Frederick Barthelme

The Age of Uneasiness

By JACK PENDARVIS
Published: May 21, 2009

“Waveland” is either a funny novel about a sad middle-aged man or a sad novel about a funny middle-aged man. My assignment is to write 600 words about it. You’d get a better idea from 600 of the novel’s own. Frederick Barthelme has always been a master at cramming a lot of meaning into a small space. Here, for example, is a subordinate character summing up the protagonist and a goodly chunk of the plot with precision and wit that a reviewer might barely hope to match: “Wife left you, you got fired, laid off, you got no job, you cruise around eating Chinese food with your landlord, observing the takeover of your world by younger, less capable guys. By children. . . . That the deal?”

Our hero, the failed architect Vaughn Williams, has soured. “I want to organize alphabetically all the things I hate,” he says. He’s torn between unmasking and submitting to the trappings of the times. Vaughn mistrusts the widescreen TV, on which a sandwich is “the size of a wheelbarrow,” and maintains that “every right-thinking individual of sound mind in these United States deplores the iPod utterly.” On the other hand, he understands that the advent of Google has made schooling unnecessary.

Vaughn’s ex-wife, Gail, has the refined, murderous verbal instincts of a 1930s screwball heroine: proposing a birthday dinner for him, she says, “We ought to carry on at least one tradition from our marriage, which failed so abruptly.”

Greta, Vaughn’s new romantic interest, was once suspected of killing her husband in cheap, tabloid-ready circumstances. “Your dangerous girlfriend,” Gail calls her.

But it is the civilized Gail whose surprisingly anarchic impulses keep things jumping. Meanwhile, Greta, despite the turbulence of her past, remains steadfast, nudging Vaughn through a dark night of the soul with sweet, dry kidding. “Is that about the size of it — you’re sort of a failure birth to death? A cry in the darkness kind of thing?” she asks.

Every smaller character is just as deftly drawn, from Eddie, the paranoid, ambiguously gay veteran with “cartoon hair” and “giant pruney lips,” to Newton, Vaughn’s vastly more successful brother (when he gets off an airplane, he’s holding a magazine with his picture on the cover), whose superiority has been in evidence since childhood: “Vaughn’s hair jiggled when he walked. Newton’s hair was smooth and graceful.”

The central puzzle of the book is how a family is made. Barthelme’s queasy optimism is exemplified by a bit player, a very short cashier who, in her brief time on the page, exults that she is “filled with the pleasures” of her life at home with an old man and a hamster named Teeny-Weeny.

But two mysterious and guilt-­inducing presences threaten to overwhelm the makeshift familial balance in “Waveland”: Vaughn’s dead father (bringing to mind that fable, “The Dead Father,” by Barthelme’s brother Donald) and an omni­present hearth god. The TV is always on, neutering the horrific, absurd and crass through endless repetition. “Every week they pull out the blue light and find some sperm. It’s a hoot,” Eddie observes of “CSI”; Katrina — even on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where “Waveland” takes place — becomes the “hurricane show.” A book-length fascination and loathing culminates in Vaughn’s rapt litany of all the television he could spend the rest of his life watching in bed: “news and sports and those incredible game shows and ‘Lost,’ which seems to have a lot of sex in it, and HGTV, all those house-buying shows, . . . a blown-up building one night and a mother killing her children the next.”

To which Greta, the unlikely voice of reason and the heart of this bittersweet, conciliatory comedy, says: “Uh, no.”


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