about the thin line between fantasy and reality, about the tough blue collar standards of what it is to be a man, the difficulty of being a low income single mother, and about the search for a parent never known. It is a sweet tale, but not sentimental. The men Colin and his young street-smart boyfriends look up to are themselves boys of seventeen and eighteen, often in trouble with the law, some having already been to prison, and destined to lives of semi-poverty and small-time crimes.

What caught me immediately about this story is the crystalline accuracy of Barker’s portrayal of how a young boy perceives the world. I was instantly reminded of my own boyhood in which many plays worked themselves out simultaneously as, from outward appearances, I simply lived out the life of a school-boy in a blue-collar neighborhood. Whether walking to school, walking the mile or so to the bakery where I got the pies I then sold door to door after school, walking to Sunday school or to a friend’s house, my inner life was rife with adventure. I rarely actually walked anywhere, preferring to lope or run outright, and needing to do so in order to function as the inner hero that I was. There were enemies lurking in every ally, spies looking through slits in curtains, while I was always on some dangerous mission with the salvation of many hinging on the success of my ventures. I recall the sense of offense, near outrage, at being called back from my important reverie life by some mundane errand, or worse, reminded to wash my hands before dinner, to go back outside to clean my muddy shoes. The adults around me so pitifully unaware of my dual life and so caught up in the ordinary, the banal.

Often when I read an author, I can see how he or she does what they do, even if I haven’t the talent to duplicate their efforts. But I cannot understand how Barker was able to envision just how much she could tell us readers simply by letting us in on the fantasy life of one small boy. How did she come up with the idea, and how can she speak through the eyes of a twelve year old boy so convincingly and with such veracity. I am still shocked that she brought it off, and that she was able to catch me so completely, absolutely absorbed for a few hours by this simple story.

Colin plodded up the hill, half moons of sweat in the armpits of his grey shirt. In the distance, lampposts and parked cars shimmered in the heat. All around him was the smell of tar.

Gaston jerks himself awake. A sniper is crawling across Blenkinsop’s roof, but Gaston has seen him. He spins round, levels the gun, and fires.

The sniper—slow motion now—clutches his chest, buckles at the knee, crashes in an endlessly unfurling fountain of glass through the roof of Mr Blenkinsop’s greenhouse, where he lands face down, his fingers clutching the damp earth—and his chest squashing Mr Blenkinsop’s prize tomatoes.

Gaston blows nonchalantly across the smoking metal of his gun, and, with never a backward glance, strides up the garden path and into the house.

As he passes through the hall, Gaston taps the face of a brass barometer, as if to persuade it to change its mind. No use. The needle points, as it does unswervingly, in all weathers, to Rain. Madame Hennigan, the landlady, believes in being realistic, and no mere barometer is permitted to disagree.

Gaston clatters up the uncarpeted stairs to the top-floor flat.

Where he becomes, abruptly, Colin again.

And so throughout the book, we move from Colin to Gaston, from lonely, father-seeking, daydreaming and late-for-school Colin to Gaston the great. Just as I remember being amazed that so few adults saw me as who I really was, taken in by the ordinariness of my appearance and apparent life, Colin is half ashamed, half proud of the duplicity that has him scolded and reprimanded by dull school masters, coddled and sent to bed by a loving but harried and overworked mother, and an inner life so full of adventure, so important, so vital.

Barker is the master of understatement. This little novel is only one hundred and fifty pages long, an easy afternoon read, and yet it covers so much. Simply by telling her story, the reader comes to see how and why tough, poor boys, lured by all the superfluous riches of market economies, turn away from the drudgery and meaningless occupations offered them to a life of petty crime, despite knowing on some level that they will likely end up in a shuffle between prison and street life. We see through Colin’s school experiences the cruelty of boys to one another, often enough abetted by equally cruel teachers. We see a boy embarrassed by his own sexual longings alternately attracted and repulsed by the crass sexuality of the older children and adults around him. And we see the deep longing for a father to admire, a man to teach him how to be a man, a lonely search for the man who wasn’t there.

This is a story of loneliness and longing and hope. If it is a sad story, it is also strangely uplifting. And it captures the wonderful imagination of childhood (so often crushed or forsaken in adulthood) in a manner as rare as it is wonderful. Give your self a treat; read this book.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

There was a time when I read disturbing authors only if I knew beforehand that I would learn something important from being disturbed. Mary Gaitskill may well have failed to measure up to my strict criterion, but it is I who would have been the loser for not reading her. I have talked to you before about two of her collections of short stories, each a photograph or still life that suggested a whole world outside the margins of the frozen scene. Today I want to talk to you about her latest novel, Veronica, which is, I think, the fleshing out of the world glimpsed in the short stories.

