Benjamin Markovits (Contemporary Writers) [1 ed.] 1032614900, 9781032614908

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BENJAMIN MARKOVITS

Benjamin Markovits is a leading Anglo-​American novelist with a varied and ambitious body of work, ranging from a trilogy of historical fictions on the life of Lord Byron (Imposture, 2007; A Quiet Adjustment, 2008; Childish Loves, 2011) to an award-​winning portrayal of a gentrification project in Obama-​era Detroit (You Don’t Have to Live Like This, 2015) to intimate studies of contemporary family life (A Weekend in New York, 2018; Christmas in Austin, 2019). Prolific and unpredictable, Markovits is one of the most interesting realist writers working today. Featuring contributions from emerging and established scholars, this collection provides fresh perspectives on Markovits’s place in the contemporary literary field, as well as offering a detailed survey of his work to date. The collection begins with Markovits’s early ‘campus novel’, The Syme Papers (2004), before exploring his celebrated ‘Byron Trilogy’, and the 2005 story cycle, Either Side of Winter. Contributors consider Markovits’s best-​known book, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which won the James Tait Memorial Prize, as well as his more recent fictions focusing on the trials and tribulations of the Essinger family. Taken together, this authoritative collection brings to light the many preoccupations of Markovits’s singular oeuvre—​from Byron to basketball, from race relations to real estate. It also includes a frank and wide-​ranging interview with the author. The collection will be a first port of call for students and scholars in search of a comprehensive introduction to the work of one of our most exciting contemporary novelists. Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in Twentieth-​and Twenty-​First-​Century American Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (2021).

Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays Series Editor: Sarah Dillon

Originally published with Gylphi from 2011–​2022, the Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series has pioneered a unique approach to the academic study of living authors. The titles in the series are devoted to contemporary Anglophone writers whose work is popularly and critically valued but on whom a significant body of academic criticism has yet to be established. The series covers writers of all forms, from those penning long and short fiction, to poets, dramatists, and authors of creative non-​fiction. The books in the series develop out of the best contributions to an international academic conference, which the writer attends. They represent the most intelligent and provocative material in current thinking about the writer’s work, and they suggest future avenues of thought, comparison and analysis. With each title prefaced by an author foreword, the series embraces the challenges of writing on living authors and provides the foundation stones for future critical work on our most significant contemporary writers. Benjamin Markovits Edited by Michael Kalisch

For more information about the series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​Conte​mpor​ary-​Writ​ers/​book-​ ser​ies/​CWCE

BENJAMIN MARKOVITS Critical Essays

Edited by Michael Kalisch

Designed cover image: © Barney Cokeliss First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Foreword © 2024 Benjamin Markovits © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Michael Kalisch; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Michael Kalisch to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​61490-​8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​61491-​5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​61489-​2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781032614892 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Foreword by Benjamin Markovits Acknowledgements Abbreviations

Introduction: A Life Elsewhere Michael Kalisch

1 The Loneliness of the Long-​Distance Academic: The Syme Papers and Singularity Sam Reese 2 The Byron Novels Peter Graham

vii ix xii xiii 1

7

20

3 ‘What Hasn’t Happened to You’: Telling Failure in Either Side of Winter and You Don’t Have to Live Like This Rachael McLennan

35

4 ‘Everybody got they role to play’: Basketball and Belonging in Playing Days Joshua Clayton

49

vi Contents

5 ‘The world seemed very large around me’: Urban Regeneration and the Sublime in Benjamin Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This James Peacock

64

6 Temporary Concerns: The Limits of Meritocracy in You Don’t Have to Live Like This Lola Boorman

81

7 Strategies of Self-​Detachment and ‘The Business of Daily Life’ in the Fiction of Benjamin Markovits David Brauner

95

8 Manners, Morals, and the Essingers: A Weekend in New York and Christmas in Austin Michael Kalisch

109

9 A Conversation with Benjamin Markovits Benjamin Markovits and Kasia Boddy

120

Index

142

CONTRIBUTORS

Kasia Boddy is Professor of American Literature at the University of Cambridge.

She has published widely on contemporary U.S. fiction including interviews with Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, and Kathy Acker. Lola Boorman is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University

of York.

David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of

Reading. He is co-​editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction (2015) and the author of four books: Post-​War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-​ Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave/​Macmillan, 2001); Philip Roth (Manchester UP, 2007); Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh UP, 2010); and Howard Jacobson (Manchester University Press, 2020). Joshua Clayton recently received his PhD from the University of Cambridge,

where his doctoral research explored correspondences between forms of fiction and forms of friendship in the work of Saul Bellow. Peter Graham, Emeritus Professor of English at Virginia Tech, has published

widely on nineteenth-​century British literature and culture, in particular on Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and Charles Darwin. Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in Twentieth-​and Twenty-​First-​Century American

Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (Manchester UP, 2021).

viii Contributors

Rachael McLennan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the

University of East Anglia.

James Peacock is Reader in English and American Literatures at Keele University.

He specialises in contemporary fiction, and is the author of Jonathan Lethem (Manchester UP, 2012) and Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age (Bloomsbury, 2015). His current project concerns contemporary fiction’s engagements with urban gentrification in cities including New York, London, Mumbai, Vancouver, Detroit and Edinburgh. Sam Reese is Senior Lecturer at York St John University. His first monograph, The

Short Story in Midcentury America, won the Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize, and he is currently working on a new theory of the short story. He has published two collections of short fiction, a critical study of jazz, literature, and loneliness, and edited the notebooks of Sonny Rollins for NYRB.

FOREWORD

I read these essays at the end of my teaching term and a few weeks after The Sidekick came out. In other words, before the kids’ school broke up and the summer began. I was writing a few pieces to help promote the new novel but not doing much real work, just trying to keep at bay the fairly intense self-​absorption that comes with publishing a novel, and which you try to hide from other people. I’m not sure reading this collection helped much. One of the first things I ever wrote for publication was a short review of a reprint of a Dawn Powell novel—​Come Back to Sorrento, I think it was, though to write those 400 words for the TLS I read not only Sorrento but also six of her other novels and the 500-​plus-​page volume of her diaries. Maybe it was the diaries I was supposed to review. Anyway, there was a line in them that stuck with me. She described the build-​up to publication as the ‘calm before the calm’—​a phrase I’ve heard other writers pass around and that gets attributed to different sources. Two years later, I sold my first novel. In the weeks before publication, in spite of that calm, I felt an urgent anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to write another. The Syme Papers had taken me over a decade to finish (I started it as a sophomore in college) though really what that means is that I needed three years to reach the end of a first draft, and then about six or seven more while it and several subsequent drafts got rejected. At some point I stumbled on an agent, who asked me to rewrite it again, which I did more or less from scratch. The final manuscript was three times as long as the first and contained very little of the original. I was 30 when Faber published it, two months after I got married. I joked at the launch party; this is like a wedding that you don’t have to share with anybody. But in fact I didn’t much like the experience of publication even then. It’s a little like standing in the school playground at lunch time, wondering if anyone’s going to talk to you—​except on a much larger scale so that it feels like hundreds of

x Foreword

decisions are being made about you all the time, by people you know and people you don’t know, booksellers, punters, friends, prize judges, reviewers, editors, publicists, agents, and so on. All of which feeds this constant awareness of how you measure up in the eyes of others, and a feeling that whatever they say in some way relates to you—​which is obviously delusional though also on some level usually true. In A Weekend in New York, I drew on these feelings to describe Paul Essinger’s state of mind before a tournament begins: ‘his attention span for other people was incredibly small at the moment—​like one of those hardened arteries that can barely let through the oxygenated blood’. Obviously the pressure on Paul was much heavier than anything I ever felt. What he had to do was go out and lose in front of a live audience of several thousand people, which included his girlfriend and son and all of his immediate family. Whereas I didn’t really have to do anything when The Sidekick came out. Except write a few pieces and read these essays and write something about them, too. If this makes it sound like a chore or another burden, that is the opposite of what reading these essays was like. It felt like smart people were talking to me in the playground, even if some of them had mixed feelings about it. It was also like holding up a funny kind of mirror or seeing your face emerging under the hand of a police sketch artist. There’s plenty here for me to recognise. The ambivalence about campus novels described by Sam Reese is something I felt not just when I wrote The Syme Papers, but when I graduated from Yale and tried to become a basketball player. I wanted to enter the real world. This is what I told my friends, semi-​ironically, after Michael Milz, my new basketball agent, faxed me a contract to the Dean’s office, and I carried those thin pages with me to the dining hall to show off. But after a few months of playing basketball, I quit and signed up for grad school. Campus life didn’t seem that much less real than the alternatives. Joshua Clayton in his essay on Playing Days talks about my interest in hybrid identities: such an ambiguity of belonging reflects the novel’s exploration of a specific kind of Jewish experience—​that of being half-​Jewish or part-​Jewish. Like its narrator, the book is also in-​between: a Jewish novel, a sports novel, an autobiographical novel, an outsider novel that can be seen as translating or migrating across genres and identities. It seemed to me, even as a kid, that half an identity was really quite a lot—​ half-​Jewish seemed pretty Jewish, especially in Texas; half-​German seemed pretty German. We went to synagogue for the High Holidays, we spoke mish-​mash at the dinner table. Each of these identities was centred in one figure, my dad, my mom. I had other identities in much more diluted form. Often the writers know more about their subjects than I do. Like Peter Graham on the Romantics, which makes it fun for me to watch him track down the

Foreword  xi

anachronisms in the Byron Trilogy. (Not all of which were intentional. As one reviewer pointed out, I tended to give my clergymen beards, when they didn’t start wearing them until Victorian times. My mistake, not Sullivan’s.) Childish Loves is really the only novel where I tried to hide a key under the carpet and then lifted the carpet. A kind of Penn and Teller strategy because the reveal is often more interesting than the illusion. But I also believe the Stoppard line Graham quotes, that there is no particular virtue to accuracy if it is not the right kind of accuracy, and no particular vice to inaccuracy, if it is not the wrong kind. And yet … Some of the details discussed as literary tropes—​for example, that shed in the back yard where the black servant used to live, which Michael Kalisch writes about in ‘Manners, Morals and the Essingers’—​I put in for exactly the reasons described: to suggest the tension between ordinary happy family life and the larger political context that family life involves you in. But I also included it because the old woman who sold my parents our house had a servant who lived in such a shed. We called it the playhouse but never really used it, because for most of the year it was too hot. So the place has a vividness for me, and strangeness, that no interpretive purpose can contain. As I read through the collection, I tried to work out how much these pictures of my novels resemble the novels I meant to write, and to what extent the novels themselves reflect what I’m actually like or think. In most cases, quite a lot, though I sometimes felt a little sorry for Marny, the narrator of You Don’t Have to Live Like This, who features in several essays. Any bad light he appears in, he shined on himself, which seems to me a basically likable quality. And whatever else he failed to do, whatever crises he failed to act in, he did do several unusual and even remarkable things: he left an academic career to move to Detroit, he bought a house in an abandoned neighbourhood and fixed it up, he got a job at one of the local schools. Even when the experiment failed, he stayed on. The most unconventional step I ever took was playing basketball in Germany, and I lasted less than half a year. But the essays also make clear to me that there are things I’ve left out of the novels, which I should probably try to address in future books. Most of my characters lead pretty good lives; maybe they should be happier than they are. Benjamin Markovits

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to the contributors—​Sam Reese, Peter Graham, Rachael McLennan, Josh Clayton, Jim Peacock, Lola Boorman, and David Brauner—​for their hard work, patience, and encouragement. Thank you to Kasia Boddy for asking great questions. Thank you to Sarah Dillon for backing the book, and to Karen Raith at Routledge for making it possible. Thank you to Harriet Baker, who has heard a lot about it. And thank you to Ben Markovits for letting us do this and for being such a good sport about it.

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ABBREVIATIONS

SP ESW I QA PD CL YDHT WNY CA SK

The Syme Papers (2004) Either Side of Winter (2005) Imposture (2007) A Quiet Adjustment (2008) Playing Days (2010) Childish Loves (2011) You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015) A Weekend in New York (2018) Christmas in Austin (2019) The Sidekick (2022)

INTRODUCTION A Life Elsewhere Michael Kalisch

Benjamin Markovits is the author of eleven novels. The winner of the 2016 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and a 2009 Pushcart Prize, he was the recipient of the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award in 2015. He held a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard in 2009 and in 2013 was selected by Granta magazine as one of the Best of Young British Novelists. In addition to his fiction for adults, Markovits has published a YA novel, Home Games (2020). He writes regularly on literature, culture, and sport for the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, and the Guardian. An established and acclaimed author, it is perhaps surprising that Markovits has not already been the subject of a collection of essays like this one; a critical appraisal of his work is overdue. Nevertheless, this is also a somewhat risky moment to be judging Markovits’s achievement. At the time of writing, he has published the first two instalments of an anticipated quartet of novel about a single family, the Essingers, and so is in the middle of his most ambitious literary project to date, one which could prove to be the cornerstone of his future critical reputation. Most recently, he has put the Essingers aside to focus on The Sidekick (2022), a sports novel in which male friendship and race relations intersect. The course of his career seems, excitingly, still up in the air. But Markovits has always been an unpredictable writer, which perhaps helps explain why he has so far eluded academic consideration. A loose trilogy of metafictions on the life and loves of Lord Byron? A semi-​autobiographical work about an American playing professional basketball in Germany? A novel centred around a part-​Jewish family titled Christmas in Austin (2019)? Such an unusual range of subjects and interests makes summarising his oeuvre or categorising his work—​let alone predicting what he might do next—​a difficult task. Markovits is hard to pin down in other ways, too. Born in California, he was raised mostly DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-1

2  Michael Kalisch

in Austin, Texas, but also spent time growing up in Oxford, London, and Berlin. Educated at Yale and Oxford, for much of his career as a writer he has been based in London, where he lives with his family (he is married to the writer, Caroline Maclean) and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. ‘I think of myself as American’, Markovits told an interviewer in 2011. ‘I follow American politics and check up on American sports, even in England’ (Markovits 2011b). In a 2013 essay for the LRB, however, he describes himself a little differently, as ‘a naturalised Brit who spent about a third of his childhood in England’ (Markovits 2013), while in the interview with Kasia Boddy in this collection, he calls himself ‘a half-​German, half-​Jew, half-​American’. The son of an American Jewish father and a German, non-​Jewish mother, Markovits was raised in a not particularly observant but culturally fairly Jewish home. ‘By Austin standards, I was plenty Jewish enough for my reform synagogue’ (Markovits 2019), he has said. He and his siblings grew up speaking both English and German. ‘Germanness and Jewishness turned out to be the same kind of thing’ for them, he writes in a 2019 essay. ‘A source of difference, connected to our parents and their childhoods, which we took pride in’. Like their German identity, Jewishness offered the Markovits kids ‘not a community but a sense that we had a life, or at least a history, elsewhere’ (Markovits 2019). This sense of a life or history elsewhere permeates his novels, wherein middle-​ class cosmopolitan ennui blends with a more existential feeling of rootlessness or dislocation. His narratives are sometimes set in America, sometimes in Europe, and sometimes between the two, and often feature characters managing complicated transatlantic lives. Much of Markovits’s work seems to also travel between the literary traditions of his native and adopted homelands without ever quite fully belonging to either, such that critics have hesitated to read his work alongside either his British or American contemporaries. Stylistically, Markovits may be said to have migrated from a form of recursive metafiction in his earlier work to a more straight-​bat kind of realism in his recent novels, and from high-​wire concept fictions to domestic dramas; but even this is to simplify the aesthetic journey made across his career. He is, in other words, a difficult writer to place. The essays in this volume offer a variety of ways to understand and situate Markovits’s diverse and distinctive body of work. The first such collection dedicated to his writing, the book aims to offer an introduction to his fiction for new readers, and to open up fresh avenues of enquiry for further scholarly exploration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a centre of gravity in the collection is Markovits’s 2015 novel, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which is wholly or partly the subject of three of the essays and is mentioned by almost all contributors. The novel won the James Tait Black Prize and garnered more press coverage than Markovits’s previous novels; for many readers, this was their first exposure to his work. It’s not hard to see why the book took off. Chronicling the rise and fall of a ‘regeneration’ project in Detroit following the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the novel engages with issues that have shaped America’s recent and more distant past—​racial injustice,

Introduction  3

urban white flight, gentrification, and the conditions of late capitalism—​and was read and reviewed as recognisably a ‘state-​of-​the-​nation’ novel (it even features a cameo from Obama). The essays that follow complicate and provide nuance to this reading of the novel. Particular attention is paid to the role of Markovits’s elusive, detached narrator, Greg ‘Marny’ Marnier, a failing academic and self-​described ‘periphery guy’ (YDHT, 26) who signs up for ‘Starting-​From-​Scratch-​in-​America’, as the Detroit project is called. In her essay, Lola Boorman reads the novel as concerned with ‘the paradoxes of telling a meritocratic narrative in an era of financial collapse’, pursuing an affinity between this theme and the recent work of Markovits’s brother, Daniel, a Professor of Law at Yale and author of The Meritocracy Trap (2019). ‘Throughout the novel we witness Marny struggle to reconcile pervasive myths and ideologies about work, achievement, reproduction, education, and happiness’, Boorman writes, ‘with an environment dominated by material collapse, social fracture, inequality, and generational stagnation or decline’. Rachael McLennan in her essay similarly critiques Marny’s ‘often inadequate’ understanding of the ‘structural factors’ underwriting the Detroit project, which leads her to suggest that Marny is ultimately more interested in his ‘individual survival’ than the wider meanings of the ‘national experiment’ of which he is an ambivalent participant. In his reading, James Peacock reaches a slightly different conclusion. He describes Marny as ‘a narrator who shifts between disengagement and commitment, flashes of self-​awareness and frustrating nescience’. But, he argues, the ‘limitations’ of Marny’s narrative are ‘key to Markovits’s critique’ of the ‘financialisation of housing’ in contemporary America. Drawing on Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, Peacock explores how and why, ‘despite glimpses of the machinations of big business and politics, and the momentary anxiety they cause him’, Marny’s comprehension of the embedded role of global capital in his ‘local’ redevelopment scheme remains ‘fragmented’, arguing that Markovits ‘encourages the reader […] to connect the fragments in ways Marny refuses to do’. Because it was, in some respects, his ‘breakthrough’ book, it is tempting to frame You Don’t Have to Live Like This as marking a new phase in Markovits’s writing. But the essays in this volume more insistently stress the continuities and connections across his oeuvre. McLennan, for example, reads the Detroit novel alongside Markovits’s second book Either Side of Winter (2005), arguing that both are ‘preoccupied with failure’ and ‘populated with characters who seek an alternative to their present circumstances’ but who seem unwilling or unable to imagine other kinds of futurity, whether for themselves or for those around them. Sam Reese, in his essay on The Syme Papers (2004), suggests that failure of one sort or another has been a crucial theme for Markovits from the start of his career. This Nabokovian debut novel follows the quest of researcher Douglas Pitt to prove that a forgotten, maverick nineteenth-​century American geologist, Samuel Syme, is the missing link in the history of the theory of continental drift. The novel alternates between Pitt’s narrative and the memoir he discovers of

4  Michael Kalisch

Syme’s friend and collaborator, Friedrich Müller, and thus displays Markovits’s uncanny knack for imitating a nineteenth-​century narrative voice and prose style, something with which he would continue to experiment in his novels about Lord Byron. The Syme Papers is a portrait of the intense identifications that can form during academic research between scholar and subject, a paean to intellectual crankiness, and a peculiar kind of ‘campus novel’, Reese explains. Exploring how the novel’s central characters all seem not so much to suffer but aspire to a state of intellectual isolation or obscurity, Reese argues that ‘the loneliness of The Syme Papers […] represents a choice by characters to stand outside the institutional and generic conservatism that pushes researchers towards conformity and away from singularity’. In their ‘rejection of group belonging’ and ‘removal to spaces outside of the campus itself’, Reese suggests, the protagonists betray a ‘deep distrust of the university and its institutional politics’. Pitt is hardly the last disillusioned teacher or academic to appear in Markovits’s work. Either Side of Winter’s Howard Peasbody is one such disenchanted educator, and Marny is a highly ‘credentialised’ but profoundly alienated early career historian, while Markovits’s more recent Essinger books—​A Weekend in New York (2018) and Christmas in Austin—​centre around a family who live their lives in the orbit of various prestigious universities (Markovits’s latest short story, ‘The Conference’ (2022), also has a university setting, this time in London). The Byron novels—​Imposture (2007), A Quiet Adjustment (2008), and Childish Loves (2011)—​share with Markovits’s first book an interest in academic obsession and the pleasures of literary sleuthing. They are historical fictions of an unusual sort. Focusing on the life and passions of the Romantic poet, they are also a portrait of teacher Peter Sullivan, ‘author’ of the first two novels, and of a character called ‘Ben Markovits’, who is bequeathed and publishes Sullivan’s manuscripts, and consequently develops a keen interest in the other man’s life. The novels therefore have a flashily self-​reflexive narrative apparatus; but this, as Peter Graham suggests in his essay, is in keeping with Byron’s own penchant for literary trickery. ‘He was brilliant’, Graham writes of Byron, ‘in a way that postmodern writers aspire to be but have never surpassed, at deploying sincerity as an understood convention and at performing self-​expression as if it were the real thing’. In his careful unpicking of the layers of metafiction and tracing of the myriad literary allusions in the three narratives, Graham reveals the novels to be not only an homage to Byron, but also engaged in an intertextual dialogue with the work of Henry James (another ‘naturalised Brit’) and Jane Austen, suggestive of how Markovits’s fiction often combines unlikely American and British influences. In the third novel, Childish Loves, the ‘Ben Markovits’ character comes to the fore, and the blurring of the line between fiction and autobiography—​already present in the earlier books—​becomes more pervasive. This narrative alter-​ego even alludes to Playing Days (2010), which Markovits published between the second and third Byron books: ‘A quiet memoir of my first long year after college, which I spent playing minor-​league basketball in Germany’ (CL, 12) is how ‘Ben

Introduction  5

Markovits’ describes the work, which was subtitled and promoted as ‘a novel’. Byron to basketball might seem like quite a jump; but, in its subtle, quiet blending of life-​writing and invention, Playing Days is of a piece with Markovits’s more outlandish formal experiments. In his essay, Joshua Clayton celebrates Playing Days as that rarest of literary beasts—​a good sports novel (with The Sidekick, Markovits has chalked up another). But Clayton also reveals how the novel tracks the efforts of its protagonist, Ben, to define a role for himself—​as an American, as a son, as Jewish. Ben’s biography closely echoes Markovits’s own, including the brief overseas basketball career. Like other Markovits protagonists, Ben seems somewhat attracted to the anonymity of mediocrity and pleased by the simple if brutal way that professional sport exposes the limits of your talent. Ben might be another character under the spell of failure, then, but he is also quietly focused and ambitious. Unlike some of the other players in the league, Ben only sees basketball as a stop gap between college and his real vocation—​writing. As Clayton demonstrates, Ben’s unglamorous position in the team is good preparation for his future career. On the court, Ben is a ‘role player’, a player of ‘who never rises to stardom but who can be relied upon for particular contributions at opportune times’, as Clayton glosses—​a ‘benchwarmer’, and so well-​placed to observe and narrate the action. His position off the court, meanwhile, is that of Dolmetscher, as his teammates nickname him, meaning translator or interpreter. This refers to his ability to speak both English and German, but it also seems to capture his position as go-​between or intermediary in the team, and his own unobtrusive, unassuming position as an only ever-​partially self-​disclosing narrator—​another ‘periphery guy’. In a wide-​ranging essay discussing Either Side of Winter and the Essinger novels, David Brauner interrogates this proclivity for detachment exhibited by many of Markovits’s central characters. Analysing the ‘strategies’ by which his protagonists attempt to ‘extricate themselves from the messy contingencies of erotic desire and the tangled commitments of family life’, Brauner suggests that Markovits’s fiction sounds a note of caution as to ‘how easy it is for quiet reflection to lead to self-​absorption; to slip from quietude into quiescence, and from quiescence into an indifference to human intimacy that can be damaging both to the self and others’. Brauner demonstrates how Paul, an aging tennis pro and central character in A Weekend in New York, is both attracted to and repelled by the intensities and mundanities of familial life, and argues that, in their close attention to domestic arrangements, pressures, and histories, the Essinger novels represent a subtle but radical reimagining of ‘the possibilities of the contemporary novel’. In this regard, my own essay on the Essinger novels follows Brauner’s analysis. I suggest that in these recent works we can see Markovits reviving a certain form of the middle-​class ‘novel of manners’—​practiced by James, among others—​in which family life becomes a kind of moral theatre. Thus the collection closes by suggesting that Markovits, after eleven books, is currently in the midst of his most important work to date.

