No sooner were Liberace and I in his bed without our clothes than I realised how stupid I had been. At this distance I can naturally not remember every little detail, but if there is one musical form that I hate more than any other, it is the medley. One minute the musician, or more likely aged band, is playing an overorchestrated version of The Impossible Dream; all of a sudden, mid-verse, for no reason, there’s a stomach-turning swerve into another key and you’re in the middle of Over the Rainbow, swerve, Climb Every Mountain, swerve, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, swerve, swerve, swerve. Well then, you have only to imagine Liberace, hands, mouth, penis now here, now there, no sooner here than there, no sooner there than here again, starting something only to stop and start something else instead, and you will have a pretty accurate picture of the Drunken Medley.That’s the DeWitt tone—tart, brisk, snobbish, antic. She can take a recognizable social situation or fact and steadily twist it into a surrealist skein. See what she does, from the same book, with the peculiarities of English fast-food outlets during the nineteen-nineties:
The Medley came at last to an end and Liberace fell into a deep sleep.
An American in Britain has sources of solace available nowhere else on earth. One of the marvellous things about the country is the multitudes of fried chicken franchises selling fried chicken from states not known for fried chicken on the other side of the Atlantic. If you’re feeling a little depressed you can turn to Tennessee Fried Chicken, if you’re in black despair an Iowa Fried Chicken will put things in perspective, if life seems worthless and death out of reach you can see if somewhere on the island an Alaska Fried Chicken is frying chicken according to a recipe passed down by the Inuit from time immemorial. (...)
There is little money; to save on heating costs, mother and son spend hours at a time on the Tube, going around London on the Circle line, where snobbish Sibylla gleefully notes the incomprehension of the average punter—people who, when they see a child in a stroller reading the Odyssey in Greek, admonish Sibylla in customary ways: he’s far too young; he’s only pretending to read; ancient Greek is a dead language; he should be outside playing football; and so on. DeWitt captures the rigorous unreality, close to solipsistic madness, of Sibylla’s existence, a mind running at a higher temperature than ours: “When I was pregnant I kept thinking of appealing names such as Hasdrubal and Isambard Kingdom and Thelonius, and Rabindranath, and Darius Xerxes (Darius X.), and Amédée, and Fabius Cunctator. Hasdrubal was the brother of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps.”
Since Ludo’s father is absent, Sibylla decides that male role models are best provided by the film she obsessively reveres, Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.” She tells us that she and Ludo have been watching it once a week. As in “Don Quixote,” the comedy and the pain proceed from the absurd implacability of her logic. If Greek worked for Mill, it must work for Ludo. If Ludo lacks a male role model, then “Seven Samurai” must step in as a proxy. Realistic counterarguments are unknown in this household, except as pure intellectual exercises. And, if “Seven Samurai” tells Ludo all he needs to know, it follows that the boy will be schooled by his fictional models. Denied information about his biological father—Sibylla refuses to reveal Liberace’s identity—Ludo sets off, quixotically and samurai-ishly, to find an ideal father: seven fathers, to be precise, each of whom he tests and fights. DeWitt loves seeing what she can do as a comedian. Her second novel, “Lightning Rods,” published in 2011, satirically posits that the solution to workplace sexual harassment might be a scheme by which female employees are paid extra to sexually service the male workers, a kind of institutionalized prostitution. [ed. More specifically: "Sexual harassment suits are costly, and they usually lead to the termination of a firm's top employee. Those same instincts that lead to an unwanted come-on also enable the killer instinct that gives a man the edge to succeed in the corporate world. So why not give these valuable chauvinists a way to let off steam once in a while? With an occasional anonymous fuck in the bathroom — all of course under the sterilized, normalized imprimatur of the human resources department — a firm can avoid costly litigation while protecting (some would say, "rewarding") its top properties... "lightning rods" (as the women come to be known) in a corporate setting. 1*]
Like everything in Sibylla’s life, her son is an obsessive concern to her, but he is also “the Infant Terrible” for whom she slaves away at her typing, and whose demands, like those of any young child, interrupt her thoughts. (The novel enacts this by having Ludo break the flow of Sibylla’s narration on the page, leaving passages of text hanging, uncompleted.) DeWitt beautifully dramatizes the ambivalence that Sibylla feels about her grand project. A funny, careless line like “I was just locking my bike when I thought suddenly: Rilke was the secretary of Rodin” seems darker hued when set against Sibylla’s thwarted ambitions and misspent days. One day, she and Ludo meet a woman in the supermarket, who starts weeping. “She once saved my life,” Sibylla tells her curious son afterward, before characteristically swerving into a discussion of Ernest Renan’s position on verb conjugation in Aryan languages. (Sibylla is as expert at the Intellectual Medley as Liberace was at the Drunken version.) Gradually, we discover, in rationed revelations, that Sibylla has tried to commit suicide, and that the threat has not gone away: “She tried to kill herself once and was stopped. . . . Now she can’t because of me,” Ludo says later, in one of the novel’s sadder lines. But despite her son’s intellectual maturity (he is eleven when he learns about the attempted suicide), Sibylla will not talk to him about this event, or much else, it seems. He voices what the reader is beginning to grasp: “What if there was a person who never listened to anything anybody ever said?”
It would be a mistake to force this strange and brave book into a sentimentality it deliberately disrupts. It won’t be made into a conventionally humane domestic novel about a frustrated single mother and a brilliant, questing son. Still, it is not only about being inefficiently intelligent and trying to raise a genius, not only about the inanities of the school system. Sibylla’s unreliability, both as a mother and as a narrator, is complexly revealed, and tugs at the book’s progression. Ludo may be a genius, but as long as he only absorbs everything his mother tells him to absorb he is not an original genius. At one moment, we catch him opining, to one of his prospective fathers, that “Schoenberg is obviously wrong to dismiss the Japanese print as primitive and superficial.” Dazzling, especially from an eleven-year-old, except that we know he is just parroting something his mother told the reader a hundred or so pages earlier. Who is the true genius, mother or son? Who is the thwarted genius?
by James Wood, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: New Directions
[ed. Not to be confused with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name. I've been banging my head against this book for several years now, at least half a dozen times, and have finally broken through. Hailed as one of the best books of the last century, if not the best (yikes), its idiosyncratic narrative style and subject matter always seemed too daunting to me and I've never progressed much beyond 50 pages. Now I get it (the style portion, anyway). The key is to just go with the flow (even if a lot of it is incomprehensible), and eventually everything will cohere and be explained. Eventually. Highly recommended (with that caveat).]
1* Eureka: Helen DeWitt's "Lightning Rods" (LARB)
