Let It Ring

Telephone a novel by Percival Everett.  Graywolf Press.  216 pp.  ****

I had thought of Percival Everett as an offbeat comic novelist who sat down to write a novel with no idea where it was headed (see .  I Am Not Sidney Poitier.  Even Erasure, though a biting satire, had a comic premise, and the novel within the novel was funny beyond belief.  James isn’t fundamentally comic, but Everett was taking off from another writer’s story).  I grabbed Telephone at the bookstore so I’d have another Percival Everett around when I felt like reading one.

Imagine my surprise when I found it to be one of the darkest novels I’ve read in years.  And there’s no larger context for the darkness.  It’s like staring at a blank wall.

The novel seems lighthearted enough as it opens.  Zach Wells is a university professor of geology in LA; he has a jaundiced view of his students and they feel the same about him (with one bright exception.  More about her later).  He’s married and has a twelve-year-old daughter who is the light of his life.  He actually mentions that if it weren’t for her he and his wife might drift apart.  His wife is a poet, also a professor; they do completely different kinds of work and don’t particularly understand what the other is doing.  But that seems par for the course for academic couples.  They feel fulfilled in what they’re doing and love their daughter.

Zach has a grad student who seems talented enough, and a big help with his students, but she hasn’t made much of her data and time is running out on her degree; the department is ready to throw her out.  He also has an undergrad who has a huge crush on him and is poised to act on it.  That too is an occupational hazard, and I wasn’t sure what professors did about that these days (I know what they did in my day but can’t mention it here without a trigger warning[1]).  Such a situation is a serious threat to his job, but he knows how to handle it.  He eventually had to be blunter than he would have liked but didn’t seem inappropriate.

Two things complicate the plot.  He receives a shirt on e-bay, and tucked under the collar is a mysterious plea for help.  At almost the same time, his daughter begins having moments of forgetfulness, then what seem to be full-fledged seizures.  Zach eventually discovers that his beautiful daughter has a progressive illness which will leave her more and more demented and eventually kill her.  The doctor has no idea at what pace that will happen.  There’s nothing they can do.

I do wonder if Everett began this as a lighthearted novel and had it go south on him.  To his credit, he doesn’t retreat, but portrays a man who is losing the human being he cares for the most in the world, and in a particularly gut-wrenching way.  I can’t say Zach handles it well, but who would?  He neglects his work, starts to hang out in low-life bars (in one of which he runs into the student who has a thing for him), and almost as if to escape his daughter’s situation, he begins to look into who sent him that plea for help.  He’s able to discover what’s up, though it’s not like there’s some easy solution.  Women are being held against their will, and he decides to do what he can.

I do admire the way Everett faces this situation.  There is literally no escape, and in a way no conclusion (I was mildly surprised by the ending, but after reading it I decided what the hell, there’s nothing that would satisfy us.  The situation he’s trying to remedy isn’t going anywhere.  In a way it reminded me of the ending of James, which of course he had yet to write.

I felt the novel was darker than it needed to be.  The daughter’s illness was heartbreaking enough, but add to that a colleague’s suicide (which Everett mentions in one chapter and never refers to again), the cruel way the daughter’s dementia makes her act, the way Zach assumes (but doesn’t know) that local law enforcement would be indifferent to the fact that Latina women are being held as slaves.  Could things possibly be worse?

There are, apparently, three different versions of the novel, and it’s a total crapshoot which one you get.  (There is a drawing on the cover, and certain details in the drawing hold a clue as to which version you have.  The dedication is also different in all three versions.)  I get it that Everett is a playful, off the wall writer; something like that seems just like him.  But this isn’t a playful novel; it’s one of the grimmest stories I’ve ever encountered.  I can’t help wondering if one of the other versions has a better ending.  I’d like to know, but not enough to invest in another book.

This is the kind of novel that I admire but can’t quite recommend.  I’m not sure I’d wish it on anyone.  I was glad when it was over.

[1] Once when I was teaching an introductory class in the short story, a student turned in one where a young woman had an affair with a professor.  The Saturday after she submitted that story, she showed up at my house—in a different town from the university; I had no idea how she knew where I lived—all dressed up and ready to rock and roll.  Fortunately, my current girlfriend was at my house (and had no doubt what the young woman was there for).  My student didn’t get the reception she was looking for.