6  Michael Kalisch

The essays are supplemented by a frank and fascinating conversation between Markovits and Kasia Boddy which offers many plain-​spoken insights into the craft of fiction writing. In the interview, Markovits discusses the impetus behind his latest novel, The Sidekick, which appeared as this book was going to press, and reflects on his interest in ‘outsider types of one kind or another’. Responding to the essays in this collection, he explains why he finds himself drawn in his fiction to thorny issue of race, privilege, competition, and family tensions: ‘If something makes you uncomfortable’, he says, ‘it’s a good indication that it matters to you’. It is our hope that the pieces that follow help locate Markovits’s work in the contemporary literary field, illuminate the richness and variety of his fiction so far, and introduce his writing to new readers within and beyond the academy. Works Cited Markovits, Benjamin (2011a) Childish Loves. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​(2011b) ‘Benjamin Markovits Interviewed by Michael Leonards,’ www.curle​dup. com/​int_​be​n_​ma​rkov​its.htm —​—​—​ (2013) ‘Success.’ London Review of Books, 36 (21), 7 November 2013, www.lrb. co.uk/​the-​paper/​v35/​n21/​benja​min-​markov​its/​succ​ess —​—​—​ (2015) You Don’t Have to Live Like This. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2019) ‘German Jewish.’ Tablet, 22 February 2019, www.tablet​mag.com/​secti​ons/​ arts-​lett​ers/​artic​les/​markov​its-​ger​man-​jew​ish

1 THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-​DISTANCE ACADEMIC The Syme Papers and Singularity Sam Reese

Benjamin Markovits has acknowledged that it was perhaps inevitable his fiction would centre on intellectuals. ‘The truth is’, the author admitted in one interview, ‘I’m the child of academics and grew up, like many people, knowing nothing better than the world of school’ (Markovits 2008). The twin impressions of ‘school’ and ‘academics’ are felt across Markovits’s oeuvre, sometimes more autobiographically, as in 2010’s Playing Days, and sometimes further in the background, as in his James Tait Black Prize winning You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015) (where the protagonist’s experiences at Yale and Oxford nonetheless shadow Markovits’s own). Even when his characters share less of their academic CV with their author, the influence of academia can still be found in his novels’ intellectual themes and questions—​to say nothing of the choice of characters. Is it a coincidence that Byron, subject of Markovits’s celebrated trilogy, was also his academic subject at university? Should we be surprised at his focus on certain historical periods, particular kinds of relationships, and a familiar narrative arc, focused on education, self-​definition, and the push-​pull dynamic of collaboration and isolation? But while Markovits frequently, even obsessively ‘write[s]‌about teachers, professors and students’, he also takes pains to ‘distinguish between The Syme Papers, which is properly a campus novel, and the other books’ (Markovits 2008). Even without Markovits’s distinction, it would be hard not to view The Syme Papers (2004) as working within the campus genre. From its opening pages, his debut novel signals its allegiance: struggling academic, Dr. Doug Pitt (‘on a Fulbright as it happens’) is searching the British Library for something, ‘anything’, that will allow him to ‘finish the book, publish (publish!), scoot home’, and, most pressingly, ‘win tenure’ (SP, 7). Pitt’s chance discovery, an obscure figure whom he immediately terms ‘my undiscovered genius’, proves to be another academic: ‘Professor’ Sam Syme an early American geologist, former boxer and DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-2

8  Sam Reese

soldier, erstwhile surveyor and tinkerer, and (so Pitt believes) the missing link in the history of the theory of continental drift. Pitt’s journey towards vindication (for his theory, and for Syme’s) takes him first to Germany, then back to Austin, Texas, where he gradually uncovers more of Syme’s story. The key piece of evidence proves to be a second academic novel—​presented diegetically as a memoir—​ embedded within Pitt’s story. Between Syme’s story, and Pitt’s, it might have been more accurate for Markovits to use the phrase campus novels. Still, why should we care about Markovits’s distinction? Separating The Syme Papers off from his later novels might seem to be drawing an unnecessary, even misleading, line. In its structure (parallel lives), in its intense questioning of how we measure up to others, even in its geography (the recurring network of Oxford, Germany, New York, and Austin), The Syme Papers bears all the hallmarks of Markovits’s succeeding books. In many ways, it can be read as a prototype for later themes and plots. To consign this novel, and this novel alone, to the realm of ‘genre fiction’ seems to play into the hands of critics, who have tended to either ignore The Syme Papers or treat it as a low watermark against which his later work is judged—​what one reviewer termed a ‘false start’ (Anderson 2005, 14). Indeed, taking Markovits at his word and reading novel as a straight ‘campus novel’ could lead readers towards something of a dead end. Yes, the genre’s framework helps to make sense of the novel’s tone—​the gentle satire of academia, research culture, and most particularly, the primary narrator, Pitt—​and helps account for the odd structure. But the genre’s conventions also fail to match up with the novel’s narrative development, which maps the inverse of the typical campus bildungsroman and instead charts a kind of disintegration—​to say nothing of the novel’s settings. For though Pitt and Syme are both academics (of sorts), they also turn their backs firmly on the world of academia and spend as much energy as possible avoiding the campus that gives the genre its name. This distance is not simply physical; Pitt, Syme, and the narrator of the embedded memoir, the German Friedrich Müller, nicknamed ‘Phidy’, all share an emotional distance from those around them. This doubling of isolation is significant. The campus of the campus novel does not simply signify a space, but also a network of connections, affiliations, and a discourse that allows for a shared identity (whatever rivalries and politics might be simmering away beneath that network)—​but The Syme Papers, by contrast, is an overwhelmingly lonely book. The protagonists profess repeatedly that they ‘suffer greatly from the demands of solitude’ (132)—​ and Markovits takes pains to stress that this is a solitude they deliberately seek. Phidy notes that ‘what drew me chiefly to these delights [his childhood hobbies] was their solitude’ (137) while Pitt almost fetishises the ‘peculiar loneliness to historical research, for which he admits “one acquires a taste” ’ (57). Physically and emotionally, the novel works against the grain of its own genre. Rather than undercutting Markovits’s interpretation of his novel, though, this re-​ orientation of the campus novel away from sociability and towards loneliness is central to understanding the novel’s work. At once critiquing and expanding the

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conventions of the campus novel, The Syme Papers reveals the ways that the social entanglements of the academic world actually deepen and entrench loneliness. Pitt, Syme, and Phidy all struggle with aspirations towards singularity and a deep-​ seated fear of mediocrity. Reading for the pathway that Markovits charts between these competing pressures (elevation and diminishment) allows us to see the way the novel unravels the conventions of its own genre and opens out a new vista for understanding key themes and patterns in Markovits’s later works. In part, the divided interests of The Syme Papers reflect the larger life cycle of the campus novel circa 2004. The genre had just passed its fiftieth birthday and, as Robert F Scott wrote the same year The Syme Papers was published, ‘there is a contingent of critics who argue that the current campus novel is in a state of crisis’ (Scott 2004, 81). Writers had sketched fictions around universities before the 1950s, of course—​chiefly murder mysteries or bildungsroman—​but it was Mary McCarthy’s 1952 novel The Groves of Academe that set the template for future campus novels. McCarthy’s fiction had already circled around academics and intellectuals (punning on the titles of McCarthy’s first two short story collections, Alice Morris’ review in the New York Times noted that ‘the intellectual and the would-​be intellectual in their several callings’ are ‘the company [McCarthy] keeps and on which she casts a cold eye brightly’ [Morris, 1952]), and her 1949 novella, The Oasis, had sketched out a satirical portrait of a pseudo-​intellectual attempt at utopia in New England. But The Groves of Academe paired a clear geographical focus on the campus as a kind of closed world or microcosm with a satirical tone and plot structures focused on competition, rivalries, and affairs between faculty (and, to varying degrees, students). McCarthy drew directly (and without much veiling) on her own experiences teaching at Bard and Sarah Lawrence, and future campus novels have tended to be read, to some degree, as romans à clef, too. But even when the silhouettes of real figures appear, the satire of campus novels in the McCarthy mould tends to be comparatively gentle and inclined towards the universal; as Scott notes, these sort of works tend to focus their attention on ‘the absurdity and despair of university life; the colorful, often neurotic personalities who inhabit academia; and the ideological rivalries which thrive in campus communities’ (Scott 2004, 83). Both qualities of this satire—​its universal, fable-​like implications, and its comparatively gentle thrust—​derive from the way McCarthy and others construct the world of the university campus as a microcosm: a miniature of the world, where the stakes are commensurately smaller, and where the limits of the campus itself seem to demarcate a safe space for critique. As David Lodge, himself the author of some of the most prominent British campus novels, explains: Academic conflicts are relatively harmless, safely insulated from the real world and its sombre concerns—​or capable of transforming those concerns into a form of stylized play. Essentially the campus novel is a modern, displaced form of pastoral, as Mary McCarthy recognized by calling her classic contribution to the

10  Sam Reese

genre The Groves of Academe. That is why it belongs to the literature of escape, and why we never tire of it. (Lodge 2008) It is telling that Lodge’s second ‘Academic Romance’ was titled Small World (1984)—​the novel, like McCarthy’s, views academia as an accumulation of ‘its own distinctive customs, seasons, rituals, and foibles, where the factors that motivate human behaviour—​power, ambition, rivalry, lust, anxiety—​can be displayed and anatomised’ (Lodge 2008). While, on the one hand, many of the most successful authors in the genre—​including McCarthy, Lodge, and Vladimir Nabokov, whose 1957 campus novel Pnin I discuss later in this essay—​were themselves insiders, whose works included rich veins of self-​referential or meta-​critical asides, on the other, the detached, self-​contained world of the campus allowed these writers to explore universal questions about human behaviour. While many of the contours of McCarthy’s template can still be seen clearly in recent campus fictions, as the twentieth century progressed, the genre also began to bifurcate. One strand of the genre became more individualistic while another—​ focused squarely on the campus as a society in miniature—​developed a much stronger and more pointed social critique. In part, this split is a natural extension of the way genres evolve. As John Frow explains, the ‘shifting hierarchy within the larger system of literary genres entails tensions between “higher” and “lower” genres, a constant alternation of the dominant form, and a constant renewal of genres through processes of specialisation or recombination’ (Frow 2006, 71). Like other ‘high’ genres, the campus novel has increasingly drawn on elements from ‘lower’ genres—​a tendency best exemplified by the two most critically and commercially successful campus novels of the 1990s: A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992). Both novels draw on the structures and tropes of the typically low-​cultural genre of detective story, without sacrificing the high-​ culture investments of academia (cleaving closely to the worlds of, respectively, nineteenth-​century British poetry and classical Greece). Given that early novels set on university (or even school) campuses tended to follow a bildungsroman narrative arc, it is hardly surprising that the genre should return to this strain of individualism—​and, with it, shift its focus from faculty to student. But, as a genre defined by a particular social institution (the university) and, from its inception, connected to different lines of cultural rhetoric around that institution’s role, these changes are also closely connected to the development of national debates around the role of education. As Christopher Findeisen explains, the campus novel (at least in the U.S.) tends to replicate ‘a dominant cultural narrative that understands education as the essential technology for producing American egalitarianism through meritocratic class mobility’ (Findeisen 2015, 288). In other words, the shift towards novels that are oriented around individual students’ personal development reiterates a cultural rhetoric that yokes education to a liberal model of self-​improvement. At the same time, another strain of the

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Academic  11

genre—​one that emphasises the campus-​as-​small-​world—​has honed the broad, universal satire of earlier writers into a much more specific and stringent social critique. Again, this shift follows both a rather familiar refinement of a generic quality and larger social changes in the way that university campuses are seen. Jeffrey T. Williams notes that, from 1990 ‘the university was assumed to be a main battlefield of American culture, and the academic novel became a kind of roman à clef of current cultural politics’; by magnifying the stakes within the microcosm of the university, this strain ‘takes otherwise specialized debates about literary theory and the literary canon to be of direct social importance, and personifies wars of ideas, the plots typically turning on struggles over gender, race, and sex’ (Williams 2012, 570). Rather than a pastoral retreat, or light satire on human foibles, the contemporary campus novel promises an incisive view into how an individual mind has come to be (particularly obvious in autofictional campus novels, like Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School [2019]) or a detailed examination of a pressing social question, played out in both intellectual and personal terms. Either way, the campus novel in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries rests on the premise that academic ideas, and the academic world, have concrete implications for the way we live our lives. On publication, critics recognised that The Syme Papers seemed to fit these broad trends in the campus novel—​even if they could not quite agree on what the stakes of Markovits’s work might be. Tamsin Dean, writing for the Telegraph, read the novel in the vein of an older, Lodgean ‘campus as a small world’ book: drawn to the universal aspects of the novel, she argued that ‘the observation of fallible humanity is unflinching’, while noting that ‘the portrayal of academic obsession’ was also ‘illuminating’ (Dean 2004). But her review also suggested that the novel’s ideas about geology and history, and the pursuit of obscure goals had some wider social ramifications, describing the ‘subject matter’ as ‘thought-​provoking’. By contrast, Alastair Sooke read this in the vein of the ‘campus novel as detective story’, seeing in the work ‘an academic romance reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, with an inkhorn intelligence that will appeal to book-​lovers everywhere’ (Sooke 2009). But Sooke’s review took issue with precisely the quality that Dean suggested gave the book a greater social heft: its focus on obsession. For Sooke, the novel was over-​ long, and its interest limited to the pull of its plot. Novelist Patrick Ness echoed Sooke; while Markovits’s prose was beautiful—​‘practically every sentence elicits a gasp of surprise or pleasure’—​the ‘problem’ of The Syme Papers, which Ness called ‘the problem with all obsession’, was that the novel lacked ‘the remotest sign of restraint’ so that the real story was ‘all but buried under the verbiage’ (Ness 2004). The novel’s initial readers all agreed that obsession was at the centre of Markovits’s work; the only disagreement (and it is one that has continued in the brief mentions the novel has elicited beyond those first reviews) lies in what exactly the payoff of that obsession might be. For Doug Pitt, the payoff would seem to be what Lodge described as ‘the mainspring of the plot’ of the campus novel: ‘tenure, the question whether a

12  Sam Reese

temporary appointment will be converted into a permanent, secure one’. Certainly, when summarised, the story of Pitt’s search for Syme seems to follow the traditional arc of a campus novel. Not only is Pitt searching (in a typical detective/​quest trajectory) for the gem that will solve a particular academic puzzle—​a missing step in the development of the theory of continental drift—​but the success of his research is tied to those typically personal stakes of the genre. Pitt begins the novel conscious that ‘my time for tenure, the seal and badge of the academic aristocracy, was slipping, slipping from me’ (SP, 9); success in his research will mean the recognition and acceptance of ‘my … my colleagues (as I hope to call them soon)’ (7), or, as he describes them elsewhere, ‘my peers, my superiors I should say’ (9), or, even more strongly, ‘my enemies—​I mean, my critics’ (12). Beyond securing his place in the institution, publication of his findings and attaining tenure will resolve Pitt’s feud with the archetypal campus antagonist, The Dean—​in this case, Dr Bunyon, Dean of History at the University of Texas, who constantly ‘attempts to poison me among my colleagues’ (10). This conflict is presented in universal terms as ‘the battle of Bunyon and Pitt, and the great war of which we are only the soldiers’ (219), extrapolating out these struggles to the generalised level that Lodge identified. To some extent, Pitt’s aspirations and fears also conform to the blended genre norms that Williams has observed in many early twenty-​first-​century campus novels. As Williams explains, ‘the academic novel has grafted with the mid-​life crisis novel, the marriage novel, and the professional-​work novel to become a prime theater of middle-​class experience’ (Williams 2012, 562). In the brutally simple terms of age, Pitt is ‘pushing forty, they call it; I’m pushing forty’ (SP, 9); he is so desperate for his son, Ben, to recognise his work that this small modicum of respect comes to outweigh his peers’ opinion of him. Watching the boy handling his manuscript, Pitt explains ‘I longed for him at least to read and understand me’ (449). Though these elements run through the narrative, and shine more clearly in summary, the problem is that they tend to only appear in summary within the story. Indeed, Markovits takes pains to deliberately frame these as asides and summaries—​take this condensation of what might have been pages or even chapters of a typical campus novel: I need hardly describe, I say, the countless red herrings and the stench of them; nor, indeed, the battles with Miss Pitt, my tender wife (whose faith in her husband’s sagacity had long diminished; whose faith in her husband’s assiduity was beginning to fade. Nor relate the circumstances of my financial embarrassment; my assurances, my guarantees, of being ‘hot on the trail,’ the begging to which I was at last reduced, and the whimsy of despair that persuaded my wife to dip into her own private funds […] in order to finance the extension of my researches, and one crucial, final flight. (SP, 102)

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Academic  13

Ness is right to point out that many of the typical narrative markers of the campus novel are buried inside The Syme Papers. Like his characters themselves, who frequently observe potentially rich seams of information only to avoid them in their search for something more obscure, Markovits gestures towards the expectations of the campus novel, only to circumvent them. In favour of what? In part, the campus novel simply gives way to what Ness calls ‘the verbiage’ of the novel—​the roiling, almost stream-​of-​conscious narration provided by both Pitt and, in his embedded memoirs, Phidy. This verbiage revolves around several linked external obsessions—​ Syme, Syme’s theories, Syme’s legacy—​but also a key, personal obsession: the idea of measuring up to others. The question of how we compare to others and our expectations of ourselves runs through Markovits’s oeuvre. Although on one level this might be read as an academic aspiration, as when Pitt declares on the opening page that ‘I was born for the company of greatness’ (7), the levels against which both Pitt and Phidy judge themselves are individualised, abstracted from the institutional standards of the university. Pitt admires the German geologist Wegener, for instance, not because of his success but because even though ‘he was staking a claim to an idea so magnificent and simple’, in the end, ‘no one listened’ to him (27). Wegener’s appeal, for Pitt, lies in the fact that he has staked a claim in an abstract chain of knowledge, just as Pitt himself ‘hopes to add his pinch of truth to the history of the universe, by proving Syme’s part in Wegener’s discovery; hopes, in his small way, to take his place in the great evolution, the only thing that matters in the end’ (476). This last phrase is telling; Pitt eschews the politics of the campus in favour of a lasting measure of success. For Phidy, the stakes of measuring up are much more personal. His one, often painful concern, once he arrives in America from Germany, is whether he can match up to the accomplishments of Syme. He notes with trepidation that ‘a man’s friendship with Syme began with the task of rendering palatable his own inferiority’ (291), and his subsequent insecurities only reinforce how much his sense of self is tied to his ability to equal Syme. Later in the novel, he seems to find validation, as he feels a sense of parity with the American. Although he might be a giant towering over him, Sam ‘is grand and fine, and everything around him matters wonderfully—​the least thing, like me’ (359). In other words, Phidy’s worth is lifted by proximity and a sense of being equal to his friend. Markovits’s repeated paralleling of Phidy and Pitt reminds us that this personal investment in measuring up to Syme also applies to Pitt. It is Pitt’s wife, Susie, who recognises this most clearly. As she explains to her sons, ‘this is the story of a nut who thought he could prove the earth is hollow; and another nut, who thought he could prove the first one was right. Nut number two is your father’ (345). Where the campus novel typically uses the communal and the institutional as its measures of success, Pitt and Phidy both turn their backs on such standards by retreating from their universities and turn instead towards the personal. Both

14  Sam Reese

of their judgements about success return to the idea of singularity—​in The Syme Papers, it is standing out, not fitting in to the campus, that is valorised. Pitt signals his inclinations towards such deliberate singularity from early in the novel. He describes himself as ‘an old obscurantist, a stickler for sticky phrases and muddy texts’ (32), notes his admiration for another early geologist, Hutton—​‘a dour, meticulous, incomprehensible man, whose theories required an interpreter in his own tongue to be understood’—​and explains that he was drawn to Syme because he stuck out in similar ways (this pattern of finding kinship among misfits and exiles recurs in other of Markovits’s novels). He first notes the ‘strangeness’ of Syme’s name in a catalogue of Wegener’s books, feeling that ‘the name rang oddly’ (17), and goes on to insistently valorise Syme’s singularity, as the kind of ‘man who ventured everything on the coin-​toss of his own inspiration, and stood so sure of the gamble that he could neglect almost to look at the result’ (66–​7). Phidy figures this same singularity through the telling figure of self-​abnegation: he is drawn to Sam as ‘the troubled soul to a greater Sum in which it has no part’ (134). By contrast, it is when Sam appears common, ordinary, that Pitt feels disenchantment with his subject of research; noting that Syme’s apparent ‘desire to impress what must have been a collection of farmers with the rudiments of his art embarrassed me’ (57). Stooping to the level of the communal renders Syme ordinary, common, ‘a sham, desperate for the meanest of admiration’. Markovits does not leave it to the reader to assess the standards that these men are using to measure themselves. Once again he offers the judgement of Susie as a means of exposing the implications of this obsession with singularity. For Susie, standing out as Syme does is a sign of failure, not success. She increasingly views her husband’s efforts to recuperate Syme’s name and theories as perverse, not admirable, declaring with some exasperation that ‘if all the world were clever, you’d make yourself stupid, just to stick out […] Being original. To you that’s flattery’ (238). But to Susie, ‘sticking out’ and ‘being original’ entail loneliness and a lack of understanding of one’s place in the world. She skews Pitt and Phidy’s rejection of the institution negatively, as a lack of groundedness, a lack of connection. By contrast, she ‘never thought to leave my mark on the world—​because I knew my place in it, and was never ashamed of simply being happy’ (239–​40). She figures Syme’s own singularity, moreover, in the terms Pitt refuses to accept: those of failure. Pitt is drawn to Syme not because he was ‘great’ (as Phidy would have it) but ‘because, in fact … he was so far wrong. You wanted him to be wrong. You liked him for that’ (238). Only towards the end of the novel can Pitt finally admit that Susie is right, that there was ‘something ghastly’ in not only Syme’s singularity but also in his own ‘scrupulous (and hopelessly unsuccessful) retention of failures’ (328). Once his highest term of praise, singularity, becomes (at least briefly) repulsive to Pitt, as he confronts the fact that he ‘enjoyed in himself the utterly insignificant bravery of the crank and the outcast’ (328). Pitt’s stress on the insignificance of being singular is telling. The quality he has most valued in himself and in his subject, Syme, can easily take on a negative

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Academic  15

valence: from this new vantage point, being singular means being strange—​a crank—​or else rejected and alone—​an outcast. Indeed, loneliness is woven through the fabric of The Syme Papers. Variations on the word appear 91 times across the novel, from Pitt’s reflections on his physical removal from others while researching in London (where he occupies a ‘lonely flat’ [68]) to the existential loneliness he reads into the very process of research; as he explains, ‘there is a peculiar loneliness to historical research. One acquires a taste, a distinct taste, for footprints, the intimate evidence of past lives’ (57). But where, typically, loneliness is understood as a painful or distressing affect, for Pitt, it is something to be embraced—​even something to aspire towards, as is failure; both work as modes outside the logic of the institution. Indeed, Pitt takes this to its logical extreme, and stakes loneliness—​ or at least the qualities of solitude and isolation—​as necessary for achieving greatness. Avowing that ‘there is a peculiar freshness to the productions of genius in isolation’, Pitt goes on to argue that ‘solitude produced in the end the genius of Samuel Syme’ (35). Nor is he alone in tying loneliness to Syme’s achievements. When Phidy looks across the unfamiliar landscape of the new world, and thinks about Syme’s achievements, he elides the man and the landscape: ‘how enormous the heart of loneliness becomes, swelling as it were into the night’ (161). Phidy’s image turns the potentially diminishing feelings of loneliness—​reducing oneself down to a single, disconnected being—​into something that magnifies, enlarges. Elsewhere, Phidy admits that ‘to me the number one always seemed much greater than the number two’ (400). For both men, loneliness is vast. Is Markovits’s novel, then, arguing that loneliness is necessary to achieve greatness? And, to follow Susie’s logic, is pursuing greatness in opposition to being happy? Despite the protestations of both Pitt and Phidy, the narrative offers both men alternatives to the logic that links greatness, singularity, and loneliness. The key breakthrough in knowledge that marks the climax in each plot comes not from the ‘genius of isolation’, but from conversation, from minds meeting and working together, from something approaching friendship and equality. Markovits takes care to frame this logic for the reader. Syme’s mother warns Phidy that ‘nobody can work entirely alone’ (272), and stresses that Syme has needed ‘the company of men such as himself’ in order to truly develop his potential (274). Narratively speaking, Syme’s mother is vindicated. Syme’s crucial breakthrough, the discovery that earns him his place in Pitt’s great chain of knowledge, only comes about through dialogue and teamwork. It is Phidy’s coaxing—​and crucially, an allusion to The Symposium—​that allows the two to translate Syme’s otherwise erroneous ideas about a hollow earth into the beginnings of the theory of continental drift. This scene is so crucial to the thematic development of the novel that Markovits doubles the text, extracting it from its chronological place within Phidy’s memoirs, and introducing it to the readers before we have proper context for its significance. As Phidy and Syme trace lines across the earth, and start to draw their own lines of thinking together, Phidy makes a particularly telling analogy, remarking that ‘the Americas and Africa might once almost have been lovers, along the lines

16  Sam Reese

of Aristophanes’ account, of a split self, searching for its dislocated half’ (104). Not only does this image provide the pair with the clue they need to find the true value of Syme’s apparently spurious ideas about the earth’s composition, but it also draws a direct parallel between their discovery and the process that allowed it. The two—​Syme and Phidy—​prove greater than a sundered one. This rhetoric is reinforced towards the end of the novel when Pitt, returned to Texas and unable to recuperate Syme’s theories or reputation on his own, turns to a more practical colleague, Joe Schapiro. Together in Schapiro’s garage, the pair re-​create one of the machines that Syme had devised in order to model the creation of the earth. As in Phidy and Syme’s collaboration, the union of two minds again yields success; the machine creates a piece of iron ‘like Texas’ (485), revealing that Syme’s theories correctly modelled the eventual formation of the earth’s landmasses. Markovits sets this joint success in contrast with the consequences of Aristophanes’ fable. Just as the sundered humans in the story, now separate, are much less powerful alone than they were together, so too are the novel’s discoveries thwarted by separations. Phidy leaves Syme and returns to Germany before their joint theory can be properly developed—​leaving it to a third party, Wegener, to eventually fulfil the promise of their abortive theory. Likewise, the Texas-​shaped piece of metal strikes Pitt’s son on the head, and the reproduction of the machine falls apart in Schapiro’s garage, leaving Pitt to miss the true significance of his discovery (‘If only he had guessed it: the final clue’ [485]). None of these characters are able to make the necessary leaps of understanding on their own; as Syme’s mother would have it, ‘no wisdom can grow entirely in loneliness’ (274). On a personal level, the choice to work alone, to dwell in loneliness, results in a kind of regression or collapse. Syme, Phidy, and Pitt all move into a state of decline, what Pitt calls ‘settling in and down’ (572). Syme puts it slightly differently. In one of the novel’s most poignant turns of phrase, he explains that ‘solitude […] unmakes us’ (199). If solitude is so crippling and counterproductive, why do the characters of The Syme Papers turn away from sociability—​especially when, as with Syme, they recognise the dangers of being alone so early on in the narrative? Their rejection of group belonging, removal to spaces outside of the campus itself, and repeated turns towards isolation are all born out of their deep distrust of the university and its institutional politics. Indeed, for Syme and Pitt, meeting the standards expected by the university means accepting mediocrity. As Syme phrases it, ‘I never guessed—​ success—​meant joining Ben Silliman and his kind’ (499). Syme’s deep disgust for Silliman’s lack of imagination and conservative thinking means that he rejects, out of hand, the promise of acceptance by academic colleagues. The representatives of the academic world themselves recognise this kind of levelling. One notes to Phidy that Syme ‘might do something, Dr Müller, he might reach an eminence […] if he would let himself be taken in’ (500). The image of being ‘taken in’ is synonymous with conformity in Syme’s eyes, and incommensurate with any of the protagonists’ ideals of singularity.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Academic  17

