Floater - Calvin Trillin

One of the books I bought when I was in Washington DC, and read immediately within one day, was the unfortunately-named Floater (1980) by Calvin Trillin.  I didn't realise when I picked it up, but it's about journalists living in Washington DC - extremely apt, since I was staying with journalists living in Washington DC.

So, what is a floater, I hear you ask?  The floater in question is Fred Becker, and the title means that he has no permanent position in the office of the national newsmagazine for which he works, but moves from section to section, filling in for holiday, illness, or whatever.  Becker steadfastly resists any attempts to tie him down to a single section, preferring the peripatetic life, even if it leaves him jack of all trades and master of none...

As a back-of-the-book floater, he had accumulated a store of knowledge on all sorts of subjects - a knowledge of millenarian sects from his bondage in Religion, familiarity with the workings of hot-air balloons from a summer week in Sports, more than he wanted to know about New Math from a period spent in Education when Milt Silvers went to the hospital with an alligator bite.  One of the problems with a floater's knowledge, though, was its spottiness.  He knew a lot about millenarian sects, but he had no idea what, say, Methodists believe.  From several weeks in the Business section at one time or another, he happened to have learned a lot about Asian currency manipulation and the speculative market in bull semen, but he wouldn't have had the first notion about how to go about obtaining a mortgage.  He knew practically nothing about French impressionism, but he could have delivered an after-dinner speech on the work of one abstract expressionist who happened to die when the regular Art writer was on vacation.

Lovely!  Trillin has a way with words which I love, never quite tipping over into ba-dum-crash joke territory, but with a light absurdity which is just the sort of thing I love.  Take, for example, the incident where Becker tries to get off the Religion page by writing 'allegedly' after everything mentioned - 'the alleged birth of Christ', for instance.  And then there is the Lifestyles piece on '2/3 stockings'.  Becker can find nobody who has a clue what this means, but plenty of people willing to pretend.  Floater reminded me a lot of Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, which is no bad thing, but without nearly Waugh's level of meanness.  Like Tepper Isn't Going Out, this novel (which was Trillin's first) is often about the stupidity and irrationality of the workplace, but never with the menace of Magnus Mills or the dark claustrophobia of Kafka - rather, again like Tepper, there is an amiability about it all.

That, I think, is the novel's main achievement: the amiability of Becker.  There is a managing editor who isn't pleasant, and an officious staff member desperate to be offended by everything that is said, but ultimately everybody is a little bit selfish but essentially amiable.  I'm using that word again, because it is the one which fits best - the characters are not good, except in the way that a sort of weary inertia prevents anybody doing anything outright bad.  But to make a character as unwittingly charming as Becker is an impressive feat, one replicated two decades later in Tepper.  One of my favourite characters - or, rather, my favourite lampoon - is Silvers.  He is that self-conscious eccentric we all know (particularly in Oxford); the sort of person who describes themselves as 'a bit mad', and makes sure they are surrounded by props to back it up.

"The deal on the London taxi is closed," Silvers said.  "Of course, you should have heard my insurance man's voice when I called to switch the insurance over from the John Deere tractor.  He thinks I'm a little unusual."

Becker had never figured out how to reply to Silvers in a way that did not provoke more stories.  Usually, he just stood there nodding dumbly while using the Thai's concentration methods or glancing around for escape routes.

"One of the great advantages of a London taxi, of course, is that if you happen to have a unicycle, which I just happen to have, the unicycle will fit snugly in the luggage area right next to the driver.  Of course, when your average New York traffic cop sees a London taxi drive by with a unicycle right..."

Becker briefly considered pretending to have a heart attack.

There is a narrative threaded through it all, concerning rumours about the President's wife, with all manner of intrigue, plot, and counter-plot, but (although rather satisfying when it all comes together) it is largely incidental to Floater, which is primarily successful because of the creation of Becker and the tone Trillin achieves.

