Susan Taylor Chehak

I'm going to start posting some bits from the reading notebook that I keep, as I move on from writer to reader in my ongoing exploration of fiction. These are some notes that I took after reading Ken Kalfus's A Condition Peculiar to the Country last year...

The book has a sort of shallow darkness to it, and what seemed to me to be a sort of meanness behind it, too. A sort of "cool" (as in hip) modern sensibility of irony and pessimism -- dysfunction? -- that seems to be deliberate, though no less uncomfortable and off-putting for that.

A couple -- he works in the Trade Center Towers and just barely escapes the devastation on September 11th, while she's set to fly on the plane that hit the Pentagon -- each at first thinks the other is dead and each is happy about that. They're in the middle of a divorce -- a nasty one, which plays out through the novel and by the end has been accomplished -- but each is seriously less well off because of the split, which is not liberation as much as self-imposed deprivation. The parts turn out to be much less than what they made up as a whole.

Somehow this plays into the theme of the attacked Twin Towers and the subsequent war in Iraq and so on. But the whole sensibility of the work has what I found to be an irritating cuteness, is that it? A sort of show-offy negativity. Smarty-pants nihilism. These two characters are each glad that the other might be dead in the events of September 11th, and that selfish sensibility sometimes flies off into unbelievable extremes, as when the husband makes a bomb and straps it to himself, but it doesn't work and so together the couple fiddles with it. She helps him, with the children watching nearby, and nobody but the reader seems to care about that. This is a chilling scene, but not even slightly believable, so it comes off as a show-off sort of stunt on the part of the author. A Chuck Palahniuk kind of move, with not much to do with the reader or the book, more to do with the author who is the smart cynical guy who thought it up? As if the whole point were only to make everybody else feel uncomfortable?

The scene turns out to be a preparation for the ending, too, where we win the war and capture Bin Laden and everybody celebrates. But again, this seems to have nothing at all to do with the world or with the characters -- either the fictional world OR the real world, but really is only about the clever author, and it makes me also think about the editors who published it -- their own sort of sensibility, a sort of f-you agenda, it seems, and I wonder, is this a response to the death of the author, the death of the novel, which also seems to be calling for the death of the reader?