We meet Waldo while he is in Boonville School for Delinquent Boys. He has been turned into the police for ”Well, why do I have to do anything at all?”
We meet Waldo while he is in Boonville School for Delinquent Boys. He has been turned into the police for several misdemeanor offenses of vandalism by his own father. He lives in a strange household of a crazed mother and a crazier grandmother, and then there is his father who seems to be muddling along as best he can. Waldo almost considers it a vacation to go away to juvie just to get away from his insane family.
He doesn’t have a clue what he wants to do with his life. He meets a bodacious older woman with too much money and too little morality who takes him under her wing. Clovis Techy pays for him to go to Rugg College. Waldo decides ”that what he really wanted to do was meet a nice simple girl, fairly well upholstered and fairly jolly.” That’s all fine and good, but he is trapped in the conundrum that many of us have faced at some point in our lives...ass, grass, or gas, no one rides for free. I like this description of his circumstances with Clovis. ”He wasn’t looking for a roadmap to take him to the right place, but wasn’t Clovis sort of a fleshy roadmap that would take him where he wanted to go?” ***Shudder***
What young man doesn’t dream of meeting some curvy older sexpot who will show him the ropes in the bedroom jungle, but Clovis is proving to be a soul sucking vampire. ”The awful part was when he finished making love to Clovis for perhaps the tenth or fifteenth time that day he slumped down, stunted and shriveled, knowing full well that he looked dwarfish and ugly. He even apologized to Clovis for his condition. She said it didn’t matter much as long as she got her just do. But Clovis had to admit that Waldo looked pretty scruffy.” Plus, Waldo is running out of ideas of new sexual adventures to suggest to Clovis. She is game for anything his perverted mind can conjur, but when his hair starts falling out in clumps and his body starts shrinking into a pygmy, he can barely think beyond achieving his next erection.
This is Paul Theroux’s first novel, and like many first novels, it is a coming-of-age story. He was twenty-six when it was published, and what he really needed more than a contract to publish was for someone to tell him to go back to the drawing board and work on restructuring the novel into something greater than its disjointed parts. I like stuff like this:
”’But I don’t hate anybody. That is, anybody that I know of--unless you can hate parts of people.’
‘Parts of people?’
‘Like my father’s stupid jaw--mostly his mouth. And especially my mother’s eye. And my grandmother’s lips have turned to wrinkles. But I don’t hate them all over.’”
This is really a 2.5 star book, but since I always round up, it will land at three stars. I’m being generous because of my long history with Paul. He’s taken me on many wonderful adventures with his writing, and I hope he will take me on many more. There is really no reason for any of you to read this book unless you are a Paul Theroux completist. He is much better known for his great travel books and has taken some knocks for his novels, which haven’t always been fair. I’ve read many novels by him that I thoroughly enjoyed, but this isn’t one of them.
”She loved Kurt Vonnegut and often quoted him. ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are like dancing lessons from God,’ she would say, perhaps dreaming of dig”She loved Kurt Vonnegut and often quoted him. ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are like dancing lessons from God,’ she would say, perhaps dreaming of digs in distant countries, though her favorite was from The Sirens of Titans: ‘I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.’”
Jane Britton was murdered in her Harvard apartment in January 1969. The circumstances were odd: her next door neighbors heard nothing; she was found on the bed with her head bashed, rugs thrown over her, a stone grave object at her head, and red ochre thrown upon her body in a circle. There were many rumors surrounding Jane. She was a liberated and spirited woman, who was thought to be promiscuous. There was talk of an affair with a professor. She had friends among the grad students who were odd ducks. One was connected to the disappearance of another woman. There were a plethora of candidates who might have killed her. The motive was murky. Becky Cooper first heard about her when she was told the story of her death. A story wrapped in half-truths, but one of those stories that becomes a cautionary tale to women.
Who killed Jane Britton?
It would go unsolved for fifty years.
The rumors placed one professor in the frame. Archaeology Professor Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky found an important archaeological site in Iran, but it wasn’t just the find that made him a minor celebrity at Harvard, but also his ability to spin a story. He didn’t just tell you what happened; he brought all the possibilities vividly to life. He was tall and dashing and was Indiana Jones long before Indiana Jones existed in the mind of Lawrence Kasdan and Steven Spielberg. ”Karl emerged as a complicated, mercurial man: brilliant, imposing, hot-tempered, ambitious, inspiring, flamboyant, charismatic, exploitative, even paranoid. Some knew to stay away from him, some admired his charisma. But one way or another, he inspired intense reactions.”
