It’s a truism that America’s founders were Europe’s misfits. So maybe it’s the national collective unconscious that has led American writers to create so many solitary oddballs. (It can’t all be cryptic self-portraiture.) Poe’s self-tormenting psychos prefigure legions of loners clinging, with bitten-down fingernails, to the fringes of society. Such characters tempt sentimental writers to caricature the world as an upside-down loony bin, where the McMurphys are saner than the Big Nurses. But from out on the periphery, loners can see society whole; their vision may be skewed, but it’s coherent. And with time on their hands, literary outsiders also lead vertiginous, noisy inner lives. Psychological drama, a world view of sorts, plus reader-friendly eccentricities: if this is a formula, it’s often a winning one.
Three of this season’s best novels feature classic American loners with the requisite awful sex lives, unfashionable addresses (boardinghouses, apartments in Queens) and dead-end jobs: hosting on late-night radio, clerking at a dry cleaner’s, proofreading on the graveyard shift. These folks are closer to the edge than we like to think we are; yet we find ourselves sharing their feelings and caring what happens to them. And though the endings are in no case upbeat, they don’t leave either protagonist or reader without a scrap of comfort, however cold.
Leonard English, hero of Denis Johnson’s fourth novel, “Resuscitation of a Hanged Man” (256 pages, Farrar Straus Giroux. $19.95), is the kind of guy who tries to make time with a woman by saying things like “My fear level is pretty high.” After two pages of dialogue, she tells him he’s “the loneliest person I know”–and it doesn’t seem like a hasty judgment. He’s so far out there, in fact, that he’s attempted suicide before the story even begins: “He’d hung himself, died, and been brought here to wait for God’s word…” “Here” is Provincetown, Mass., geographically and socially at the American edge, where he comes to work as a part-time d.j. and private eye. Given P-town’s reputation as a gay resort, it seems implausible that English is surprised at all the “sexually disoriented people”–until you get to know him. Even among the disoriented, he stands apart.
Rather than reveal what “God’s word” finally drives English to do, let’s just say that we wouldn’t do it–and that he screws it up. But we sympathize with a character who both courts and dreads his destiny, who yearns for human contact yet knows it won’t satisfy, who’s troubled by “the sense of a cloud between me and God.” And we admire a writer who weaves a coherent novel out of wild strands: English’s search for his doppelganger (aptly named Twinbrook), his affair with a disgruntled lesbian, his religious obsessions. “…It is always a book about the verge in conscoiiouslness,” writes Twinbrook in a badly typed fragment of some mad document English finds in his abandoned office, “the splitting apart of the world, and the end of time…I write first of all because——ETC.” Johnson is a knowing writer–his nonfiction includes a recent Esquire piece on the civil war in Liberia–who drops just enough hints of a self-referential tongue in his cheek.
Martha Horgan, in Mary McGarry Morris’s “A Dangerous Woman” (358 pages. Viking. $19.95), is even less presentable than English. She’s a Vermont village loony whose unspecified derangement takes the form of compulsive honesty and impulsive attachments to embarrassed, then frightened townsfolk. The closest we get to a diagnosis is when a fellow townsman says “there have always been those among us for whom the wind’s a little too strong, the sun just a little too bright.” Martha may be misread the way Salinger’s Holden Caulfield has been: as a spirit too pure for this corrupt world. Her blurted revelation of her boss’s petty chiseling could be taken as proof of secular sainthood. So could her sexual victimization by beer-swilling boys of good family–who go unpunished. “We deemed her honor and her future to be of less value than her tormentors’,” says the speechifying townsman. “And our message was loud and clear: Martha Horgan didn’t count.”
Morris’s own story–neighbors in Amherst, Mass., didn’t know she was a writer until her first novel, “Vanished,” appeared in 1988–encourages such sentimental readings. But righteous indignation is only part of the novel’s moral panorama: while the absolutist Martha sees the world “filling up with people [who] bent the rules…until nothing…could set things straight,” Morris doesn’t let us forget what a pain she is to deal with. Her intense feelings keep her too busy for moral choice: when she’s not blindly following a few rigid ethical rules, she’s trying to control her rage. “A Dangerous Woman” inverts loner-novel conventions. Here it’s the supporting cast whose psyches have the twists and turns– like the man Martha thinks is her true love, an alcoholic writer whose self-hatred proves only intermittently stronger than his selfishness. Martha merely sets up the moral choices for those around her. They end up with a keener (if more painful) sense of who they are; she never has a clue.
Mary Gaitskill’s first novel, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” (304 pages. Poseidon. $18.95), juxtaposes two loners: a pair of young women more functional than Martha but more depressed. They meet through a Laundromat bulletin board–the “locus classicus” of loneliness–and, as the title suggests, each senses their yin-yangish affinity. But the prospect of a friendship between them is undercut by their separate agendas. Fat Dorothy (a name suggesting she’s at an Oz-like remove from society) is a proofreader eager to talk about “Definitism,” a creepy individualist belief system based on Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Thin Justine (a name evoking the Marquis de Sade) is a part-time journalist eager to win Dorothy’s confidence and sell her out. Their histories also make intimacy unlikely: both were sexually abused children, rendering Justine kinky and Dorothy celibate.
The anomic New Yorkers in Gaitskill’s 1988 story collection, “Bad Behavior,” led some readers to mistake her for an S&M Tama Janowitz. “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” shows she’s up to something more serious. Unlike Morris or Johnson, she gives her loners’ pathology a psychological specificity–which doesn’t mean she explains it away. When her damaged people damage others, Gaitskill doesn’t expect us to smite our brows: it’s how things are. Her supporting cast includes neo-Dickensian monsters like Dorothy’s father, who plays marching music on the hi-fi while railing against the “bastards” who are out to get him–he means everybody–and molests her at night. Children dread miniature tyrants at school and full-size ones at home; adults have only the dubious advantage of fuller awareness. The novel’s ending hints that reconciliation is possible–but don’t count on it. In Poe, you could at least tell the loners from everybody else. In Gaitskill, America is just loner after loner, from sea to shining sea. The fringe is everywhere.
