[In the following review of works by various writers, Wilhelmus praises the stories in Gordon's The Rest of Life for addressing the complications of life in the 1980s and 1990s.]

Last year in The Volcanic Lover, Susan Sontag described history as a kind of flea market where the leftovers of the past become found objects for a person collecting materials for her own creation. The items she inherits from the past are random and include not only objects but also ideas, artifacts, and codes. What she does with them is equally the product of accident and the consequences of her own immediate need.

Today, “contingency,” the buzz word for this view of history, is at the heart of some of our most considered explanations about why things are as they are and how they got that way. “The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson,” says Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, “suggests that … everything—our language, our conscience, our community—[i]s a product of time and chance.” “I am not speaking of randomness,” says natural historian Stephen Jay Gould in Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, “but of the central principle of all history—contingency,” the view that, “A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result.”

The significance of such a concept for writers and readers of fiction cannot be encompassed in a single essay, but the wonderful thing for literature is that it holds out the possibility of a more open and fluid view of truth, one which makes the kind of things creative writers do more consistent with how life is, mixing fact, fiction, and happenstance, the products of culture, but also individual need and desire. Reflecting his own admiration for the ability of narrative artists to capture his view of life, Gould named his work Wonderful Life because his outlook was shaped by Frank Capra's movie. And Rorty, a philosopher, has endeared himself to novelists, in preference to metaphysicians, with statements like the following: “So the lesson I draw … is that novels are a safer medium than theory for expressing one's recognition of the relativity and contingency of authority figures. For novels are usually about people—things which are, unlike general ideas and final vocabularies, quite evidently time-bound, embedded in a web of contingencies.”

Today, because of this web, both writing and reading are more complex activities. Standards are more fluid. Writers represent a greater variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. Readers are more individualized in their tastes and judgments. To sense the degree to which contingency may have shaped the manner in which some contemporary writers create fiction, one might look at Iain Sinclair's Downriver (Or, the Vessels of Wrath), A Narrative in Twelve Tales,¹ a book based, among other things, upon a narrative constructed out of a series of postcards, randomly selected, all bearing photographs from the British colonial era.

Principally Downriver is a meandering exploration of today's communities along the Thames within and near London and the conditions which gave rise to them, including the history of British imperialism as well as Thatcherite “energy without soul,” both of which have turned the dockside areas into a sad mixture not only of poverty, drugs, racial and religious strife but also trendy shops, cafes and opportunities for gentrification. The neighborhoods are, as Americans would say, “mixed” and include not only the poor, disadvantaged, and socially and racially marginal but also haplessly fashionable, upwardly mobile young professionals. A measure of their character is that they are full of exotic “locations” for documentary filmmakers.

History can “explain” such circumstances; theory cannot since only contingency can account for such haphazardness. What's interesting about Sinclair's representation, therefore, is the degree of randomness he is willing to let into his novel. “Joblard's HEART OF DARKNESS,” which is the name Sinclair gives to the random selection of cards which organizes Downriver, is interesting because, however arranged, they would have served equally well as a basis for narrative. In fact, they create a plan whose pattern is patently and appropriately aimless. Yet the allusion to Conrad's novella raises a whole series of questions about the manner in which history, however arbitrarily, has created the circumstances he describes.

The river Thames, its very mud, no less its buildings, its people, and the cultural artifacts it has yielded, constitute a rich tide in which who-knows-what floats to the surface. Novelists and poets are part of this tide. So snatches not only of Conrad and Eliot, but also a dozen other earlier writers float next to other writers who seem especially adept at documenting the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary life, especially Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Michael Moorcock, and William S. Burroughs, perhaps also Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis as well. Literary allusions combine in turn with the history of the hulks and transports and with tours through buildings and neighborhoods once built from the riches accumulated through the subjection of brown-skinned people and now just as liable to be inhabited by them. Sinclair, who has been “a rare-book dealer, a filmmaker, a gardener, a brewer, and a dockworker, as well as a poet and critic,” seems no less to embody the randomness he describes.

