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Jernigan, by David Gates

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JerniganThe protagonist in David Gates’ novel, Peter Jernigan, is a mess.  As the novel opens, he’s been up all night driving through the New Jersey snow.  The sun is up and blinding now as he makes his way to Uncle Fred’s camp.  He longs to get the car off the road, feed lots of wood into the stove to warm up the cabin then drink what’s left of the gin in the bottle on the seat next to him, washing down four Pamprins with it and sleep the sleep of the just.  We know he gets into the cabin and anticipates cutting some wood and getting warm.  Chapter Two opens with Jernigan reflecting that he has Uncle Fred to thank for getting him into this place.  And for calling the state police, who carried me out of the trailer and rushed me to the hospital.    But he doesn’t remember any of that and, horribly, he says, They got there too late for my thumb and forefinger — the surgeon almost had to do (meaning cut off) the whole hand — but the essential man, was, and is, still intact.  Which is the big thing, right, the essential man? Jernigan.  And, of course, we wonder, who is this guy? How did he end up here?  Who’s Uncle Fred?  Turns out Uncle Fred is not anyone’s uncle, just a friend of Jernigan’s from college who got the nickname Uncle Fred because he looked like some kid’s uncle. 

The book is written in a casual, tossed-off kind of way which I found particularly jarring when Jernigan’s story gets pretty serious, and then seriously dire.  Turns out Jernigan is the master of the off-hand comment, a clever literary device that keeps me wondering and guessing throughout the novel.  And Jernigan is written in a self-consciousness style.  Often, in Dickensian fashion, he talks directly to the reader.  Like when he veers off the main story and into a vignette about Judith and we’re wondering who’s Judith? though we understand that Jernigan’s had a relationship with her and that she didn’t understand him as well as Uncle Fred always has.  After the vignette, he says, But we’re jumping all around here and losing track.  Not that I mind losing track, far from it.  But.  Okay, I easily fall into the style.  And at the end of Chapter Two, when Jernigan says, End of reminiscence, I’m ready for the real story.  Except not.  Because the real story is how Jernigan got into this mess — injured and off by himself in a musty-smelling shithole of a trailer.  He tosses off a kind of a prayer, asking forgiveness from his son for being a drunk and for knowing he’s probably not capable of doing better, since he has failed at least once before at getting sober. [Read more…] about Jernigan, by David Gates

American Pastoral

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AmericanPastoralAmerican Pastoral begins with a vignette from the narrator, Nathan “Skip” Zuckerman’s, youth.  It’s a story about another kid in their Jewish neighborhood in Newark, Seymour Levov, nicknamed “The Swede.”  The point is that Swede was no ordinary Jew,  he was blonde and blue-eyed, beautiful and athletic, the All-American Adonis who transcended the Jewish experience.  He was kind and unassuming, seemingly perfect and loved by everyone, adults and his peers alike.  Flash forward and the narrator is at his high school reunion, remembering the past through the filter of nostalgia.  The story jumps back and forth in time — from the reunion in the 1990’s, to the pre-World War II Newark — a center for manufacturing in the Northeast, filled with second generation Jewish immigrants working hard to succeed — to the period of post-war enthusiasm and prosperity, through the devastation of the Vietnam war.  The history is told through the lens of Skip Zuckerman, but it is the life of Swede Levov, the Golden Boy.  And what a life he’s had.  He enlists in the Marines but spends most of his military career as a recreational specialist in South Carolina since the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima just after he finished basic training.  He leaves the military, goes to college and takes a job in his father’s glove factory.  Later he marries “a shiksa,”  Miss New Jersey of 1949, no less.  From all outward appearances, The Swede continues to lead a charmed life.

Zuckerman runs into the Swede a couple of times over the years, but as an adult the Swede appears to have  “ended up bland .”   What could have happened to turn the Swede into “a human platitude?”  Of course, once he discovers the real story of the Swede’s life, Zuckerman says, it has been a little bit like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.  The narrator is obsessed with the Swede’s life, wondering whether anything “had ever threatened to destabilize the Swede’s trajectory?  What brooding, grief, confusion and loss had come his way in life?”

This is the setup for the real story, the story of Swede Levov’s life, which the narrator has imagined — from golden boy to broken man.  The Swede’s daughter, Merry, it turns out,

New York Times Photo Archives - Patrick A. Burns
New York Times Photo Archives – Patrick A. Burns

was a Vietnam war activist who bombed the post office in their small New Jersey town, killing the local doctor and sending her into hiding.  With this act of violence, Merry destroys the Levov family’s unbearably idyllic life.  A major theme that interests Roth in this novel is parent-child relationships.  Parents must do everything they can to help their children succeed.  It is impossible for a parent to give up on a child, to believe the unthinkable about a child, to confront the evil which is “ineradicable from human dealings.”  Even though Swede Levov had a second chance, a second wife, three normal, healthy children, he had experienced “the worst lesson that life can teach — that it makes no sense.”  He can never really be happy again.  Merry’s violent act “transport[ed] him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence and the desperation of the counter-pastoral — into the indigenous American berserk.” 

American Pastoral is pretty grim, though there are bits of Roth’s sharp humor throughout.  And the setting of Newark is equally grim — a place changed from a manufacturing hub to “the worst city in the world,” abandoned now that everyone has moved to the suburbs.  Newark-manufacturingWhile Newark used to have “a factory where somebody was making something in every side street.  Now there’s a liquor store in every street — a liquor store, a pizza stand, and a seedy storefront church.  Everything else in ruins or boarded up. ”  Even Swede Levov had to move his glove factory to Puerto Rico, after holding out as long as possible through the riots of the sixties.  His loyalty alone — to his employees and to the neighborhood –cannot hold back the tide of urban decay.

