Book Review : More Ammo in War Between the Sexes

Excelsior by Randall Silvis (Henry Holt: $17.95, 293 pages)

One of the killer things about being a novelist is that you have to get your first novel done with and out of the way. One of the killer things about being a heterosexual man is by the time you get around to writing your first novel you’re apt to (a) have fathered a family, and (b) be pretty depressed. Therefore, men often write--and not always as their first novels--stories of sensitive/heartless heroes who are stuck with women who (a) aren’t good enough, (b) are too good, (c) are not on their wave length. In these novels the man often “freaks,” generally has an affair, but returns, a better person, and less depressed, to his wife, and all that she is made to stand for in fictional terms.

Which is not to say that glowing novels answering this description have not been written. John Updike’s first “Rabbit” book is a masterpiece of this genre; Robert Kirsch’s “In the Wrong Rain” was touching in its sense of loss; Irving Wallace’s “The Sins of Philip Fleming” may have been the finest book he ever wrote.

But there have been some fairly dubious ones over the years: David Shields set one in the Middle West that had a basketball background and a wife who “fixed” grades; Mark Lindquist’s “Sad Movies” portrayed the depression part of his novel so convincingly that it was hard to believe it when his hero found life worth living by rescuing a dog from the pound.

Premise Is Solid Enough

The basic premise in these books is solid enough. In a patriarchy, the only persons treated worse than the daughters are the younger sons. The disappointment of a young man who is brought up to think he is “special,” only to find he is merely a reproductive cog; a mild financial asset to someone’s thinking corporation, a cypher--no more than that--in the great scheme of things, is a terrible thing to experience. (For this decade’s masterpiece of masculine disappointment, see Bret Lott’s “The Man Who Owned Vermont,” in which a man can’t be kind to the woman who loves him, loses her and his child-to-be, is stuck arranging second-rate soft drinks on supermarket shelves, retreats to the sanctuary of male companionship only to find it empty . . . and so on.)

Lott’s prose is gorgeous. The prose of Randall Silvis, or Silvis himself, needs, I tentatively submit, to settle down. “Excelsior” is, again, about a 34-year-old man named Bloomhardt, trapped in a hideous dead-end job; accountant for a steel corporation. His wife loves him, but he treats her with the brutishness of the truly helpless. (Also, in a series of scenes which may or may not have comic intent, Bloomhardt almost kills his kid repeatedly--making his luckless tyke climb trees, ride a bike, swim, all of which ends in blood, tears, bruises and recriminations.)

Bloomhardt (kind of an on-the-nose name?) often wonders, “How could he love his wife so dearly and yet be unfaithful to her?” One reason is that the slut he strays with commits everything short of rape upon his reluctant body. When Annie, his wife, finds out, she forgives him. Bloomhardt, in a rage, leaves her.

Feels Worse and Worse

Annie befriends a feminist next door and learns “self-assertion” so that when Bloomhardt wants to return, she won’t let him. Bloomhardt, who always wanted to be a writer, turns down a trip to Europe offered by a friend, contemplates suicide, visits his mother, goes to work, and feels worse and worse.

The strange thing here, in terms of subject matter, is that the women--the slut who tempts him to adultery in a graveyard, the feminist who speaks like the Wicked Witch of the West, and even Bloomhardt’s poor old mom, are sub-human; terrifying creatures--as is one last grotesque female who makes a cameo appearance. The men Bloomhardt works with, though vile on the surface, all have their reasons; the women have no reasons at all.

Toward the end of the story, Bloomhardt’s wife has an abortion (because of one of the several post-marriage nights they’ve spent together). “The woman I love could never have murdered a baby,” he remarks, and Bloomhardt comes home, he tells his wife, “ . . . to help you forgive yourself for having done it.”

One remembers Rabbit’s drunken ex-wife drowning her baby in the bathtub, or the wife “fixing” grades in that basketball novel, and wonders: Can the bummed-out man in these novels only be redeemed by fixing blame on a long-suffering wife?

A Higher Meaning

Hard to tell. Bloomhardt decides that in a cruel world the only talismans that can save him are his wife’s undies, his son’s pajamas, and a Christmas tree: he opines to his wife that life is a packing crate and he’d like her to be his excelsior. (And we remember that excelsior also has a higher, grander meaning.)

Just two questions about this first novel. First, is it comic or realistic? Why are some characters, like the wife, real, and the others, like the feminist, stick figures? What about all the wounds inflicted? Are they supposed to be funny or sad? (It’s like Nathanael West got married to Theodore Dreiser in this book--just a little uneven in tone!)

Second, do you think it might be possible to call for a treaty between men and women writers? No more wives married to uncaring husbands (written by the ladies); and no more men married to women who don’t measure up. Because, listen . . . governments are corrupt, people are starving, a terrible disease is sweeping the planet, and for a white man--or woman!--in America to complain so bitterly of his or her lot; to think of suicide because life isn’t quite what it should be, seems, at best, presumptuous, at worst, in very bad taste.