All this is very well, and an interesting conception of the randomness that is apt to occur in any situation and exert an effect upon the times. Stylistically, too, his book is a challenging mixture of autobiographical confession and fantasy. The “I” who speaks has suspicious traits in common with the author. But turn the page and a vintage, sepia-colored photograph becomes the means to create a nurse-cum-prostitute and stripper named Edith who has, in the life of the novel, as much reality as the speaker himself. These things aside, however, Sinclair may also have identified one of the drawbacks of the randomness in postmodern fiction (I have a similar feeling about Rushdie) in that his prose is both so challenging and such a bore. Luxuriant, flat, scatological (like Burroughs), seedy, occasionally funny but more often trailing off into irrelevance, it is a style which in simpler times might constitute a grandiose failure. On the other hand, when randomness is the point, we may need to grant the artist some leeway. Stephen Dedalus on Sandymount Strand is no less irritating and his vision of contingency not that different.

Boredom on the other hand is never the problem in The Wrestler's Cruel Study,² another postmodernist fiction by Stephen Dobyns, which is full of dramatic energy despite the fact that its themes are both recondite and philosophical, mixing high meaning with devilish comedy and low farce.

One of contemporary America's most interesting writers, Dobyns—author of seven books of poetry and fifteen novels—is also a great chronicler of urban chaos, violence, ethnic, racial, and social diversity, and intellectual fashion. His current novel, set in New York City, is a wild mixture of styles, meanings, and textures structured around the protagonist's search for self-definition and his education into the randomness of modern everyday life.

What if, for instance, the last refuge of the myth of the hero is contained in the cheesy surroundings and cheap dramatizations of pro wrestling? What if, on the other hand, such myth-making has both its rational and religious defenders and Nietzschean redescribers? What if a young, physically beautiful, innocent, and heroic Michael Marmaduke—who in the wrestling arena performs under the moniker “Marduk the Magnificent,” destroyer of chaos—undertakes a quest to save his similarly beautiful and innocent girlfriend, Rose White, who has been stolen by gorillas? What if it takes him on a circuitous journey through the night streets and alleys, precincts, boroughs, and even the sewers of New York? And what if the point of this quest is to teach Michael whether God or Nietzsche is more relevant to a discussion of life today?

Michael's manager, Primus Muldoon, an admirer of Nietzsche, claims that identity is an onion without a core. But other characters comprise a grand cabal whose purpose is to initiate Michael into hidden truths based on traditional religion. Much of the hilarity results from Dobyns' depiction of various Manichean and Gnostic doctrines as the reason a series of street gangs are fighting it out in the streets of New York. Crazy as all this sounds, zany, and complex, it is also sinister in a way that readers of Dobyns' earlier novel, Cold Dog Soup (1985) will understand. Like Cold Dog Soup, this novel is also a night journey through and beneath the streets that is both wild and tacky but which involves a serious look into the abyss as well. Michael's study is cruel because he will lose his innocence and will have to learn to live in a world whose primary quality is its uncertainty.

How contingency may deal with established writers may also be cruel if only because at the flea market of the past readers themselves are in constant flux, redescribing, redefining the value of the trinkets they find as they pass among history's well-stocked tables. Three other recent works by James Dickey, John Hawkes, and Reynolds Price illustrate how contingency plays unexpected games in considerations of some of our most respected literary figures.

For example, the book jacket for Dickey's new novel, To the White Sea,³ argues that it is “pure James Dickey: a transcendent meditation on one man facing desperate odds,” a statement meant, I suppose, to remind us of Dickey's former success, Deliverance, and to reaffirm his place in the iron man tradition in American fiction. Yet while the facts of the novel may invite such comparisons, today we can hardly countenance the type of viewpoint it might take to read it that way.

The first-person narrator of Dickey's novel is an American gunner who parachutes into Tokyo near the end of World War II on the night before the great firebombing raid on that city. On the day of the raid, he escapes from the city arriving at a plan of fleeing further and further north into country where he feels he, a native of Alaska, has a chance to survive. All the elements of the code are intact—the narrator's conviction that violent death or mutilation is the final arbiter of what is important, heroic cunning, ritualized preparation to do battle, rejection of human society, primitive self-reliance, a fascination with weaponry, brutalization of women, all play their part.