The brutal truth is that beauty can be a curse for a woman in a way that it rarely or never is for a man. Alison is only seventeen when she is discovered by a guy who runs a sleazy modeling agency in San Francisco. A runaway at fifteen who returns to her family only long enough to run away again at sixteen, Alison is as street smart and wild as any of the young girls depicted in Gaitskill’s earlier short stories, so although Gregory Carlson does lure her to his studio to take pictures and then to sample the flesh of this young beauty he spied selling flowers on the street, she at least half knows that will be the outcome before she accepts his invitation. She watches what happens to her with the eye of a painter or researcher. Perhaps had he been only a trickster or Allison less beautiful, that would have been the whole of the story, but he does send off the pictures he takes, and Allison is contacted by a modeling agency in New York. Returning home again only long enough to get the reluctant blessing of her parents, Allison soon finds herself in Paris living around a group of young, beautiful girls who are alternately coddled and abused, kept in fancy apartments where there are literally bowls of cocaine and pantries full of fancy party foods.

It is this period of a few months that provides the backdrop for the rest of the story. Alison becomes famous in a minor way quite quickly, but when she publicly shames the head of the modeling agency who owns the apartment she lives in and whose mistress she has become, she is quite literally dumped on the streets of Paris, blacklisted and more-or-less broke.

I have been talking as if Gaitskill tells her story in a chronological fashion, but in fact, she is a master of time-change, of moving from present to past not simply chapter by chapter, but often from one sentence to the next. Indeed, the bulk of the story centers around a period of time when Alison is a proofreader in New York, and even that story is told from a present that occurs many years later in which Allison, now living again in San Francisco and a lifetime removed from the nubile youth required for her earlier years of modeling, is very ill with hepatitis, her past swimming before her in a fevered haze of memory.

Having filled you in on this much of the story, I still have not even mentioned the title character, Veronica. Unlike the often pathetically thin, underfed girls Alison has known in the world of models, Veronica is an overweight, middle-aged woman whose sense of style is outlandish and whose cynicism is finally polished and directed shotgun style at almost all who fall under her gaze. I have no idea how Gaitskill landed on this unlikely duo as the lynchpins for her story, and yet the attachment, even love, that develops over time between these two is quite extraordinary, and for a novel as tough and unsentimental as this one, almost tender. Their relationship blossoms in the troubled New York of the 80s when AIDS is new and when New York comes to be known as the city of death. The chain-smoking, tough-talking Veronica is a loner and fellow worker who proofreads “like a cop with a nightstick; ” she dates a bisexual man who is away with his young boys much more often than he is with Veronica, and the stories she tells of their strange dates in Central Park are bleak and alarming.

Although the reader is introduced to Veronica early in the novel, it is only in the helter-skelter jumping from past to present, Paris to New York to San Francisco that the story of their relationship slowly unfolds. Indeed, Veronica is already long dead from AIDS and Alison super sick with hepatitis C when Gaitskill now and then returns the reader to the present.

I have perhaps told you more of the story already than I need to, and you may well be wondering why, given the gloomy list of events, one would want to read such a novel. The answer is in the beauty of the writing and the emotional depth achieved by the author. Gaitskill knows these characters, and she knows them with the certainty of having lived these lives rather than merely viewing them. Her metaphors are wild, sometimes even twisted and alarming, and yet seem utterly appropriate the moment one reads them. At least this reader wonders why he has not seen the world in just such metaphors as soon as they leap off the page. Gaitskill says of one of her characters that “His opinions were frivolous, fierce, and exact,” and I am tempted to use just that language to describe her writing. There is such a fierce beauty in the ugly scenes she depicts, in the deep, inner agony she describes.

I know that I cannot do justice to the writing by quoting a line or two, and there is certainly no way I can capture Gaitskill’s incredible ease in moving from time to time, place to place, in slowly allowing this story to take form by weaving present to past, naïve childhood to stormy young adulthood to fevered present. But let me leave you with a longish passage describing a bus-ride Alison is taking in San Francisco, nearly delirious from the fever engendered by hepatitis C, and yet still observing the details of events around her.

The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery. As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whining sound, like we’re streaking through space. Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them. Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around. More distant green, the side of a building. The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point. It sags down with a gassy sigh. Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor. Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus. The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on. The crabbed door suctions open. Teenagers stomp up through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words. ‘Cuz like—whatcho look—you was just a—ain’t lookin’ at you!’ The old lady does not look. But I can feel her taking them in. Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine, and brain. Watering the flowers of her brain. The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap. Private snack suspended for public feast of youth. She would never be so close to them except on the bus. Neither would I. For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars. I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.

If you read this book, I promise you will see and hear and smell the world Gaitskill is describing for you, and you will come away somehow with a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of these strange beings that we are.