It is this suspicion of mediocrity—​of settling—​that allows us to make sense of Markovits’s turn away from the space of the campus, and his marginalisation of the typical plotlines of the campus novel genre. In Markovits’s rendering, the narrative trajectory of the campus novel is exposed as fundamentally conservative. However much he claims to want tenure, Pitt eventually recognises that in order to be accepted by the institution, he has to stop ‘sticking out’, something he is unable to do. Tenure may have been designed to allow academics freedom from institutional politics, but the decision-​making process, policed by partisans like Bunyon, means it only ever goes to those who already fit in. Even the space of the campus is conservative; the novel’s sharpest satire is directed towards the gossipy parties given by the Dean, reflecting William’s observation that while the arrangement of the campus space ‘around an open commons’ is suggestive of ‘the public square of American democracy’, it also carries some of the ‘limitations of a village, exhibited in the cluster of postwar novels—​close-​at-​hand, laden with gossip and village politics’ (Williams 2012, 566). Even the writing of the typical campus novel reproduces this insular, conservative dynamic. Although the genre is apparently transgressive—​‘mocking and exposing the follies and misdemeanours of the academic profession’—​as Lodge makes clear the authors who most often pen campus novels are in fact themselves ‘a member of that profession’ (Lodge 2008), with a privileged insider status, and their satire often serves more to police norms than to affect genuine change. The loneliness of The Syme Papers, then, represents a choice by characters to stand outside the institutional and generic conservatism that pushes researchers towards conformity and away from singularity. It is why Markovits’s characters see standing outside the norm as a heroic gesture, even if, as Susie’s astute analysis of Pitt demonstrates, this is often self-​sabotaging. The scale of the solitude demanded of those standing outside such institutions is best shown in a haunting dream that Phidy recalls, at the end of his memoir. He dreams of Syme, but Syme stands apart, taller than everyone around him, and as Phidy watches, ‘he was growing and could not help himself, unfit for company, taller and thinner and more remote’ until ‘he had reached such a height I could no longer make out his face’ (566). But, as with so many images of standing apart within the novel, Phidy’s dream is hardly unambiguous. Indeed, in the final chapters of the novel, the rhetoric of singularity is dismantled just as surely as the conservatism of the campus. Not only does working alone fail to produce meaningful discoveries, it ultimately renders the individual small. The bathos of the novel’s final lines—​after the grandeur heaped upon Syme from both Pitt and Phidy—​encapsulates this diminishment concisely. ‘Even Syme’, Phidy’s memoir asserts, ‘came, as we all do, like a lover to his insignificance’ (591). In the end, The Syme Papers undercuts both the maverick, aspiring to lonely solitude, and the limiting status quo of campus politics and their representatives, the Bunyons and Stillimans. Does this mean that, for Markovits, the campus is a no-​win space? An answer to an interview with the TLS provides a telling detail. Markovits described Nabokov’s

18  Sam Reese

Pnin (1957)—​one of the foundational works in the campus novel genre—​as the one book he wishes he had written, explaining that ‘one of the great things about Pnin is how warm it basically is’. Markovits notes how much the novel privileges positive affect, in spite of its satire of academic life, noting that ‘Pnin loves America, but many of his American colleagues also love and get Pnin. It’s hard to write happiness, especially uneventful happiness, and Nabokov does it beautifully here. It’s just great’ (Markovits 2019). With its play of names (Pitt, Phidy, Pnin), the imprint of Nabokov’s novel can be felt throughout The Syme Papers; clearly, Markovits is aware that the campus novel can end without compromise—​can even be, as with Pnin, a source of happiness and joy. And while neither Phidy nor Syme are able to find a solution to the pull between destructive singularity and compromised mediocrity, Pitt’s final choice in the novel not only adds a third pathway to the narrative, but offers a model for understanding many of Markovits’s other protagonists, who struggle with loneliness and failed aspirations. Although Pitt does not recognise the significance of his recreation of Syme’s machine (‘the final clue’), in the novel’s epilogue, after he has ‘settled in and down’ to teach at a high school, leaving academia behind, he has a sudden epiphany. Tracking down a relative of Syme’s close friend, Tom, he discovers that Syme’s own version of the machine had produced exactly the same effect as the version Pitt had made with Schapiro: Syme’s experiment had perfectly modelled ‘a molten, spinning core enveloped in a hardened, fragmented shell, splitting apart’ (SP, 589). Looking at the fragments from Syme’s own attempt, Pitt sees ‘the end of Africa, the back of Australia, and the foot of India’. But rather than returning to his project, to aspirations towards singularity, towards potential academic success, Pitt takes the knowledge (and the fragments of this miniature earth), and turns inward. He admits to the reader that he has now ‘learned to fear my enthusiasms—​not only for the loneliness they produce, but the blindness in them’, nor does he want to risk returning to academia, the place ‘where solitude seems more desperate and unsure’ (590). Instead, personal validation is all that matters—​and in choosing to return home, to his family and a newly rediscovered sense of self, the ‘tide’ of Pitt’s ‘enthusiasms’ begins to ‘ebb’, and leaves behind ‘something that looked very much like—​happiness’ (591). Pitt’s path to happiness, like Pnin’s, does not simply model a way for a ‘crank’ or a ‘nut’ to negotiate a place between academic ambitions and admittance into a levelling academy. His narrative can be mapped out more broadly onto abstract question of how individuals negotiate failed ambitions and systems that want to treat them as interchangeable parts. As Markovits has avowed several times, ‘I like writing about failure’, and Pitt is archetypal of his protagonists—​in that his deepest pains come from failed attempts to measure himself against others. Markovits even draws a direct comparison between this novel, his own career, and his future works in Playing Days, when the narrator describes the journal he kept while playing basketball in Germany, and a different piece of writing that ‘he hoped to expand […] into a novel […] about a man named Syme, who believed he could prove the

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Academic  19

earth was hollow’ (PD, 142). In a telling phrase, the narrator notes that ‘the two files had a way of bleeding into each other. The novel was full of young men with nothing much to do, playing games together and traveling through the countryside; and the journal described the same thing’ (PD, 142). Where singularity for Pitt means measuring up to the greatness of others and attempting to surpass them, while meeting the expectations of the university implies a lowering, a third option also lies open: neither rising nor lowering but staying the same. In part, this involves accepting one’s limitations—​in the face of happiness, he admits ‘I was built for nothing less’ (SP, 591)—​but with this, Markovits implies, comes a deepened sense of self. Pitt describes this as ‘becoming characteristic of oneself’ (569). In the author’s note to Playing Days, Markovits describes his formative ‘experience of a world in which incredibly talented people worked extremely hard at what they do, even though none of them could turn their talents into a life that would satisfy them’. Yet Markovits truly admires them as ‘a standard for what it means to be good at something’. Not successful or singular, but true to themselves. Works Cited Anderson, Don (2005) ‘Misplaced Passion of Pedagogy.’ The Australian, 19 November 2005, 14. Dean, Tamsin (2004) ‘A Thesis of Genius.’ The Telegraph, 1 March 2004, www.telegr​aph. co.uk/​cult​ure/​3613​254/​Arts-​bulle​tin.html Findeisen, Christopher (2015) ‘Injuries of Class: Mass Education and the American Campus Novel.’ PMLA, 130 (2): 284–​98. Frow, John (2006) Genre. London: Routledge. Lodge, David (2008) ‘Nabokov and the Campus Novel.’ Cycnos, 24 (1): n.p. Markovits, Benjamin (2005) The Syme Papers. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2008) ‘A General Love of Books: An Interview with Benjamin Markovits by T Bunstead.’ 3:AM Magazine, 24 October 2008, www.3amm​agaz​ine.com/​3am/​a-​gene​ral-​ love-​of-​books-​an-​interv​iew-​with-​benja​min-​markov​its/​ —​—​—​ (2011) Playing Days. London: Faber and Faber. Markovits, Benjamin (2019) ‘Twenty Questions.’ Times Literary Supplement, 27 November 2019, www.the-​tls.co.uk/​artic​les/​twe​nty-​questi​ons-​benja​min-​markov​its/​ Morris, Alice (1952) ‘When Suspicion Fell on the Impossible Mulcahy.’ New York Times, 24 February 1952. Ness, Patrick (2004) ‘Buried in Limestone.’ The Telegraph, 18 April 2004, www.telegr​aph. co.uk/​cult​ure/​books/​3615​535/​Bur​ied-​in-​limest​one.html Scott, Robert F. (2004) ‘It’s a Small World, after All: Assessing the Contemporary Campus Novel.’ The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 37 (1): 81–​7. Sooke, Alastair (2009) ‘A Buffoon in Pursuit of Not-​Quite Genius.’ The Independent, 3 April 2009. Williams, Jeffrey T (2012) ‘The Rise of the Academic Novel.’ American Literary History, 24 (3): 561–​89.

2 THE BYRON NOVELS Peter Graham

Apart from The Syme Papers (2004)—​his debut novel and, as Sam Reese shows in his contribution to this collection, an experiment in the campus novel genre—​ the fictions of Benjamin Markovits have so far fallen into two categories that at first might seem quite distinct. There are his contemporary novels, with realistic settings and situations close to or drawn from the life of their author, some of which might fit into the trendy form often called autofiction, a slippery term in its own right. Then there are the three novels centring on Lord Byron and his circle, which seemingly belong to the enduring subgenre called historical fiction, another shifty category with a capacity for blending self-​concealment and self-​disclosure. But the two types of Markovits books are more closely connected than they might at first appear. In different ways, all of them contain elements of what Max Saunders calls auto/​biografiction (Saunders 2010). What the Byron books share with the contemporary novels is a penchant for blurring lines or crossing boundaries: lines between fact and fiction, boundaries separating fact from invention and truth from imagination. Just how this blurring occurs in Markovits’s Byron novels becomes fully evident only in the third, Childish Loves (2011), which retrospectively illuminates its predecessors Imposture (2007) and A Quiet Adjustment (2008) by foregrounding their underlying fictive situations. The three novels purportedly constitute the literary remains of one author, Peter Sullivan (whose pseudonym is Peter Pattieson), posthumously edited and published by another, Ben Markovits (whose degree of overlap with the extratextual Benjamin Markovits is uncertain). In all three novels the reimagining of Byron’s life, times, and circle is interesting in its own right. But the teasing metafictional issues are even more intriguing. Readers’ responses to the Byron novels will be conditioned by generic expectations that the narrative situations of the fictions may spur them to recognise. How important DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-3

The Byron Novels  21

to me, a reader might ask, is factual accuracy in historical fiction? What sort of connection is to be imagined between auto/​biografictional authors’ lives and their auto/​biografictional art? Saunders and other contemporary critics offer good ways of understanding such issues. But so does the example of Byron himself. Perhaps the shrewdest thing about Markovits’s gambit is having chosen as his subject a man so keenly conscious that his contemporary readers saw or sought him in his art—​and an artist so deft at both tempting them on and thwarting them. Perhaps the first modern artist-​celebrity, the Byron whose narrator in Don Juan says poets are ‘such liars’ (Byron 2004/​1824, 182) but also calls his muse ‘the most sincere that ever dealt in fiction’ (522), embraced mobility and self-​contradiction as essential truths of being. Byron took pleasure in blending disclosure and mystification. He seemingly offered his lived experiences in his art, but he laughed at his public’s penchant for clumsily confusing autobiography with fiction. He was brilliant, in a way that postmodern writers aspire to be, at deploying sincerity as an understood convention and at performing self-​expression as if it were the real thing. Markovits seems to enjoy such byronic perplexities. His Byron books encourage questions about such matters as life’s relation to art, tensions between factual accuracy and invention, authorial intent, and readerly response—​and they defeat attempts at answering those questions with any certainty. Markovits’s Byron novels are often called a trilogy. So they are in the sense of being three works loosely centred on a single personage; but unlike a conventional trilogy, the Markovits novels don’t tell a continuous story or proceed in chronological order. Nor, though all involve historical fiction, are they constructed in the same way. Imposture, a historical novel with a brief preface explaining that ‘Ben Markovits’ is posthumously publishing the manuscript of a former teaching colleague, is set in 1821 and imagines the last months in the life of John William Polidori, the young doctor who in 1816 had accompanied Byron during the first months of his expatriate travels. Their time together included the ‘haunted summer’ of the famous ghost-​story competition spawning both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, the latter based on the ‘ground-​work’ of a Byron fragment. A Quiet Adjustment centres on Anne Isabella Milbanke, the high-​minded heiress who, unfortunately for them both, married Byron. It spans the period between their first acquaintance in spring 1812 and the notorious burning of Byron’s memoirs a month after his death in April 1824. No paratext suggests that anyone other than Markovits is author of A Quiet Adjustment. Childish Loves is the most complicated and puzzling of the three Byron novels. It amplifies the posthumous interaction of editor and literary executor Ben Markovits (for clarity I’ll subsequently call him Ben to distinguish him from the real-​life author of the three novels, who will be referred to as Markovits) and author Peter Pattieson/​Peter Sullivan (subsequently called by his birth surname, Sullivan). Ben’s investigations of Sullivan’s life and art occupy roughly half of the book: the remainder is composed of three first-​person narratives voiced by Sullivan’s Lord Byron at three different

22  Peter Graham

times of life. Alternating with these Byron narratives are contemporary first-​person accounts wherein Ben spins a tale of somewhat obsessively unearthing details of Sullivan’s very private life. Ben suspects that Sullivan’s own story is obliquely revealed through his Byronic fictions. Similarly, Ben’s readers may ask what the contemporary portions of Childish Loves might reveal of Markovits’s life. Due to the Byron novels’ narrative differences, trying to make coherent sense of them as a trilogy is harder than is interpreting them as freestanding works. Because the third book changes how a reader understands the first and second, there’s a strong counterintuitive case to make for starting a survey of the Byron novels with Childish Loves. Even so, the ensuing account will take a more obvious path and ‘begin at the beginning’, as the Byronic narrator facetiously says he’ll do at the start of Don Juan. Like Markovits and the personae of his novels, I’m interested in Byron’s art and life, Romantic literature, and Regency culture, so there will be a fair amount of contextualisation, allusion-​hunting, and fact-​checking, as I trace connections to the work of Jane Austen and Henry James, as well as of course to Byron. This close attention to detail is not meant to imply that fidelity to facts is the chief duty of historical fiction. Instead, I proceed from the critical premise that, as the narrator Ben observes in Childish Loves, echoes, omissions, changes of details, and apparent errors can be strategic or unconscious gestures of artistic or personal intent. Imposture

Early in Childish Loves Ben describes the literary remains Sullivan entrusted to him. He characterises Imposture, the completed manuscript he chose to publish first, as ‘immature—​clever in a first-​novelish kind of way, but too plot-​heavy and conceit-​driven […] The kind of novel you write when you still hope that writing is a way of making money’ (CL, 6). Some parts of this pre-​emptive deprecation might be disingenuous, but cleverness in various forms is a keynote of the perfectly titled novel, where imposture is pervasive. ‘Imposture’ also perfectly characterises the misleading fashion in which Polidori’s expansion of Byron’s abandoned prose fragment came out. The Vampyre had its April 1819 debut in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, where, though published anonymously, it was implied to be Byron’s work (apparently by the opportunistic Colburn rather than Polidori). Imposture’s protagonists are impostors too. Their story begins on The Vampyre’s publication day as teenaged Eliza Esmond addresses Polidori, a byronically handsome but dishevelled young dandy, on the publisher’s doorstep: ‘My Lord, I hardly knew you […] You’ve grown so dark and thin’ (I, 3). In this initial moment of mistaken identity, the first act of imposture is Eliza’s. She falsely claims to have danced with Byron three years before at a ball where her older, more beautiful married sister did in fact waltz with him. Then, reverting to truth, Eliza reports watching Byron on his balcony (where she mistook Polidori for him) on his last morning in London before setting off for the continent.

The Byron Novels  23

Polidori doesn’t correct Eliza’s mistake. Instead, playing Byron, he offers her his own copy of The New Monthly Magazine and gives her his address in Lincoln’s Inn. So begins the ill-​starred love story between a downmarket Byron lookalike and a young woman with ‘a look of innocence abused, and worse still, too long preserved’, a social status somewhere ‘between a guest and a governess’ (I, 37), and a bookish life lived mostly in her head. Their deceptive and self-​deceiving times together are limited to a handful of encounters and finally an illicit assignation proposed by Eliza. Disguised as a page boy, she travels with Polidori to Brighton, where they consummate their love, and afterwards confess their respective impostures. Polidori proposes marriage, but Eliza, whom he earlier rightly recognised as ‘a girl who made things up, who lived […] in her imagination’ (I, 108), recoils disgusted from the truth. Now feeling that ‘he was the vampire’, Polidori leaves Eliza his remaining money in the bloody sheets of her sexual initiation. He makes his way back to his father’s house, where he drinks cyanide and dies in his locked childhood bedroom. Imposture features another layer of multiple impersonation. A Prologue signed by ‘Ben Markovits’ explains his role as the manuscript’s literary executor and tells of his youthful acquaintance with its author, an older colleague who went by Peter Pattieson but was actually named Peter Sullivan. Once alerted to the pseudonym, Ben recognises it as that of the imaginary schoolmaster ‘whose name supplied the gap left by Scott’s anonymity’ (I, xix) in publishing the Waverley novels. Ben’s Prologue explains the story of The Vampyre as he heard Peter teach it to his class of English students. Peter believed that Colburn’s implying Byron’s authorship of the novel had ‘touched on something that had always titillated Byron’s public: the idea that the poet’s best work would lie just outside the edge of what he dared to publish himself’ (I, xiv). Ben concludes that ‘the gift’ of the manuscripts ‘entailed the right of publishing them’ (xx). His pre-​emptive answer to potential objections to historical inaccuracy in Imposture is that Sullivan ‘has taken liberties, of course, with the facts, as no doubt he is entitled to do’. In acknowledging ‘the danger of anachronism’ and of ‘writing against time’, Ben means for readers to agree that neither is a ‘serious infidelity’ in a story that feels true and authentic. That said, Sullivan’s strategic deviations from the facts constitute much of the novel’s cleverness, and the heavy dose of literary allusions convincingly evokes a composing presence who’s spent a lifetime teaching literature. The allusions, somewhat obvious choices for the most part and occasionally anachronistic when put into the mouths or minds of 1819 characters, are just the kind Sullivan might choose. Two allusions recur four or more times each: ‘the world was all before him’, referring to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and ‘acquaintance of poets’, derived from the title of an 1823 Hazlitt essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’. Others include ‘in his hot youth’ (Byron’s as yet unpublished words from Don Juan canto I), ‘distant slant of light’ (echoing Emily Dickinson), images from Byron’s ‘Lines Inscribed on a Cup Formed from a Skull’ (the skull in Sullivan’s fiction being not a Newstead Abbey monk’s but a

24  Peter Graham

Waterloo soldier’s), and Keats’s phrase ‘warm South’ (from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, published several months after the action of Imposture). Making such shoutouts to literary masterworks might be a writing trick of many English teachers, but the narrative’s changes to history indicate a far from schoolmasterly understanding on Sullivan’s part, and on Markovits’s. Both seem to believe, as Tom Stoppard puts it in ‘Reflections on “Biographical Fiction” ’, that ‘there is no special virtue in accuracy if it is not the right kind of accuracy, and no special vice in inaccuracy unless it is the wrong kind of inaccuracy’ (qtd in Lee 2020, 536). Imposture is inaccurate in large and small ways that mostly work together to condense Polidori’s personal tragedy, to connect his life even more closely to Byron’s, and to extend the effects of his brief acquaintance with the poet into subsequent generations. Imposture makes some major departures from Polidori’s and Byron’s actual lives. For instance, the novel’s Polidori is 19 (in real life he was going on 21) when he signs on as the physician in Byron’s entourage. He dies in the spring of 1819, shortly after publication of The Vampyre, whereas in real life Polidori lived until 1825 and published various other works. Eliza’s letter proposing an out-​of-​town liaison borrows both the suggestion and an exact phrase from a missive the persistent Claire Clairmont wrote to Byron in spring 1816: ‘I shall ever remember the gentleness of your manner and the wild originality of your countenance’ (I, 163). Taking a leaf from Lady Caroline Lamb’s playbook for appealing to Byron, Sullivan’s Eliza dresses in a page’s costume to accompany Polidori on the coach to Brighton. By far the most significant inaccuracies and inventions have to do with Polidori’s sister Frances, who in real life married Gabriele Rossetti and with him had four children, three of whom, Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William Michael, became eminent Victorian writers. Frances was born in 1800, five years after Polidori; but in Imposture she’s only two years younger. In Imposture the first-​ and second-​ born siblings shared (in Polidori’s recollections anyway) an intense, erotic bond. They had ‘used to kiss, as they had seen their parents kiss […] but now he felt that Frances had outgrown him; she was playing mother to him too’ (8). This attachment seems not unlike the one Byron and his older half-​sister Augusta formed as adults, and Imposture both emphasises Byron and Augusta’s incestuous love and explicitly connects it with the Polidoris. Augusta is with Byron at Piccadilly Terrace when Eliza watches Polidori on the balcony. Shortly afterwards, Polidori impersonates Byron to seduce a chambermaid at their Dover hotel and asks her to address him as ‘my sweet brother’ as he calls her ‘my dear kind sister’ during sex. Intermingled in his mind: ‘the sight of Augusta in her négligée; the sound of Byron’s low laughter; Frances’s marriage’ (53). These heated half-​fantasies merge into a reincarnation of a scene from the conclusion of The Vampyre: the vampire Lord Ruthven’s seduction of his friend Aubrey’s sister. In the invented history of Imposture, Polidori, dismissed from Byron’s service at the end of the summer, encounters the Byron circle again at Milan. He

The Byron Novels  25

has come to see his newlywed sister who has moved there with Rossetti. (She actually married in 1827.) Polidori finds Frances and Byron already acquainted and creepily overfamiliar—​his ‘fat’ finger (95) in her mouth. But only three years afterwards does he learn the full extent of their carnal relations. In spring 1819 Frances has returned to London, her marriage in ruins. With her is a son not three years old, ‘with features Polly recognized at once: his rich locks, fine, harp-​ shaped ears, and astonishingly blue eyes’ (124), all physical attributes of Byron as described in Imposture. In real life, William Michael Rossetti was born in 1829, the third of Frances’s four children. He grew up to be one of the founders of the Pre-​Raphaelite Brotherhood, eventually edited the works of his siblings Dante Gabriel and Christina, and, in 1911, edited his uncle’s Diary of Dr John William Polidori, 1816, Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc., the manuscript Polidori is writing in Imposture and the stimulus in the novel for his retrospective thoughts on the Villa Diodati summer. Commenting on the displaced paternity that creates this rich dramatic irony, Ben observes towards the end of his Prologue, ‘I don’t suppose, at this late date, that the Rossettis will mind accepting into their genealogy a drop of the Vampyre’s blood’ (xx). A Quiet Adjustment

When speaking in Childish Loves of why he led off by publishing Imposture, Ben mentions that as an unintended consequence of this choice A Quiet Adjustment ‘would be judged in its light; it needed to be judged in its own light’ (CL, 6). But a reader coming first to A Quiet Adjustment will simply deem it a historical novel, as it contains no prologue attributing the novel to Sullivan. Later in Childish Loves Ben sums up this second book by a more experienced Sullivan as ‘three hundred pages of repression of a particularly English kind’ (CL, 48). But occasional anachronisms and Americanisms break the illusion of Englishness; and if A Quiet Adjustment has a literary model, it is the Anglo-​American fiction of Henry James, with a dose of Jane Austen also in the mix. A Quiet Adjustment chronicles a short but determinative phase in Anne Isabella Milbanke’s life: her time with Byron. The novel starts with their first sight of one another in March 1812 and ends with the burning of Byron’s memoirs a month after his death in April 1824. It falls into three sections representing three distinct time periods: ‘Courtship’ (spring to winter 1812), ‘Marriage’ (October 1814 to March 1815), and ‘Separation’ (December 1815–​6, with the remaining years of the separation quickly treated). Staying mostly with Annabella as a Jamesian central consciousness allows for a bravura display of naivete, overthinking, dramatic ironies, and hypocrisies, all embodied in a prose style modelled on Annabella’s own, or sometimes parodying James’s. The result is a convincing likeness, evidence that fiction can equal biography at plausibly presenting the inner truth of a real person. But adopting this point of view has narratological costs. Grounded in Annabella’s mind, the novel must forego material from her time apart from Byron unless it has

26  Peter Graham

been reported to her by him—​and in terms of raw material for a ripping yarn, these years were one of the richest periods of Byron’s life. His bachelor adventures between Annabella’s refusal of his first proposal and her acceptance of his second could be the stuff of a Tom Jones sort of tale. In 1812 through 1814, Byron’s much vaunted ‘years of fame’, he wrote rapidly, published prolifically, partied incessantly, and cut an amorous swathe through Regency society. During this period his chief confidante, in life and in entertaining letters, was the worldly Lady Melbourne, both aunt to Annabella Milbanke and mother-​in-​law of the mistress Byron called a ‘little volcano’, Lady Caroline Lamb. When he grew tired of Lady Caroline’s obsessive demands, Byron moved on to the ‘autumnal charms’ of the Countess of Oxford, an intellectual woman devoted to Whig politics—​and to handsome Whigs like Byron. During this same period Byron became reacquainted with his married half-​sister Augusta Leigh, almost certainly entered into a sexual affair with her, and probably fathered her daughter Medora. As A Quiet Adjustment proceeds from Byron’s wooing Annabella to his winning her, wedding her, and alienating her, it moves from being a potential Jane Austen situation in ‘Courtship’ to a darkly Jamesian one—​part The Portrait of a Lady and part The Aspern Papers—​in ‘Marriage’ and ‘Separation’. Like an Austen novel—​but one ending with a refusal not a marriage—​‘Courtship’ focuses on a young lady’s prospects and proposals. Annabella, a country girl staying in London for the season, first sees Byron at Melbourne House, where Lady Caroline has organised a waltzing class and Byron dances only with his sister. (Self-​conscious about his deformed foot, real-​life Byron did not waltz.) Annabella’s youthful blend of intellectual arrogance and emotional ignorance is evident from the first: ‘he was tempted into sin by his finer feelings; and it would take nice management indeed to prevent the one without suppressing the other’ (QA, 35). As their acquaintance proceeds, she plays with the notion of ‘a literary marriage’ between a lady and ‘a list of qualities’ (60) and, seeing a bust of Byron at Melbourne House (in real life Byron hadn’t yet sat to a sculptor) concludes that ‘he would do very well as a husband in marble’ (65). But by the time Byron is ready to propose, Annabella has become a little wiser. Unsure whether she’s proceeding from common sense, cowardice, or both, she turns him down: ‘Lord Byron had proved himself greater than the scope of her choosing: she hadn’t the measure of him. That was in the end what decided her’ (88). There is some relief from Annabella and Byron’s protracted and intense courtship in the form of other well-​drawn characters, Lady Caroline, Lady Melbourne, Annabella’s parents, and most especially her confidante Mary Montgomery, a sharp, good-​humoured invalid who delights in describing the social scene as an Austen female wit might. She’s a good complement to the serious Annabella, who tends, as Lady Melbourne points out, to look down on the world like a girl on moral stilts. As Annabella dithers about the addresses of two eligible men, Mary clarifies: ‘A very good man and a notorious libertine have fallen in love with you. Both honour you for your perfections, so much so, that the one only just dares to

