Mr. Fix-it

Carolyn See’s tender and funny new novel begins with an extended serio-parodic Guggenheim application, dated August 2027, for a grant to study the work of the mystical genius artist, Peter Hampton. This is an odd and inciting preface to a novel about Hampton, circa 1996, $10-dollar-an-hour handyman in Los Angeles, drifter, lost soul, dilettante art student, would-be painter. I am ready to award the fellowship, even if the artist doesn’t exist except in See’s mind. The story develops out of a series of picaresque incidents in the sun-drenched, highway-crazed, gone-from-elsewhere Southland. By the end of the book, Peter Hampton has achieved his destiny, but the Guggenheim applicant at the book’s opening will need to amend his application.

Well-known for her family memoir “Dreaming,” her novels and nonfiction dealing with such well-linked subjects as drinking, dysfunction, pornography and family values, See has reached here toward a difficult goal, to depict the formation of a great artist while not giving up her familiar gifts for dancing lightly in prose. Novels about artists tend toward the sensational, the sanctimonious or burlesque. An obstacle is the obligation to offer a convincing portrait of a visual genius with words (a parallel problem exists with novels about writers, because the words of the storyteller rarely justify the claims for the hero of the story). See ducks the problem neatly, although she spends a few pages describing Peter Hampton’s early masterpiece, “Painting by the Pool.” Her tale has the form of the autobiography of a genius yet to fulfill his destiny, a “Portrait of the Artist as an Odd Job Hustler,” and she depicts him with her characteristic smart funning, her eye for quirks and jerks.

The handyman skates through foolishness, as in this evocation of a spoiled adolescent girl’s “fluffy little dream room--which was about as big as a basketball court--white carpet, white bed, white pillows, white this, white that. . . .” Later, of course, the handyman is handily crawling through her window and, during the next procedure, the girl’s mother is apologizing for interrupting sweet blond Millicent, aged 16 or is it 18, in her white bed with the handyman, aged a fretful 28. This encounter follows the startling near-drowning of a baby in a pool, a rapid, breathtaking sketch of disaster. Both incidents are all in the day’s freelance work.

See has a happy ear for urban jabber. When Millicent lures Hampton into her white room, white bed, white body, she murmurs those romantic words of a deeply poetic juvenile soul: “Isn’t this cool?” She also notes the smells of that kind of romance: “sex and bubble bath and clean sheets and detergent.” And she indicates what serves as conscientious afterthought in this world: On the handyman’s answering machine, “The messages were piling up. It seemed like everyone in L.A. needed something fixed.” There is no grief in the telling. See celebrates a certain vapidity.

Sex and housekeeping are only a part of the handyman’s ministry. He catches an escaped pet python, disposes of a meal rabbit and lectures on proper behavior for a frustrated mom beating up her 10-year-old while the savvy brat beats her up in return, yelling about child abuse. It’s a job. Hampton’s encounters include kids, hippies, students, layabout bohemians, trailer park floaters, driven millionaires, losers and semi-winners--all wittily ventriloquized.

Eventually there is a desolate boy with AIDS and a darkened edge comes to the comedy. The reader gets it that Hampton is learning to be an artist by caring for the life around him. He yearns to paint the sleeping boy with AIDS. This brave, somewhat requisite AIDS character has escaped with his lover to die in Southern California, but See understands that he’s homesick for his Ohio middle America with “the strip joints out of town, where you watched girls you’d gone to high school with take off their clothes.”

Within the donnee that we are following a great artist before he becomes a great artist, a Stephen Dedalus of the freeways, See creates a series of sharp anecdotes about dysfunction, which is of course how human beings function. Just as the hero of G.V. Desani’s little-known comic masterpiece “All About H. Hatterr” generally ends an adventure without his clothes, so Hampton often completes his day’s employment under, above or alongside one of his chore-givers. It would be lubricious, except that it’s so nice.

The artist-to-be charges only $10 an hour to fix, rescue, clean, baby-sit, console--the lonely young wife, the wily teenage daughter, the knowing sexy widow; also to soothe the crazies, comfort both the afflicted and the merely itchy. See’s swift prose, her dead-on dialogue with twists of knowingness depth-buried in it, energizes the adventures. Along with James Joyce and Desani, you might want to bear in mind Don Quixote seen as a helper devoted not to charging the windmills but to keeping them spinning. Or rather, you might want not to bear anything in mind--just ride with the comedy. As a student of Southern California, See is majoring in a comedy of manners, not so much of bad manners but of the loosey-goosey manners of a certain time and place, that first American space station on Earth, Los Angeles. Her understated minor is the study of how a feeling lost soul locks into becoming a true artist with a firm vocation.

For extra credit, a good reader should consider the sense discreetly not underlined in this novel. Through his work, worry, wanderings and fun, Hampton manages to find a real world to paint. See implies delicately, light-heartedly, slyly, without arguing the point, that a great artist can use some great experiences and deep feelings about those experiences. Pay attention, Andy Warhol, under your wig of straw in your Factory in the sky. It’s too late for you but not too late for others to watch your legacy fade away.

A final twist in “The Handyman” comes when we find that Hampton’s first masterpiece, a mural surrounding a swimming pool, has been painted out--a fate shared, alas, by most of the works of humankind.