Karl was the type of person that people want to be guilty. ”The students detested Professor Karkov with a vividness and clarity of feeling that, in the young, is rarely reasonable, and yet not always wrong. Their arrogant tribunal of the spirit pronounced him unattractive, cowardly, dishonorable, disloyal, callous, self-elevating, hypocritical, calculating--guilty in general of conduct unbecoming a young professor.”
What was interesting for me was the slight differences in the description of Karl by the author and then the descriptive terms used by the students. One painted a picture of a man who had some redeeming qualities, but the other painted a picture of a man who should be drummed out of academia.
Jane butted heads with him. She had a strong personality. I could see him being a puzzle piece that she might be thinking about how he would fit into the chaotic puzzle of her life. He could help her. He could destroy her. She might fuck him, but she certainly wouldn’t like it if he fucked her over. She was certainly the type of woman who would have no qualms about ruining a man’s career.
Becky Cooper was soon consumed with the story of Jane. There were certainly more questions than answers, and over the distance of time, facts had been modified to tell a better story. ”I laughed out loud at her fifty-year-old jokes. I started writing my own emails like her. It felt a lot like love--a confusing mix of admiring her, devouring her, inhabiting her, emulating her, channelling her, and thinking I was her.”
Whose face was in the mirror, Becky? Yours or Jane’s?
Jane was the type of friend you rarely found in real life, but of course, the dead could be shaped into who we wanted them to be.
Cooper didn’t shy away from self-reflection. ”I attributed the depth of my feelings to the natural process for a biographer. Breathing life into someone on the page was an act of both resurrection and transubstantiation: I wrote them by learning about them, then by holding them inside me, then by feeling for them. By the end, I’d become their host, so of course I would forget where they ended, and I started.”
It was a dangerous thing to become obsessed. It could crater every other relationship you try to have, but at the same time, I kept thinking to myself, Everyone needs something to obsess about. Hopefully, not something all-consuming, but something that adds a layer of mystery or something that enlarges your life.
Cooper weaved in some of the sexist history of the Harvard archaeology department. She shared some staggering numbers, like that 87% of the grads who washed out of the program were women. 70% of the women were sexually harassed or assaulted on digs, and 40% of the men. How many red flags did a university need to know there was something wrong? I pondered whether sharing these stories of some of these women went beyond the bounds of the intention of the book. After all, this was a true crime murder mystery, not a sexism expose, but I found myself frequently raising my wife’s blood pressure when I shared some of the stories and statistics with her. Cooper also expanded the parameters of sexist behavior for me, revealing things that were so self-evident in retrospect, but would have been difficult for me to fully grasp when I was managing companies. All of this did relate to Jane because it showed us the environment she was trying to navigate as a female archaeological grad student. Even if she’d lived, would she have been doomed to fail?
So we had several suspects beyond just the villain Karl, and Cooper chased each of them to ground, building cases for motive and exploring the stranger aspects of their personalities. ”I looked back at where I started. How quickly everything became a giant puzzle, a world of secrets, where every fact had a double meaning and everyone seemed to have a secret life. The speculative quicksand on which my story was based seemed so limitless that sometimes I had to remind myself that Jane did die and someone did kill her.” I could see that Jane, through her sparse correspondence, came back to life in Cooper’s mind. Someone might have needed to gently shake Cooper at some point and remind her that Jane was fifty years dead. I could see her blinking for a moment, uncomprehending, and then mourning her death as if it had just happened.
The historian H. W. Brands confessed that, as he wrote about Abraham Lincoln dying, he had tears streaming down his face. The moment was as real for him as it would have been for a weeping Lincoln supporter in 1865.
This book drives the reader forward relentlessly. It flips between chapters focusing on Jane Britton and the people surrounding her and Cooper’s investigation and her relationships with the remaining people who were connected to the murder. The resolution is a gut punch. My mind still touches on the reveal and steps back. The truth doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes it bogs you down in disbelief. I do wonder, now that Jane has been laid to rest, how will Becky Cooper fulfill herself going forward?
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Michael Chabon looking remarkably like how I envisioned his protagonist looking in The Mysteries of Pittsburg.