The Byron Novels  27

approach you, while the other scarcely understands you […] I think on the whole you had better be a very good girl’ (45). But simultaneously Mary recognises that her friend might well wish to be ‘a little less perfect than you are’ (46). The ‘notorious libertine’ of course is Byron. The ‘very good man’ is George Eden, a rejected suitor of Annabella’s in real life whose fictionalised version departs from fact in a fascinating way. In A Quiet Adjustment Eden is a young clergyman who has just received his first clerical living. But George Eden, later the Earl of Auckland, was actually a Whig politician and later in life Governor General of India and Lord of the Admiralty. Transforming Eden into a clergyman allows for a clever intertextuality with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which real-​life Annabella Milbanke read during the interlude between Byron’s rejected proposal in 1812 and their eventual engagement in 1814. Annabella judged the novel ‘a very superior work’, ‘the most probable fiction I have ever read’ (Le Faye et al. 1989, 175). Transforming George Eden into a clergyman makes him analogous to Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Eden’s proposal to Annabella calls to mind both Collins’s and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s offers to Elizabeth. Although not ridiculous like Collins’s proposal or arrogant like Darcy’s, Eden’s offer displays the same privileged patriarchal condescension those two rejected addresses share. But male complacency is not what makes Annabella turn him down. A few pages previously Byron has summed up Eden’s character in a putdown borrowed verbatim from one the real-​life Byron had used for John Claridge, a close friend from Harrow days: ‘Now there is a good man, a handsome man, an honourable man, a most inoffensive man, a well-​informed man, and a dull man, and this last epithet undoes all the rest’ (QA, 42). If Annabella, as Mary suspects, is a bit tired of her formidable virtue, remembering Byron’s trenchant phrase might well have stimulated her refusal of Eden (his very surname would work against him in that case) and sent her life down a darker if more interesting path—​the road to ‘hell’ as Byron terms their marriage in early honeymoon days. Eden reappears in both ‘Marriage’ and ‘Separation’. Both times he adds a needed note of human decency to morally disturbing situations. ‘Marriage’, picking up about two years after ‘Courtship’ ends, concerns ‘the unhappiness [Byron and Annabella] each had caused the other, by that offer and by that refusal’ (QA, 97). When they resume a relationship and then become engaged, Byron’s behaviour is complicated by deep yet unrepented guilt for his ongoing incestuous love affair with the easy-​going Augusta, who was his soulmate in ways Annabella never could be. In this snowbound section of the novel where descriptions of wintry weather externalise the climate of the new marriage, Annabella learns how relatively little she means to Byron—​‘what was lacking was love, that was the wind that failed them’ (99)—​and how much their union means to her: ‘there was nothing, she guessed, she would not let him do’ (123). She grows increasingly aware of her sensual appetite for him and gradually discerns, after Byron’s many dark innuendoes, that his desire is for Augusta. When the newlyweds stop at Augusta’s house on their way south to London, a sadomasochistic ménage a trois evolves,

28  Peter Graham

with Byron cruel and frustrated at his sister’s denying him what she formerly granted, pregnant Annabella confused and marginalised, and Augusta trapped between them. Dimly recognising ‘proof of something’ when seeing Augusta and Byron alone together, Annabella goes to Eden’s church in nearby Sutton and in private confession (a rite Anglican clergymen of the time would have been unlikely to provide and an Evangelical like Annabella would not have sought) tells the good man whose proposal she had rejected the facts, as she understands them, of her marriage with the man she chose. Annabella’s confession includes a recognition that is the turning point of the novel: ‘I cannot repair him; I cannot regulate him. He is ungovernable. He is impossible’ (209). Nine months later, Augusta Ada Byron has been born into a world where she ‘cried and ate and slept; her mother did little else, only more quietly’ (221). The narrative has elided most of the first year of marriage, complicated by financial troubles, Augusta’s presence in Piccadilly Terrace, and Annabella’s pregnancy, and only briefly alludes to Byron’s possibly deranged cruelty to her at the end of her confinement. Though still devoted to Byron, Annabella agrees to his suggestion that she take Ada to her parents’ house. Once she confides details of Byron’s ill-​treatment, the Milbankes insist upon the ‘quiet adjustment’ of a separation. Understanding that ‘jealousy was always the sin to which her virtuous nature was most likely to surrender’ (257), Annabella nonetheless determines that if she can’t have one Byron, she’ll secure the other. Learning of Byron’s plan to leave England and hearing rumours that Augusta will join him in Geneva, she determines to keep them apart, piously explaining to Mary Montgomery—​who shows considerable distaste for helping with the venture—​that she won’t ‘stand idly by while Augusta […] consigns herself to ruin’ (283). Eden, asked to assist them in his capacity as priest, sees this manipulation for what it is, asserts that Augusta’s form of innocence ‘cannot survive what you might call a full confession’ (309), and stoutly debunks Annabella’s self-​justifications. But the cruel campaign succeeds in making Augusta hand over her letters from Byron. With utterly believable ambivalence, Annabella intensely dislikes what she reads of herself in these letters—​and then she kisses them. In the brief final chapter, set eight years later, after Byron’s death in Greece, an older Annabella feels somewhat differently about her estranged husband and his writing. ‘She dressed meticulously each morning in black and was careful to eat what she could’ (327). As Byron’s widow she plays a decisive role in having his memoirs burned by convincing Augusta to acquiesce in their destruction. To the lasting regret of subsequent generations, the real-​life memoirs were indeed burned—​ironically enough, in the drawing-​room fireplace of John Murray’s publishing house. As the narrative ends, Byron’s ‘side of the story had gone up in smoke. What was left was hers’, Annabella realises, ‘and she felt, not unlovingly, the duty thus imposed on her’, almost as if ‘they had been married again’ (341). It’s a telling final touch to the portrait of a complicated marriage: a poet’s private thoughts recorded for publication, then obliterated thanks to his surviving spouse’s feelings. Annabella’s repression has become Byron’s suppression.

The Byron Novels  29

Childish Loves

Like A Quiet Adjustment, Childish Loves contains three distinct Byron narratives centring on three periods of Byron’s life: the 15-​year-​old schoolboy’s summer vacation and subsequent term of absence from Harrow (1803), the 17-​year-​old’s first term at Cambridge (1805), and the final months of Byron’s life in Genoa, Cephalonia, and Messolonghi (1823–​4). The novel’s interjected Ben chapters plus a short afterword offer a chronological account starting ‘two years ago’ with his brief New York appearance at a meeting of fellow custodians of unpublished manuscripts written by now-​dead authors and mostly consisting of a year spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a Radcliffe fellow. It’s easy enough to pin down the dates of these sections and connect them with facts of Markovits’s life: the narrative takes place after Imposture (2007) and A Quiet Adjustment (2008) have been published and reviewed; real-​life Markovits was a Fellow in creative writing at the Radcliffe Institute in 2008–​9, is married to an Englishwoman named Caroline, to whom the book is dedicated, and father of a daughter. Because the twenty-​first-​ and nineteenth-​century segments of Childish Loves alternate, it’s not possible for a reader proceeding in the normal linear way through the book to settle into either period or to form an unbroken relationship with either of the novel’s two narrators, Lord Byron as voiced by Peter Sullivan and Ben Markovits as voiced by Ben Markovits. Instead of falling under the spell of Byron, the reader must always be aware of listening to a literary ventriloquist. The result is likely to be a colder response to the Byronic first-​person narratives. The multiple layers will make careful readers more inclined to appraise the fictional Sullivan’s success or failure in voicing Byron and correspondingly less willing to either blame or credit Markovits for the Byron impersonation’s general effect and the accuracy or inaccuracy of its particular details. It’s a sly move. Markovits has created the Sullivan who voiced Byron, so the fair way to assess Markovits’s accomplishment in the Byron interludes is to appraise a fictional portrait of a writer of historical fiction. But the impression and grounds of analysis might change if a transgressive reader chose to first read the numbered Ben chapters and then the titled Byron chapters, or to read the Byron bits first and the Ben ones afterwards. The result of this choose-​my-​own-​adventure approach would be the emergence of Ben’s frame story as a continuous account of literary investigation, and Byron’s prose as three separate chronological accounts. Interestingly, though, what could not result from an attentive back-​to-​back reading of ‘Fair Seed-​Time’, ‘Behold Him Freshman!’, and ‘A Soldier’s Grave’ is a sense that Sullivan’s unfinished fictive project might have been three preliminary parts of an imagined version of Byron’s burned memoir. Why not? Starting with obvious matters, ‘Fair Seed-​Time’, ‘Behold Him Freshman!’, and ‘A Soldier’s Grave’ are all first-​person present-​tense accounts. A memoir drafted in 1818–​9 would have cast the first two episodes in the past

30  Peter Graham

tense, and the events described in the third would have not yet taken place. There are subtler anachronisms as well, among them the titles added to Sullivan’s typed manuscripts. It’s improbable or impossible that Byron would have chosen them. The phrase ‘Fair Seed-​Time’ comes, as Ben points out in one of many metafictional moments, from Wordsworth. But the phrase is from The Prelude, unpublished during Byron’s lifetime. ‘Behold Him Freshman!’, appropriate for a section centring on Byron’s early days at Cambridge, is a tag from his own Hints from Horace; but it was composed in 1811, four years after the period described in the section the allusion titles. ‘A Soldier’s Grave’ comes from ‘On this Day I Complete My Thirty-​Sixth Year’, a lyric Byron wrote in January 1824. Unlike the other two this allusive title isn’t anachronistic, but it seems implausible on literary grounds. The dramatic irony of this apt title would be evident only to someone who knew that a few weeks after the episode concludes with a convalescent Byron leaving off prose to write a poem (his last, as it turned out) he would be dead in a sickbed, not on a battlefield. What unites the three Byron sections is that they all concern ‘childish loves’, though the inflection of the term varies from episode to episode. In ‘Fair Seed-​Time’ Byron is the child, a 15-​year-​old boy rejected by a beloved young woman three years older and propositioned, seduced, or raped by a young man eight years older. ‘Behold Him Freshman!’ casts Cambridge student Byron as the lover, platonic or not, of the 15-​year-​old choirboy John Edleston. In ‘A Soldier’s Grave’ the childish object of Byron’s unrequited love is Loukas Chaladritsanos, a handsome 15-​year-​ old Greek whom Byron engaged as his page. Each of the three completed sections therefore features homoerotic or homosexual attraction to a 15-​year-​old boy. But to assess the three episodes as a completed whole would be premature. In leafing through material Sullivan hadn’t yet incorporated into an episode, Ben comes upon a vignette involving the Earl of Clare, whom Byron claimed to have innocently but passionately loved at Harrow and whom he briefly encountered when both were traveling in Italy in 1821. Sullivan’s fragment, much too close to be called a paraphrasing, is a condensation of two entries (91 and 113) from Byron’s 1821–​2 journal ‘Detached Thoughts’. The condensation ends, ‘We were but five minutes together, and in the public road, but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence which could be weighed against them’ (CL, 278). The actual entry in ‘Detached Thoughts’ continues in a vein of earnestness unusual for Byron: ‘Of all I have ever known—​ he has always been the least altered in every thing from the excellent qualities and kind affections which attracted me to him so strongly at School’ (Byron 1996, 44, 49). This fervent but idealised schoolboy attachment seems perfect for the ‘general theme’ of Sullivan’s Byron fictions as Ben characterises it: ‘the uncomfortable relationship between innocence and sexual attraction’ (CL, 277). Childish loves wherein innocence and sexual attraction ambiguously intertwine appear in the twenty-​first-​century episodes too. The central one is Peter Sullivan’s possible or likely affair with Lee Feldman, a student at the Boston prep school where he taught for 20 years. There is insufficient evidence of this affair between

The Byron Novels  31

a repressed, hitherto irreproachable teacher and a troubled, erotically experienced student to convict Sullivan of any crime; but the scandal drives him from Boston to the New York prep school where he teaches under the assumed name Peter Pattieson and becomes friends with his fellow teacher, a young Ben Markovits. Fascination with the sexuality of the dead man whose literary remains he has inherited drives Ben’s research. There is a clear analogy between Ben’s interest in Sullivan and his fictions and Sullivan’s in Byron, and a cleverly laid trap that potentially extends the analogous prurience to include Markovits’s own readers: ‘What I wanted was to find the parts of his story that didn’t stand up to the history, which he might have invented himself or drawn on his own experience for’ (114). Childish loves quite different from improper sexual relations between a teacher and a teenage boy are also to be found in the twenty-​first-​century chapters, as are expressions of Byronic nostalgia for younger days. Like the Byron of ‘Detached Thoughts’ and the burned memoir, the Ben of these chapters is a thirtysomething married man, an expatriate, and the father of a daughter. Like Byron, his sensibility seems that of a cosmopolite without a country. He writes with detachment of the Austin of his childhood, the Hampstead of his writer’s life and his marriage, and the Cambridge of his fellowship year. ‘American lives being lived behind the glass fronted doors’ (122) and ‘New England fall, which comes so highly recommended’ (123), are how Cambridge strikes this anglicised Texan who refers to the garment his daughter wears on a crisp November day as a ‘jumper’ (123), not a ‘sweater’. Like Byron, Ben is separated from the English mother of his child, though his distance is more often emotional than geographical. His wife, Caroline as in the book’s dedication, is a long-​standing acquaintance, the daughter of friends of Ben’s parents, and so herself embodies an aspect of childish love; a basement flat in Caroline’s childhood home is where unmarried Ben starts his London life as a writer. Ben flatly singles out details that build to suggest a life of stasis rather than evolution or maturation—​such as posters from his New York apartment that hang on his Cambridge rented walls, ‘as if nothing much had happened in the past ten years, only marriage and the birth of a child’ (112). One day, on child-​wrangling playground duty, Ben reencounters Kelly, an Austin neighbour he vividly remembers from his childhood, a girl who had seemed too popular and pretty for him at high-​school. Kelly’s now a divorced mother, uncomfortably marooned in Cambridge and pining for Austin. Their developing bond becomes a variant of childish love, on Ben’s part a tangle of nostalgia, guilty imagination, and consequent shame—​the adult equivalent of the bottled-​up adolescent crush chronicled in a manuscript from the first Ben chapter, a sprawling story called ‘NOT THE FIRST LOVE STORY IN THE WORLD’ which is pressed on Ben by the still-​grieving father of its dead teenaged author. Most of Childish Loves’ enigmatic metafictions complicate the Ben chapters, but Sullivan’s ‘Fair Seed-​Time’ also features an intriguing intertextual conversation. It selectively and imaginatively documents actual events from an interlude of Byron’s life, roughly the last half of his 16th year, as a dark, polyamorous variant on a Jane

32  Peter Graham

Austen sort of situation: three or four families in a country neighbourhood, genteel young people at leisure and looking for love. Byron is the age of an Austen heroine on the verge of being ‘out’ in society. Southwell might be a stand-​in for Highbury in Emma. Byron’s Newstead Abbey and Mary Chaworth’s Annesley Hall could be nearly any Austen estate less grand than Darcy’s Pemberly. The excursion Byron, Mary Chaworth, and a mixed party from Annesley and Southwell undertake to visit Peak Cavern echoes the Box Hill outing in Emma or perhaps the trip to Sotherton in Mansfield Park. The situation, featuring 15-​year-​old Byron’s unreciprocated feelings for the young heiress of Annesley Hall and Mary’s practical but ultimately disappointing marriage to the rich landowner John Musters, could be the stuff of an Austen plot, but with the notable difference of a homoerotic ending, with rebuffed Byron in bed with a ‘man of the methode’, his Newstead tenant Lord Grey. Early in the first chapter of Childish Loves, narrator Ben devotes a lengthy paragraph to tracing Sullivan’s literary influences and mentions Jane Austen third, after Byron and James. In an interview, real-​life Markovits names Austen one of his own favourite authors (Markovits 2016). It makes sense, therefore, that Austen’s works would form part of the novel’s imaginative world. Yet beyond the general likenesses just mentioned, ‘Fair-​Seed Time’ specifically but anachronistically contains a few passages wherein the narrator Byron echoes Austen’s words, though as far as we know Byron never read Austen, and when he was 15 she was as yet unpublished. Byron nicknames his mother Catherine Gordon Byron ‘Kitty’. This biographical detail derives from Thomas Moore’s account of Byron’s Southwell days. But a few lines after mentioning ‘Kitty’, Sullivan’s Byron observes ‘she coughs incessantly’ (CL, 56). Through this phrase, Catherine Byron is subtly but unmistakably connected to Catherine ‘Kitty’ Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, the sister whose ill-​timed coughs plague a fretful mother whose irascible temperament Mrs. Byron shares. Once Austen is on a reader’s radar, it’s hard not to view Byron and Mary Chaworth’s discussion of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest as echoing the uncritical devotion to that particular Gothic novel avowed by both Harriet Smith in Emma and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Mary’s silly response to the novel sounds more like Harriet than Catherine, but Byron’s blend of satire and free indirect discourse in reporting it is reminiscent of the narrative tone of Northanger Abbey: ‘Oh she loved The Romance of the Forest above everything else. Indeed, she had read it through twice almost entirely from beginning to end. Nothing could be so fine as The Romance of the Forest. She never saw the use of going to the trouble of reading two books, when one will do’ (69). A more substantial Northanger Abbey echo comes when, discussing the undeclared but seemingly imminent match between Mary Anne Chaworth and John Musters, Byron opines, ‘Sometimes I believe she is frightened of him’, and Miss Wollaston answers in the spirit of Henry Tilney when he half-​facetiously scolds Catherine Morland for harbouring over-​the-​top Gothic suspicions of his father. Older, witty, and rational (like Henry in relation to the naive Catherine), Miss Wollaston dismissively tells Byron that he has been ‘reading too many novels […] In life, in Nottinghamshire

The Byron Novels  33

at least, there is still such a thing as a good match, a comfortable engagement, and a happy marriage’ (CL, 81). It’s a striking echo of Catherine Morland’s internal response to Henry’s correction, right down to the geographical parallel: ‘Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works […] it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for […] in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age’ (Austen 1985/​1818, 58). Austen’s and Sullivan’s rationalists make perfect sense, but future events will prove Miss Wollaston, like Henry Tilney, only half correct in downplaying the possibilities of a dark side to human nature and conduct, even in ‘Midland counties’. In the passages just discussed, it’s much easier to discern literary influence than to pin down the source of the anachronism. Given what Markovits has said of his regard for Austen’s works, it seems unlikely that he would unintentionally have Byron allude to Austen before the books alluded to were published. A more plausible hypothesis, perhaps, might be that Markovits has deliberately made Sullivan unaware of or indifferent to Austen’s dates. But if the Austen intertextuality poses a conundrum, the comments Childish Loves offers on Peter Sullivan’s supposed fiction, Markovits’s own published books, and the process of researching and assembling Childish Loves itself are even slipperier. Read as reliable, these observations might change a reader’s opinion of Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment and also of the The Syme Papers (2004), Either Side of Winter (2005), and Playing Days (2010)—​and of Childish Loves itself. But how reliable are they? Conversing with his and Sullivan’s former headmaster in Childish Loves, Ben claims ‘my first novel cured me of any interest in historical fiction […] What do I care if Byron slept with his sister?’ (CL, 43). These remarks build into an artful disavowal or dismissal of Sullivan’s two completed books and their subject matter. And they sharply distinguish between Ben and Sullivan as authors, when Ben continues, ‘In me, the shame of the human being is still stronger than the shamelessness of the writer. There are subjects I won’t touch, and Peter did not have my scruples’ (44). This distinction is not hard and fast, though. In the second chapter Ben characterises his fellowship project in Cambridge as ‘writing a book about a guy I used to teach high school with […] I want to find out what you can learn about people from the books they write—​how much is true’ (111). So Ben is searching for knowledge of his dead former colleague’s life in the historical novels he wrote on Byron, paradoxically through fact-​checking Byron’s life: ‘I wanted to find the parts of his [Sullivan’s account of Byron] story that didn’t stand up to the history, which he might have invented himself or drawn on his own experience for’ (114, emphasis in original). The mystery that most preoccupies Ben is whether Sullivan had a sexual liaison with a schoolboy. ‘I don’t much care if he did or not […] I just want to know’ (260). Ben may not care if Byron slept with his sister, but he does want to know whether Sullivan slept with his student. Researching Sullivan’s Byron fictions, Ben learns that ‘finding out the facts behind Peter’s story broke

34  Peter Graham

whatever spell, of truth or truthfulness, it had cast on me’ (116). And then he quotes the notably self-​contradicting Byron on the matter of fact or truth: ‘ “Pure invention is but the talent of a liar,” Byron once wrote. But what should we make of the talent of impure invention?’ (118). What indeed? Pure, excessive, or ungrounded imagination is what gave Byron contempt for many novelists, whereas what he admired in others, such as Fielding, was a balance that Ben calls ‘the negotiation […] between the formally satisfying artificiality of art and the unshaped reality of the world’ (257). It seems important to recognise here, as Byron’s own celebrity life showed, that the ‘negotiation’ goes both ways. Form satisfies in one fashion, but messy reality is what many readers care about. Citing the example of the first canto of Don Juan and its infamous domestica facta, Ben asserts ‘Everybody knew what he meant, and what’s moving about the poetry isn’t the story it tells but the real history it refers to’ (260). Is this claim equally valid for Sullivan’s historical novels and for Ben’s fictions, both in Childish Loves and elsewhere? Well, not for the investigative Ben, for whom the selective departures from reality are what’s interesting and revealing about Sullivan’s work. And when in the final pages of Childish Loves Caroline reads her husband’s passages of quasi-​ memoir, she initially forbids its publication, in an echo of Lady Byron at the end of A Quiet Adjustment, but then after some time relents, once it ‘seemed to her almost as fictional as anything else that’s out of date’ (397). Childish Loves ends with Caroline pregnant again and Ben, delivered of his pastiche pages, relieved to ‘get the book out of my hands, and out of the desk drawer, and more than willing to exchange the pleasures of this kind of writing, such as they are, for the happiness that writes white’ (397). In other words, he’ll be happy to subside into a life lived anti-​byronically, unrecorded as far as the world can tell. But whether Ben or Markovits will give up cutting a figure in ‘black letter upon foolscap’ as the Byron of Don Juan called it when he was around the same age, will be a matter for other books. Works Cited Austen, Jane (1985/​1818) Northanger Abbey. New York: Penguin. Byron, Lord George Gordon (2004/​1824) Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt. London: Penguin. —​—​—​ (1996) Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol. IX, ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray. Lee, Hermione (2020) Tom Stoppard: A Life. London: Faber and Faber. LeFaye, Deidre, William Austen-​Leigh, Richard Arthur Austen-​Leigh (1989) Jane Austen: A Family Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Markovits, Benjamin (2007) Imposture. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2008) A Quiet Adjustment. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2011) Childish Loves. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​(2016) ‘Book Brahmin: Interview with Benjamin Markovits.’ Shelf Awareness, 2 December 2015, www.she​lfaw​aren​ess.com/​issue.html?issue=​2645#m30​657 Saunders, Max (2010) Self-​Impression: Life-​Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3 ‘WHAT HASN’T HAPPENED TO YOU’ Telling Failure in Either Side of Winter and You Don’t Have to Live Like This Rachael McLennan

It’s amazing how quickly certain intimacies become public currency. But it’s also true that for a childless married woman, who has just turned the corner of forty, you need some kind of protection against sympathy. You need stories to fill the gap made by what hasn’t happened to you. (WNY, 301)

In the excerpt above, taken from Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York (2018), it is hypothesised that stories perform an important function in relation to others’ perceptions of an individual’s failure. Failure is understood as a life marked by absence, ‘the gap made by what hasn’t happened to you’. Here, the failure is lack of children, further understood as a woman’s failure to adhere to conventions of a heterocentric life narrative. It is stated that stories are necessitated both as defence, ‘some kind of protection against sympathy’, but they are also necessary to ‘fill the gap’ made by certain things not happening. These insights about the role of some stories in an individual’s life are prompted by Nathan Essinger’s patronising assessment of Sandy, a former acquaintance and colleague for whom he has ‘mixed feelings’ (WNY, 300). Nathan’s speculations are prompted by sexist and ageist assumptions regarding what a normative or successful woman’s life looks like (children before she is aged 40), which he appears to endorse. According to Nathan, stories can function as a bulwark against social judgements of failure. They occupy an ambiguous space in which they both endorse the regulatory force of norms which govern narratives of human development (because a story is required to explain why an individual has not met those norms) but may offer some scope to counter them (an individual has agency to tell a story, and it may be a story which resists sympathy or one in which an individual refuses DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-4

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to understand their life in terms of what has not happened to them). However, Nathan’s reflections on Sandy are prompted by her laughing remark that she is ‘learning what it was like to help out’ (WNY, 301) with her stepdaughter’s baby, suggesting that Nathan believes that Sandy feels she must indeed protect herself against sympathy, that she must turn her failure to have children of her own into something to make light of. For Sandy (Nathan thinks), her ‘story’ is primarily a defence against failure and does not take the form of counter or resistance (the notion that not having children might not be evidence of failure is not challenged). The stories Nathan has in mind do not, then, reimagine what failure means, even if Nathan’s thoughts suggest that this is a possibility. Jack Halberstam discusses some of the ‘rewards of failure’: failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behaviour and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthood. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life. (Halberstam 2011, 3) In light of Halberstam’s remarks, it is possible to argue that it is Nathan, not Sandy, who exemplifies failure here. Failure is expressed in Nathan’s lack of empathy, his inability to imagine the rewards or the subversive power of failure, his assumption that his colleague feels (only) failure. Nathan’s failure is explained by his own world view, which limits his storytelling abilities and the stories he imagines for others. Crucially, if Nathan is wrong about his identification understanding of failure, then his speculations about the function of stories may be wrong also. This essay argues that Markovits’s novels are preoccupied with failure of various kinds, but focuses particularly on its manifestations in Either Side of Winter (2005) and You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015). I am not the first to claim that failure is a central theme in Markovits’s work—​Claire Lowdon, for example, claims that ‘Markovits is excellent on gradations of failure’ (Lowdon 2018). But failure functions in complex ways in Markovits’s novels, and Lowdon’s praise deserves scrutiny. Specifically, I argue that these two ‘American’ novels (meaning that they are set in America, focusing on Americans), are populated with characters who seek an alternative to their present circumstances. In Halberstam’s terms, their desire for an alternative ‘expresses a basic desire to live life otherwise’ (2). However, they more often than not are limited, or unsuccessful, in pursuing measures of success or satisfaction at variance from the dominant markers of successful middle-​class adulthood in American culture; Halberstam argues that ‘success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms

