This is a guest post by Detlev Fischer that draws upon his Reading Matter project on Substack.
When I mentioned in a comment to a post on Neglected Books’ Substack my Reading Matter project, which has used sentences and parts of sentences from one hundred novels of 1982 to build a virtual novel from that year, Brad asked if I would like to present some of these books in a guest post at Neglected Books. First, I thought this would be quite easy. After all, I had already written and put up on my Substack a short vignette for each of these novels – but not in order to critique them or assess their literary merit. Why, then, did it turn out to be so difficult?
Quite a few of the one hundred novels of 1982 that I had picked to be in the set are still available in print, some only as an eBook: Danielle Steel, Don DeLillo, Fay Weldon, John Updike, Alice Walker, Saul Bellow, Doris Lessing, Philip K. Dick, Anne Tyler, Richard Brautigan, Judith Krantz, John Banville, Eve Babitz, Gerald Murnane, Joyce Carol Oates, and probably a few more, although I doubt that many are still widely read. So, what is causing the unease when having to pick some books by the “lesser-known authors” that have gone out of print long ago? I think it is the implication, by framing them as forgotten books, that they deserve not to be forgotten due to some ineffable quality of topic or style, some curiosity value, or perhaps just because they offer a vivid snapshot of the early eighties, an area with different sensibilities (or lack thereof), a period that, perhaps fuelled by some vague post-woke sentiment, has received renewed attention. But I want to deal with these books outside of notions of quality or merit.
While I would be a fool not to admit that I liked some better than others (as you can glean from the vignettes), I appreciated all of them as books. I contemplate the crestfallen, inescapably dated aspect that even the most boisterous of them now have, something reflected in the yellowing paper, the brittleness, the material often literally disintegrating in reading. There they are, all these sentences, some long and intricate, some short, some overdone, some terse. Some forty-five years ago, someone put them down, flowing straight from the babbling mind or carefully crafted, in incantatory or puckish or distant or confessional tone. All the authors sitting at their desks and labouring away. Some took five years to complete the work (DeLillo’s The Names), others were fast enough to put out a second novel in the same year (Steel’s Once in a Lifetime). And I was now turning over all these sentences like puzzle pieces, grateful for anything that fit, regardless of the source.
Granted, there is aggression in not taking a book on its own terms, instead subjugating it to a material process independent of these terms. But the flip side is attention to everything, down to the failures of grammar, the printer’s errors. Every sentence rings a bell, some bell, unfailingly. Every sentence, even the most banal or abrasive one, opens an inverse space of what is not in the sentence, and the same notion extends to the entire book. The sentence’s tone, its choices, position it neatly in a space that we fill up around it. When in Judith Krantz’s Mistral’s Daughter, the prototypical painter-creator Mistral (modelled on Chagall) rails against the “whirlpool of the filth of the entire world of art” and derides “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table,” we impute the protagonist’s position and through that the author’s; we neither share nor reject this stance, but we see it. In Babitz’s L.A. Woman, we find the non-conformist counterpoint where the narrator quips that “normal people will think that art can be taken too far, but the trouble with being normal is it stops you from being great.” Great? There is a levelling effect in a reading that insists on indifference, a sentiment that is reflected in a sentence in Bellow’s The Dean’s December: “For her there was no catastrophe and nothing was corrupt, and all living creatures – all! – were equal in her cheerful American heart.” The inverse space of this sentence distances the second-order author-compiler even from his own all-embracing indifference. Sentences are creatures of sorts.
I know it will sound foolish, but I resist the implication that some books are more deserving not to be forgotten. And even now I resent driving them onto the stage as if I were in the position of arbitrator, telling readers through my choice what’s worth reading and, by implication, what might be rightly forgotten.
So, with that out of the way, these six out of the one hundred novels of 1982 I present here. For the rest, you will find vignettes at Reading Matter.