“When I remember that dizzy s
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Michael Chabon looking remarkably like how I envisioned his protagonist looking in The Mysteries of Pittsburg.
“When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”
There are moments in time that are demarcation lines in our lives. They might involve deaths, loves, the culmination of clarity, or in the case of Art Bechstein, a summer of chaos. He has issues. In fact, his issues are so large that other issues are building hotels, spas, and skyscrapers on his original issues. He has the mysterious death of his mother lingering like a ghost over everything he does. When feeling pressured at all, he bursts into tears in front of his gangster father. He has just graduated from college and is starting the summer, the last summer of discovery, before he has to decide what he will do with the rest of his life. I would reassure him that there will be many more moments like this as middle age descends upon him like a hammer and a series of midlife crises buffer him about like chaff swirling in the back of a grain truck. We’ve all been there...shit...I graduated...now what?
The prospects are rarely clear cut for most of us, except for those few who have been focused on a career path since the age of seven. I must admit, as difficult as these decisions are, Art has a few more things bothering him as well that I haven’t mentioned yet.
I don’t like the fact that he calls himself Art. It diminishes him even further. Of course, one of his best friends is also Arthur, Arthur Lecomte, and he is way too suave, well dressed, cultured, and charming to be called anything but Arthur. Art isn’t really sure why Arthur likes him, but he suspects that it may be because he wants to seduce him. When the path forward is so uncertain, what a great time to question one’s sexual orientation as well? Art has wrestled with it before, in high school when he was experiencing a long drought of female disinterest. Once girls started paying attention to him again, he put all those homosexual thoughts on a backburner, but now that he is hanging around with Arthur, he is starting to wonder about his sexuality once more. Is it because he wants to be more like Arthur?
He has a girlfriend named Phlox Lombardi. ”Everything about her that was like a B-girl or a gun moll, a courtesan in a bad novel, or an actrice in a French art movie about alienation and ennui; her overdone endearments and makeup; all that was in questionable taste and might have embarrassed me or made me snicker, I had come to accept entirely, to look for and even to encourage. She delighted me as did bouffant hairdos and Elvis Presley art. When she came out of her bedroom dressed in a nylon kimono and huge slippers of turquoise fur, I was almost dizzy with appreciation, and the gaudy plastic Twister mat at my feet seemed to be the very matrix, the printed plan, of everything I liked about her.”
He is right in thinking that Arthur and Phlox are way cooler than he is and should be questioning why they like to hang out with him. As he navigates his feelings for both of them, I start to feel like Art is responding more to the desires of others rather than to his own feelings. He loves both of them. He isn’t wrong about that, but he dangles both of them as if by some miracle they could all be together. A triangle of love and lust that will not require Art to choose. The problem, of course, is Arthur and Phlox are insisting that he must pick. Frankly, I think both Arthur and Phlox, once they experience Art’s dithering, should have both dropped him like a hot potato. Art is worried about this. Both are well aware that Art needs them, and maybe that is why they allow him to play with their emotions as he tries to figure out his own muddled desires.
The problem is, once he chooses one, he loses the other.
Art and Arthur have a mutual friend named Cleveland. He is a force of nature, who takes too many drugs, drinks too much, and rides his motorcycle like a blazing comet while under the influence. He wants to ”eat the entire world.” He is flailing at the world like an inebriated and crazed Don Quixote, and of course, the windmills will win. He has visions of being a gangster and insists that Art introduce him to his father. The faster Cleveland tries to ascend, the closer he gets to the sun, and we know what happened to Icarus.
This is certainly a coming of age story. When it first came out, many compared it to Catcher in the Rye, which is something publishers routinely do for any coming of age story that has some literary merit. The comparison has been used so much that readers practically roll their eyes when they see yet another reference to J. D. Salinger’s masterpiece. Although Art Bechstein is no Holden Caulfield, there is a legitimate search for the truth going on in this novel. This book does capture the peculiarities of the ‘80s and the emergence of the modern age when more people felt comfortable talking about their sexual orientation with more complete honesty. If you had told me back then we would still be grappling with homosexual issues in 2020, I would have thought you were crazy.