At the same time, however, not even Dickey suggests that we ought to admire this outlook. Much as Clint Eastwood's movie Unforgiven questions the mythology of the Western, To the White Sea gives us few reasons to believe that the narrator is anything but a psychopath. Not only does he kill too often and too easily but also the very traits from his past which, until the end, assist in his survival seem distorted. He may even have killed a woman before he went to war. Moreover, as he goes further and further north he becomes more and more primitive: his identification is no longer with people, not even with himself as a person, and his thinking grows ever more totemistic. Even on the northern island when he encounters a truly primitive tribe who knows nothing of the war and who treats him with apparent kindness, he rejects them while committing a gratuitous act of mayhem.

In any case what is billed as an “odyssey of self-discovery and an exploration of the primal nature of war and man” turns out to be none of these things—but rather a work which by today's standards is brutal, chauvinistic, sexist, and sadistic—the death rattle of the iron man tradition or an ironic throwback when seen in the context of other contingencies today. To his credit, Dickey appears to demythologize as he mythologizes and leaves room for readers to make judgments of just this sort.

“Strong writers” find ways of reinventing themselves, and another case in point is John Hawkes, whose fourteenth novel, Sweet William,⁴ is the creation of a master.

Yes, the narrator of Hawkes's novel, Sweet William himself, is a horse. That observation aside, however, the compression of a complete biography into the lifespan of a four-legged creature, is both a totally humane affair and one which opens surprising insights onto the demonic. Given the nobility of his birth as a thoroughbred, Sweet William is a beast whose breeding creates noble expectations—all, however, destroyed in the terrifying circumstances of his mother's death.

I had, in fact, the privilege of hearing Hawkes read this opening chapter and overheard the outrage of another listener, a breeder of horses, for whom the experience of hearing about the death of this “noble dam” was simply too painful to endure. “If you had ever owned horses,” she said, “you could not write like that.” To which Hawkes, with every kindness, replied, “I do. I can.”

Similar moments occur in every chapter of this extraordinary novel illustrating the rage, the passion, and self-conceit that drives a noble creature's life albeit among circumstances that are ultimately tragic, ultimately pointless and contingent. Sweet William's is no average life: its “once-ness” is too important to be merely an average. Hawkes makes us feel this uniqueness in every act (including a gelding) perpetrated on his life up to and including its ending.

In every regard, Sweet William is a ruthlessly passionate, savagely imagined eulogy for a being whose identity refuses to be simply a horse. Ultimately, the novel challenges the safe conceptualization by which we judge not only the creatures we use but our own lives as well. Darwin argued that all creatures have equal status in the struggle to survive, that evolution was no ladder “upward” to perfection in the merely human. And although this is no environmentalist novel, the message the “Distant sounds and long shadows [that] swim inside [Sweet William's] head” create in us are more relevant to life than any provided by the bumbling human beings who inhabit the novel. No wonder Sweet William is a misanthrope!

Next, in the introduction to his new volume, The Collected Stories,⁵ Reynolds Price reminds us of the storyteller's attempt to construct a self out of the contingent materials he is given, and he acknowledges the fact that that self is constantly disintegrating and reintegrating, even in a collection intended to give shape to a lifetime. Stories, better than novels, he declares, “show a writer's preoccupations,” though “To sort old stories is to meet old selves, lost or long-since abandoned.” Each new ordering is nonetheless a new self in some respects, a fact implicit in his abandoning his stories' former chronology in favor of a pattern “which attempts an alternation of voices, echoes, lengths and concerns that would prove unlikely if I held to the order of prior volumes.”

What kind of self is it that he chooses to portray? What lends significance and meaning to a collection that spans a career of some thirty years and more?

The first thing one might say is that there is surprisingly little variation either in style or content in stories from the earliest to the latest. We say that Price is a Southern writer, but it might make as much sense to say that he is a writer about the mysteries of adolescent sex, spousal suicide, racial blindness, or intuitions of religious conviction in an age of doubt.

