Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Malaise
Malaise is Lemann’s fourth novel – and for the first time, in her writing, I found myself a wee bit bored. I am not sure why. I think this book, in some ways, lacks the “hilarity” of the others, although parts of it are quite funny. And Lemann’s funniness is subtle – it’s in her language, in the deadpan statements – it’s something you either respond to or don’t. I can’t MAKE you think she’s hysterical – some people are tone deaf to certain kinds of humor. There are certain comedians who are very successful and my response to them is: “That is just so not funny to me.” So I get that humor is a very personal thing. Nancy Lemann’s humor is, yes, in some of the situations people get themselves in … but it’s more in the language itself, and the outlook of the characters, how they see the world. It’s very me, and that is a rare rare thing to find in a writer. The following excerpt shows, for me, Lemann’s similarity to me – in terms of humor, language, and sort of deadpan outlook on the chaos of the world. It works for me. I was very interested to read the following review – posted on Amazon – and it refers to when Malaise came out in hard cover. Anyway, check this out – she describes the whole Nancy Lemann thing FAR better than I ever could:
People either get Nancy Lemann or they don’t. Those who do practically worship her for her deeply elegant, eccentric, hilarious novels about displaced Southerners. Those who don’t tend to complain that she’s too repetitive. That she is, and a good thing, too. In her lovely and odd novel, Malaise, Lemann uses repetition as she does in all her books: as a wellspring for both humor and meaning. Her characters turn phrases over and over in their minds, as if trying to solve them. In Malaise, those phrases concern California, the death of the British Empire, old age, and graciousness. Fleming Ford is a New York journalist, born in Mississippi, whose husband’s work takes the family to Esperanza, a San Diegoesque resort city not far from the Mexican border. As always, Lemann’s writing wildly conflates the personal and the geographical. Fleming shuns Esperanza as the ends of the earth. At the same time, and not just coincidentally, she falls in love with Mr. Lieberman, an old Englishman who represents the decorousness that she has left behind. Along the way, we get some astonishing writing, like this aside about a visit to Death Valley: “It’s so godforsaken, so historical, and so pure that you are curiously elated. It may be called Death Valley, but the minute you get there you are subsumed by a vast and incongruous gaiety.” Addled by nostalgia and despair, Lemann’s characters are forever bumping into a vast and incongruous gaiety, and telling us about it over and over and over. We wouldn’t have it any other way. –Claire Dederer
“Lemann conflates the personal and the geographical”. Totally. That is always her big thing. How places remind us of who we were, or who we want to be, or things we want to forget. How geography plays such a potent role in our destinies. The way she writes about Esperanza is new territory for Lemann – she normally writes about the South (ie: New Orleans) – or New York City. Here she goes to a town that sounds like San Diego (and, in fact, Lemann lives there now) – and Fleming, the main character, is gobsmacked by the sun and the desert. She can’t get it off her mind. What it MEANS to live in the desert. Especially since her husband is “in water”. She is obsessed with geography, and yet her heart yearns back for “suave” New York.
She has some similarity to Grace Stewart in The Fiery Pantheon in that her ideal involves rectitude, quiet dignity, kindness, stoicism – and, if possible, white hair and seersucker suits and bow ties. Fleming is obsessed with a newspaper mogul named Mr. Lieberman – a 70-something year old guy – who was her boss once. Fleming is married, pregnant with her third child … and her heart yearns for Mr. Lieberman, even though they are on separate coasts – and, uhm, there’s 35 years age difference. You get the sense, though, that Fleming would not have a sordid affair with this man. No. Loyalty is always very important to Nancy Lemann’s character, and Fleming is loyal to her husband. It’s just that Mr. Lieberman represents a world gone by … a world she misses – one of men’s clubs, and rectitude, and stoically bearing up under grief, and New York, etc.
