Light out for the Territory
Courtney says I’m overdue for typing some sentences about the end of Updike. (That’s true, though what I’ll say in a few days will resemble Emily Barton in Granta more than Richard Ford in the New Yorker.)
But before I go there, a few words on Alan Cheuse’s new novel, To Catch the Lightning, which I picked up in October, read in November, and have thought about often.
Last week in Salon, Laura Miller reviewed Elaine Showalter’s take on American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers. This was the paragraph that sent me back again to Alan’s wonderful book:
America is the first nation united by ideas rather than a shared cultural and racial history, and foremost among those ideas is the paradigm of self-invention, via hard work, in the free territory of the frontier. Our literary culture has always hankered after fiction that, in one way or another, embodies this hope. “The answer to the American quest for originality,” Showalter writes, “seemed to lie in the coming of the poet-hero, a genius who, through divine inspiration, would create immortal works, and an art commensurate with the vastness of the nation and the scope of its dreams.” Only such a protean figure could sum up the whole country in a single work. This in turn led to the fantasy of the Great American Novel — and also to a condition that I like to think of as Great Literary American Novel Syndrome, a term whose acronym, GLANS, gives you a pretty good idea of just who’s expected to write the thing.
I’m not going to touch the argument there at the end, which I’d say is basically accurate though not especially useful. But the first half of the paragraph seems right on the money.
I think immediately, as I’m certain Miller and Showalter did, of Twain and Huck Finn. There’s no novel that better exemplifies–or more effectively undermines–the American mythology of self-invention. It’s the touchstone for American writers, most especially those of or writing about the West, where Huck’s Territory has lasted longest. Huck’s fingerprints are all over two of my personal touchstones, Angle of Repose and Cloudsplitter. (The latter feels so much like a Western novel that I forget it’s almost entirely set east of Buffalo.)
To Catch the Lightning is a big book that belongs on the same shelf as the big books of Twain, Stegner, and Banks. It delivers authentically the contest between frontier and society, the self-ruining struggle to save an Other, the longing for a new Eden, the knowledge of that new Eden’s impossibility.
Lest you think it’s all about that thematic stuff, Alan’s novel provides rewards in individual scenes, too–Edward Curtis trying to save his desperately ill son; a crew fighting to keep a boat from smashing up in an Arctic storm; a marvelous series of encounters between Curtis and J.P. Morgan’s entrancing assistant.
I’m guessing that as much as the reader takes from the book, the writer/reader will take more. You’d think, really, that Showalter was describing Edward Curtis with that line: “the poet-hero, a genius who, through divine inspiration, would create immortal works, and an art commensurate with the vastness of the nation and the scope of its dreams.” Curtis’s passion for his art and his subjects is sometimes uncomfortably familiar–thankfully, only sometimes familiar.
Enough yammering about the book. By now, you want a further taste, yes? Here’s 20 minutes of Alan reading at this year’s Key West Literary Seminar.