I’d say I got a good sense of a narrow slice of the New Jersey Jewish experience from the 1940’s through the 1990’s by reading American Pastoral.  Through the story of Swede Levov, Roth handily demolishes the myth of the American dream.  The notion of creatingModernNewJersey some kind of perfect life in the bucolic suburbs where one can hide from the reality of life and the desperation of poverty and war is absurd.  Especially for Jews.  It is Roth’s tour de force about “the ritual post-immigrant struggle for success turning pathological.”

Is American Pastoral the quintessential New Jersey novel?  It definitely has that element described by Rutgers Professor Michael Aaron Rockland — characters trying to find a center, looking for meaning in their lives while living in a “never never land” of rural New Jersey and pretending to be living on a farm.  Levov’s wife actually buys cows and runs a successful dairy farm for a time.  Yes, this book has given me a fairly Dickensian feel for Newark at the end of the twentieth century.  And I’m glad to be moving on to Jernigan, wondering about the kind of New Jersey David Gates has presented there.

On to New Jersey

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SlatefordJunctionPA-CourtesyChuckWalsh
SlatefordJunctionPA-CourtesyChuckWalsh

I’m kind of reluctant to leave Pennsylvania, the rolling hills and beautiful, though coal mining damaged countryside to head off to New Jersey.  New Jersey?  Yeah, I have all sorts of preconceived notions about New Jersey even though I’m most familiar with the airport, having flown to New York via New Jersey from Seattle several times over the years — there’s a nonstop.  New Jersey immediately conjures up images of mobsters, a notorious Mafia hang out. No surprise that The Sopranos was set in New Jersey.  Also, Jersey Shore and Real Housewives of New Jersey, right?  But I haven’t watched those so that’s no help.  I also know that Martha Stewart went to High School in Nutley, New Jersey, thanks to my good friend Robin who went there too — though years later than Martha so their paths never crossed.  Of course, these random facts don’t really give me a handle on what it would be like to live in New Jersey or what it’s like as a place.

My research into independent bookstores in New Jersey leads me to Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey.  I’m drawn to Watchung because the bookstore’s website tells me that Montclair is “a town that really values the word,” and the store owner’s comment

Courtesy-Patch
Courtesy-Patch

that she estimates sixty authors live there. Perfect.  Someone at Watchung will definitely be able to recommend a New Jersey novel for me.  I call them up and speak with someone who seems perplexed by my request — a novel that takes place in New Jersey, one that would give me a sense of New Jersey as a distinct place.  Philip Roth is the first author who pops into her head but she asks if she can call me back, wants to think about it.  I’m good with that.  In fact, I figure she’s really taking me seriously.  When she calls me back, she’s come up with  a book called something like “Legends of New Jersey” which doesn’t appeal to me — mostly because it’s not a novel.  She then suggests that I do an internet search to find a book I might like.  “That’s what I would do,” she tells me.  Now I’m disappointed because I’m really counting on the expertise of independent booksellers to make recommendations for this project.  So I decide to get American Pastoral by Philip Roth and then take her advice and do some online research about a more current author who has written about New Jersey.

My search leads to me an essay by Bill Morris in an online literary magazine called, The Millions, titled, “Who Wrote the Great New Jersey Novel?”  Find it here:  http://www.themillions.com/2012/07/who-wrote-the-great-new-jersey-novel.html   In welcome-to-new-jersey-signit, Morris says, “New Jersey’s lack of defining character traits —  it’s facelessness, its rootlessness, its lukewarmness —  make it an ideal portal to get inside the soul of a nation that becomes more faceless, rootless and generic — more soulless — by the day. . . . In contemporary America, anomie is a moveable feast, and its template was exported from New Jersey.”  Oh, he’s wonderfully cynical and I can’t wait to read his list of nominees for the great New Jersey novel.  But first, he asks, “what, beyond a New Jersey setting, makes a novel a New Jersey Novel?  He then quotes several writers on this subject.  Michael Aaron Rockland, a professor at Rutgers who teaches a class in “Jerseyana” (really?) says that the whole notion of New Jersey is that “we live in a never-never land, where we pretend we’re living on a farm.  The real centers of New Jersey are these office parks in the middle of nowhere.. . . what every writer writes about is our trying to find a center in our lives.”  Another author who grew up in New Jersey says, ” New Jerseyness is a kind of vagueness.  It’s peculiarly indeterminate.”  And this makes me think about my interaction with the bookseller at Watchung.  She seemed unable to recommend a book that exemplifies New Jersey, maybe because it’s so hard to put your finger on this place.  It’s fuzzy, mercurial.  Is it a suburb of Manhattan or a distinct place with character all its own?

I scroll through the list of New Jersey novels offered by Bill Morris and find that I haveRichardFordBooks read many of them but have somehow missed that they were set in New Jersey.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  I love Richard Ford and eagerly read my way through the Frank Bascombe trilogy, one after the other and loved them all.  But I agree with Morris, who says the thing about these novels is that they’re all about what goes on inside Frank’s head.  Since Frank is a failed novelist who turns to sportswriting and then to selling real estate, he, like his home state is the “poster boy for the uncelebrated.”  He offers this quote from Frank as one of the most left-handed compliments any state ever received:  “Better to come to earth in New Jersey than not to come at all.”

Philip Roth is on the list, American Pastoral, specifically.  So I decide to start my New Jersey reading here and also order up Morris’s favorite Jersey novel, Jernigan, by David Gates from Watchung Booksellers, as my second source since I’ve found that reading two novels set in a state gives me the sense of continuity and departure that I need to form a deeper understanding of the place.