In this first novel, Michael Chabon is already showing the great promise of the amazing writer he was going to become. I thought it was interesting, reading an interview with him, that he mentioned that he felt like a failure. Here is a celebrated novelist, who has won numerous awards for his writing, who still feels the lash of any criticism. I’m glad that he continues to muscle through those misdoubts that have been sown in his mind by critics who have obviously failed to understand just how good a writer he is.
This is an excellent first novel that any writer would be proud to call their own.
FYI a movie was made based on the book in 2008 which was directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber and starred Jon Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sienna Miller, Nick Nolte. I haven’t seen the movie, but hope to see it sometime this month.
”I had lost everything: novel, publisher, wife, lover; the admiration of my best student; all of the fruit of the last decade of my life. I had no fam”I had lost everything: novel, publisher, wife, lover; the admiration of my best student; all of the fruit of the last decade of my life. I had no family, no friends, no car, and probably, after this weekend, no job. I sat back in my chair, and as I did so I heard the unmistakable crinkle of a plastic bag. I reached into my torn hip pocket of my jacket and passed my hand through the hole, into the lining, where I found my little piece of Humboldt County, warm from the heat of my body.”
At the very beginning of this novel, Grady Tripp has lost or been on the verge of losing all of the important things he has listed above, but it takes the length of this novel for denial to be replaced by the cold, hard face of reality.
He has a certain level of charm, a certain level of intelligence, but truth be known, his days of being one of the wonder boys of writing are long past. He is like a high school quarterback who still talks about his days on the playing field long after his football cleats have molded and turned to rust. He keeps hope alive by continuing to work on an epic novel, his grand masterpiece, a bloated, indulgent, horse-choking size manuscript that he...never...wants...to...finish. He doesn’t want anyone to read it for fear that his illusions about the novel will be shattered and the last vestiges of hope of ever publishing another novel will be dashed. At the same time, he wants someone to read it so he can feel vindicated.
The fear outweighs the desire for exoneration.
So how does a tuba, a dead dog, and three quarters of a boa constrictor end up in the trunk of Grady’s “stolen” 1966 maroon Ford Galaxie?
Ahh yes, the Devil is in the details.
Grady’s wife has left him because she found out he was sleeping with his boss’s wife. ”I intended to get involved with Sara Gaskell from the moment I saw her, to get involved with her articulate fingers, with the severe engineering of combs and barrettes that prevented her russet hair from falling to her hips, with her conversation that flowed in unnavigable oxbows between opposing shores of tenderness and ironical invective, with the smoke of her interminable cigarettes.” Sara is also one of those people who has a book with her all the time. She reads while waiting for a movie to start. She reads while her food is microwaving. She reads during any spare minute that life will give her.
As I’m sitting here rereading this quote, I keep thinking about the words involved in that sentence and how nice it was to read a book by an author using a higher level of vocabulary. I’ve been very disappointed in recent years with most new adult books reading like they’ve been put through a young adult word strainer. Michael Chabon is a gifted writer, and his love of the language is on constant display throughout the novel.
To make matters worse, Sara is pregnant. We only get to spend a few days with Grady Tripp, but the thing that is readily apparent is that Grady is an all-star at cratering his life.
As if a pregnant mistress and an AWOL wife are not big enough issues for him to deal with, he also has several other chaotic walking disasters waiting to explode in his face.
His favorite student, Hannah Green, is in love with him, and she is just too damn pretty to be resisted. His most gifted student, James Leer, is suicidal. His best friend and agent, Terry Crabtree, has come to town, dragging along a transvestite with him, to inform Tripp that his career is in jeopardy and his best hope is that Tripp has written the great American novel that will salvage his career and put Grady back among the pantheon of Wonder Boys, or should we say Wonder Elderly?
Grady is also smoking WAY too much herb.
“It’s always hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.” Chabon scatters sentences like that throughout the novel that had me thinking about what is hope? Is denial really the worst thing? Isn’t denial sometimes the only way we can have any hope? Whenever I take a hard, critical look at my life, the easiest thing to do is crush all the hope out of the equation. Hope is most of the time ethereal and untethered to logic, but without hope how does the magic happen? Those magical moments when something goes unexpectedly well, or a major issue in our lives reaches a resolution without our intercession, or a friend, an acquaintance, a stranger out of the blue does something that makes us believe in the basic goodness of humanity again.
