Book Review : Turning Existential Lead Into Emotional Gold

The Man Who Owned Vermont by Bret Lott (Viking: $16.95; 231 pages)

“I couldn’t help but marvel at the colors. I picked up a wedge of orange cheese and studied it under the light, then unwrapped it and smelled it, taking in the deep, sour aroma. The sliced ham was a rich pink; I picked this up too, and smelled it. There was yellow mustard and white mayonnaise, green leaf lettuce and soft, brown bread . . . . I took a bite of the sandwich, and thought I could taste each individual flavor. . . . “

At this moment (in a flashback), alone at night in his apartment--with a cold that’s just beginning to clear up and a wife who’s waked him earlier to tell him she’s pregnant, Rick Wheeler is rich--in love, and in life. But because of the cards dealt to him, Rick’s luck may or may not hold, and in fact, it doesn’t.

As “The Man Who Owned Vermont” opens, we see Rick really alone in his apartment high and dry, his wife having left him with not a soul on earth to talk to except an itinerant plumber who makes looking for an ordinary leak into a work of elegant performance art. Turning existential lead into emotional gold seems to be what’s demanded of the characters here; they don’t have any wealth of the material kind.

Rick works as a salesman for RC Cola. He’s got that job. He’s got his stripped-down apartment. For a few years he had his wife, Paige, and the promise of that baby. His is the kind of life most of us have--although on some promotional blurb or other it’s referred to as “ordinary,” as if those who wrote blurbs or criticisms or even books didn’t have to go to the dry cleaners or get their cars fixed or even sometimes get up in the night to make a sandwich.

It’s Not Just the Job

When Rick gets antsy, it’s not just about his job, although the job is dealt with here in great detail, in direct contrast to, for instance, “Death of a Salesman,” where Arthur Miller has the salesman’s wife plead that “Attention must be paid.”

Bret Lott himself pays the attention, showing us the life of a salesman--poor wretched dude, up and at the supermarket way before dawn, stacking displays, pushing for extra shelf space, cow-towing to store managers, getting back to headquarters in time for sales meetings where ritual humiliation is the order of the day. Rick’s dreadful jumpiness comes from the closure of the material world all about him. If he finds a measure of nocturnal delight in mustard and mayonnaise and bright pink ham, it’s because that’s it, that and the world of RC Cola and the nice wife (who he quit school to marry) and the baby to whom he won’t be able to offer anything “better.”)

Like many wretched young husbands, Rick takes refuge in an obdurate ongoing sullenness. In a beautifully realized chapter when Paige, his wife, drags him to a pathetic wedding in a hideous Italian restaurant she--already a queen of low expectations--says to him: “All I’m asking is that you come and at least smile and shake a few hands. So you might not like this place and so you might not know anyone. I’m not even asking you to enjoy yourself. Just be here, all right?”

Rick hates it but what else is there? This is the world of marriage, and he’s stuck with it. A grizzled wedding guest reminds him of these intractable facts: “Partner . . . you better learn to live with it. Put up with it. There ain’t much you can do to change it. You look at me. I’ve tried . . . . “

At this same wedding Rick and Paige meet a couple their age who’ve dug in and are trying. They’ve bought a ramshackle old house out in the sticks and are slaving away to make it into a home; slaving to make their own lives into a viable marriage. Rick and Paige can’t seem to hack it, or at least Rick can’t. He’s almost literally possessed, bedeviled, compelled to wreck things; picking fights, alternately competing with his wife and belittling, even torturing her, until he becomes partly responsible (or is he?) for his wife’s miscarriage.

He falls into an anguish that takes on the dimensions of a cosmic sulk, refuses to talk to his Paige until, in desperation, she moves out. It’s as if misery is the only thing Rick can afford, despair the only commodity he’s willing to invest in.

What Could be Worse?

What’s the one thing worse than a bleak little marriage?

Rick finds out it’s the bleak little world of separation and divorce. He meets a butcher whose botched infidelity with an unattractive woman he didn’t even like has destroyed his marriage: Haltingly the butcher remembers his own last moments with his wife. “What I’ve done kept me from touching her. And it’s funny, but you’d think it would be the other way around. That you would try to do everything you could to make up for the loser you are. But it doesn’t work that way. That’s what’s funny.”

Rick also goes on a desperately lonely date or two with someone’s hard-working ex-wife and lonely little kid; mother and child living in a plastic bell of sadness redeemed only by a string of fleeting moments put precariously together, held together by painful and aching tenderness and love.

Surely none of this is “new.” What makes this narrative so engrossing is the pure familiarity of it; the bugginess when you “can’t” be civil to your spouse, when Christmas is here, and you go through it with dizzyingly lonely “friends,” when to look at your child is a kind of heartbreak you can’t stand for one more second, when your home becomes a prison, your spouse a jailer and your job a life sentence. Just beyond you, over in another territory, lovers embrace, children are happy, jobs are worth doing, and people never hurt the ones they love.

This is a short book, each chapter written as a tough little story on heartbreak, and on human limitations.

If Bret Lott isn’t lying, this is one of the most interesting stories on the sadness of American men that’s out there in our world.

This is the stuff that women think they want to hear when they implore their husbands to communicate. Maybe women ought to think twice, go out and buy up some Brewskis, kick back on weekends for marathon hours at whatever sports the tube is offering. Because the pale of the disappointments and sadness of our silent husbands may be too sad for us to hear.