Savoring dark ironies as decade dawns
I have started off this new decade by reading two fine novels whose main characters are the butts of life’s dirty tricks. The first, Don Carpenter’s “Hard Rain Falling,” originally published in 1966, has recently been reissued to growing acclaim (New York Review Books, paperback, $16.95). In his introduction to the new edition, George Pelecanos writes that it “might be the most unheralded important American novel of the 1960s.” I don’t know quite what that statement means, but it has been widely quoted and, suddenly, for whatever reason, my friends were reading the book. I opened its pages only after one of them assured me that, despite what I’d heard somewhere else, it bears no similarity to anything written by Jack Kerouac, and after I got over my natural distaste for its title evoking that tiresome mountebank Bob Dylan.
We first meet Jack Levitt as a teenager in 1947, “a cynical optimist” who doesn’t know who his parents were - though the reader does, for his sorry beginnings as the unwanted issue of two feckless wanderers introduce the novel. He has just run away from the grim orphanage where he was left at birth. Soon enough he gets into trouble and is sent to reform school, where, after attacking a sadistic guard, he is thrown naked into a tiny cell, spending four months in the dark with no human contact, his erratic meals shoved through a slot. Deprived of everything out of which personality can be maintained, he’s on the edge of an existential void where “nothing existed but a single spark of energy, and that spark could die for no reason, and existed for no reason.”
The experience is a defining one in Jack’s life, an ever-present generator of fear, but also the antithesis of what he would have life be: that is, to possess meaning of which he is part. He watches Billy Lancing, a young black man up against all that involves in 1947, a genius at pool who has, while it lasts, talent and confidence and that amalgam of both: grace. Jack marvels at the man’s poise and command and wishes “desperately that he had something in him that could make a place go electric.” But, no, Jack isn’t good at anything except fighting and, possibly, if he were to let himself let go, killing. Indeed, his rage and penchant for violence are always ready to surface as primitive assertions of identity. “That’s what you’ve always wanted to do,” he reflects, “smash the brains out of somebody’s head; break him apart until nothing is left but you.”
One bad break after another accentuates Jack’s lack of consequence. He simply doesn’t figure in the world’s calculations, eventually ending up in San Quentin for a crime pinned on him to save the reputations of a couple of powerful men’s daughters. In a characteristically deft note of bathos and bleak humor, Carpenter emphasizes Jack’s nullity as he is escorted to Chino, a way station to San Quentin, by two guards who were “taking courses in criminology at San Jose State, and had requested the assignment because they wanted to see the center at Chino. They were going to write a paper about it.”
That’s Jack’s story, or at least part of it, but it doesn’t describe his whole character, which has a huge, bewildered, yearning interior. He finds unlikely love through a sexual relationship with another inmate - Billy Lancing, as it happens; and this is the other defining occurrence in his life for it ends not only with a real experience of love, but, finally, with witnessing the mortal sacrifice that it’s capable of. After his release he finds a flaring, wavering, guttering variety of love with a woman whom he marries. But what a mess that turns out to be. Boredom, unfathomable longing, and a lack of tenacity in all Jack’s doings - the fruits of his barren, loveless childhood, and subsequent history - doom the relationship.
The facts of Jack’s existence, its various trajectories, produce a choppy plot; but, this is still a beautifully written work, its prose precise and clean, and if the novel never quite coheres, the structure is supple, passing deftly back and forth in time. The pool-hall scenes are peerless, and every event is alive with detail. The states of mind portrayed are, for all their existential sweep and philosophical valence, thoroughly grounded in one particular man’s life. That life and the larger theme of its meaning jog along, out of step, just as they do in reality.
The other novel, first published in 1945, now reprinted, is “Cairo Modern” by Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 (translated by William M. Hutchins; Anchor, paperback, $15). Set in the 1930s in Egypt, it follows the fortunes of Mahgub Abd al-Da’im, a university student a few months away from his degree. We meet him in argument with two friends about the principles that should govern life: One is a socialist and believes in science; the other is religious and believes in regenerate Islam. Mahgub’s answer to both is “tuzz,” which we may take to be something between a Bronx cheer and “pshaw!” Mahgub is a nihilist, and his goal is “pleasure and power, achieved by the easiest routes and means, without any regard for morality, religion, or virtue.” It is a guiding philosophy with one great drawback, however: Mahgub is without influence or wealth, one or the other essential to even a first unscrupulous step.
His trials are terrible, though funny, too, in a dreadful way as he comes up against the implacable ruthlessness of Egyptian society of the time. His fears are justified that “his philosophy - when it emerged from his brain to the world of realities - might encounter the same difficulties a projectile does on emerging from a cannon, when it explodes and disintegrates into fragments.” Yes, Mahgub’s hard-nosed views are shown to be sadly naïve. Though he has undoubted success in acting dishonorably - and this makes up the novel’s painful plot - it brings him further humiliation and hardship. “How,” he asks himself, “could he starve to death while rejecting conscience, chastity, religion, patriotism, and virtue too? Had anyone who was really depraved gone hungry in this world?’’ This is a morality tale of sorts and yet, like every novel I’ve read by this great writer, it is vibrant with the life of its characters and rich with dark irony.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