Obviously, after all of these posts – it should be clear that I am one of those people who love Nancy Lemann, who find her repetitive language to be her greatest gift – and not annoying at all. You have to slow down to get into Lemann’s books, most of which are pretty much plot-less. Just slow everything down, and get into the repetitive language, let it work on you … give up expectations of anything happening, and let your mind off the hook. Start to think about places you have known and loved, how they affected you, where your heart’s home is – regardless of where you live, etc. etc. Nancy Lemann can be quite hypnotic.
Malaise came out in 2003. It’s 2008 now, dammit. That’s a long long time to wait between books. But I’m patient. The second I hear a new one is out, I’ll be the first in line to buy it.
EXCERPT FROM Malaise
I have a certain amount of time on my hands due to my career slump and my stunning remove to the other side of the world at age forty in the middle of the journey of our life. I’m supposed to be working on Special Perspectives, which I attempt to dream up at my office in the garage overlooking a canyon. Canyons are weird. I saw a coyote once come up from the canyon: it looks like a rangy berserk sort of wolfhound. No telling what else is down there: foxes, monitors, hyenas going mad.
Special Perspectives – it sounds so official, like some sort of evil Soviet enterprise, some sort of daunting euphemistic committee to winnow out people who should be executed. Or at least who should be airbrushed out of existing photographs. It’s like something out of the Politburo. My editor would soon create a new and even more euphemistic title for me: West Coast Special Perspectives Team Coordinator.
The insubstantial nature of the endeavor was betrayed by its vague and redundant title, which continued to go through various changes, in the end returning by a circuitous route to the blandly cheery New Perspectives, in the meanwhile persisting with the perhaps more nebulous Special ones.
In time I did come up with several thought-provoking Special Perspectives pieces on such vague subjects as Optimism, Pessimism, and Nostalgia. But then my Special Perspectives tended to get too apocalyptic. The universe being so vast, who planned it that our green earth and humanity should grow, why are we here, what is before and after, the span before and after life being so immeasurably longer than the span of life itself. I grew seedy hanging out in my pajamas all day trying to figure out the universe.
I kept thinking about atomic particles. Because we are made up of then. And consciousness resides in some of them, and they are never destroyed. And if you look at your television set when a channel is not operating properly and see little white things, those are photons left over from the big bang sixteen billion years ago. You may ask how I know all this. It is because there are a lot of nuclear physicists in Esperanza. There is an emphasis on science. Science nerds. That’s quite distinct in this part of California. Most of the nuclear physicists are Russian, and are the parents of my daughter’s friends. So at children’s birthday parties I take them aside and interrogate them about our atomic particles.
Then I dutifully go to my office in the garage and wallow in nothingness, trying to figure out the central mystery of our finite existence.
I also spend a lot of time with a group of squirming three-year-olds dressed up as ladybugs in a series of incredibly long and complex rehearsals for my daughter’s ballet recital. Intrigues ran high among the ladybugs. They formed cliques. They had tantrums. They were heartless. Their mothers snapped. I stayed backstage during the rehearsals marshaling kaleidoscopic varieties of ladybug trauma.
At the actual performance the audience was packed to bursting. The ladybugs were supposed to form a big ring on the stage holding hands, then skip around. Naturally they went too fast and one ladybug got caught in a spinning vortex causing the circle to snap like an electric cord pulled abruptly out of the socket. One ladybug ran to the edge of the stage all alone and started twirling around. Others were madly jumping up and down like human pogo sticks. One ladybug sobbed quietly and inconsolably in a corner – thank God not my daughter. Several ladybugs stared vacantly ahead, paralyzed.
My daughter was the last to leave the stage – trapped in the spotlight like a deer in the headlights. Finally, thank God, she turned a broad smile directly on the audience and scampered toward the wings with her awkward grace amid thunderous applause.
I was so relieved my daughter had not been scarred by the experience that I was walking on cloud nine. But I was crushed with guilt. For once they wheel you out of the delivery room, you carry out of it forever a mother’s guilt, no matter how good a mother you are, or how many ladybug rehearsals you attend.
After soothing the frayed nerves of a fifty-year-old man dressed as a giant duck who arrived in a souped-up Corvette to perform at my son’s birthday party, I realized I’m not the only one in a career slump.
