The Story of Her Time

Machine Dreams a novel by Jayne Anne Phillips.  Vintage.  331 pp.  $16.00.  *****

This is a masterpiece of American fiction.  I’ve been asking myself why I didn’t read it years ago, and I think there are two reasons.  Jayne Anne Phillips was getting her start in the literary world at the same time I was, in the early eighties, and I vaguely remember feeling jealous of her success (she wasn’t the only one).  I hate to say that, but there it is.  Also in those days I was opposed to books with a revisionist opinion about Vietnam; I thought that war was wrong when I faced the possibility that I might have to fight in it, and I’ve never changed my mind.

Actually, though a character in Machine Dreams does go to Vietnam, his sister—who in many ways seems the moral center of the novel—is adamantly opposed to the war, and raises the money that would have sent him to Canada.  She has no more doubts than I did.  Her father, a World War II veteran, feels the same way.  I had entirely the wrong impression of the book.

This novel occupies almost exactly the same chronological space as my family.  I’m not sure I can nail down when Danner and her brother Billy were born, but I was born in ’48, and these characters are my vintage.  They grow up in West Virginia, not far from my home town of Pittsburgh, and though the family is completely different from mine, there’s something about the attitude of people, the lives they lived, that seems weirdly familiar.  It’s a feeling of reading about your own life, even though it isn’t quite yours.

I was drawn to the novel after reading a devastating review of Phillips’ latest novel by my favorite reviewer, Dwight Garner.  He describes the new novel as “sludgy, claustrophobic and pretentious. Each succeeding paragraph took something out of me.”  He follows that up by saying, “It hurts to say this because my feelings about her work are, more so than usual, personal. Two of Phillips’s early books — the story collection Black Tickets (1979) and especially the novel Machine Dreams (1984) — mean more to me, I’d guess, than any fiction published in the last 50 years.  I’ve read each five or six times.”  But he feels that nothing she has done since lives up to the promise of those early novels; her work has steadily gone downhill.

I find that incredible (also vaguely frightening).  My most immediate reaction to reading Machine Dreams was: how does a woman so young know so much about the world, especially her parents’ generation?  The novel proceeds in sections that move from 1942 to 1972, and each is focused on one of four family members: Mitch and Jean, the parents, and Danner and Billy, their children.  In telling the story of four people, Phillips tells the story of two generations.  She nails it.

Mitch fought in World War II and was not opposed to war or to combat.  As with many men in his generation, the war was the highlight of his life.  He came back to West Virginia and founded a cement business along with an uncle.  Their business didn’t thrive, exactly, but seemed to be getting off the ground when his uncle (perhaps because he was looking at the books, which didn’t tell a pretty tale at that point) died of a massive heart attack.  Mitch didn’t have the nerve, or maybe the business acumen, to continue after that, so he sold the business and worked through the years at various other jobs.  He wasn’t poor, but his life was a continual financial struggle.  And though he wasn’t a wild man, or abusive, he seemed to feel a residual anger that things hadn’t worked out better.

His wife Jean, fifteen years younger, married Mitch because another romance had failed and he seemed like the most likely suitor available.  She was a smart capable woman who couldn’t be satisfied just raising a family, so she eventually became a teacher—a profession she did very well—and became the more consistent breadwinner.  She and Mitch loved each other, at least at first, but their arguments over money wore them down.

Danner and Billy were born just fifteen months apart, in the late forties or early fifties.  Danner seemed the more interesting character early on, just because she’s so smart and sensitive; I thought that Phillips captured the agony of the early teenage years, right around the age of thirteen—when the girls are catty and the boys act confident and aggressive, even though they’re anything but—absolutely perfectly, a dance at the local swimming pool that Danner anguished about for days.  That was like every dance I ever went to.

Both Billy and Danner went on to college, but while Danner seemed to thrive, Billy—who was confident around girls, and seemed to know what he wanted from life—couldn’t convince himself that college was for him.  He dropped out right about the time the draft lottery was instituted (I remember that night, which determined so much about our futures, vividly), then got a low number and was drafted.  He seemed to regard that as his fate.[1]

I can’t tell much more about his experience of the war without spoiling the plot.  I’ll just say that it’s heartbreaking for the reader, and it broke Danner’s heart along with those of her family.  The novel’s ending was the most powerful and compelling part.  In many ways the whole book was pointing toward it.

The very ordinariness of this family makes their story all the more heartbreaking.  This is the story of many families at that time.

I don’t know if Garner is right about the rest of Phillips’ work.  I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a whole writing career be a downhill slog, but whatever is true about that, the woman wrote one great American novel, which should be a part of the canon as long as there is one.  She told the story of her time.  And she did it when her own career had barely begun.

[1] There was one factual detail that seemed incorrect to me.  Phillips implies that, once the lottery was instituted, college students lost their draft deferments, but that wasn’t so.  You were eligible for the draft if you graduated or dropped out, but not until then.