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of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation’ (2). In Either Side of Winter, characters’ efforts to change their lives are, with one notable exception (the story of Howard Peasbody), ultimately underwritten by conventional narratives of human development. That exception, which I will examine in detail, does indeed ‘poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life’, to return to Halberstam, but does so in troubling and limited ways. Similarly, Greg Marnier, ‘Marny’, the narrator of You Don’t Have to Live Like This, is finally unable to relinquish his desire for some of the markers of the middle-​class adulthood he claims to despise. He seems incapable of deciding what a different life might look like, and how it could generate happiness. That is to say, in these novels Markovits’s characters may desire to live life otherwise, but they often fail to envisage what that ‘otherwise’ might look like, and/​or to make it reality, or fulfilling. The explorations of failure in these novels enable examination of the American Dream and the possibilities of self-​(re)invention so key to American national narratives, with surprisingly bleak results. Both of these novels ultimately suggest that individuals are trapped by the worlds they live in, or do not truly want to escape them. And when they do make meaningful efforts to escape, as in the notable instances of Howard and Marny, the results are disturbing, pessimistic, and arguably produce ways of living which are even more indicative of failure than the prior existence each desired to alter in the first place. The possibilities of change or opportunity Halberstam posits that failure offers, above, are not harnessed. My understanding of Halberstam’s work as a useful theoretical model for thinking through failure in these novels may therefore seem contrary. After all, neither the excerpt involving Nathan, above, nor the two novels I wish to examine here can be ultimately understood as illustrating the ‘queer art of failure’ Halberstam describes, with its ‘productive’ results. Nonetheless, my reading of these novels in relation to Halberstam’s work suggests that its claims about the recuperative possibilities of failure may be overly totalising and overly optimistic, and so may need to be treated with caution. Both novels’ explorations of failure are restricted by views held by characters and/​ or the narrative voice, which not only prioritise but privilege and even ‘naturalise’ heterosexual male experience and perspectives, just as Nathan does, exposing that Markovits’s explorations of failure are really only concerned with its manifestations in the lives of heterosexual men. This chapter understands the centring or universalising of a heterosexual male perspective in both novels as an additional shortcoming—​a failure, that is, that the texts themselves do not identify or explore sufficiently. It is true that taking into account the ten years separating their publication, these two novels may chart a development in Markovits’s exploration of failure; Marny’s scrutiny and critique of the aspects of American culture which contribute to his sense of failure is more sustained and far reaching than any presented in Either Side of Winter. The possibility that Markovits’s novels are engaged in exposing the failures of this male perspective cannot be dismissed—​ for example, both of these novels could be read as cautionary tales that ultimately

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testify to the power of the system its characters cannot entirely reject or relinquish. However, my readings of these novels suggests that their inability to reimagine failure is primarily circumscribed by the fact that they share the narrow vision which closes off Nathan’s empathy and imagination. Either Side of Winter

Either Side of Winter focuses on moments of transformation and change in the lives of four characters—​Amy, Howard, Stu, and Rachel. It is divided into four sections, each corresponding to a season (indeed, each section could be called ‘You Don’t Have to Live like This’). It begins in fall, following the cycle of the school year. The school setting links the stories, as three of the four central characters teach at the same private school in New York, and the fourth is a student. The movement of the fan in the school’s stuffy reception, described in the novel’s first page, offers a useful commentary on the novel’s structure, atmosphere, and the operations of its narrative voice: ‘you waited for it to come your way, you felt it, not so much a relief as something to feel other than the heat, and you heard it turn away again’ (ESW, 3). The narrative voice, like the fan, operates in relation to a new individual, turning towards a new person in each of the novel’s sections. The excerpt above indicates that the fan fails in its function to provide relief, aptly foreshadowing the problematic (or failed) function of the novel’s narrative voice. It also reveals that those who feel the fan experience not cool but only the simple fact of change, also anticipating the fact that for most of the main characters, what is primarily sought is release from, rather than an alternative to, their suffocating life circumstances. The fan’s movements are prescribed and repetitive; in the passage above one simply waits one’s turn to feel its blast, foreshadowing the characters’ limited agency to effect change (one could think of Nathan’s passive characterisation of human life in which individuals are primarily acted upon, things happen or do not happen to them). The fan’s movement captures the sense, too, that individuals are trapped in patterns and cycles—​of behaviour, of growing up and older, of the school year, of the seasons. Whereas You Don’t Have to Live Like This is very precisely grounded in a historical moment, it is difficult to determine exactly when this earlier novel is set, although it seems likely to be in 1999 or 2000 (ESW, 73). It seems that this is a novel, a New York, in which the events of 9/​11 have not occurred. The absence of discussion of specific cultural events and historical moment may be intended to detract from the influence of structural forces on individuals, focusing instead on individual agency, or lack of, to create change. But it may also be intended to naturalise or universalise the stories told, implying that the changes and crises described could happen to other people at any time, in any year, a reading supported by the seasonal cycle which dictates the novel’s organisation. The novel’s reliance on the seasonal cycle also risks naturalising the life courses described, suggesting both that the characters are simply occupying positions in a pre-​ordained system,

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or that they are caught in patterns and cycles. And in fact, the four stories described largely correspond to conventional narratives of human development. In ‘Fall’, Amy, in her twenties, fears she is failing in her adult life to live up to her youthful promise, and achieves some happiness in re-​negotiating her loyalties to her family and her new partner. But this is a familiar gendered story about a heterosexual life script in which a young woman signals her adult identity, or ‘fall’ from innocence by replacing her father with a partner as the dominant relation in her life. The ‘Spring’ section focuses on a middle-​aged teacher, Stuart Englander, and his fascination with a female student. He sees her variously, and simultaneously, as erotic object and substitute daughter (125). Stu’s interest is predominantly stimulated by the student’s youth, which prompts his reflections on his own past (his wife tells him it is the time of year ‘when the sap rises’ [123]). This is, once more, a familiar story—​ this time of heterosexual male mid-​life crisis. Stu is not even the only teacher behaving this way in the section; his former colleague has run off with another student (119). Stu decides not to act on his own obsession, opting to remain with his wife and his marriage. In ‘Summer’ the focus is on Rachel Kranz, the object of Stu’s crisis in the previous section. She deals with the illness and death of her father and her own tentative movements into adulthood. This is a coming-​of-​age story which might be understood as simply a variation on Amy’s ‘Fall’ narrative. While all these characters share a sense of failure and unfulfillment, there is no radical questioning of the markers of adulthood and success in relation to which they may feel inadequate; all three either eventually come closer to meeting those markers (Amy is engaged by the novel’s conclusion), achieve a certain acquiescence or contentment with their position (Stu) or are granted a future in which they have met them (‘Summer’ springs forward in time to tell us that Rachel goes on to be a wife and mother and have a successful career as a lecturer). These sections suggest that there are limited possibilities for lives and that it is difficult for individuals to do other than follow the scripts available and manage their own feelings about their relative success and satisfaction in meeting them. The ‘Winter’ section, however, is very different and the novel’s title signals its importance. This is the only section which focuses on an individual who is not heterosexual (Howard Peasbody, a biology teacher). It is also the only section marked not by the realignment or renewal of existing relationships, or assumption of new ones, but by their willed and desired severing, and concomitantly with a refusal to conform to measures of success in heterocentric culture. Howard is in a relationship with Tomas, but an old university friend, Annie Rosenblum, reappears in his life and informs him that she is the mother of his teenaged daughter, whose existence Howard has known nothing of. This discovery acts unexpectedly; not as an opportunity to reimagine what ‘family’ might mean, for example, but as a catalyst prompting Howard’s efforts to cut himself off from all of his close relationships. One of the first pieces of information readers are given about Howard is that ‘There was something of the gentleman in his manner; he had the kind of natural wit and fine feeling that turned every imperfection into an expression of

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subtler character—​a refusal to join in’ (51). As Howard’s winter’s tale progresses, it becomes evident that he is already drawn to opportunities to resist all intimate affective ties and their obligations and responsibilities. His motivations are explained variously: And Howard remembered what it was he hated so much about the company of friends, of equals, had hated ever since his mother died, had despised in his school mates, his college friends, his graduate colleagues: the constant skirmishing for intimacies, never being sure of your place in others’ affections. Not to mention the petty, petty greed of the social instinct, always hungry for more flattery, interest, love, at the expense of everything he held dear: independence, clarity of thought, a fundamental honesty regarding what mattered in your life and what didn’t. (ESW, 92–​3) It might be that he is protecting himself from hurt, stemming from the loss of his mother when he was a child. It may be that Howard has decided that relationships of all kinds are competitive, and one response to this situation is not to join in. But Howard is also attempting to engage (as Marny does later in You Don’t Have to Live Like This), in a philosophical exercise of self-​improvement. In Howard’s case, it is one which involves cultivating particular virtues, such as independence and honesty, in spite of their costs for relationships; above, the qualities he values most are compromised by the desire for affection. Howard believes he possesses ‘reserves of discipline, of disinterest, of abstemiousness. Qualities by which he had hoped to prune himself over time into a simpler, more functional shape’ (53–​ 4). This exercise in self-​improvement is not free from competition and hierarchy, though; Howard attends to the qualities which he believes might save him from ‘mediocrity’ (82) that is, which make him, different, special, perhaps better than others. If Howard seems less open to acknowledging this, he is acutely aware of the potential for self-​destruction in his project: ‘With each passing year, he grew more and more terrified of what he would do to himself if left alone, the logical conclusions he would reach’ (82–​3). Most sinisterly, Howard’s personal project of ‘pruning’ bears similarities to the ‘experimentation’ of the Nazi scientists he professes to admire. During lunch with his colleagues, he draws a parallel with a section in Slaughterhouse Five discussing Lot’s wife looking back at Gomorrah: How ‘human’ it seemed of her to look; I believe that was the word. I remember thinking at the time: it was a neat emblem for a kind of mercy, of sympathy, necessary in any judgement about the Third Reich. For example, and there are others that occur to me, the doctors who experimented upon the incarcerated Jews. They are often held up as the bogeymen of the clinical instinct; but it has always seemed to me a very human ambition, rather fine and self-​sacrificing in

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its way, to wish to experiment upon man. A natural progression of the desire to know, to look; without flinching, or pretended delicacy […] (ESW, 97) Most obviously, Howard’s remarks are troubling because they excuse antisemitism, and there is evidence throughout that he is antisemitic. Despite his hurt at his colleagues’ reactions to his statement, the lunch time conversation reminds Howard of an incident where his father is distressed by his son’s youthful vandalism, which includes the ‘smearing’ of a swastika on the school wall; Howard reflects ‘it was a statement of style, no more’ (98); yet it also seems that his father has taught him such attitudes and his mother played an important role in countering them. Howard’s antisemitism is also evidenced in his attitudes towards Jews he encounters in New York and teaches (54), as well as towards his newly discovered daughter Frannie (71) and her mother (53). Indeed, it is as if the cafeteria conversation (or Howard’s recollection of it), a little like the discovery of his daughter, intensifies and accelerates his project of pruning the self, of severing ties. It seems to suggest strategies which aid Howard’s efforts to alienate Anne, Frannie, and his partner, Tomas from each other, and which indeed he has already employed: for example, he falsely tells Tomas that Francesca describes him as ‘Aryan’ (96), and following the cafeteria conversation, he insinuates to Anne that Tomas is antisemitic (101). Howard’s efforts to manipulate those closest to him recall his comments about the Nazi doctors, with Howard’s cruelty designed to further his own project of ‘pruning’ and to ‘know’ himself’. However, the term ‘pruning’ suggests that Howard sees his work on himself as benign; he works on himself as a gardener might. It carries the disturbing implication that his efforts, like his understanding of the Nazi doctors’ actions, are to be understood as ‘natural’ or ‘human’. Todd McEwen argues of the novel that ‘coldness is a crime, Markovits shrewdly demonstrates, against the self first of all’ (McEwen 2005), and this initially seems correct. ‘Winter’ concludes by showing how Howard’s exercise of pruning and its attendant cruelties has resulted in the near erasure of his identity, his dehumanisation. In a final violent confrontation between Howard and Tomas, Howard’s bathroom mirror is broken but Howard does not replace it: ‘Whenever he stood up after washing his face, for a second he thought that the image before him was his own: those dirty black medicine shelves, mostly empty, a few pillows, his blade, a bar of wrapped soap’ (ESW, 107). While Howard, more than anyone else in the novel, presents an alternative to dominant models of human development and measures of success in American culture, he certainly does not offer in their place a model that recuperates failure more positively, as Halberstam suggests is possible. Instead, his life is predicated on states of rejection, cruelty, prejudice, and isolation. The representation of Howard could, however, stand as an example of ‘queer negativity’ which Halberstam describes as possibly ‘a project within which one remains committed to not only scrambling dominant logics of desire but also to contesting homogenous models of gay identity within which a queer victim stands

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up to his or her oppressors and emerges a hero’ (Halberstam 2011, 148). Howard’s story achieves what Halberstam looks for in one model of queer history: one ‘more resigned to the contradictory and complicit narratives that, in the past as in the present, connect sexuality to politics’ (ESW, 149). However, any possibility of grappling with Howard’s complex story in the ways Halberstam encourages is foreclosed by the novel’s content and structure. If Howard suffers for the crime of his coldness, others seem unaware of this. He also appears in the novel’s subsequent two sections, in ways which suggest that his crisis has gone largely undetected by others—​‘Spring’ demonstrates that he is able to continue to maintain professional relationships (119), while in ‘Summer’ he tries to give Rachel some advice (230). If he wants to sever all ties from others, he has not succeeded. Structurally, Howard’s story is buttressed by those of ‘Fall’ and ‘Spring’ on either side of his own, indicating that it should be read in relation to others. The novel’s organisation suggests further that Howard is not an anomaly but has his place in the world. McEwen argues that ‘Markovits consistently draws our attention to the barriers we erect against each other, against any possibility of admitting we are all the same, all human (a word that recurs, almost a mantra)—​that we share, must share, almost everything’ (McEwen 2005). But this is not quite right, as it describes Howard’s behaviour but not that of Amy, Stu, or Rachel. Howard’s reluctance to share is explained as follows: Another habit: it seemed best to him on the whole to keep what you knew in reserve until it was needed. Things said or done had a way of snagging on the world, of taking on more than was meant, becoming hard to untangle. Of course he also knew that anything stored in the icebox had a way of changing colour and losing smell, of denaturing in some way; but generally, he preferred that risk. (ESW, 63) Howard’s existential dilemma is echoed in his attitude to words. He is seemingly concerned to weigh up the value of relationship to others, and experiences relationships as entailing loss of control, in the way words lose meaning when sent into the world (the cafeteria conversation, for Howard, may be an example of this). Howard concludes that it is better not to speak, even though this too has risks (like the food in the fridge he risks rotting, going to waste alone). It is tempting to read Howard’s dilemma, regarding the costs of living life in relation to others versus radical self-​experimentation, as shared by each character in the novel. Unlike Howard, though, Amy (Fall), Stu (Spring), and Rachel (Summer) never seriously question or waver from a life lived in relation to others, with the potential for loss of control and misunderstanding that that entails (they take the risk that their words will snag on the world; Howard risks their denaturing). By including Howard’s story in the category of ‘Winter’, though, the novel raises the bleak possibility

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that Howard’s cruelty and prejudice should be understood as ‘human’ as any other behaviour in the text. The primary difference is that unlike Howard, Amy, Stu, and Rachel resign themselves to the world as it is, rather than attempting to live a life otherwise (and by extension, Howard and his efforts to challenge norms are seen as exceptional and in the minority). It is as if Howard’s story constitutes a cautionary rejoinder, ‘Be careful what you wish for’, to the injunction, ‘You don’t have to live like this’. The fact that his story alone appears to reach for something beyond the familiar scripts of heterosexual life narratives, with such chilling results, suggests that in this novel, the idea ‘that we share, must share, almost everything’ is experienced not as a generative and optimistic insight, but more as something which must either be accepted or chafed against, but not altered. Halberstam notes that the exploration of failure is becoming a kind of manifesto for the ‘subversive intellectual’, one component of which is to ‘resist mastery’ (12). The novel’s reliance on free indirect narration, the fan-​like operations of its narrative structure, and its use of seasons to underpin its organisation, all indicate its failure to relinquish mastery, and its thorough implication in the ‘all-​encompassing and global theories’ (Halberstam 2011, 12) of human development and success which it may be attempting to critique, precisely because its ideas of the ‘natural’ and ‘human’ are inextricably affiliated with heterocentric culture. You Don’t Have to Live Like This

Perhaps You Don’t Have to Live Like This should be understood as a more sustained, intensified version of the stories told in Either Side of Winter, one which additionally experiments with narrative voice in telling failure (the novel focuses on one character only and employs first-​person narrative). Marny shares Howard’s tendency towards solitude, his difficulties with close relationships, his problems with joining in—​and most importantly, his strong desire to live life otherwise. He opens his narrative with something approximating a confession of failure: ‘When I was younger I was never much good at telling stories’. He notes that his brother referred to his accounts of soccer as ‘this and then this and then this’ stories, concluding that ‘I don’t know that I’ve gotten any better at it’ (YDHT, 1). Initially, this seems unpromising. To the extent that Marny does not provide any information about what kind of story he is going to tell, or why he wants to tell it, it does seem that he might not have got any better at telling stories. Readers may feel that he does indeed rely on the ‘this and then this and then this’ format as a template for his subsequent narrative, which appears more concerned with recounting events in chronological order, rather than offering much in the way of explicit commentary or reflection on them. But there is nonetheless much information in these opening remarks. Marny’s doubt about whether he has improved his storytelling skills raises the possibility that he has not developed in line with cultural norms—​he might be older, but he might not have changed. Marny’s statement therefore links his own

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personal development (or lack of) to his ability to tell stories. Western culture’s dominant narratives of human development insist that growing older should entail acquisition of maturity; Marny questions whether he has met this requirement by reflecting on his storytelling abilities, suggesting that they might illustrate or reflect not only his success in narrating, but his maturity. Marny only explicitly refers back to this opening statement once in his subsequent narrative. Called in to make a police statement at one point, he states that he ‘remembered my brother’s joke about my stories. How I said, this and then this and then this’ (307). Possibly he understands his story as comprising a kind of witness statement—​yet witnessing what, precisely, and to what purpose, is unclear. Marny narrates his experiences in Detroit and his involvement in a gentrification or regeneration project led by his friend Robert in the early years of the Obama administration. This very specific spatial and temporal setting initially suggests that this novel is much more invested in interrogating structural factors and their impact on individuals than Either Side of Winter. Yet Marny’s understanding and assessment of such factors is often inadequate and problematic. Having picked up hitchhikers en route to Detroit, Marny explains that ‘a friend of mine from college, who had made a lot of money, was buying up run-​down neighbourhoods and renting out the houses to people who had the skills or energy to bring them back to life’ (27). While Marny’s explanation suggests that he is someone who can engage in the work of restoring the city, he does not describe what makes him equipped to do so. Robert himself credits Marny with inspiring the project, suggesting it to him as they chat at their ten-​year Yale reunion some years earlier. Robert claims that this is why he has invited Marny to be involved, additionally stating that he ‘wanted a historian on hand, in case this thing takes off. I want you to write about it’ (53). But the story Marny narrates is not one of which Robert would approve. While Robert’s intention is that Marny will write an account of the project’s triumph, Marny’s narrative centres on his own life in Detroit. It is often ambivalent, if not sceptical or even hostile about Robert’s project, and ultimately charts its failure. And Marny’s credentials as a historian are rarely in evidence. Marny begins a new life in Detroit because he is failing to meet a number of conventional markers of adult life. He has returned from the U.K. where he was unsatisfied by the precarious conditions of his university short-​term teaching contracts, but is unable to determine a new path for his life when he returns to stay with his parents in Louisiana. He notes that in childhood he was interested in war and that ‘I probably dreamed about war because I wanted to know what I was made of—​under the gun’ (3). Of his experience at Yale as a university student, he reflects that despite being broadly content, ‘the feeling didn’t go away, that there should be a better test of who I am than middle-​class American life’ (4). Although Marny does not state it explicitly, it is likely that moving to Detroit attracts him as a way of satisfying these youthful desires to be tested, as a man and as a middle-​ class American (he purchases a gun before moving there [22]). Later, in Detroit, he describes his lifestyle as if it comprises a philosophical experiment:

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I’m one of those academic drifters. I spent my twenties trying to get a job I’m not gonna get, and now I’m not fit for anything else. But it’s been good for me so far. You know how there are some basic facts about yourself that you don’t know, because you don’t want to face them or can’t get the angle to look. I’m trying to look. (YDHT, 120) However, it is never clear what Marny has learned about himself. His experience in Detroit largely confirms his conception of himself as ‘the periphery guy’ (26); as a single man in a group of friends who are largely in relationships and have children, he appears to consider himself an outsider. Marny is ambivalent about whether he truly wishes to opt out or resist middle-​class norms of adulthood (for example, he often describes his loneliness and appears to desire a partner) and appears additionally unable to evaluate to what extent he is representative of his generation, of living in a particular set of historical and cultural circumstances, or whether there his dissatisfaction is specific to himself. And while he is dissatisfied by the modes of adulthood offered under neoliberal capitalism, he appears to be unable to envision a satisfying alternative, as witnessed by his complex feelings about Robert’s Detroit project and his role in it. Robert sees those involved in the project as participating in a specifically American enterprise. Marny recalls Robert’s reflections: ‘It’s an obvious point, he said, but what people forget about the early settlers is that they were shipped over by private companies; it was a business venture. A typical Robert James pronouncement, vaguely general and matter-​of-​fact. He believed that what we were doing in Detroit belonged to the same tradition’ (53). Robert’s position aligns somewhat with that of the novel’s fictionalised President Obama, who visits Detroit and makes a speech in which he claims that ‘the people rebuilding Detroit’ are engaging in the ‘American Experiment’ (Robert prioritises the role of business as a motivating factor for the ‘American Experiment’, Obama focuses on national identity and self-​improvement). Obama says that people have come to Detroit from all over America because they have suffered economic difficulty or because they cannot pursue adulthood on their terms: “You have come because there was a voice in your head saying, You don’t have to live like this. There’s a better way to live. This voice has called people to America for over four hundred years. It calls to us now …” and so on. (YDHT, 179) Marny records Robert and Obama’s positions without stating what he thinks of them, although he gives hints of resistance—​Robert’s views are described as his alone, which implies that Marny does not support them, while the ‘and so on’ suggests that Marny is weary and sceptical regarding Obama’s optimistic characterisation of what is happening in Detroit (we learn early in the novel that Marny backed

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Hilary Clinton over Obama in the 2008 presidential election). Indeed, perhaps Marny’s scepticism is explained by the abstract, generalised tenor of Obama’s speech, which depicts those who are starting over in Detroit as participating in a mythologised, romantic and archetypally American narrative of self-​invention, which neglects to mention the specific American cultural crises, predominantly economic, which prompt their relocations in the early twenty-​first century, as well as the very different ideological perspectives to be found among the settlers. Marny’s life in Detroit comes to a crisis point when he is required to take up a role as witness in a court case involving two men he is close to; one white, one African American (Nolan Smith, an African American, is accused of kidnapping a neighbour’s son). The court case exposes racial tensions and inequities in Detroit and in the law, and precipitates the ultimate failure of Robert’s Detroit project, which, rather than offering an opportunity to design society anew, instead simply replicates existing inequalities and divisions in American culture. It also exposes Marny’s own limitations. While his friends fight in his house, he retreats upstairs; while his neighbour lies unconscious in his (Marny’s) house, he has lemonade in the man’s house with his mother. He fails to understand or acknowledge his complicity in the problematic aspects of Robert’s project; his characterisation of himself as a ‘periphery guy’ seems a position he assumes to avoid accountability. Regarding a domestic issue in his girlfriend Gloria’s house, he reflects that, ‘I don’t want to take sides here, maybe I should have taken sides’ (329)—​an attitude that sums up his position on most issues and reveals him to be ineffectual—​or worse, to be, after all, taking a side which he does not want to acknowledge. Strikingly though, as Robert’s project fails, he remains in Detroit unlike most of his friends, who flee the city. At its conclusion Marny is ‘drifting’ once more, pondering a move to New York, without a job, alone. His concluding speculations about baseball suggest that he takes a certain comfort in its familiar rules and moves and finds it a powerful source of memories: All kinds of memories come back to me, nothing is lost. Orange wedges and Capri suns in the ice chest. Grass in your cleats. God knows what the parents are talking about. Their kids. You keep starting over. Somebody kicks the ball away from your feet. And for a few seconds you watch them passing it up the field. While your breath comes back, you just stand there, hands on hips. Fuck this, you think, but then you put your head down anyway, and when it’s probably too late to catch them, start running. (YDHT, 391) Marny’s reflections about American self-​invention are no less romanticised than the fictionalised Obama’s; here, the memory of playing baseball in childhood offers the ability to engage in that American desire to ‘keep starting over’, although Marny does not state that he is engaged in a national experiment; rather, he is interested in his individual survival. His reflections suggest that the memory provides him with

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some kind of guidance for living; for him, unlike Howard, there is some reward to be found in joining in, playing the game, following the rules, even with little sense of the value of the exercise. But his anecdote also suggests that the game is played in defeat (‘too late to catch them’), almost because there is no alternative to joining in, as much as one might want to opt out (‘Fuck this’). Participating in the game without any real commitment or belief in it returns Marny to his opening discussion. Telling stories in terms of ‘this and then this and then this’ mimics both his participation in the moves of the game and his replaying of his memory of it, and suggests that while he engages in a system, a logic, which makes him unhappy, with no alternative, he would rather join in than not (like Amy, Stu, and Rachel). If any development is to be found here, it may be that Marny is deciding that he will no longer be a ‘periphery guy’. Marny’s ‘this and then this and then this’ indicates that this novel, too, is concerned to explore the role of narrative voice in telling failure. But like Either Side of Winter, it suffers from difficulties (failure) in its execution. Marny’s area of academic expertise is American colonial culture, but at no point in the narration does he exploit his expertise to reflect on the situation in Detroit (indeed, the connection is made by Robert), something which might be expected of him given his supposed credentials for, and presumed acceptance of, role of historian of the project. Reflecting on his upcoming court appearance, he claims that ‘For someone who likes to talk, who cares about the difference between one way of saying something and another, who thinks of speech as the best kind of action … it was like, for sailors, being in a high wind’ (360). Yet Marny’s narrative is notable for precisely its inattention to detail and its carelessness with how things are said. He simply does not evidence the care for words which he claims for himself. This is illustrated by his tendency to describe people as belonging to types. While he does this to men too (277), his descriptions are particularly objectionable when describing women and African American characters, and betray prejudice according to gender, race, and age. For example, of Robert’s mother, he notes that ‘there was still something left of the way a good-​looking woman looks at a man’ (16). Of another woman, he reflects, ‘Maybe women their age can’t help themselves. They have to say something if they see somebody pregnant’ (186). Robert’s nanny is ‘one of those women who puts makeup on her face to look unhappy. Maybe because she’s not pretty enough’ (282). Gloria’s father is ‘one of those innocent happy dark-​skinned white teethed black faces that probably cover up a lot of private opinions’ (YDHT, 204). Marny’s efforts to describe people in this way may be intended to convey a sense of worldly experience on his part (he has seen all these people before) but instead, they reveal a failure of empathy rooted in privilege, and the limitations of Marny’s knowledge of the lives of others, akin to Nathan Essinger’s. As for Marny’s conviction that ‘speech was the best kind of action’, it appears that he is primarily interested in speech as action which exonerates himself—​telling Gloria about a car journey with his neighbours in which they patrol the streets, he says ‘somebody took a gun’ when the ‘somebody’ in question is himself (106).