Runaway by Alice Munro

I want to talk to you today about one of the very best authors of the last fifty years, and one of the best short-story writers of all time. Her name is Alice Munro, and today I will talk about her 2004 collection of short stories, Runaway. Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Magaret Atwood, three friends, three Canadians (although Shields was born in the U.S.), three great writers. Shields died in 2003 at sixty-eight, Atwood is sixty-seven and still writing like a house afire, Munro is seventy-five and has announced that she has published her last collection of stories. Marvelous to me that Canada produced three such incredible authors in that short span of time. We readers should treasure all three both for their writing and for the ways they lived their lives.

I have told you before of my lifelong aversion to short fiction, but I think finally I have overcome it. Or should I say that Grace Paley, Shields, and Alice Munro have bulldozed it. This collection has only eight stories in it, and I came away from these stories feeling that I had read not short stories, but parts of novels. It seems that Munro must have thought through, mind-written, whole novels about some of these characters, and then decided to give her readers only some of the chapters. If she could do a good job with the few scenes she let the reader in on, then the reader could fill in the interstices, could become an accomplice in writing the novel.

One reviewer said that this book is so good that he didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to quote from it, that neither quoting nor synopsis could do it justice; the only way to do it justice is to read it, so he would simply repeat that injunction. Read Munro! Read Munro! I understand the feeling, and yet while I will certainly resist the temptation to synopsize, I am going to try to give you a few themes, a few passages, hoping to incite you to read the whole book.

Like the other great short story writers I mentioned above, Munro insists on writing about, illuminating the lives of, what we would think of as quite ordinary people, showing us that their inner lives are certainly as rich as the lives of the rich and famous, and that their existential crises are every bit as real. Several of the stories in this little volume are about girls/women who run away—run away from the small towns they have been raised in, from the boyfriends who threaten to smother them in the over-seriousness they manifest in their own lives, from the parents who love them too much or too little. The title story is about a young woman who enlists the help of an older woman in running away from her husband. She is helping the older woman whose husband is invalided to clean and straighten her house when quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, the younger woman moves from what appear to be soundless howls to outright howls and hysteria. She can’t stand it anymore, she wails. It turns out that what she can’t stand anymore is her husband.

He was mad at her all the time. He acted as if he hated her. There was nothing she could do right, there was nothing she could say. Living with him was driving her crazy. Sometimes she thought she already was crazy. Sometimes she thought he was.

The young woman is surprised, stunned at the ease with which the older woman is able to help her escape—a bus-ticket to Toronto, a bit of money to tide her over, a plan that spills out as if it had been in the making for sometime. Once on the bus, she has to begin to think what she is running to, what she is running from, what will become of the people and animals she has left behind.

Another of the runaways in this book is a girl from a small town, odd among the inhabitants because she is bright, studies math and foreign languages, and at first opportunity runs off to college.

Juliet knew that, to many people, she might seem to be odd and solitary—and so, in a way, she was. But she had also had the experience, for much of her life, of feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul. And usually, she let them.

Once Juliet has run away, she returns home infrequently and for short, uncomfortable visits. This young woman who studies Greek and Latin is the primary figure in two of the stories in this volume. In the first as the runaway who returns home with an infant girl, and although now living with the father of her child, not officially married. She is surprised to discover that her liberal, teacher father and her ailing mother are more shocked than they let on about her unmarried state—that it has even caused her father to resign his teaching post. And she finds herself running again, now back to the relative safety of her man and her adopted coastal home. How could she guess that twenty years later her own daughter would run away, not from a conservative and religious household and town, but, instead, towards a spiritual life that she has perhaps been denied by her atheistic mother. What is freedom to some may be bondage to others.

Finally, let me talk briefly about the middle story in this volume, “Passion.” This, too, involves a kind of runaway. Here the heroine, Grace, is from a very small town, raised by an aunt and uncle who always seem in some ways strangers to her. Following her senior year in high school, she gets the opportunity to go to a resort town and work through the summer as a waitress. There, she meets a family with much more money than any she has known and falls in love with the mother, Mrs. Travers, just as the young son of the family is falling in love with her, indeed, plans to marry her. There are twists and turns of running away in this story that I will only hint at, but let me give you something of the flavor of the young woman as she goes on her first date with the wealthy son.

He did take her to the movies. They saw Father of the Bride. Grace hated it. She hated girls like Elizabeth Taylor in that movie, she hated spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked but that they wheedle and demand. Maury said that it was only supposed to be a comedy, but she said that was not the point. She could not make clear what the point was. Anybody would think that it was because she worked as a waitress and was too poor to go to college, and that if she wanted anything like that kind of wedding she would have to spend years saving up to pay for it herself. (Maury did think this, and was stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.)
She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn’t altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn’t shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men—people, everybody—thought they should be liked. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with.

Certainly, these few passages do not do justice to the book, so I must end with the same injunction as the New York Times Book Review critic, Read Munro! Read Munro!