Somehow when you hire a man over the phone to dress up as a giant duck at your son’s birthday party, you expect him to be maybe an enthusiastic college kid or a wholesome young camp counselor. Seeing as he never took off his costume, you might wonder how I even knew that he wasn’t a wholesome young camp counselor. It was the frail rasping voice and the delicate fumes of scotch that emboldened me to ask, in the course of making polite conversation, how old he was. Pretty soon the next thing I know he’s telling me how his wife left him, he lost his job, he’s broke, and if it weren’t for the napalm factory in Chicata closing down, he wouldn’t be dressed up like a children’s fairty-tale character sweating his brains out because it was hotter than hell in there.
In the costume.
That’s another thing about Esperanza. It’s supposed to be idyllic avocado farms and Mexican-style villages and orange groves, and then suddenly you find out there’s a napalm bomb factory just down the road with escaping napalm that they have to shut down. AVOCADO FESTIVAL NOT MARRED BY NAPALM LEAK the local headline will decry.
I guess it’s the dark side of paradise.
The Books: “Picnic” (William Inge)
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. Next play in my little unalphabetized pile of Samuel French plays is William Inge’s Picnic. Inge – one of THE biggest playwrights of the 1950s – his success…
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And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. Next play in my little unalphabetized pile of Samuel French plays is Clifford Odets’ marvelous The Big Knife. Odets wrote it about (and for) his good friend Cary…
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The Books: “At Home” (Michael Weller)
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. Next play in my little unalphabetized pile of Samuel French plays is a one-act by Michael Weller which I had completely forgotten about until this morning: At Home….
The Books: “Split” (Michael Weller)
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The Books: “serenading louie” (Lanford Wilson)
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The Books: “The Great Nebula in Orion” (Lanford Wilson)
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The Books: “The Owl and the Pussycat” (Bill Manhoff)
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. Next play in my little unalphabetized pile of Samuel French plays is The Owl and the Pussycat , by Bill Manhoff I remember seeing the film version of…
The Books: “The Ritz Of The Bayou – The New Orleans Adventures Of A Young Novelist Covering The Trials Of The Governor Of Louisiana, with digressions on smoldering nightclubs, jazz-crazed bars, and other aspects of life in the tropic zone” (Nancy Lemann)
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The Books: “Reckless” (Craig Lucas)
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. Next play in my little unalphabetized pile of Samuel French plays is Reckless, by Craig Lucas I did this play in college. It’s one of the funnest craziest…
The Books: “Coastal Disturbances” (Tina Howe)
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. Next play in my little unalphabetized pile of Samuel French plays is Coastal Disturbances, by Tina Howe I wrote more about Tina Howe’s plays here. Coastal Disturbances got…
The Books: “Laughing Wild” (Christopher Durang)
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. Next play in my little unalphabetized pile of Samuel French plays is Laughing Wild, by Christopher Durang A two-person play about two absolute wack-jobs. The woman is literally…
The Books: “Hello Out There” (William Saroyan)
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The Books: “Andromache” (Jean Racine)
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The Books: “My Cup Ranneth Over” (Robert Patrick)
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The Books: “The Country Girl” (Clifford Odets)
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The Books: “Standing On My Knees” (John Olive)
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The Books: “The Flowering Peach” (Clifford Odets)
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The Books: “The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches”
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The Books: “Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey” (Fouad Ajami)
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The Books: “Crowds and Power” (Elias Canetti)
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Nancy Lemann lives in Chevy Chase MD now. She and family moved there about the same time Malaise was published.
I live in San Diego and she used to be listed in the phone book so one day I called her up (in the late ’90’s). I too love her books and was pleased to meet her and exchange several meaningful conversations.
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The Books: “Sexaholics” (Murray Schisgal)
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The Books: “Anne of Green Gables” (adapted by Donald Harron)
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The Books: “Mary of Scotland” (Maxwell Anderson)
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The Books: “Here” (Michael Frayn)
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