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Marny is an incompetent and unreliable narrator who cannot apprehend his own failings, but my discussion above has exposed problems of execution similar to those in Either Side of Winter, suggesting that Marny is not convincingly read as a cautionary tale designed to warn readers of the fallacies underpinning Nathan’s belief that ‘You need stories to fill the gap made by what hasn’t happened to you’. In both novels, but in different ways, narrative voice and organisation is inadequate to the task of critiquing forms of failure in twenty-​first-​century American culture, or actively impedes that task. The two texts I have examined ultimately shy away from fully exploring the rewards of failure as described by Halberstam. While they do suggest that Halberstam may be too optimistic in discussing such rewards (sometimes failure is simply failure), this reluctance seems explained by resistance to interrogating or relinquishing the values of heterocentric culture. As a result, they are ultimately rather conservative in their politics and fall short in their examinations of failure. It is clear that failure as manifested in the lives of American men, together with questions about how narrative voice is implicated in telling failure, are ongoing concerns in Markovits’s work, as indicated in his two recent novels about the Essinger family, A Weekend in New York (2018) and Christmas in Austin (2019). It remains to be seen whether Markovits’s ‘American experiments’ can imagine worlds where failure is reimagined and lives can be lived (and told) otherwise; if they are to comprise tales which perform a role other than filling the gap made by something not happening to a person, these remain yet to be written. Works Cited Halberstam, Jack (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Lowdon, Claire (2018) ‘A Weekend in New York by Benjamin Markovits—​a sporting shot from the Granta young British novelist.’ The Sunday Times, 3 June 2018, www.theti​mes. co.uk/​arti​cle/​rev​iew-​a-​week​end-​in-​new-​york-​by-​benja​min-​markov​its-​a-​sport​ing-​shot-​ from-​the-​gra​nta-​young-​brit​ish-​novel​ist-​cfnrrw​l9h Markovits, Benjamin (2005) Either Side of Winter. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2015) You Don’t Have to Live Like This. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2018) A Weekend in New York. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2020) Christmas in Austin. London: Faber and Faber. McEwen, Todd (2005) ‘Thrilling Times.’ The Guardian, 20 August 2005, www.theg​uard​ian. com/​books/​2005/​aug/​20/​feat​ures​revi​ews.guard​ianr​evie​w13

4 ‘EVERYBODY GOT THEY ROLE TO PLAY’ Basketball and Belonging in Playing Days Joshua Clayton

The YouTube channel BenMarkovits has to date posted only one video. Its title is ‘Playing Days—​The Audition Tape’ and its description reads, simply, ‘Applying for a job in an empty gym’ (Markovits 2009). In the gym, a young, solitary Markovits speaks (in German) to the camera, explaining his German family origins and expressing a hope that the talent scouts watching will like his ‘Jumpshots und Dunks’, before putting on a show. His shooting form is solid, his dunks are clean if unspectacular, and he misses only a handful of shots. At several points he relies on the wall to simulate passes from a teammate, and the thuds echo loudly around the low-​lit, empty gym. Markovits has invited us to watch him in the peculiarly lonely display of playing a team sport by yourself. The video serves as a sort of origin-​story artefact for Markovits’s 2010 book Playing Days, a fictionalised account of a single season spent playing professional basketball in Landshut, Bavaria, for ‘a second division team [in Germany’s Basketball Bundesliga] known locally as the “Yoghurts” ’ (PD, 9). As a piece of marketing, albeit a quiet one, the video both authenticates and ironises Markovits’s authority for writing such a book. Although he had already discussed his basketball past in several journalistic pieces, before Playing Days was published Markovits was primarily known for his novels about Byron, and there is a pleasure in seeing such a writer incongruently demonstrate a bodily talent (as when the video ‘James Wood Finger Drums’ made the rounds in 2008, prompting the literary critic himself to speculate that the appeal was akin to ‘seeing […] George Steiner do parkour or something’ [Wood 2010]). As David Foster Wallace did for tennis, Markovits possesses a certain experiential licence to write about his chosen sport, and both writers make use of their ‘athletic credentials’ (Purdon 2010) to gain unusual insight into the lives of low-​level sports professionals. Both have covered the greats, too: Wallace wrote on the ‘kinetic beauty’ (2012, 8) of Roger Federer; Markovits DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-5

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has written several times on Michael Jordan and has profiled LeBron James.1 But Playing Days’s compassionate portrait of the lower rungs of the basketball world was more closely anticipated by Wallace’s 1995 profile of Michael Joyce and ‘the trenches of tennis’s minor leagues’ (1997, 217), territory that Markovits himself—​ as David Brauner discusses in his essay for this collection—​came to explore in A Weekend in New York (2018). In addition to this broadly ethnographic reportage, Playing Days accounts for Markovits’s origins and developments as a writer. Plainly a bildungsroman, it is also a kind of künstlerroman—​a portrait of the artist as a young basketball player—​and an important transitional book that sketches out the kind of writer Markovits would become. It is also a book about transitions. The narrator—​hereafter Ben, to distinguish him from Markovits the author—​is caught between several different states, statuses, and categories; but such indeterminate belonging is, I argue, largely to his and his author’s advantage, affording them at once the privileged experience of an insider and the detached clarity of an outsider. As well as pointing to Markovits’s literary origins, Playing Days also anticipates his later novelistic explorations of sport, family, community, and politics. Published the year after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the book lays some ground for You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015), Markovits’s post-​crash critique of Obama-​era optimism in which basketball has a more concentrated political impact. Obama’s cameo appearance in that novel centres around an impromptu basketball game which serves as a synecdochic set piece for racial tensions within the corporate political elite. Playing Days, by contrast, never mentions Obama, but his presence is still felt. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father (2004), basketball allows the young Obama—​as it does Ben—​to ‘find a community of sorts’ (80) and to understand better his difficult relationship with his father. Alexander Wolff, in The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama (2015), notes of the future President that ‘the game […] played an outsized role in forming the man’ (1). The game clearly played an outsized role in forming Markovits the man and writer, too. It gave him his path into writing, providing material as well as a wage to tide him over: when Ben arrives in Germany, he is already thinking that basketball ‘might be an interesting way to pay a few bills’ (PD, 49) as well as a source of ‘experience’ (59) that could be drawn on later. ‘That was always the plan’, he admits: ‘that basketball would give me time to write. And something to write about. I was also working on a piece of fiction left over from my student days, about a man named Syme’ (142). The Syme Papers (2004), conceived during ‘student days’, began to be realised during the next stage, the playing days, which comprise not only a period of professional playing but of amateur literary play before anything so concrete as a book contract. In both industries—​basketball and literature—​Ben is as yet both insider and outsider, and Playing Days not only has its narrator come of age and put away his ‘hoop dreams’, but also has its author come to terms with his likely literary future. Markovits, an American migrant who lives in the U.K. and whose work is published by the British house Faber, has positioned himself between national literary traditions.

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The audition tape—​in which Markovits speaks German, attests to his German citizenship, and is exclusively courting European scouts—​has already marked him as an outsider as he plays the game at home, but by this he is also afforded a smoother route to a job in Germany, where he can, for instance, visit ‘Munich, the city my ancestors had fled almost a century before’ (PD, 23). Basketball opens an economic and cultural channel that enables Markovits to explore his origins and reckon with the overlapping facets of his identity along familial, cultural, religious, and literary lines. In none of these areas is his identity fixed, but he is thereby better poised to explore them. He is also at relative ease in relation to various institutions, having favoured the precarious freedom of the outsider over the safety of any one institution. ‘Ideally’, writes Mark McGurl, ‘the institution is the safe space in between interiority and exteriority, a kind of turnstile where one is continually converted into or meshed with the other’ (McGurl 2014, 37). Basketball, Americanness, Europeanness, Jewishness, literature, Jewish literature, liberal politics, selfhood: these are the principal institutions and critical categorisations that Markovits, as I will show, has been able to enter and exit with elegance and (apparent) independence. ‘nervously stepping into the role that his talents had thrust upon him’ (PD, 28)

‘I grew up in Texas with two obsessions’, Markovits once wrote: ‘basketball and Romantic verse’ (Markovits 2002). Having made good use of the latter in his previous work, Playing Days turns to the former for self-​explication. But the book is in several ways continuous with his Byron project, as hinted by the epigraph of Playing Days, attributed to the poet: ‘But I hate things all fiction—​there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric—​and pure invention is but the talent of a liar’. This constitutes an aesthetic credo and a suggestion that the Ben figure in Playing Days meshes with the Ben of the Byron novels. The Ben of Childish Loves (2011), the third Byron novel, can refer to Playing Days (2010) as his ‘quiet memoir’ (CL, 12), noting that it fared better in England than in America and that it ‘had received a more muted critical reception’ (12) than the Byron novels. Ben himself effects a lukewarm response, suggesting it carries ‘the mildly unusual, overcomplicated quality of the story you tell on coming home from work’ (12); but this is also what he had ‘aimed at’ (12), and the faint praise here of Playing Days belies how important it is, and how important basketball is, for understanding Markovits as a writer. To this end, it is also important to understand what kind of basketball player Ben is and thus where he belongs in the sport’s pecking order. In basketball vernacular, a ‘role player’ is one of limited ability who never rises to stardom but who can be relied upon for particular contributions at opportune times: he might be an excellent rebounder, or on-​ball defender, or long-​distance shooter, but he probably isn’t excellent at much else. Another kind of role player might be adequate across

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the board but undistinguished at any one thing. ‘Role player’ might also apply as a generous, euphemistic alternative for the term ‘benchwarmer’: somebody who fills out a team’s roster but in fact makes little impact. Ben comes to understand that he is of the last sort as he reflects on the uncompromising ways in which he and his fellow players are measured and valued. ‘It’s hard to describe what matters in sports’, he concedes, ‘without resorting to the banality of numbers’ (PD, 173). Henkel, the Yoghurts’ head coach, wandering the team bus following a hard loss, has handed each player the statistics of his individual performances for the season. Ben’s numbers are pretty dismal, and he reflects that there is ‘something awful about seeing your contributions to the cause so concisely summed up’ (174). ‘As it happens’, however, ‘Henkel was happy with what he called “my progress.” […] What he meant was, I had learned my role. […] Henkel had decided what I was good for and how to put me to use’ (175). The arrival of self-​knowledge is both deflating and edifying: any lingering fantasy for professional success is obliterated by the unequivocal indication of where he sits in relation to all the other players in the basketball world. But this is also somewhat freeing. In a piece predating Playing Days by six years, Markovits recalls having ‘asked my coach for a private word’ about ‘how far he thought I could go in this league. “If you work hard and keep at it,” he said, “I think you can play a useful role for a good team in the second division.” I had discovered, to my delight and disappointment both, just about where I belonged. So I quit’ (Markovits 2003). Markovits and Ben, both free from what Geoff Dyer has called ‘the trappings of permanence’ (Dyer 1998, 5), can pack up and return home. In the meantime, Ben can make literary use of his relative detachment from the basketball community and, like other of Markovits’s narrators, he sets himself up as more observer or interloper than active participant. Greg Marnier (‘Marny’), the narrator of You Don’t Have to Live Like This, claims that, ‘from the beginning of this whole business, I felt like an outsider’ (YDHT, 58). This is a touch disingenuous, serving in part to downplay his involvement in the gentrification project that structures You Don’t Have to Live Like This as well as within the racially charged court trial with which the novel culminates. For Ben in Playing Days, thinking of himself as an outsider gives him enough separation to be able to see, more clearly and coolly, the realities of life in minor league professional sport. Late in the novel, an American scout, Mel, spends some time in Landshut evaluating the local players’ potential for being signed to a team in America’s National Basketball Association (NBA). He and Ben strike up a temporary friendship that depends on a mutually illuminating transfer of information: while Mel jokes that Ben can be ‘on retainer’ as his ‘inside man’ (PD, 217), Ben is admitted behind the curtain of professional scouting, becoming privy to the terms on which scouts are paid to evaluate the talents, bodies, temperaments, and earning potential of his colleagues. As he judges Ben’s teammates, Mel adopts ‘the quick cadence of a professional opinion’ (229), but his reports are, in fact, brutally personal. Had Ben been fully invested in a basketball future, he might not have been capable of asking the hard

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questions (or of passing the answers onto us as readers). As he is, however, Ben is ready to receive and record extraordinarily detailed judgements of his colleagues and, in turn, himself. Other members of the Yoghurts are also able to appreciate that their basketball careers will be exceptionally short—​a stepping-​stone into adulthood rather than an island on which to waste away. One player is on ‘vacation’ (27) from an MBA; the ‘basketball experience’ of another, Thomas Arnold, ‘stretched no further than a useful role on his high school team in Berlin’ (54). Now in Bavaria on national civil service, Thomas ‘got in touch with the Yoghurts mostly because he didn’t know anybody’ (54): for him, the basketball team is a stop-​gap and an opportunity for company and exercise. For others, however, basketball is their one hope for a career, and it is already risky, disappointing, and brutally competitive. There is a sizable constituent whose lives align with how Marny describes the condition of most of his ‘college friends’: ‘[w]‌orking harder than they wanted to, making less money, living somewhere they didn’t want to live’ (YDHT, 5). ‘The truth was’, Ben notes in Playing Days, that ‘most of these guys weren’t where they wanted to be, and every loss reminded them of the fact that they belonged where they were’ (PD, 120). Precarity is typical in this business, and the term ‘basketball migrant’ (Falcous and Maguire 2010, 175) has been used to describe the transitory careers of lower-​and middle-​level professional players and coaches. Sociologist Christopher Faulkner, focusing on ‘a burgeoning population of transnational athletes’ (Faulkner 2021, 107), interviews a series of players about their ‘senses of home, belonging and attachment’ (109), and finds, unsurprisingly, that all these categories are complex and unstable. Although their own sense of home is no less fixed, the fellow migrants on Ben’s team know where they belong in basketball terms. They too have learned their role, even if it is painful to accept it. Two players on the Yoghurts have a strong sense of belonging somewhere better. Bo Hadnot is an American, from Mississippi, who, despite being already more than a decade into his European career, still has ambitions of playing in the NBA. The current season in Landshut represents Hadnot’s last chance to prove himself, and his dwindling career is contrasted with the ascendancy of Karl, ‘the local high school hero’ (PD, 38) expected to become what was at the time the rarest of figures: a European making it big in America. Karl is in fact a thinly disguised portrait of Dirk Nowitzki, whose career remains a watershed for international players achieving success in the NBA. Markovits did indeed play against Nowitzki, back when both were in the same German league (Markovits 2003); in the novel, however, Ben and Karl play together, up to and including the playoff championship game against Würzburg (the team where Nowitzki actually began his professional career as a teenager). Markovits teases Karl’s identity when he is introduced (16), but there are several clear confirmations throughout. Karl, or Nowitzki, eventually ‘played his part in changing the role of big men in the modern game’ (PD, 37), and he becomes a figure through which Playing Days reports on the European maturation of an American institution. Although basketball had reached European shores soon after

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the sport’s semi-​mythic ‘invention’ (Naismith 1996, xix) in 1891—​the Fédération Internationale de Basketball (FIBA) was founded in 1932, for instance (Andrews and Ritzer 2007, 32)—​it wasn’t until late in the twentieth century that traffic really opened up between the NBA and the European leagues, with Nowitzki the most prominent player marking this shift. He ‘turned out to be a pioneer’, as Markovits wrote in 2021, ‘of the foreign invasion of the NBA’ (Markovits 2021). Ben, meanwhile, in one of the several go-​between roles he adopts within the novel, forms with Hadnot and Karl the third point of a triangle. In Childish Loves, Ben suggests that ‘middleman describes my role exactly’ (CL, 6); in Playing Days, Ben’s teammates grant him the casual title of Dolmetscher—​an ‘ugly humble German word for translator’ (PD, 18), as Ben glosses it. The word, however, is usually translated into English as ‘interpreter’ in order to distinguish it from Übersetzer, which refers to a textual translator. A Dolmetscher translates in person and on the fly, and is thus more corporeally in between two groups, compelled to be both inside and outside two parties and two languages. Translating Dolmetscher back to English, and thus introducing a sense either of hermeneutic interpretation or a plainer understanding of events, underscores Ben’s abiding role, beyond his team, in analysing and re-​presenting the basketball world. He is sometimes a literal interpreter, translating German for Hadnot; otherwise, however, the word resonates when Ben finds himself an intermediary between the reader and another character’s ‘confessional’ autobiographical story (104). The richest such story is Olaf Schmidt’s, a teammate with outsider credentials well in advance of Ben’s and with whom Ben ‘had made a joke of drifting together’ (76). Until he is invited to have dinner with Olaf’s family, Ben is unaware that Olaf, a black German man, had in fact been born in the Ivory Coast and adopted by a young white German couple. The circumstances leading up to Olaf’s adoption, as told to Ben and then translated and compressed into a few paragraphs, comprise a short history of race and labour relations within postwar Germany. The details are too extensive to summarise here, but they illustrate the disruptive power of a naïve (and white) radical idealism. Olaf’s adoptive parents are representative of a set of middle-​class Europeans whose largely unfettered lifestyle choices have come to upend the lives of those with less secure standing. ‘They were children of the 60s’ (PD, 76) who had initially decided—​along with so many others who ‘weren’t reproducing nearly enough to sustain the economy, which depended more and more on the supply of skilled workers from the former Soviet satellites’ (77)—​not to have any children of their own. When they do have a daughter, however, they move into a neighbourhood whose racial and cultural heterogeneity: more or less suited their ‘ideals.’ But then something began to happen, both to the neighborhood and to their own lives. Most of their friends, it seemed, and not only their friends, but the kinds of people who might have been their friends,

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the kinds of people, in fact, who became their friends, had had similar ideals. Together, they moved up in the world. (PD, 77) In Ben’s second-​hand account, the egalitarian ideals of Olaf’s parents become self-​sabotaging: once they rise higher into the middle class, ‘[t]‌he wonderful cooperatives, which they had set up to foster a sense of community, did their jobs too well. They became exclusive. Property values climbed and the poor moved out’ (78). The parallels here to basketball teams—​as communities divided between home-​grown talent and imported labour whose ‘property values’ can fluctuate according to cultural and demographic shifts and the marketability of individual players—​are resonant, if inexact. As though Ben were making notes for Markovits’s future work, the attention paid to overlapping sites of community conflict suggests some origins for his later exploration, in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, of the perils of utopian enterprise. In the presence of Olaf’s family, Ben ‘had to resist the urge to mention my writing’, in part because he ‘didn’t want Olaf to think that our friendship depended on my curiosity’ (76). There is, at any rate, plenty to be curious about and much material on offer. Olaf’s history in basketball, though it reflects some of Ben’s experiences, traverses areas in which Ben could only ever be an outsider. Olaf relates having encountered, on a basketball scholarship in California, what to him were alien attitudes towards race, community, and integration. He is discouraged, ‘by the black players’ (81), from making friends with white players, and he senses a stubborn commitment to racial separation even within the same team. Ben has to push Olaf a little for the substance of his story: a white player, whom Olaf had befriended and who had become attracted to the prospects of playing professional basketball in Europe instead of America, begins to see their coach as favouring the team’s black players and decides to sue. ‘The story made it into all the papers: it was the first time a white player had accused a white coach of discrimination’ (82), and Olaf becomes ‘caught in the middle. If he refused to testify, he had a chance to salvage his relations with the coach and the rest of the team’, but he would also stand to lose ‘one of the few [friends] he had made on campus’ (83). Olaf, finding himself in ‘an impossible situation’, ‘did the only thing I could do. I went home at Christmas and didn’t come back’ (84). Olaf’s story demonstrates the racial conflicts within organised basketball and the omnipresent tension between group loyalty and individual interests. It also brings into relief the novel’s uncertain generic status, caught as it is between autobiography and invention. Ben wonders whether Olaf might be ‘leaving something out’ (84); it’s also possible that Ben has refined or embellished his interpretation. Olaf’s story is, like his parents’, presented as a piece of reportage in which a (relatively) free indirect discourse is occasionally interrupted by direct speech, such that it isn’t always clear how much Ben might be adding or editing. The story also contributes

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to Playing Days’s wider interest in how people tell personal stories in order to understand themselves and determine where it is they belong. Ben is intrigued that ‘the real source of [Olaf’s] regret’ (85) was not compromised friendship or racial disharmony but ‘the fact that [his coach] had promised him, before the season went sour, a significant role’ (85). Olaf, it turns out, has little interest in the thematic or narrative resonance of his past experiences; he is far more concerned with ‘whether [Ben] had any connections among American college coaches’ (86). ‘the bright reflected heat of my father’s court’ (PD, 9)

Not everybody on the team is quite so loquacious in the narrator’s presence. Ben is forced to piece together Hadnot’s history by degrees and from third-​party sources. By coincidence—​although one that is facilitated by the smallness of Landshut as a town and by the extent to which the Yoghurts, in their provision of accommodation, determine the wider material and social conditions of players’ lives—​Ben enters into a relationship with Anke, a young German woman who it turns out is Hadnot’s semi-​estranged wife and the mother of his daughter. Hadnot’s unreliable presence opens up a parental vacuum which Ben himself comes temporarily to fill, as he steps into an unsteady father’s role for Hadnot’s daughter. Much of Markovits’s fiction has revolved around the managing of complex, and at times incompatible, family roles. Whereas A Weekend in New York (2018) and Christmas in Austin (2019) stage gatherings at which decades of family history come to a head, Playing Days is centred around a solitary, often deeply lonely figure. Ben’s season in Bavaria has him adrift during a difficult period when, between two complementary states of ‘living inside of a family’—​between, that is, childhood and parenthood—​‘you […] have to get used to living outside of one’ (PD, 124). The difficulties of fatherhood and sonhood inflect Playing Days throughout. Ben sees his venture into basketball as to some degree honouring the value his father had placed on the sport as well as the efforts he had made to usher his son into it. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve ever been happier anywhere’ (7), Ben recalls of the court his father had built ‘for his kids to play on’ (6). Ben’s father remains a significant presence throughout the novel, which is dedicated to Markovits’s own father. In 2020, Markovits’s first novel for children, Home Games, returned to many of the same questions surrounding fathers, sons, belonging, and basketball. As if it were intended as a prequel, Home Games features a first-​person narrator, also named Ben, who has his own experience of displacement when his father’s new job forces the family to relocate to Texas. In Home Games, it is rather the father’s transitional stage that affects the people around him. ‘You know what’s hard sometimes about being a kid’, Ben’s father says to his son over spaghetti and meatballs, ‘is that when you’re growing up … your childhood coincides with the part of your father’s life where he’s trying to make a career for himself’ (HG, 31). In Playing Days, Ben sometimes thinks of his coach in fatherly terms, although the patriarchal bona fides are a little strained, thanks to Henkel as much as to

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Ben: ‘A team is a family’, says Henkel during a dinner with the Yoghurts’ owners. ‘ “Maybe you fight like cats with each other at home, but against everyone else you fight much worse, like—​tigers.” This was really the way he talked’ (PD, 183). Nevertheless, Ben is far from immune to seeing his coach as a father and himself and his teammates as children. Ben’s actual father, when he pays a short visit to Landshut, comes along to watch some training sessions. He even joins in with the team’s warm-​up. Ben is conflicted, as if paranoid of being usurped as a son by better basketball players: ‘I saw my father and Hadnot trading jumpshots, […] and I felt something like jealousy or embarrassment—​as if I had introduced [my father] to a girl I was sweet on’ (197). During another session, Ben’s father challenges Karl to a game of H-​O-​R-​S-​E. A venerable variant of the one-​on-​one, H-​O-​R-​S-​E involves a player attempting a shot which, if it goes in, must be closely imitated (the same distance from the basket, the same hand, etc.) by the opponent. Every failed imitation rewards the player a letter, and the first player to spell out H-​O-​R-​ S-​E loses. Karl, despite his huge advantages in height and youth and skill, loses; watching from the side, Ben ‘could see in Karl’s red face, as the game went on, the sullenness of a son’ (234). H-​O-​R-​S-​E involves quite literally following in somebody’s footsteps, and Karl, at this early stage in his career, struggles to keep up and assume the role to which he is being beckoned. An awkwardness is apparent even during Karl’s moments of triumph, as when his first true taste of stardom comes early in the novel. It occurs not against a rival team but against members of his own. During a preseason intra-​squad scrimmage, to which local journalists are invited, a photograph is taken of Karl in a moment of ambiguously animalistic, Whitmanian fervour. ‘A barbaric yawp’, as Ben describes it: except that his eyes, which were stretched wide open, seemed anxious rather than joyful. […] Giant Steps, the caption read, but another came to mind that captured much better my sense of his odd look: Pretending to Roar. He was imitating the stars he had seen on TV, most of them black, and hadn’t yet learned to feel the anger or joy they felt at their own gifts, and which the game allowed them to express. Karl was whooping because it seemed expected of him. (PD, 29) For Karl, basketball is largely a media import, and he has been influenced by the glamour of professional players while living free of the social structures and racial tensions laying out their paths to fame. Like that of any other institution in the U.S., basketball’s history has been intertwined with the history of American racism and the struggle for civil rights. ‘When Jim Crow laws split the country in two’, writes Kenneth Shropshire, ‘sports were not exempted’ (1996, 26), and professional and collegiate basketball leagues in the U.S. only started becoming racially integrated from the middle of the twentieth century, thanks in part to the prominence of breakthrough figures such as Bill Russell (Goudsouzian 2010, 91). Race is still