He is aware of history, but primarily it is family history. World events play only a small role in these 50 stories. Many are devoted to self-understanding, but the self in relationship to a close circle of family or friends. Conflicts center upon things that disrupt that circle—puberty, the death of old people, the threatening but seductive appearance of strangers, a reluctant lover, infidelity, and suicide. It might be instructive to count the number of stories involving twelve-year-old boys among these fictions or the number of deathbed reminiscences by old people of things that took place in their youth. The tone in practically all these stories is hopeful, pitying, or forgiving. They contain little irony or wit and seldom flirt with the abyss. They are in more than one sense devotional and move us along on the rich current of Price's calm, resonant prose. Reading Reynolds Price in this collection, one thinks of long-held truths and life's perpetual complications and their resolution, of the desire for tradition, and of the calm ship, not the approaching hurricane. But among contemporary writers, his is only one voice (though a powerful and attractive one), and it's hard to believe that other, more disruptive voices, and the hurricane, aren't ready to arrive.

Finally, the most highly-evolved voice of all from among those in this selection, Mary Gordon writes a kind of prose suitable to address the complications and contingencies life has to offer in the 1980s and 1990s—as presented in her recent collection of three novellas entitled The Rest of Life.⁶

I know that the reviewer in the New York Times Book Review said that in this volume Gordon had presented three women protagonists whose apparent timidity and dependence on men challenged the assumptions of the feminist enterprise. That may be true, but the stories strike me as polemical only in the sense that they present a picture of what it takes for an individual, albeit an individual woman, to adjust and survive in current circumstances and conditions. Each of the women is cautious. Each, it seems to me, knows about the hazards to mental and emotional security that experience provides. Each, however, seems also to hunger for a kind of self-understanding not necessarily identified with getting or keeping a man.

Structurally, I would say these novellas strive to represent states of understanding rather than outward conflict. In “Immaculate Man,” a woman has an affair with a priest with whom she runs a shelter for battered women. Although obsessed with the possibility that he might turn to other women, she is wiser than he is, initiated, unprotected by innocence or the worship of helpless femininity which shapes his thinking. Virtually plotless, returning again and again to the same themes, the story is an extended and deepening meditation, however apparently static. This distrust of story as event comes through in a brief exchange between the woman and her lover in which she argues that once she nearly let her daughter drown, a story she must continually return to “in case,” she says, “it's the one thing about myself that's most important, the truest thing.” He, however, claims that because the story is inconclusive and the daughter didn't drown she should read nothing into it.

“No [he says]. The story didn't end. You don't know if it was you.”

“If the story ended [she says], someone would be dead.”

“Or saved. …”

For him, in other words, stories must be conclusive and must be consequential on some larger stage where people may be dead, “Or saved.”

The distinction is crucial. Either stories are tools, suitable to state and restate our adjustment to the hazardous and haphazard enterprise of living, or they are calls to arms to grasp for ultimate states of being and truth. In each of the three novellas, men are in a sense “immaculate” in subscribing innocently to the latter point of view. In the second story, “Living at Home,” the narrator lives in terror of losing her lover, a journalist who covers wars and pestilence in third world countries, making him vulnerable to accidental death. And he, too, is frightened though he fails to comprehend it as well or as honestly as she does.

In the final story, too, the one that gives the collection its name, a woman in her late seventies revisits her homeland in Italy after an absence of 63 years, sent away because at fifteen she had entered a suicide pact with a boy of sixteen who had been her lover, and had refused to die with him. The shame—but shame of what?—had caused her father to reject her and send her to the United States where she had lived ever since. The boy, her lover, had been a brilliant student, a poet, to whom the ultimate test was to convince himself—and her—of the desirability of death. Her father, a famous academic, saw only his dream of what was important. In the end, however, the woman realizes that life is not just one story, one dream, one ultimate set of consequences, dictated in the stories sanctioned by a man. And at the end she concludes: “All the different stories. All the different ways it could have happened, each of them [is] true.”

Notes

1. Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath), A Narrative of Twelve Tales, by Iain Sinclair. Random House.

2. The Wrestler's Cruel Study, by Stephen Dobyns. W. W. Norton.

3. To the White Sea, by James Dickey. Houghton Mifflin.

4. Sweet William, by John Hawkes. Simon & Schuster.

5. The Collected Stories, by Reynolds Price. Atheneum.

6. The Rest of Life, by Mary Gordon. Viking.