I've only found one other blog review - Teresa's - and she wasn't a huge fan, so there's fair warning.  I found it a quick, wryly amusing, delight; a send-up of an environment for which Trillin obviously feels a great deal of affection.

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

I don't read many living authors, certainly not as a percentage of my overall reading, but I think there is only one whom I consider to be a 'great' - and that is Marilynne Robinson.  This opinion was formed on the basis of her novel Gilead, and has been strengthened by reading her first novel, Housekeeping (1980).  I don't think it is as good as Gilead, but it is still a strikingly beautiful example of how astonishingly an author can use prose.  The opening lines are surprisingly stark, given the writing that follows:

My name is Ruth.  I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Forster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.

This opening, hovering between comedy and tragedy without any indication which side the balance might fall, is an indication of the absence of men in Housekeeping.  Indeed, the only man who has stuck around makes a dramatic exit in the first pages of the novel - in a manner which reminded me of the opening to Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, although Robinson's came first.  The man is Ruth's grandfather; the exit is on a train in the town where they live; the train derails from a bridge, and sinks through the ice to the depths of an enormous lake, drowning everyone on board and hiding their bodies from rescue.

Even this dramatic event, which reverberates slowly through the whole novel - (The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town's history, and as such was prized.  Those who were in any way associated with it were somewhat revered.) - is depicted almost quietly.  There were no proper witnesses, and Robinson does not take on the mantle of omniscience - instead, this tragic and would-be grandiose event is presented through veils of supposition and uncertainty.  I don't think Robinson could be over-the-top if she tried.  See how calmly she depicts the aftermath, when describing the widow with her daughters (later to be Ruth's mother and aunts):

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace.  She knew a thousand songs.  Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce.  In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she putt hem in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon.  Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind.  Of course they pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after an absence.  Not because they were afraid she would vanish as their father had done, but because his sudden vanishing had made them aware of her.

Occasionally there are moments of plot in Housekeeping, and they can be quite significant moments, but nobody could call this a plot-driven novel.  No, it is certainly character-driven - and the central character is Ruth.  Robinson doesn't capture her voice in quite the mesmeric way she captures John Ames's in Gilead - but that is a feat I consider unmatched by any recent novelist, so she shouldn't be judged too harshly on that.  We see the bleak, plain experience of young life through Ruth's eyes - as her sister Lucille grows apart from her, as she looks back on their mother's abandonment of them, as she tries to understand her increasingly eccentric aunt.  But mostly as she watches the world pass, and attempts to find her place in it.  There are certainly humorous elements to her observations, but perhaps the dominant note is poignancy: 'That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different.'

I am usually left unaffected by depictions of place and landscape in literature (it's probably the reason that I loathed Return of the Native, for instance) but even I found Robinson's depiction of Fingerbone - the atmospherically named small town - entirely consuming and impressive.  Whoever designed the cover for this edition did an exceptional job.  Maybe it's cold, vast places which affect me, since I felt the same about Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves.

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.

At book group, someone mentioned that Housekeeping couldn't have been set in the UK - we just don't have that sort of isolated vastness anywhere.  Having the enormous lake, holding unfindable bodies and untraceable secrets, and the equally enormous railway bridge running over it - it is such a clever way to create a dramatic, memorable landscape, and define the town in an unsettling manner.  A trainline should signify connection and communication, but here it just seems to connote distance and almost terrifying grandeur. And the bridge comes back into play at the end of the novel, encircling the narrative with the same all-encompassing dominance that the bridge and lake have over Fingerbone.

I've not mentioned much of the plot, because (as I said) it is pretty immaterial to the chief pleasure of reading Housekeeping.  The novel is really like a very long poem.  It meanders, in the best possible way; it is impossible to speed-read, or at least it would be an exercise in wasted time to do so.  Instead, one ought to wallow and wander through Robinson's prose.  Traditional storytelling has no place in Housekeeping - instead, a patchwork of moments is sewn together, creating a fabric which is unusual but beautifully captivating.