58  Joshua Clayton

perhaps the preeminent issue in basketball, at a time when the NBA is majority African American (Lapchick, 2020) and when many young black men still, despite the huge improbability of professional success, ‘[count] on basketball to transform their lives’ (May 2008, 3). Every NBA team is largely composed of men who each saw hundreds of other black Americans fall short; the European game will never be marked in the same way. Karl is as yet an outsider in his own sport and, without this troubled racial affinity, he will in several other ways remain an outsider even when he makes it to America. In postwar, post-​reunification Germany, a different set of racial tensions come to the surface. Ben is German (and Christian) on his mother’s side and Jewish on his father’s—​and thus outside of Judaism’s traditional matrilineality, as he will be forced to acknowledge, late in the novel, when he hesitantly pursues conversion for Anke. But playing basketball in a German setting invites him to explore the Jewish aspects of his identity. Ben in fact intertwines his family history with the history of basketball, tracing a line back to his six-​foot-​ten great-​grandfather, who had emigrated ‘to the States from Bavaria just before the First World War’ (PD, 5). The generational span here is roughly commensurate with the lifespan of basketball itself, and neither narrative is independent from history at large and from twentieth-​ century Jewish history in particular. ‘Basketball has always been a ghetto game’, notes Ben, ‘but in its early days the ghettos were Jewish and many of the stars were Jews’ (5). It’s true. Charley Rosen’s The Chosen Game (2017) and Douglas Stark’s When Basketball Was Jewish (2017) attest to the sport’s early popularity with American and European Jews. The hero of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), Swede Levov, is a high-​school hero in several sports who embodies basketball’s shifting ethnic emphasis, as well as the shifting cultural roles of Jewish sons born to immigrant families. For Levov, basketball is inextricable from his historical consciousness, his sense of being ‘fettered to history, an instrument of history’ (Roth 2016/​1997, 5, emphasis original), since the day he breaks his high-​ school scoring record coincided with ‘the sad, sad day in 1943 when fifty-​eight Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes’ (5–​6). In 1990s Bavaria, however, basketball’s Jewish presence is much diminished. It is even deliberately obscured. During the first half of the novel, Ben isn’t aware of any other Jewish players on his team, but Anke reveals Hadnot’s largely hidden history. ‘ “Did you know he was a Jew, like you?” Germans can never say the word without sounding daring. For them, it is almost like saying “sex.” “At least, his father is,” she said’ (PD, 157). Despite this affinity, however, Hadnot is disinclined to discuss his Jewishness, and Ben is largely left to ponder his own in private. Ben’s ‘relationship to Jewishness has never been straightforward’ (64), he admits; he was ‘raised as a Jew and bar mitzvahed’ (64), but in college, thanks largely to his own uncertainties born of what he calls his ‘mongrel’ (64) status, he was reluctant to participate in the religious observances of Yale’s Jewish population. Germany, although it ‘belong[s]‌ to the Christian half of my family history’ (64) and thus presents something of a matrilineal homecoming, provides him with

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opportunities to recover a connection to his father’s Jewishness and to reckon with legacies of twentieth-​century transatlantic Jewish history. When he visits Munich, Ben seeks out Schwabing, the area of the city where his mother’s ancestors lived. He ‘find[s], or rather, stumble[s] across’ (64) a synagogue, to which he is admitted by virtue of his surname and his ‘strong nose’ (65). Given a choice of yarmulkes at the entrance, Ben opts for the more durable leather and, as the novel progresses, he quietly alludes to a semi-​regular attendance. Ben even invites Hadnot along for one shabbat service. The acceptance comes as a surprise. ‘Maybe he was just being polite, or maybe he felt sufficiently adrift and far from home that even the comfort of a community he had inherited against his will seemed appealing’ (158). Either way, Hadnot ‘got bored and excused himself after fifteen minutes’ (159). David Herman, reviewing Playing Days for the Jewish Chronicle, remarks that ‘Jewishness is a red herring’ in the novel—​Ben being ‘Jewish enough to be drawn to the synagogue’ and to ponder his religious identity but not, perhaps, Jewish enough to make it a central concern (Herman, 2010). But such an ambiguity of belonging reflects the novel’s exploration of a specific kind of Jewish experience—​ that of being part-​Jewish. Like its narrator, the book is also in-​between: a Jewish novel, a sports novel, an autobiographical novel, an outsider novel that can be seen as translating or migrating across genres and identities. It reflects Derrida’s notion of generic ‘participation without belonging’ (Derrida 1980, 59) as well as the range of artistic influences working on a writer who once, in an interview, chose Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953) as the book ‘you wish you’d written’ and Michael Jordan as the person ‘you would most like to sit next to at a dinner party’ (Markovits 2008). It would be reductive, clearly, to frame Bellow and Jordan as father-​figures for Markovits, but the unlikely convergence of their influence is illuminating. Everything written about basketball since the mid-​1980s is effectively under the shadow of Jordan; Sam Smith’s 1992 book The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of a Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls is something of an upmarket forerunner to Markovits’s own single-​season inside story. And while Bellow may not mean much or anything to Jordan, Bellow was taken by the legend of the ‘Jordan mystique’ (Simmons 2009, 626), as Bill Simmons termed it in his 2009 ‘Hall of Fame Pyramid’, a 400-​page ranking of the 96 greatest players in NBA history. (Jordan, predictably, sits atop the pyramid.) Abe Ravelstein, the Allan Bloom-​inspired subject of Bellow’s final novel, Ravelstein (2000), holds parties for his students to watch the Chicago Bulls at their peak, inviting them to see their teacher as a Jordanesque personage. Jordan ‘was now an American cult figure’ (Bellow 2000, 57) and ‘Ravelstein felt himself deeply and vitally connected with Jordan, the artist’ (56). Chick, Ravelstein’s narrator and like Ben an observer figure, modifies himself in the same paragraph, judging Jordan to be ‘not a cult figure but a hero who moved the hearts of the masses’ (57). Markovits chose Jordan for his entry in the Guardian’s ‘My Hero’ series (2011), and, in a 2002 piece for the London Review of Books, he reports on how Jordan’s athletic heroism used to move the

60  Joshua Clayton

hearts of him and his colleagues in Germany. They once ‘came to practice slightly drunk on him’ (Markovits 2002), a phrase that Markovits would recycle for Playing Days when, after having watched TV highlights of the Bulls, the Yoghurts ‘all came to work slightly drunk’ on Jordan’s performance and put on an impromptu slam ‘dunk competition’, imitating ‘the moves of Michael Jordan’ (PD, 281). Ben, however, embodies not the lone splendour of a hero but the loneliness of a bit player. ‘Basketball is, of course, a team sport, but a big part of its tradition is the solitude in which you learn to play it: by myself, on my father’s court, through the heavy rains and the heavier heat of a thousand Texan afternoons’ (PD, 24). In this, at least, Ben can claim affinity with a young Jordan, who is depicted in the opening scene of Space Jam sinking shot after shot, alone, under moonlight, in his father’s North Carolina backyard (Pytka 1996). The loneliness that Ben experiences as a basketball player is also useful training for his long-​term career plans. For a writer, loneliness is not just subject but, as Michael O’Sullivan argues in an essay on Henry James, another of Markovits’s heroes, a ‘method’ or ‘practice’ (O’Sullivan 2020, 341). Loneliness may vary between athletes and novelists, but it can be in both cases generative: young players and writers invest their time in loneliness, in its promise that protracted effort in empty rooms and empty gyms will later pay off on a public stage. ‘Yes, a very good Dolmetscher’ (PD, 293)

In the tradition of the basketball movie—​Space Jam, Coach Carter, Glory Road, White Men Can’t Jump, Hoosiers, Air Bud—​Playing Days arranges its end around a Big Game. Landshut, the underdogs, face off against Würzburg in a match-​up that is all-​too-​perfect, given that Hadnot has recently defected to Würzburg following his unsuccessful negotiation for a renewed contract with the Yoghurts. Hadnot had relied on Ben to translate as the meeting veered between praise from teammates, financial concerns from owners, anger from Hadnot, and silence from Karl. The championship game, accordingly, presents Bo’s chance to claim revenge in the manner befitting a sportsman. Karl, the immature future superstar (and German), is pitted against Bo, the aging, disappointed (Jewish) American, with Ben—​the interloper, the ‘mongrel’, the Dolmetscher—​thrown between. The game has its preamble and its aftermath. A few weeks beforehand, Hadnot, whose new team has a game nearby in Munich, stays for a few days in Landshut with Anke and their child. Ben, still in a relationship with Anke, makes efforts not to encounter him, but one day, having decided ‘to work on my shot’ (PD, 283), he finds Hadnot practising, by himself, in the Yoghurts’ unlit gym. ‘It occurred to me’, Ben thinks, ‘that he was preparing for the playoff in a few weeks’ time. […] This was probably his last chance of making it into the basketball big leagues’ as well as his chance for ‘revenge’ (283). ‘How much would it help him to practice a thousand more [shots]?’, Ben wonders. ‘But you do it anyway, just in case, or maybe because you prefer it to the real thing’ (284). Hadnot’s solitary repetitions

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are interrupted by Ben, whose mere presence ‘changes the atmosphere’ (284). Even worse, Hadnot now knows that Ben has taken him for a subject in his fiction: ‘I hear you’re writing a book about me’, he says, while the two former teammates, as if sizing each other up for a duel, ‘pass the ball back and forth’ (285). ‘ “How are you gonna write that book,” he said, “if you don’t know a damn thing about basketball?” ’ (285) This turns out to be a challenge to a game of one-​on-​one—​or, rather, a one-​man show demonstrating to a naïve young upstart where he truly belongs. Hadnot is merciless, denying Ben every inch and taunting him: ‘You gonna write about this, too?’ (287). Ben’s final role during the championship game turns out to be almost implausibly significant. Karl’s role has also been altered for the game: Henkel, hoping to wrongfoot their opponents, has decided to play the seven-​foot Karl at point guard, a position usually filled by the shortest, speediest member of a team. Karl is angry, convinced that his individual abilities will be obscured and that he will thus appear less impressive to the attending scouts; Henkel is willing to dampen Karl’s prospects so that the team might win: ‘clubs and players, whatever coaches like to say, have very different interests at heart’ (300). Ben begins on the bench, relegated to observer, but soon enough is called in and assigned Hadnot as a defensive matchup. Throughout the game, Ben’s head is subjected to a constant internal ‘refrain’, ‘what the Germans call an Ohrwurm’ (298). He has experienced it before with inconsequential phrases, but in this case the word pulses like a mantra or a repeated self-​accusation: ‘Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher’ (298). The title he is given early in the book has hardened into an epithet that defines his role. It places him between his teammates and it extricates him from them, as if Dolmetscher is an instruction—​to leave the world of basketball and to translate it, one day, into prose. Note 1 With complicated results: see Markovits (2014).

Works Cited Andrews, David L. and George Ritzer (2007) ‘The grobal in the sporting glocal,’ in Richard Giulianott and Roland Robertson (eds.) Globalization and Sport, pp. 28–​45. Oxford: Blackwell. Bellow, Saul (2000) Ravelstein. London: Viking. Derrida, Jacques (1980) ‘The Law of Genre,’ trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1): 55–​81. Dyer, Geoff (1998) Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence. London: Abacus. Falcous, Mark and Joseph Maguire (2010) ‘Globetrotters in local contexts: Basketball migrants, fans and local identities,’ in Mark Falcous and Joseph Machuire (eds.) Sport and Migration: Borders, Boundaries and Crossings, pp. 175–​88. New York, NY: Routledge. Faulkner, Christopher (2021) ‘Home and belonging in the experiences of professional basketball migrants: “I have many places which I can call home,” ’ in Jim O’Brien,

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Russell Holden, and Xavier Ginesta (eds.) Sport, Globalisation and Identity: New Perspectives on Regions and Nations, pp. 107–​20. New York, NY: Routledge. Goudsouzian, Aram (2010) King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Herman, David (2010) ‘Review: Playing Days.’ Jewish Chronicle, 3 June 2010, www.thejc. com/​cult​ure/​books/​rev​iew-​play​ing-​days-​1.15932 Lapchick, Richard (2020) ‘The 2020 Racial and Gender Report Card: National Basketball Association.’ The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, www.tidesp​ort.org/​nba Markovits, Benjamin (2002) ‘Michael Jordan and Me.’ London Review of Books, 23 May 2002, www.lrb.co.uk/​the-​paper/​v24/​n10/​benja​min-​markov​its/​diary —​—​—​ (2003) ‘Dirk (career earnings $80m) and me (career earnings $5,000)’. Observer Sport Monthly, 7 September 2003, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​obser​ver/​osm/​story/​0,,1034​ 720,00.html. —​—​—​(2008) ‘Small Talk: Benjamin Markovits.’ Interview with Anna Metcalfe, Financial Times, 19 January 2008, www.ft.com/​cont​ent/​f7385​6f8-​c3ca-​11dc-​b083-​00007​79fd​2ac. —​—​—​ (2009) ‘Playing Days –​ The Audition Tape.’ YouTube video, www.yout​ube.com/​ watch?v=​Phms​LCK6​Cvk. —​—​—​ (2010) Playing Days: A Novel. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​(2011) ‘My Hero: Michael Jordan by Benjamin Markovits.’ The Guardian, 12 March 2011, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2011/​mar/​12/​mich​ael-​jor​dan-​hero-​benja​min-​ markov​its —​—​—​ (2014) ‘Just Undo It: The LeBron James Profile That Nike Killed.’ Deadpsin, 10 July 2014, https://​deads​pin.com/​just-​undo-​it-​the-​leb​ron-​james-​prof​ile-​that-​nike-​kil​led-​ 160​2381​429. —​—​—​ (2015) You Don’t Have to Live Like This. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2020) Home Games. New York, NY: HarperCollins. —​—​—​ (2021) ‘That Edge.’ London Review of Books (blog), 29 July 2021, www.lrb.co.uk/​ blog/​2021/​july/​that-​edge. May, Reuben A. Buford (2008) Living through the Hoop: High School Basketball, Race, and The American Dream. New York, NY: New York University Press. McGurl, Mark (2014) ‘The Institution of Nothing: David Foster Wallace in the Program.’ Boundary 2, 41(3): 27–​54. Naismith, James (1996) Basketball: Its Origin and Development. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. O’Sullivan, Michael (2020) ‘Loneliness as method: Henry James, individualism and the “more intimate education.” ’ Textual Practice, 34 (2): 339–​58. Purdon, James (2010) ‘Playing Days by Benjamin Markovits.’ The Observer, 13 June 2010, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2010/​jun/​13/​play​ing-​days-​benja​min-​markov​its Pytka, Joe (1996) dir., Space Jam. United States: Warner Bros. Rosen, Charles (2017) The Chosen Game: A Jewish Basketball History. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Roth, Philip (2016/​1997) American Pastoral. London: Vintage. Shropshire, Kenneth L. (1996) In Black and White: Race and Sports in America. New York, NY: New York University Press. Simmons, Bill (2009) The Book of Basketball. New York, NY: ESPN Books. Stark, Douglas (2017) When Basketball Was Jewish: Voices of Those Who Played the Game. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

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Wallace, David Foster (1997) ‘Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,’ in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, pp. 213–​55. —​—​—​ (2012) ‘Roger Federer Both Flesh and Not,’ in Both Flesh and Not, pp. 5–​36. London: Hamish Hamilton. Wolff, Alexander (2015) The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Wood, James (2010) ‘James Wood on the Unhinged Power of Keith Moon.’ Out Loud Podcast, www.newyor​ker.com/​podc​ast/​out-​loud/​james-​wood-​on-​the-​unhin​ged-powerof-​keith-​moon

5 ‘THE WORLD SEEMED VERY LARGE AROUND ME’ Urban Regeneration and the Sublime in Benjamin Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This James Peacock

If you solve the real estate problem, you solve everything else.

(YDHT, 380)

Thus declares Robert James, a major character in Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015). He is a developer who has purchased several dilapidated Detroit neighbourhoods for regeneration or, in his words, ‘a kind of Groupon model for gentrification’ (YDHT, 17). Detroit is an apt location. It is a city that saw its population more than halve between its 1950s peak and 2010 because of mass defaulting on mortgages and the decline of automobile manufacturing; where average house prices plummeted to less than $8,000 in 2009; where many residents viewed abandoning their homes as more viable than staying. The result is a landscape in which approximately a fifth of houses lay empty in 2010, and in which the ‘inversion’ of which Alan Ehrenhalt (2012) writes—​the regeneration of city centres and the concomitant reduction in affluence of suburbs—​is, unlike many other American cities, yet to take hold (Neel 2018, 113). In other words, the ‘real estate problem’ is particularly acute throughout Detroit. His fictional regeneration scheme borrows elements from various post-​2008 initiatives: the selling of houses for a dollar to adventurous artists and creatives; community projects such as the Old Redford district’s Blight Busters and public schemes such as the Detroit Land Bank Authority, which allowed new homeowners to purchase adjacent lots for as little as $100. James invites his college friend Marny, the novel’s first-​person narrator, to help him. Whether motivated by utopianism, greed, or both, James’s claim that real estate ‘is the only topic of conversation’ (YDHT, 379) and his assertion that secure mental health depends on ‘having a room of our own’ (380) raise important issues DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-6

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which, despite the intensity of the city’s housing problems in the period of the novel’s publication, have political, ethical and psychological implications beyond the Detroit setting. Primarily, they suggest fundamental tensions in the relationship between the individual, domestic space and land in what Samuel Stein calls the contemporary ‘real estate state, a political formation in which real estate capital has inordinate influence over the shape of our cities, the parameters of our politics and the lives we lead’ (Stein 2019, 5). In this essay I describe characteristics of the real estate state in the context of the global financialisation of housing—​‘financialisation’ being an apposite umbrella term, favoured by Raquel Rolnik, that encompasses phenomena such as the urban regeneration Markovits’s novel depicts, and the gentrification into which regeneration, regardless of benign motivations, inevitably slips. In producing aporia based on value relationships between a residential building and the land where it sits, financialisation excites a ‘real estate problem’ that, I argue, is of a different kind and magnitude to the one James sententiously explains to his friend, and lacks easy solutions. Deriving from the play of materiality and abstraction inherent to questions of capital, land and property value, this problem produces emotional and existential aetiologies for individuals that are the stuff of fiction. In my reading of the novel, I approach them via the sublime (with reference to its relative, the uncanny), exploring the ways Markovits represents a financialised structure of feeling characterised by displacement, alienation, unhoming and anxiety in the face of a world in which the local, micro and domestic cannot be understood without reference to the macro and global. Such a structure is prevalent in many contemporary gentrification fictions. These include home invasion narratives such as Cari Luna’s The Revolution of Every Day (2013) and Brian Platzer’s Bed-​ Stuy is Burning (2017). In home invasion stories, Michael Fiddler argues, ‘the presence of the invader within a domestic setting disrupts boundaries’, creating an ‘unheimlich atmosphere’ that ‘breaks down conventional categorisations of the internal and external’ (Fiddler 2013, 282). Similar concerns emerge in sci-​fi and fantasy tales of urban change such as N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020), in which competing visions of neighbourhood authenticity are transmuted into warring worlds. In Marny’s narration, whose characteristic tone is otherwise an affectlessness suited to his tendency to drift into situations as ‘a periphery guy’ (YDHT, 26), the structure of feeling emerges in paranoia, profound racial anxiety, suspicion of pervasive criminal activity and sudden, sublime moments of awareness of systemic interconnectedness. The sublime, according to David E. Nye, ‘disrupts ordinary perception and astonishes the senses, forcing the observer to grapple mentally with its immensity and power’ (Nye 1994, 15). Nye emphasises that it is ‘a historicized object of inquiry’, reflecting the concerns of its time (9). In Marny’s case, and in the case of many other gentrifier characters in literary fiction, the sublime is connected to financialisation and its effects on urban neighbourhoods and individuals. It enables a deeper recognition that gentrification is driven by a supplementary relationship

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between ‘large-​scale socio-​structural trends in capitalism’ and ‘consumer tastes’ (Schlichtman et al 2017, 14)—​in other words, structure and agency. My essay ultimately asks how much Marny appears to learn from his sublime experiences, and whether lingering gaps in his understanding are, in fact, key to Markovits’s critique. In his attempts to explain ‘the real estate problem’, Robert James emphasises ‘privacy’. He argues: ‘We have this whole idea of presenting ourselves that comes from having a room of our own’ (YDHT, 380). In his formulation, health, beauty, economic and mental well-​being depend on possession of private, domestic spaces because they allow individuals to ‘face the world’. Recalling a visit to a Brazilian favela, he illustrates the importance of ‘privacy’, and thus, circuitously, attempts to justify his project: And I asked some guy, do you rent or own? And he kind of looked at me, and he said, when I needed a house, I built a house. When my father built his house, there was still land to build on, but now there isn’t any land, so I built on top of his. But you should see these houses. Two rooms. There are no gardens. The only private space for someone with a family is on the roof. So people take showers on the roof, they snack, they sit around. You can see it all from the funicular. (YDHT, 379) With a casual sexism betraying his colonial mindset (also signalled by the presumptive first-​person-​plural pronoun), James argues that this lack of privacy, of a space ‘to prepare [themselves]’, is the reason that in Brazil, ‘the only women we would consider attractive are young women’ (279). His coinage, the ‘inside-​outside thing’, suggests an opposition between domestic and external space: ‘we build houses to go inside, which is fine, but then we have to deal with going out again’ (380). The private inside is both fortress against and preparation for the outside. Inevitably, then, despite James’s idealistic pronouncements about his scheme, the implied dichotomy of inside and outside eventually results in suspicion and division, a redrawing of boundaries. ‘Starting-​ from-​ Scratch-​ in-​ America’ (57), James’s urban pioneer initiative, reproduces the prejudices and anxieties bedevilling America’s colonial history. (That Marny is involved in colonisation is confirmed by the neighbourhood’s new nickname, ‘New Jamestown’ [222]). Unsurprisingly, ‘[t]‌he first community organization of any kind [is] the Neighborhood Watch’ (129), and it is not long before a group of recently arrived, gun-​owning residents are patrolling at night, ‘keeping an eye on things’ and setting up checkpoints to police the locals and protect their private property (89, 130). Politically, they are a diverse group, including ‘potheads and Marxists’ and ‘Tea Party types’ with a ‘libertarian streak’ (127), but they are predominantly white males. As we shall see, the specifically masculine fantasies they are enacting are what appeal to Marny.

