Imitation of life

THERE’S no reason to like Daniel Wellington, the thirtysomething art history professor who is the main character of Lawrence Douglas’ first novel, “The Catastrophist.” He’s self-centered, arrogant, shallow and lazy -- and those are his good qualities.

“In the morning I get up whenever,” Daniel reveals in the opening paragraphs. “For breakfast I munch dry Fruit Loops while padding about the small living room in my underwear.” How did he reach this level of lassitude? It’s simple: His wife, R., a beautiful but chilly woman, told him she was pregnant. That’s when Daniel began navel-gazing in earnest. “Gradually,” he informs us, “I lost the ability to distinguish between my original dread and my dread of my dread. My anxiety reflected back on itself, like an object trapped between two mirrors.”

This is funny, right? Lean, not too much description, not too internal or philosophical, the voice of someone watching himself -- a time-honored tradition in post-Freudian American literature. It’s writing that leaves a lot unsaid, which is, granted, generally preferable to writing that tells too much. But there’s not a lot of pause in the timing, or meaning to discover between the lines. Not many threads of love or compassion or interest or outrage tie Daniel or the novel’s other characters to the world. These are Starbucks people. They are smooth, well-dressed, well-educated, well-fed and self-satisfied.

“I’m not cut out for deceit,” Daniel claims, but his life, it turns out, is a collection of lies. There’s the one he told the journalist in Berlin about his Holocaust-surviving parents. (In reality, they survived Brooklyn and Pittsburgh.) Or the one about how his marriage is just fine, even as he enters into the early, e-mail stages of an affair. There are other affairs, as well as the students he lusts after (why are they always named Tamara?) and, of course, his tangled feelings for his soon-to-be-born baby (nicknamed “Unborn”), who, he assures his wife, causes him no angst whatsoever (in spite of the apartment he rents in preparation for getting out).

When R. has a miscarriage, Daniel is -- like a true hypocrite -- deeply disappointed. But then his career takes off. He gets tenure. He hires a young research assistant. He flies to Berlin to give a lecture and meets Bettina, the woman of his dreams. He begins to construct his academic work around trips abroad, so that he can meet her in foreign cities. (He is, in other words, designing in earnest the complete collapse of the life he has created thus far.) His wife gets pregnant again.

But oops! Daniel’s affair ends, the lie about his parents is exposed and a student responds to his e-mail come-on by sending it to the dean of faculty. In reaction, Daniel reads his wife’s journal and works himself into a rabid froth of outrage over her infidelity. He hurls a piece of pottery at her, gashing her forehead but causing no harm to the fetus. She throws him out of their 200-year-old farmhouse. (Don’t worry, Starbucks people are Teflon-coated, so it turns out all right in the end.)

Douglas is a funny, smooth writer with a light touch. But there is altogether too little description of the world his characters move in. Even a rare descriptive phrase like “soymilk skies” has a bit of a smug ring to it. More important, the people here are silly, with such shallow roots in their emotional sod that any good writing just slides off them. Daniel and R. and Tamara and Bettina don’t care, really, about what happens or what their lives mean, so why should we?

Maybe, the hopeful reader wonders, the author is making a statement about ambivalence in modern life. Or about how life’s greatest catastrophes sneak up on us, all our little crimes and misdemeanors waiting to achieve critical mass.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave! But no. Douglas has wasted his momentum, his humor, even his beautiful giddiness on a bunch of people who don’t seem worth the effort. There may not be a law that says a character has to grow in the course of a novel (or, for that matter, a life). But without some change, we might as well be looking at a painting: still-life with phobias. *