Limits of Memory

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.  Modern Library.  298 pp.  $17.00. *****

Hillbilly Elegy  by J.D. Vance.  Harper.  264 pp.  $27.99. ***1/2

The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout.  Bantam.  178 pp. $7.99. ****

Austerlitz presents an interesting aesthetic question.  It’s told by one man (named Austerlitz) to another, who narrates the novel.  I first bought the book because it included that type of narration, and my friend Levi thought it might be a good accompaniment to another book he recommended, In the Light of What We Know.  He thought I should read the Sebald first, but instead I re-read Absalom, Absalom, another such novel.  It’s always good to read Faulkner, was my feeling.[1]

The question you can’t help asking about Austerlitz, even though it’s essentially dumb and misses the point, is: how did he remember all this detail?  I’m talking about the narrator, to say nothing of Austerlitz.  The book is so beautifully written, with so much remarkable detail, that you can’t believe people can see so much, much less remember it all.  For a long while I was reminded of Samuel Beckett’s novels; I was enthralled and completely captured by the prose, but didn’t see the story adding up.  It was all trees and no forest.  (That’s still my impression of Beckett’s work.  I believe that’s what he intends: it’s all trees, beautiful trees that he renders in marvelous detail, but there’s no forest.)

Eventually, perhaps halfway through, you realize there is a forest in Sebald’s book: Austerlitz’s family helped him flee the Nazis when he was young, and that traumatic experience shaped the rest of his life.  When you realize that fact you want to go back and reread the whole thing, but by that time I, for one, was exhausted by the intensity of the prose.  I might just say, to a prospective reader: all the detail is important.

My friend Sally said she would have recommended reading Sebald’s novels in order, gradually immersing myself in his manner (Austerlitz was the final one).  She said starting with this novel was like starting with the late Henry James; it might be so complicated and mannered that you would be put off.  A few mannerisms did confound me (there is such a thing as a paragraph, I might have said to Sebald.  You could indent now and then.  I sometimes wanted to say the same thing to Beckett.  I realize they’re making an aesthetic statement by not paragraphing, but all the detail is difficult enough without having a break now and then).  But there is obviously a mighty sensibility operating here.

Hillbilly Elegy is a much more conventional memoir, about a kind of person we rarely encounter in literature, the Scots Irish people who settled in Appalachia and who have often been overlooked and forgotten by modern politicians, even as they have drifted into Ohio and other Rust Belt states, seeking work.  As I explained in a recent piece, these are more or less my people, though my grandfather, and all his heirs, escaped his West Virginia farm for the big city.  In my mother’s case, I think the escape was intentional.

The early part of this memoir is a hodgepodge of unsavory characters and events.  Vance’s mother was a drug addict who moved from man to man, looking out for herself only and using her children as pawns, if she thought about them at all.  His grandparents saved his life, and they’re the most vital and vivid characters in the early part of the book, but they’re not exactly role models; one time when J.D. got kicked out of a drugstore for playing with some of the toys on hand, they didn’t reprimand him, but went after the store clerk.  Vance’s Mamaw in particular had about as filthy a vocabulary as I’ve ever encountered, and she didn’t model healthy behaviors in other ways, with her toothless mouth and a cigarette hanging out of it, despite the fact that she had emphysema.  She was fiercely protective of her family, tried to do right by them, but wasn’t Norman Rockwell’s idea of a grandmother.

I read this book partly in an effort to understand the opioid crisis, and I’m still a little stumped.  I understand that this group of people has lost the work that they once did, mining coal or maybe working in a factory, and that they haven’t been able to find new work (I for one don’t think the answer is going back to the old jobs.  I spent my youth hearing how dreadful it was to be a coal miner, and now people look back on that work with nostalgia.  Ah, the good old days of black lung).  I don’t see how the logical next step is using narcotics.  I actually learned more about the opioid epidemic from Jennifer Egan’s recent article in the Times.  She emphasized that many addicts struggle with anxiety and depression, use opioids to self-medicate.  Vance never comes out and says that.  He seems as bewildered by the whole phenomenon as the rest of us (I’m sure it’s particularly difficult when the addict is your mother).

I found his explanation of his people’s recent voting patterns the least satisfactory part of the book.  He claims the pattern isn’t racist, but I don’t buy that; it sure as hell isn’t rational.  Some of his explanations:

“Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.  In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure.”

How can you cite those statistics as anything other than willful ignorance?  There’s as much evidence that Obama was born in this country as there is that Vance was.  Vance then complains that Obama attended an Ivy League School, that he’s “brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which of course he is.  Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up.”  What does that mean?  We should elect someone like Mamaw?  He goes on:

“Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities.  He is a good father while many of us aren’t.  He wears suits to his job while many of us wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all.  His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”

That whole section of his book makes no sense whatsoever.  I still that as voters his people are racist and willfully ignorant, and they voted for Trump because he shares those characteristics.

Vance’s own story is remarkable, and once he goes to college, then on to Yale Law School (disqualifying himself, I assume, from ever running for office), his story picks up steam and becomes inspiring.  It’s fascinating to hear about all the things he needed to learn because he had no examples around him (to wear a suit to an interview, for instance) heartening to hear about the people who helped him.  The last third of the book is inspiring.  The first two-thirds reads like Erskine Caldwell.

I connect a Rex Stout mystery with these books because narrator Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe’s sidekick, claimed to have a prodigious memory.  He said he could listen to an account from a witness and go home and report it to Wolfe verbatim.  Wolfe needed such a person because he rarely left the house himself; at his weight of a seventh of a ton (285 pounds, according to my calculator) he wasn’t especially mobile.  Wolfe was the brains of the outfit, Goodwin the brawn.  They are two of the most memorable characters in detective fiction.

I can’t help wondering what’s happened to the Rex Stout readership.  I went to two good used bookstores, in two cities, and didn’t find a single one of his books.  Used bookstores used to be stacked with them.  I think that reading detective fiction is often an addiction, and you constantly need new authors.  I suppose that means the old ones disappear.

That’s a shame, because I loved all the Nero Wolfe books (and don’t read other crime fiction these days, other than Elmore Leonard).  I think I was drawn to this book because it’s the famous one where Wolfe took on the FBI, also because he led such a settled domestic life, and a number of my friends and family are looking for ways to pass their retirements.  Wolfe solved that one.  He worked with his orchids four hours a day, spent the rest of the day reading and drinking beer, and eating wonderful meals created by his gourmet cook.  He worked only when it was absolutely necessary.  He lived exactly the way he wanted, and seemed satisfied (maybe that how we know it was fiction).

I don’t know if this is a good place to start on the Stout oeuvre.  I actually think any of the novels is a good place; they all include the same elements.  And I must say that the writing, though plain and straightforward, is nevertheless a pleasure to read.  After W.G. Sebald—a far greater writer, of course—it’s great to read someone who just tells a story.  He even uses paragraphs!

[1] We never discussed any of these books.  Levi died of a heart attack last August, not long after the made these recommendations.  I still miss him, and think about him, every day.