Needless to say, the misadventures of Grady Tripp snowball to the point that I did wonder if he needed to just hop in the Galaxie and drive to New Mexico to let the desert sun melt away his indiscretions, his blunders, his failures. Can Grady grab a branch large enough to hold him as he free falls to the bottom of the deepening crater of his life?
Oh, and let’s not forget about the dead dog, the three quarters of a boa constrictor, and the tuba in the trunk. These are mere nuances in the greater scheme of his disastrous life, but they must be dealt with as well.
There is also a movie from 2000 with Michael Douglas as Grady, Robert Downey Jr. as Crabtree, and Tobey Maguire as James Leer. The movie isn’t as good as the book, but it is an enjoyable romp that captures the campus humor of the book.
This is the best book I’ve read in a long time. I’ve got a copy of Chabon’s first book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh on the way. I have a feeling it will prove to be an impressive writing debut.
”I put my mouth to the page and kissed the ‘O.’ Kissed it and kissed it. Then, impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the s”I put my mouth to the page and kissed the ‘O.’ Kissed it and kissed it. Then, impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the signature, patiently as a cat at his milk bowl I licked away until there no longer the ‘O,’ the ‘l,’ the ‘i,’ the ‘v,’ the second ‘i,’ the ‘a’--licked until the upswept tail was completely gone. I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name. I had all I could do not to eat the whole thing.”
After reaching the threshold of his frustration with his father, Marcus Messner heads west to attend the very conservative Winesburg College in Ohio. Given his obsession with the writings of Bertrand Russell and his own personal disregard for organized religion, he probably should have found a college that better fits his temperament. Desperation tends to lead to rash decisions, and Marcus would have done anything to get away from New Jersey, his father’s cloying obsession over every moment of his day, and the family kosher butcher shop.
He is a young man of grand passions and explosive opinions. He soon finds himself at odds with the requirements of the school, specifically the 40 times he has to attend chapel a year, but he also keeps moving from roommate to roommate, unable to get along with anyone, and finally moves into an attic room that no one wants so he can live by himself. Is he intolerable of differences of opinions, or is everyone else too intolerable to live with? His father has become angry at everyone and finds the world to be a very unsafe place, and though he would deny it vigorously, Marcus is exactly like his father. The difference is that his father took several decades longer to become that angry.
There is a girl. There is always a girl, or at least there always should be. Olivia Hutton is the odd, but pretty, girl in history class. A doe, a fragile beauty, who remarkably seems to like him. He is a virgin, and he soon discovers that she is not. When they park on their first date, he is expecting or hoping for some heavy petting, but he gets more than he could ever hope for or is even ready for.
She has a scar, a long, white scar across her wrist. ”You would have thought the whole of Olivia lay in her laughter, when in fact it lay in her scar.” Olivia finds him to be odd, serious, and mysterious. When Marcus’s mother meets her, she insists that he needs to stop seeing Olivia because... ”This is a girl full of tears.”
This astute observation made me sad. I thought to myself, here is a girl where the tragedy of her life is splashed across her face for all to see. Why is it no one can help her?
Marcus fucks everything up with Olivia. Is this the classic boy-wins-girl, boy-loses-girl, and boy-wins-girl-back plot? Hmmm, if only his life would prove to be that simple.
As she avoids him, his obsession with her grows. They exchange letters, jockeying for understanding. He realizes that he must get her back. He is working, trying to become valedictorian of his class, and trying to find the right words that will win back Olivia. He has no time for the rules and regulations of this very conservative school and soon finds himself in conflict with the dean.
Why can’t everyone just leave him alone? Why can’t Olivia see that his love/lust for her is real? Isn’t he doing enough?
This is 1951, and the Korean War is raging. Young men are dying in the snow and mud, trying to keep the Chinese from overrunning South Korea. The fear of being drafted is a looming dread hanging over him. As long as he can stay in school, he will be deferred, but can he make the compromises that will keep him out of conflict with the dean and also keep him out of the conflict overseas?
Marcus has a lot of can’ts in his vocabulary. Indignation surrounds him in a cloud of dissent.
The big decisions we make that we think will unalterably change the course of our lives are sometimes sabotaged by a series of small decisions that lead us down the most unexpected paths. It is ”incomprehensible the way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”
This is a slender volume that is exploring themes that go deeper than what the overarching plot would indicate. The writing flows quickly, like a rain swollen stream, and sometimes I found myself being pushed along too fast. I had to occasionally reach out and grab a passing branch so I could let the water flow past me for a while to ponder the subconscious rumblings of the machinery beneath the stage.
