Happy Chaos

Picasso once called for the authentic modern work of art to be “a sum of destructions,” a prescription that Ross Feld’s fourth novel fills to a . . . D: Divorce, disease, death and depression pervade this ironic comedy of derangement in decisive detail, and whenever the author feels the tempo of his depredations lagging, he rakes characters out of the narrative embers as enthusiastically as Dickens used to toss them on. The effect is the same, a kind of writerly exuberance capering around the pyre of defection, as when Zwilling refers to “my stinginess with chaos. (How could anyone but me be worthy of it?).” But for all the eponymous dream’s (the nightmare’s) comic gusto, in which urban Jewish speech is mined for its latest, most laughable distortions, it is not Dickens but the Russian novelists whom Feld so appositely invokes--Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky are cited with cunning allusive emphasis, and Chekhov would have delightedly acknowledged a tale on the first page of which “we seem to stand bewildered in the shallows of death” and in whose last chapter all the (surviving) characters convene at a superbly orchestrated funeral, exalted to a kind of mortal illumination by the erasures and scarifications they have confronted throughout, bewildered indeed.

Yet the promiscuous yearnings and professional engagements that entwine Joel Zwilling (a failed three-time novelist whose first wife and one of his twin children have perished in a car accident before the novel’s action begins) with his old schoolmate Brian Harkow (a failing film director with adopted twin sons, one of whom is killed in an offstage family roughhouse in order to bring the novel to a close) are anything but grim in the embrace of Feld’s double-helix plot that rackets back and forth from loathed Cincinnati, capital of American disapprovals, to lethal Los Angeles, where everything is indulged but nothing delivered. Each relationship in the book--between parents and children, between wives and lovers, between creators and their ambivalent collaborators--is searched for structural flaws that invariably are located, and no association between any two human beings is permitted to pass muster. All efforts to turn novels into movies, to recover from cystic fibrosis, to make a living out of art, for instance, are surely doomed, or damned, or done for. But the consequence of such destiny is a kind of gaiety in despair, a carnival-esque resolve: Zwilling’s dream is less like Prospero’s, in which every third thought will be of his grave, than like Caliban’s, from which he wakes and cries to dream again.

A further success in this dense little story, the best of Feld’s three novels that I have read--the most close-set and controlled, as well as the most . . . hilarious, I was about to say, but had better leave it at exhilarating--is the vision of the women attached to, or in the nature of the case alienated from, the main men of the novel: Barbara, Zwilling’s second wife, who has made herself into an “intellectual property attorney” to beguile the languors of her barrenness, and Shelley, the adoptive mother of Brian’s twins, who has become a health writer, and the very symbolic Selva, named for Dante’s dark woods, who negotiates most of the transactions between Zwilling’s defeated literature and the defalcations of Brian’s “film treatments.” There are the young women too--Polly, the live-in girlfriend of Zwilling’s surviving twin son Nate, with whom she has collaborated on a sort-of countercultural journal, and Tessa, Brian’s daughter, whose cystic fibrosis is granted a scrutiny sufficiently detailed to challenge Hans Castorp’s “little condition.”

None of these intimately studied women, whom we accompany through some of the most appealing and appalling gender ordeals of modern fiction, is allowed to triumph over, or even to transcend, the debacles fate and Feld deals them, but their humorous stoicism carries the novel they adorn beyond the conventional defections of energy and self-confidence which assail, in their different modes, the paired anti-heroes. It is the women of “Zwilling’s Dream” who complete and compose this narrative in which the men are thrust--even young Nate, bereft twin who appears to be without an operational center, just as his dad lacks a circumference within which to shore up his dolorous consciousness--like so many pearl-headed pins, markers which the women cautiously move around the map of this harrowing and ultimately rapturous novel.

For all of Feld’s references to European literature and his resort to the most sophisticated structures of modern fiction, his fourth novel is a powerfully American story, charged with a curious sense of the anthematic: The cars and the drinks, the cities, the travel between them, the very complaints and afflictions of the bodies so dramatically sacrificed strike me as representative of the way we live now, the way we suffer, the way we die--as the author says in his last words, “letting Zwilling pass.”