Book Review : A Look at the Hideous Side of Life

Cardinal Numbers by Hob Broun (Knopf: $15.95; 150 pages)

This is an intimidating--as well as tragic--book to write about. Tragic, because Hob Broun, grandson of Heywood Broun, son of Heywood Hale Broun, died at 37 and this is his last book. Major surgery had left Broun a quadriplegic on a respirator who wrote with a sip-and-puff device to activate his computer, for the last five years of his life.

It is intimidating, because the material on the book jacket alone here is better than half the books you read in a year; the grief and the sense of loss have ennobled even the lowly blurb to a fine literary essay.

Incredible Powers

These stories are incredibly powerful, and I think the reason is that no effort has been made to be a “good sport” about the awful, the truly hideous side of life that most of us sidestep or glance away from. A Nathanael West, for instance, might easily conjure up a series of ghastly details like “flowers that smell of feet,” but outside of his emotional depression, West was OK. Able-bodied. Those who suffer terrible physical handicaps, on the other hand, are somehow under an obligation to optimism--those long-distance runners without feet, the armless boy who recently strummed a guitar for the Pope.

Hob Broun would have none of that. He evidently felt the way a regular human being would feel about being paralyzed in his prime (with a burgeoning career and a wife and a kid). He felt bad. Life--although we do not always allow ourselves to see this--often takes us far beyond nightmare. Broun explores this. Few do.

Each story here takes the reader over some edge. The narratives are unbearably condensed. How many words actually deserve a sip-and-puff to record them? Not all that many. And each story here is a crazy, audacious experiment in style and truth-telling. “This is what I could have done,” each one tells us. “Grieve for what is lost here. This is what I could have been, whether you miss me or not, know who I am, grieve for the books, the whole careers, that each one of these stories stand for.”

‘Out by the Hayrick’

My favorite is “Blood Aspens,” a Western set “on the middle fork of the Flathead between Horseshoe Peak and the Divide.” Broun names his characters: Buzz, Wiley, Midnight, and then “casts” them for us: Dan Duryea, Andy Devine, Marlon Brando. Broun tells us, “Out by the hayrick, Midnight . . . was planting geranium slips in a rusted-through pump trough.” Then, 13 lines farther down, Broun blows the lid off. And you feel so stupid. Of course, that’s what they must have done in the West! My God, how dumb I’ve been not to notice the truth--except that the truth is too gross, too sad, too grotesque, to look at.

In the same way that “Blood Aspens” is perfectly true to the Western style, “Ruby Dawn: Private Duty Nurse” perfectly combines a Chandler-ish, hard-boiled texture (“foam crackled like burnt candy at the edges of the beach. Nightfall came as a relief”) with an ironic homage to all those Sue Barton and Cherry Ames books (Miss Barton is Ruby’s boss here.) What did all that fictional slap-doodle about cute-girl nurses cover up? A hard attention to grizzly illness and slow death: “Ever worked with a pediatric iron lung before?” Barton queries Ruby, who answers, gamely, “Once or twice.”

And in “Is this civilization?” Broun perfectly captures the disappointed, alienated, intelligent tone of a woman professor in a small-town college who goes to dinners for “interesting women” where the artichoke bisque has scorched. For the hostess, that’s tragedy. For the professor, tragedy is her maimed lover, who, like Broun, was or has been irrevocably messed up by well-meant surgery. Yes, the couple still has a “relationship.” Yes, they still have sex: locked alone in his mind her lover does talk to her: “Na aun. Aun!”

There are other things to say here; that lots of these pieces have to do with life on the road. Did this mean Broun wanted to move, or that he was obsessed with what he could not see? Everything out of sight of his straight-vision line? But the main thing to say is to report lost artistry and persistent grief. Read these stories for the truth. And weep.