There is a movie from 2016, directed by James Schamus, that I fully intend to watch as well. Will Schamus capture the nuances? We shall see.
”’The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.’ Traceable to Nietzsche, like everything else in modern thought.
‘Probl”’The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.’ Traceable to Nietzsche, like everything else in modern thought.
‘Problems are not solved but outgrown.’
What in hell, he wondered (as always), was it supposed to mean?”
Peter Mickelsson’s life is full of ghosts. Dead philosophers come and argue with him, long dead residents of his country house in Pennsylvania who clatter about raising the hair on the back of his neck, and the living ghosts of the people he has disappointed, from his ex-wife, his kids, his colleagues, his students, all the way down the line to his friends.
It is good that he has the crutch of philosophy to lean on because his life is coming unspooled like a Greek tragedy with monsters too large and growing in number for him to possibly hack his way to freedom. His unhinged ex-wife is trying to take every last drop of his income; an unbalanced IRS agent is trying to seize what little he still owns. A small town whore is trying to steal the pieces of his heart with each illicit screw; a student is on a collision course with suicide, and his “girlfriend,” Jessica Stark, the one with ”gray eyes like Homeric seas,” is under siege by the Marxists in her department.
On top of all this, the American public has lost its mind...they elect Ronald Reagan President of the United States. This is tragic on many levels, but probably the most damaging thing to come from the Reagan victory is the death of progressive ideas in the Republican party. If Mickelsson were real and alive today, I wonder what he would think about the mess we have now?
He isn’t even really a good teacher. He sees the students as necessary evils. Fortunately, he is considered a celebrity asset to the university, due to his past success with publishing books. He is trying in fits and starts to write a best selling philosophy book (you can imagine the blank looks when he tries to explain this to people), but his ghosts, his life, his excessive drinking, his wild bouts of looping paranoia make writing impossible.
Despite the fact that he is quickly sinking in quicksand with no discernible bottom, he does keep flailing away, trying to grab a root or branch. ”I’ve listened too long to your sensible people with your life-withering sanity. What do you do with the impetuous, dangerous torrents of the soul? You try to dry them up!”
Mickelsson’s financial situation becomes more and more untenable. He drops hot checks all over his small town. He even bounces a check on his whore, which is a good way to end up with a shiv in your spleen or a bloody beating in a back alley, but he craves Miss Donnie Matthews and her pale white body, so he settles his account with her before he does with the grocer or the mechanic. ”Tears ran down his face. How many men’s sperm did that warm cave contain? That was Peter Mickelsson’s community: a thousand dark, writhing lives, unfulfilled, unfulfillable. He came, her legs from around him, and--this time, anyway--he did not die.”
It would be rather a fitting epitaph for Mickelsson’s life to have immortalized on his tomb...Death by whore.
It is hard for me to separate John Gardner from Mickelsson. According to sources, Gardner was struggling with alcohol, depression, divorces, overwork, and a lack of sleep, all of which contributed to that tragic motorcycle crash that took his life. Mickelsson’s Ghosts would be his final novel to be published. The spiral downward that the reader experiences with Mickelsson is coming from a deep well spring of Gardner’s own life. The bafflement, How did I end up here? The longing look at the shotgun by the door and thinking, Why Not? The financial struggles to maintain a reasonable lifestyle. The harassment of his ideas by his colleagues and students. ”The treacherous, ego-bloated, murder-stained hovel of philosophy.” The anger that his actions have inspired in the women he has known. All of this smacks of Gardner’s own trials and tribulations.
For Mickelsson, the cost of trying to live a truthful life is proving to be more than even his larger than life figure can withstand. ”All truths are for me soaked in blood.” He begins to make a connection with his past, his father, his grandfather, when he starts to work on the house, when he begins to use his hands as they did. Building things, fixing things, might finally make things right in his mind in a way that philosophy never can. I do wonder if Gardner was on the verge of those truths for himself. Was he wanting to escape academia and return to a life more fulfilled by creating something more visually substantial than words, such as walls, roofs, or gardens? Like a lot of us, maybe what he needed was to find truth through a balanced life. Maybe then, he could keep a woman in his life. Maybe then, he could find peace.
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