- • Christine Lehner: Expecting
- New Directions, 1982
- She is expecting: it starts with a sample of urine, suffocating heat, driving to town, the pregnancy confirmed. I always think of California, but have to remind myself that the place, the marshes where they have a house, must be on the East Coast. People are abbreviated to single letters: husband J, paranoid friend P, teacher H. The narrating I, after all, is also just one letter. I will give P a role here larger than she assumes in this book, which can be said to grow unhurriedly and with no concern for effect, just like a pregnancy. The text constantly moves between reported daytime experience and reported dreams, dreams that contribute depth in a very effective way, better than flashbacks would. And of course there’s the weight of the future: expectations and fears, observations of the husband (calm and interested, no need to raise the stakes here), of bodily changes: blue veins appearing on the breasts, the body itching. She scratches a lot. “Please stop scratching. You’re going to start bleeding and then you’ll regret it,” says her mother. “My mother and I drink iced drinks beside the cavity that will soon be her swimming pool.” And there is also the grandmother, four generations if you include baby Milo still swimming in the uterus. The couple visits P (“P insisted that we come”). P, who seems to be attacking both the bonded, contented, “us” and the pregnancy, constantly pushes a different story: “she narrates for us the plot of Gigi (…) she recounts details we had happily forgotten.” Gigi made me attentive of a subterranean network of Colette references that appear in several novels in the set — it actually made me buy (but not yet read) Mitsou. “On the bathroom wall, blocked out in pastel colors, is her Thorazine schedule.” P repeatedly makes unpleasant phone calls, filled with resentment and jealousy: “I find people like you, who remember so accurately the names of persons mentioned in the Alumni Bulletin, to be deplorable. You remember me talking about him, and then you read about him. You put it all together: that kind of memory is a sign of extreme deviousness.” – “P, we don’t have to be friends. We can just hang up and that will be the end of it.” P talks about H, apparently the object of jealousy (H could be John Hawkes, whose Virginie – Her Two Lives is in the set of one hundred novels of 1982, and who contributed a blurb to Expecting). Again, P, paranoid: “You’d like it if I left H alone, but I’m not going to. You could be very dangerous if I let you, but I’m not going to.” – “Goodbye, P.” In the silence that follows, I replace the receiver very gently. And I do not ever want to touch it again. It has become an unclean poisoned object.”
- • Jeremy Leven: Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S.
- Alfred A. Knopf, 1982
- The book is often very funny (it has been turned into a movie, Crazy as Hell, which I haven’t seen). Satan is the first person narrator, involved in ways that become clearer—or at least more ludicrous—as the plot evolves. Since Leven has been a practicing neuropsychiatrist, the novel betrays an intimate knowledge of mental illnesses, mental hospitals, and psychiatric treatments. It’s one of several books in the set that feature visits to Plato’s Retreat (the other two are Gael Greene’s Doctor Love and Cindy Nemser’s Eve’s Delight). Here, the place is referred to as Dante’s Inferno (Satan will eventually elaborate on why Dante’s description of hell is entirely inaccurate). Hapless psychotherapist Dr. Sy Kassler, who over the course of the novel goes through all sorts of bad shit (divorce from wife, loss of access to his children, loss of job, house burned down) will eventually come to treat Satan, who’s embodied in a computer that sports nobs that Lupa, falling in love with Satan, will eventually make use of. In the sex retreat, Kassler quickly loses sight of Lupa, who is a lot more comfortable with the setting and has let herself get lost in the crowd. Kassler finds a door with a flashing welcome sign above it, and behind it a beautiful girl (today’s authors would more likely call her a young woman). They talk and agree they don’t like the place, connect instantly, agree they are hopeless romantics. “Then he took the girl into his arms and kissed her tenderly on the lips. It was the kiss that Kassler had fantasized he’d have some day—joyful and sublime.” They both want to get together, meet again, tomorrow, at the same place; the girl says she is superstitious that she might otherwise lose his address. Skip forward. ‘“This is crazy,’ the girl finally laughed. ‘We don’t know each other at all. We are a couple of strangers in the bottom of a very perverse place. It’s crazy.’ ‘Insane,’ Kassler agreed. (…) ‘Hey,’ the girl called to Kassler. ‘You’re not crazy or mean or married or going to break my heart or anything, are you?’ ‘No , I am not,’ Kassler answered softly.” He’s in love. After leaving the room, Kassler is told by staff contact Charon, “You can drop the smile. She’s an advertisement.” Kassler doesn’t want to believe it, and Charon explains. “Very pretty girl. And super bright. Rumor has it she hasn’t had to perform a single sexual act to keep the men returning in the two years she’s been here.” The plot is too insane to describe here in a one-paragraph vignette; it is intricate, but very effective.
- • Elizabeth Swados: Leah and Lazar
- Summit Books,1982
- While photographer Sam Glanzrock in Eve Babitz’s L.A. Woman overdoses in Paris, Leah’s admired big brother Lazar goes there “to study mime at the Sorbonne, and French, and write poetry sitting by the river Seine. He’d read all about the artists who did that, and he was to be one of them.” But the visit is an immediate disaster: he’s doesn’t know any French and is far too unstable, in fact raving mad. “The square of cafés looked like an arena. Lazar felt he was in the center on his balcony. He knew he needed energy if he wanted to be in the arena. He took out his pill bottle and swallowed his medication. He waited a proper time until the recognizable wave of relief came over him. And then he jumped toward the painted Paris sky.” Only, Lazar will not die like Sam. After that event, he is not only manic-psychotic but has also lost a leg and an arm, or even two legs and an arm, I don’t remember. When Leah, who has meanwhile gone through a Miami phase of being prostituted by a guy called Artie, getting pregnant, aborting, and touring as vocalist of an otherwise all-male band, eventually ventures to see Lazar again in some hotel room, he is a pathetic relic moving around somehow on a skateboard, still ordering everyone around. Hyperactive and delusional, he is convinced to be a rare genius, writing a novel and sending any number of weird letters to magazines and publishers. From the very first pages of the novel, Leah has to witness Lazar’s slow spiralling out of control. It starts with him being a precocious youth in love with his own excitement, lording over Leah and saying things like “You may sit at the very foot of my bed but you are not to touch me or feel sorry for me. Do you understand?” Lazar is all exuberance, wildly in love with a girl who seems rather overwhelmed and suspicious of him. ‘“This is not just a feeling,’ Lazar said to his sister. ‘It is a calling. I was meant to be a great lover.’ (…) Leah would have been much more jealous of her brother’s distraction had he not included her in almost everything. (…) ‘We are engaged – the three of us.’” He is very close to their mum, who has a drinking habit and suffers from manic depression. He dances with her (“Leah had no idea that Lazar could move so well”), and, pretending to search for the right college, goes on extended travels with her. The father is a mostly absent business man. At some point Lazar even has sex with Leah. Leah feels remote: “She was going to be an extraterrestrial creature. A super-being. She didn’t know for sure, but she thought it would transform her from a regular, American girl to a creature who could communicate and mate with boys from other planets.”
- • Peter Van Greenaway: Manrissa Man
- Gollancz Suspense, 1982
- Stylistically, Manrissa Man is an outlier, one of the most unusual and extreme of all 1982 novels in the set. The language is wilfully disjoint, terse, acidic and formal, trusting readers to fill considerable gaps. The book opens with a foreword and an “Author’s note to the second edition” which follow the spiel of carefully placing oblique hints without giving the story away (great apes developing super-human intelligence under the sinister manipulations of science in Manrissa, a US laboratory complex, and eventually turning against their tormentors and the human race in general, using the biological weapons they were made immune to), followed by prologue of unreferenced quotations from Deuteronomy; a philosophical quotation on two types of imperative (hypothetical and categorical); Martin Chuzzlewit, including its library reference card; an account of Napoleon’s battle strategy, etc. The terse and disjointed approach also rules in the body of the novel itself, which is to a large extent constructed from post-mortem testimonies of surviving ranks of the incidents by some Congressional committee. The thing I liked best was the interaction between Matthew Longmore, ‘obscure lecturer in linguistics in a run-down Southern college” (dust jacket), and the three Manrissas he teaches; Alpha, later on the leader of the devastating Manrissa uprising, has become far more intelligent and ruthless than the specialists who subjected him to experiments. Some of the sentences used to describe the behaviour, facial expressions, and gestures of the Manrissas, as well as of the chimpanzees in Malamud’s God’s Grace, felt only very slightly off —in fact just right—when applied to human characters. Things like: “He reached out a hand and tentatively pulled at my lips, much as one fumbles at a transistor in search of a voice.”
- • Jacqueline Briskin: The Onyx
- Delacorte Press, 1982
- Let me ignore the car angle in this saga of the Ford-like Onyx car dynasty, with car inventor and can-do man Tom Bridger; his half-brother Hugh permanently scarred by a car fire (was it Tom’s fault?); Tom’s passionate love Antonia (will die early) that he fails to marry only because of one letter is cut in pieces and not read (never do that!); Tom’s illegitimate son Justin who is into unions to spite his capitalist family (imagine the conflicts!) and whose Jewish wife Elisse will have to pay the ultimate price; Tom’s pedestrian wife Maude; and a bunch of dynasty children that are usually half-siblings prone to debilitating temptations of half-incest: “From the time that Zoe was twelve and he fourteen, this worship of unconsummated flesh had kept him from other girls who were most certainly willing to go all the way.” Characters here are not either good or bad, but usually torn and conflicted, so this could be said to raise the handling of the book’s cast above that in another sprawling 1982 family saga by Sidney Sheldon, Master of the Game, where we have the good twin Alexandra and the bad twin Eve. There is something amazingly stilted and cumbersome about the language with its struggling metaphors: “His tears were not exactly grief but a mournful farewell, the lachrymose equivalent of a final taps sounding for the youth and joy he had possessed vicariously through his brother.” At times, these turns of phrase give cause to interesting speculations, as when we learn that, “as Zoe swam into puberty, her emotions swerved onto the shoals of sex;” and let me quote what happened on these shoals: “She would awaken breathless, her shapely thighs clenched together, heiress to a legacy of libidinous dreams in which Hugh caressed her budding breasts and her private orifices: those dawns she learned a manipulative technique she called “going up and over,” and Hugh’s image remained the simulacrum on which these self-seductions balanced.” Ever since I have wondered how exactly “going up and over” is done. Is that a thing?
- • Jerzy Kosinski: Pinball
- Bantam Books, 1982
- The book that started it all. On a Dick Cavett show eight years before its publication, where Kosinski, together with Anthony Burgess and Barbara Howar, is supposed to review Cavett’s book Cavett, the show’s host says, quizzed by Kosinski about his plans for the future: “I never had a plan for my life. That’s what makes me hard to figure out about myself. (…) I’ve never had this plan. I’ve always felt that I was like the ball in a pinball machine that sort of went on a logical route but only after you’d looked at it afterwards.” Was this moment perhaps the seed for Pinball? I found a German translation in a book exchange box in front of a church in Veddel, noted the publication date, and everything slowly took off from there. For no other reason I settled for 1982 as publication date of all sources. I ordered the original. (It has to be said that as a novel, Pinball sucks.) The next two books were Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts and Paretsky’s Indemnity Only. At that point, I was more concerned with permutations, transpositions, re-orderings and reversals of material from just a few books, even allowing more generous changes and the addition of self-written sentences, not yet having a clear overall concept in mind. Pinball contributes the incestuous undercurrent, the necrophilia, the postponement, the teasing and withdrawal. I merged the anonymous group sex in the underground joint Dead Heat with Ortiz-Taylor’s underground mummies in Guanajuato in Faultline and Bellow’s domed crematorium in Bucharest in The Dean’s December. For Kosinski, the novel served a platform on which the formerly respected author damaged by rumors that he stole other writers’ work could air his grievances, transposed to the field of music and the theft of musical themes. Plagiarism. The threat to identity is located in the source of expression, in the artist’s strange voice resulting from surgery: “The tumor was between the larynx and the pharynx (…) Along with the nose and mouth, those are the parts of the throat that determine how our voice sounds.” The between is typical. It is always uneasy. “Even though he was thoroughly convinced that no one would ever identify his voice as Goddard’s, he always felt a shiver of apprehension.” You can sense this frisson of being found out, coupled with fear, in many passages. The close tie of attraction and repulsion and the resulting deep unease permeate the book. The second challenge is chance, again put forward with both admiration (Stockhausen is mentioned several times) and disdain: “Above all, to Donna, Goddard was an aleator, a musical dice thrower, who thought musical meaning in nihilistic spontaneity and depended for his effect on free-wheeling macronic improvisation.”