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And yet James’s comments, despite his disingenuous insistence on one conception of ‘privacy’, invite another, deconstructive reading of the ‘inside-​outside thing’—​a supplementary relationship that recalls Gaston Bachelard’s ‘dialectics of inside and outside’ (2014/​1958, 244): the inside can only be defined in connection with the outside, and the individual’s psychological orientation is shaped by that supplementarity. The dialectics assumes particular power in a contemporary economic context: specifically, alongside characteristics of the real estate state which complicate ‘privacy’ and thus provide a framework for understanding the implied critique of Markovits’s novel. James uses ‘private’ to denote ‘a room of our own’, but this benign sense is not synonymous with privatised space; that is, privatised land. To express it simplistically: the domestic space might feel like one’s own, and thus ‘private’, but in the real estate state it invariably sits on land privately owned by another individual or corporate entity (such as, in Markovits’s novel, James’s investment consortium). As Stein argues, land is integral to contemporary capital, as both ‘a precondition for all commodities’ production and circulation, and a strange sort of commodity in and of itself’ (Stein 2019, 29). Under neoliberalism, land is less a collective social resource than a profit-​generating private asset. Its value is abstract and speculative: it is, as David Harvey writes, ‘a fictitious form of capital that derives from expectations of future rents’ (Harvey 2012, 28). Consequently, any material value of the buildings on that land is rendered hypothetical to the point of near inconsequence. If future rents are ‘highly susceptible to external factors, such as pollution, zoning or the vagaries of demand’ (Stein 2019, 29), and demand in turn is affected, or deliberately constructed, through political, financial and racial factors, then the property’s value will fluctuate in accordance with these extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors. Thus, in the kinds of paradoxes upon which literature thrives, the room is both one’s own and someone else’s, and is both linked to, and abstracted from, the land upon which it sits. Buildings are less relevant within the global market as domestic spaces than as ‘a peculiar form of value storage’ (Rolnik 2019, 17)—​ signs of potential future exchange. (An extreme example is the recent ‘hedge city’ or ‘safe deposit boxing’ phenomenon common to world cities like London and New York—​the purchase of urban properties to remain empty as ‘machines for money laundering’ [Stein 2019, 35].) So, the man who built his house in the favela risks the future abstraction of bricks, mortar and labour, and a slippage in the meaning of ‘private ownership’, as the land, for arcane reasons dictated by fluctuations of the global real estate market, acquires extra value. Contemporary economic and political aspects of the ‘inside-​ outside thing’ deriving from tensions between privacy and privatisation, property and land, mean that the global financialisation of housing ‘directly relates macroeconomics to individuals and families’ (Rolnik 2019, 17), with the following consequences for this argument: The personal and private are inseparable from the global and privatised; to inhabit the here of the domestic space is thus to engage with the

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elsewhere of global forces. Or, to express the notion in more lyrical, uncanny terms—​to be inside and ‘at home’ is simultaneously to be outside and ‘not-​at-​ home’, moving with global flows beyond one’s comprehension or control even as one invests time, money and emotion in personalised spaces. ‘Gentrification’, since Ruth Glass used the term in 1964, and despite the proliferation of its significations since, has consistently referred to displacement. What Markovits depicts is both the threat of literal displacement experienced by characters such as Nolan Smith, a long-​term black resident repeatedly invited to sell up ‘so that more white people could move in to the neighborhood’ (YDHT, 68), and the more abstract, existential feeling of unhoming proposed here, one often closely allied, as we shall see, to gentrifier anxiety and guilt. It is the feeling of ‘unhomeliness, this uncanniness’ that, according to Thomas Dunn, ‘forms much of the affective substance of home itself’ (2019, 11) in an era of restless consumption, refugees and widespread economic precarity. Also pertinent here is Tim Putnam’s argument about ‘the influence of external institutions on the domestic sphere’ (Putnam 1999, 152). He argues that the ‘technical infiltration of the household’ by ‘material “life supports” ’ of domestic life—​plumbing, electric cabling—​which accelerated in the early twentieth century, ‘was paralleled by infiltrating economic and political structures affecting individual household members’ (144, 145). As a result, the purchase of domestic goods, as well as decoration and the arrangement of furniture, can be seen as ‘reflect[ing] and indeed defin[ing] cultural changes’, imbricating individual taste and the workings of external institutions (145). Of most relevance here, given Markovits’s interest in renovation and infrastructure, is Putnam’s observation that the assimilation of household technical supports through the 1950s and 1960s meant, on the one hand, that the home became a ‘terminal of technical infrastructures’ (146), but on the other hand, that these features became integrated enough to fade into the background of consciousness. Furthermore, he posits in the late twentieth century an active elision of the evidence for ‘the rational and technical organization of corporations and public powers’ in homes. This is achieved through personalisation of décor and an inward turn in many countries ‘away from the street and the public realm, toward the backstage of the private garden’ (147). In what Putnam regards as a shift towards ‘postmodern’ domestic living, emotional and aesthetic investment in the private ‘room of our own’ occludes evidence of external structures of land, technology, finance and politics upon which households rely. Thus Robert James’s ‘inside-​outside thing’ assumes different connotations as the supplementary relationship between inside and outside is disavowed. In the following reading of You Don’t Have To Live Like This, the key to understanding the full implications of the ‘inside-​outside thing’, and thus the targets of the novel’s critique, lies in positioning Marny—​a narrator who shifts between disengagement and commitment, privacy and revelation, flashes of self-​awareness and frustrating nescience—​along a spectrum of recognition and disavowal of the supplementary relationship described above. Through Marny’s

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sometimes conflicted, but always self-​absorbed account, one sees at the narrative level a model of Putnam’s ‘inward turn’, to which the gentrifier’s preoccupation with the room of our own corresponds. If romanticised notions of privacy and domestic space distract from the intersecting economic, social, political and racial forces that help create that space, one must pay particular attention to moments when even someone as intent on distraction and inwardness as Marny is alerted to his connections with the big, frightening outside. However, the elisions and contradictions of Marny’s narration raise the question of whether his moments of sublimity and paranoia are in fact symptoms of his privilege, and whether control of the narrative, the exercise of denial and distance, ultimately defuse any anxiety and reassert the centrality of the urban settler’s perspective. In the first chapter, Marny’s reflections on school, college and academia reveal his complexities and his motivation for signing up to James’s scheme. His adolescent reading of military history—​what he terms his ‘nerd specialty’—​coupled with his collection of lead soldiers (YDHT, 2), suggests a masculine fascination with the assertion of power that compensates for uncool enthusiasms (like role-​playing fantasy games) and ‘puny biceps’ (2). Marny offers a plausible explanation, albeit with a characteristic reluctance fully to commit to a critical position betrayed by the adverb ‘probably’: ‘I probably dreamed about war because I wanted to know what I was made of—​under the gun’ (3). Such sentiments predict his participation in the neighbourhood patrols, sitting in a car ‘with the Remington between my legs’ (99–​ 100), and later his stashing of two firearms in his bedroom, ‘the Remington from Walmart, which I kept under the bed, and Mel’s Smith & Wesson […] That lived in my sock drawer’ (297). Such details imply an association between domestic space, paranoia and power. Likewise, of the patrols Marny remarks: ‘your average middle-​ aged middle-​class American Caucasian has deep-​seated fantasies about protecting his children by means of violence’ (100). His anthropological tone ignores his own protectionist instincts and participation in the scheme. It represents an attempt to soften the underlying prejudices that provoke the patrols, including the expectation that crime will be ‘prevalent as “background noise” ’ to the regeneration of traditionally working-​class neighbourhoods (Zukin 1987, 133). Far from acknowledging racist motivations for the neighbourhood action, Marny justifies his participation via a facile desire for homosociality: ‘We had a good time. I haven’t been out like that […] with a bunch of guys since I was sixteen’ (YDHT, 100). From the outset, Marny’s desire for ‘a better test of who I am than middle-​class American life’ (4) is bound up in an attraction to archaic masculinity contrasting with his suburban upbringing and tendency to ‘live too much in [his] head’ (26). His ambition is consistent with the gendered American myths discussed by Nina Baym, those which cast the roaming hero seeking ‘self-​ definition’ as masculine (Baym 1981, 132), and both the conquerable land and the emasculating restrictions of society—​in Markovits’s novel embodied in Marny’s mother, ‘freaked’ by her son’s fascination with war (YDHT, 2)—​as feminine. Through the opportunities provided by Robert James, a man ‘close to the center of

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the action’ (26) and thus the ‘inside’ to Marny’s ‘outside’, Marny can live under the gun in a location ripe for characterisation as frontier territory. In Detroit, sections of which, according to James, resemble ‘London after the blitz’ (17), he can live a pioneer wilderness fantasy speaking to his desire to locate an authentic masculine selfhood. That his vision of this new life is vague is due partly to his nebulous consciousness and self-​confessed inability to tell stories engagingly (1), and partly to the ideological imprecision of the romantic American myths he feeds upon. This imprecision, serving to mask the capitalist imperatives of the project—​ the fact that ‘[s]‌omebody had to get rich off it’ (48)—​is encouraged by James’s pronouncements, designed to tempt Marny with diverse images of settler colonialism. One focuses on real estate, on ‘beautiful big houses standing empty’ and waiting for middle-​class occupancy; another is of ‘a guy who talks about plowing the land into farms’, suggesting an agrarian idyll (17). If the first evokes the callous pioneer who values property more than history or local culture and aims simply to ‘retake space’ (Smith, 1996: 45), the second resembles what Japonica Brown-​Saracino calls the ‘social homesteader’, intent on neither ‘unmitigated transformation’ of the neighbourhood nor, at the other extreme, social preservation, but instead seeking ‘cautiously [to alter] their place of residence to build a home’ (Brown-​Saracino 2009, 10). Both images, however, subscribe to the Turnerian conception of ‘free land’ common to westward expansion and the regeneration of depressed urban spaces. Marny hints at his receptiveness to, and latent anxiety about, the notion of free land in a strikingly ambiguous image he conjures as he drives towards Detroit, having decided to join in with James’s plans. He is accompanied by a hitchhiker named Astrid, a German artist moving to the city for reasons Marny presents as early stage gentrification clichés (and who might well have been tempted by the offer of $1 properties): ‘All the artists she knew were moving to Detroit—​it was the new Berlin, she said. Hip and cheap. New York was dead already, expensive and dead. The only interesting thing you can see in New York is what money does to cities. And so on’ (YDHT, 27). Though the laconic final phrase signals his dismissiveness of Astrid’s enthusiasms, his response also relies on entrepreneurial and colonial cliché, and borrows from James’s marketing rhetoric: ‘I tried to explain myself. That a friend of mine from college, who had made a lot of money, was buying up run-​down neighborhoods and renting out the houses to people who had the skills or energy to bring the neighborhoods back to life’ (27). The desire to ‘explain himself’ implies uneasiness about his motivations, even at this early stage, and his reference to James’s wealth suggests that Detroit might eventually follow New York: the fabric of communities rapidly altered by land speculation, the exercise of economic power. Soon after this exchange, Marny experiences the first of his surreal visions, a premonition of more troubling sublime moments to come, which like them demands to be interpreted in the light of tensions between key terms discussed previously: structure and agency, inside and outside, free land and private land. In

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observing that the complex road network resembles ‘those sugar-​spun cages you get over fancy desserts’, he reduces the built landscape to an imaginative confection for consumption; he de-​scales and thus renders narratable and controllable a scene where otherwise ‘everything passes too quickly—​ the grassy verge, the trees growing up from the streets below, the exit signs and apartment blocks and office blocks and stadiums’. Warming to his theme, he describes a fantasy of control: I imagined lifting up one of those bridges with my finger, and watching all of the other highways, and not only the highways but also the exits and avenues and boulevards, streets, roads, crescents, lanes and alleys, pulling away from the ground, because they’re all connected, and leaving a tan line across America, the color of earth, with a few worms digging around underneath, some pill bugs and dirty wet leaves. (YDHT, 28) This is an image of a potentially overwhelming, sublime landscape of interconnected infrastructure and real estate rendered manageable through masculine narratorial power. Structure succumbs to individual agency, and the privacy of imagination renders the land ‘free’ for Marny to play with as he wishes, in an extreme colonial settler version of the ‘dialectics of inside and outside’ that encompasses the ability to return the built environment to the supposedly natural state underneath. And yet several elements of this image create contradictions and tensions, hinting at the anxiety that dominates Marny’s sublime visions later in the novel, when the gentrifier’s settler dream dissolves into racial conflict, paranoia and finally ennui. First, the line revealed when Marny pulls away the built landscape is ‘the color of earth’, rather than earth itself: an imitation of nature, inflected by human development. And the natural world that might spectacularly be revealed is bathetic and perhaps even unpleasant, nothing but a few small creatures and ‘dirty wet leaves’. The very imagining of free land, then, is always-​already compromised by its supplementary relationship with colonial settlement. When, immediately after the description of his bridge-​lifting fantasy, Marny states that ‘the sunlight flared in the rearview mirror, blinding me against it’ (28), the sense of nascent anxiety is reinforced. The referent ‘it’ is positioned such that it can denote both the mirror and Marny’s vision. What is revealed is the ideological blindness of an idea rooted simultaneously in the past, symbolised by the rearview mirror and thus signifying the settler’s dream of a return to pioneer or homesteader principles, and the future, symbolised (in another quintessentially American cliché) by the road. No matter its temporal paradoxes, the idea is essentially revanchist, involving the retaking of land. The sun, temporarily impairing Marny’s vision, implies not simply his lack of understanding of the full picture—​that is, the complex, structural intersections of history, economics, race and class underpinning land ownership—​ but also the active disavowal of this complexity exercised by pioneer-​entrepreneurs like Robert James.

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Though, as I argue later, the extent to which he learns from his Detroit experiences is unclear, the ensuing action, culminating in Marny’s testifying at Nolan’s trial for suspected kidnapping, provides Marny with numerous opportunities to reflect on the relationship between structure and agency, deconstruct the pioneer experience, and become aware of the wider implications of the ‘real estate problem’. Through a series of increasingly dangerous episodes which demonstrate the supplementarity of the micro and the macro and the fundamental uncanniness of his settlement in Detroit, Marny is alerted not only to (infra)structural, social, economic, and political webs, but also to the paradoxes at the heart of real estate capitalism. He gains awareness that land is neither free nor private and yet simultaneously both. As Rolnik explains, ‘the perpetuation of capitalism’ requires a division between labour and land which is effected by the transformation of free into privately owned land. Surplus value is extracted by the landowner (Robert James) through rents, the landowner being an active agent within ‘an open field for capitalist operation’ (Rolnik 2019, 151). Such a system, in which a ‘free’ competitive market depends on enclosure and private ownership, is, as Karl Polanyi argues, ‘a vital part of the utopian concept of a market economy’ (2002/​1944, 187). Not only this, but the system also depends on a liberal notion of ‘negative freedom’—​the right not to be ‘hindered by a prohibition or obligated to perform a certain action’ (Rolnik 2019, 151), the right to own exclusively but also to exchange or give away property rights for profit through contracts. This right has always had ‘an essential political dimension’, bound up as it is in an ideology of individual sovereignty (Rolnik 2019, 151); but in the era of financialisation (or state-​led, third-​wave gentrification) when real estate and government have become increasingly linked, its global effects are more exaggerated and pernicious. In Markovits’s novel, Marny experiences these effects (which provoke his sublime moments) in occasional glimpses of global capital and politics’ shadowy movements behind the gentrifying dream; in incidents which demystify the relationship between infrastructural life supports, labour and neighbourhood change; in the realisation that negative freedom is a luxury available only to dominant groups and in the widening racial fissures created not just by accidents and individual criminal acts, but by regeneration itself. The first significant incident occurs soon after Marny has moved into a house close to Robert James, ‘on a street in which about half the buildings had burned down’ (YDHT, 47), and it involves his first encounter with Nolan Smith. The meeting distils the anxieties emerging in the early weeks of Marny’s Detroit adventure. During these weeks, he divides his time between accompanying James’s partner Beatrice on missions to persuade ‘holdouts to sell’ (49) and renovating his house. These activities are more closely related than Marny initially suspects; both offer insights into the wider structural factors that enable the dream of a room of his own. Through Beatrice, Marny learns about real estate agents’ unscrupulous attempts artificially to raise prices, and the city authorities’ role in the buyback programme (49). Through renovation, he learns about the extensive infrastructural supports that connect his house to others on the street and beyond.

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The emphasis on materiality and labour shows the influence of early gentrification novels like L. J. Davis’s A Meaningful Life (1971). Marny shares with Davis’s protagonist, Lowell Lake, a latent fear and mistrust of the locals. For Lake, these feelings manifest in his inability to distinguish between the black men on his street (Davis 2009/​1971, 137) and his discomfort at their ‘eerie’, incurious gazes (99), and result in a shocking act of violence. For Marny, they manifest in his desire to carry a gun when he accompanies Beatrice (YDHT, 49), his assertion that ‘[e]‌mpty streets make you think that everyone else is in the know’ (51) and his petulant reaction to Beatrice’s surprise at his reference to black residents as ‘them’: ‘Maybe I don’t like being told that I’m a racist’ (52). Although his discomfort results partly from his sheltered suburban upbringing, and the frontier fantasies it engenders, it is also increased by the agglomeration of structural elements—​ economics, infrastructure, systemic racial inequality—​to which he is exposed during his first weeks in Detroit. Nolan Smith quickly becomes the focal point of Marny’s anxieties when they first meet (and eventually finds himself at the centre of wider media debates about the politics of regeneration). With Hector Cantu, a recent arrival whose team of Mexicans are helping Marny renovate his property, Marny visits Nolan to inform him that the electricity will be cut off while they reconnect Marny’s supply line to the mains. Nolan responds, ‘you may do so at my convenience’, and when Hector stresses that he has a permit and does not require permission, threatens to break his windows with a baseball bat (YDHT, 68). The scene presents challenges both to Marny and, because of characteristic lacunae in his narration, to the reader. Not only does the situation render visible the external technical support structures upon which the home relies, those Putnam argues are elided in postmodern domestic space, it also emphasises the production of labour attendant upon private land ownership that is integral to capitalism, what Rolnik calls the ‘barrier raised between work and land’ (151). The landowner, Robert James, has struck a deal with the Mexicans; it is suggested that he has helped expedite their visas and offered them cheap property in exchange for their skilled, and apparently unpaid labour on newcomers’ houses (YDHT, 64). As commodities within James’s speculative investment, they are multiply alienated: their houses and labour are not their own, and any value they add to property and land ultimately belongs to James’s consortium. Thus the infrastructural requirements of Marny’s domestic renovation evoke transnational migration and exploitative labour practices, on neither of which Marny takes a critical position. More troubling for him is the specifically racial element of his visit to Nolan Smith. Despite his resistance to Beatrice’s suggestion that he is racist, Marny’s narration betrays a preoccupation with surface physical markers of race: Nolan is ‘a big black guy, built like a linebacker, with muddy-​ looking skin and lots of little pigtails of kinky hair’ (YDHT, 66); the mailman who appears halfway through their exchange is a ‘big old guy with the kind of black skin that changes color around the eyes, like a sink around the drain’ (67). The

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stereotype of ‘kinky hair’, combined with the association of dark skin and waste matter in the image of the drain, betrays underlying prejudices, and the ‘muddy’ aspect of Nolan’s face forms a symbolic connection with the earth-​coloured line Marny imagines as he drives towards Detroit, casting Nolan as a native occupant of frontier territory (Nolan acknowledges this imaginary when he later refers to Marny and others as ‘Goddam colonizers’ [266]). Marny’s attention to physical details fails to compensate for his implied inability to read Nolan’s character and mood. As Nolan remarks: ‘You think I’m angry. I am not angry. This is how I talk’. Most importantly, he refuses to allow Marny the privilege of assuming he has excited any emotions, thereby undermining the dramatic importance the white man might attribute to the situation: ‘You are not understanding what I am saying. I don’t have any feelings about you at all’ (68). Marny does not learn from this misapprehension. He continues to regard Nolan as angry when he is not (317), and does the same with his African American girlfriend Gloria: ‘I wondered if somehow I had annoyed her. But the truth is, she was probably being friendly enough’ (160) (Once again, Marny employs the vague adverb ‘probably’, implying that reading his partner’s moods correctly is not that important). He even writes of Barack Obama, who appears at a promotional event and whose words provide the novel’s title: ‘I couldn’t read him at all’ (190). Though he never acknowledges it, Marny’s misreading of black faces and emotions mirrors the open racism of his friend Tony Carnesecca, who refers to Nolan as a ‘violent, angry negro’ (151) and later has a violent confrontation with him. Nolan’s supposed inscrutability and his declared indifference to the changes in his neighbourhood are crucial to understanding the scene’s significance, and once again show the influence of A Meaningful Life, with its malevolently incurious black witnesses to white settlement. Nolan simply wishes to be left alone: ‘If you want to move in here, that’s your business. But if you interfere with my life I will interfere with yours’ (YDHT, 68). In a scene which, as we have seen, renders visible and thus demystifies infrastructural and economic relations underpinning real estate and domestic space, the neighbour’s refusal to emotionally engage introduces an unwanted remystification, a troubling unknown or even unknowable factor. To complicate matters further for Marny, Nolan’s refusal to participate constitutes a refusal to concede any moral or social value to neighbourhood regeneration, which might obscure the less benign financial imperatives upon which it is based. If the locals perceive no such value, neither through complicity nor angry resistance, then the naked capitalist motivations risk being laid bare. As Marny later reflects: ‘There was a general feeling in the neighborhood, which I didn’t totally share, that the old Detroit blacks should be grateful to us, for pushing up their property prices and giving some of them domestic employment’ but the old residents choose to ‘[keep] to themselves’ (151). Yet again, adverbs betray: he does not ‘totally’ subscribe to this paternalistic view, but neither does he entirely reject it. Blackness thus functions as a central aporia. On the one hand, it constitutes a shadowy, uncanny outside, suggesting its own sublime otherness. Frequently,

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Marny’s allusions to his relationship with Gloria read like an attempt to overcome this otherness. Rather than ‘the guy from the social experiment across the freeway’, he wants to be ‘part of Gloria’s working world’ (219), but he cannot help but emphasise ineluctable difference: ‘I felt like I was falling in love but maybe not just with her, with something else, another world, but maybe that’s always what falling in love is like’ (224, emphasis added). On the other hand, it is Marny’s inability to assimilate black locals into his vision of regeneration as a moral project that forces him to acknowledge the evidence of other forces—​flows of capital, political intervention in land deals, artificial boosting of property values—​that shape Detroit’s transformation and depend on the very racial discrimination to which Marny’s narration contributes. Without the visible, enthusiastic participation and gratitude of Detroit’s black residents, Marny has to recognise their alienation, their abstraction from properties and neighbourhoods. Those like Nolan who refuse to sell and move are, ultimately, impediments to the inflation of land values and accrued profits from future rents; their continued presence ironically highlights the fact that ‘Capitalism is always racial’, that urban renewal is frequently used ‘to target one racial group for exclusion or expulsion while clearing the way for another’s quality of life’ (Stein 2019, 27–​8). Nolan uses the term ‘Negro removal’ (YDHT, 143), which Marny dislikes because it triggers his guilt. Black residents’ perceived indifference, their negative agency in refusing to frequent the new ‘food markets, street bazaars and bars […] getting a reputation’ (YDHT, 123) and in so doing to legitimise gentrification as an inclusive social project, therefore have a deconstructive function. They show what Miranda Joseph (2002) argues is the supplementarity of community and capital, and thus the perspicacity of Nolan’s declaration: ‘There is no human nature, there’s just law and economics’ (YDHT, 144). Additional confirmation comes in Marny’s increasing awareness of the workings of global capital behind the hip veneer of New Jamestown. In conversation with Steve Zipp, another recent arrival, Marny learns that ‘the numbers didn’t add up’: there is ‘some under-​the-​table deal, with the city or somebody else, to sweeten the pot’ (152). The most likely explanation, Zipp explains, is James’s deal with Goldman Sachs, allowing them to purchase empty buildings for the storage of aluminium, ‘one of those commodities people buy up in a recession’ (242). The mere presence of the metal drives up land prices, suggesting that in James’s scheme the dream of a ‘room of our own’ is just a front: as Zipp says, ‘what’s really going on is big business’ (242) or, as Time magazine proposes, ‘a commodities scam’ (YDHT, 336). There is only economics, then: the human inhabitants of the houses are simply placeholders, abstract elements of financialisation. The ‘real estate problem’ is not the lack of privacy and the human need for domestic space. It is that human habitation, in the final analysis, is subservient to land value, and ideas of domestic space and community subsumed within global capital. It is within this wider context that Marny’s most explicit description of the sublime must be understood. Significantly positioned just after a conversation

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about racial injustice with Gloria, it encapsulates the narrator’s creeping unease about his participation in James’s scheme and the sense, partly engendered by Nolan and partly by Marny’s suspicions of criminal activity behind the scenes, that on a profound ethical or spiritual level the scheme is otiose: the parking lot had no cars in it, just heaps of garbage, rubble and tires, and pileups of snow. I started to feel scared. I was also hungover and sleep-​deprived. The world seemed very large around me, not just the planet itself but the number of people, the scale of buildings and the general infrastructure, highways and tracks and office blocks and container depots. It’s almost impossible to keep your sense of proportion, you come out too small, so you have to combat how little anything matters with your most unreasonable voice, saying, it matters, it matters, it matters. (YDHT, 196) In contrast to his freeway vision, mobility and power is replaced by emptiness, paralysis and the waste products of construction, consumerism and transport. Moreover, individual agency is diminished and the sense of structure exaggerated to an intimidating level. The generic non-​specificity of Marny’s description corresponds to the fading of his romantic, frontier vision and the homogenisation of neighbourhoods and lifestyles under gentrification. As he remarks a few pages before: ‘This is the trouble with being a pioneer. You want a new life and you set up an outpost and soon it looks just like the life you left’ (185). Any sense of taking control and making a difference is sacrificed to the feeling of insignificance Marny experiences as he begins to understand the reality of his situation. This sublime moment causes him to question the validity and authenticity of his experience in relation to the larger drivers of gentrification, a process Kirsteen Paton calls ‘restructuring’ (2014, 1). In stressing the supplementarity of individual or local experience and global forces, restructuring is a sublime version of the ‘inside-​outside thing’, one which embodies the tensions Fredric Jameson identifies in ‘Cognitive Mapping’, that individual experience: no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place […] There comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience. (Jameson 1988, 349) Marny’s desperate repetition of ‘it matters’ demonstrates burgeoning understanding of his inauthenticity and a simultaneous desire to resist it. And yet his understanding is immediately undermined when the reader learns that this ‘outpost’ has a twenty-​ four-​hour McDonald’s—​one of the most familiar markers of global capital’s insidious reach—​into which Marny ventures for breakfast (YDHT, 196).

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If the choice of venue is ironic, the irony is less that Marny enjoys the products of a global corporation, or even that McDonald’s is not dismissed as intrinsically inauthentic; it is more than having evoked the sublime, Marny does not even acknowledge the connection. As previous examples have shown, his narration is a tapestry of recognition, disavowal, engagement and disinterest, characterised by lacunae as much as pithy observation. Despite its positioning exactly halfway through the novel, the scene cannot be regarded as pivotal because Marny continues to resist its potential revelations. During an argument with his brother and Nolan, he insists on a parochial reading of Detroit’s regeneration at odds with the evidence of big business’s role: ‘if you keep things local, if you pool together, if you help each other out, you can live pretty well without chasing the buck’. The possibility of local community, in a disingenuous echo of James’s ‘room of our own’, he attributes to the availability of ‘cheap real estate’ (YDHT, 267). In response, Nolan reminds Marny that ‘[s]‌omebody’s making money off of this, and it isn’t the people of Detroit’, and that ‘[s]omebody’s always paying’ (266, 267). Likewise, Marny’s brother refuses to accept that Americans ‘want to help each other out’: ‘I pay my taxes so that other people are not my problem’ (268). Marny’s assertion that ‘it’s not about money’ (266) disregards not only his own suspicions about James’s financial webs, but also the fundamental fact that local community is never separate from global capital, but rather, as Miranda Joseph argues, supplementary to it. Indeed, ‘capitalism and, more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of community to legitimate social hierarchies’ (Joseph 2002, viii); they employ the logic of flexible specialisation to address certain communities in their specificity and exclude others. Beatrice, with a pragmatism that eludes Marny, admits this: ‘markets depend on cultures. But markets don’t make cultures, you have to engineer them. That’s what we’ve been trying to do […] Handpicking tenants, different kinds of people’ (YDHT, 337). Marny’s romantic view is especially problematic given that he expresses it in the middle of a case that exposes gentrification’s hierarchies and divisions. A black teenager called Dwayne Meacher steals a pedestrian’s iPhone and is immediately knocked down by a car driven by a white man, Tyler Waites. With typical suggestive vagueness, Marny notes that the cops arrived within three minutes, but ‘[f]‌or whatever reason, the ambulance took another twenty minutes’ (YDHT, 225, emphasis added). From this incident springs the chain of events resulting in Nolan’s arrest and Marny’s court appearance, as well as the details of the commodities scam that is artificially raising rents. Immediately after the accident, the press appears intent on exploiting it for critiques of James’s ‘development model’. What Marny too readily dismisses as media-​friendly ‘easy symbolism’—​‘the fact that the kid was black and the driver was white’ (226)—​is, in fact, a potent representation of gentrification’s structural inequalities. Likewise, the media treats Nolan’s hearing as ‘a larger trial of the whole idea’, with Nolan standing for ‘old black Detroit’, his antagonist Tony ‘old white Detroit’ and Marny ‘the new guys. It didn’t go unnoticed that I was the only one in the clear’

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(326). As both cases develop and people start ‘taking sides’ (227), further evidence emerges of the larger structural, institutional factors from which Marny’s vision of local community is inseparable: more cops appear in the neighbourhood streets (201); mysterious ‘powerful donors’ post Nolan’s bail, turning his trial into ‘a political football’ (313); the revelations about Goldman Sachs appear in the papers (336). Appearing as a witness, Marny is once again forced, at least momentarily, to consider the interconnectedness of micro and macro: ‘I found the whole business both depressing and impressive. […] You realize pretty quickly that you are in the hands of massive but at the same time small-​scale forces’ (334). The exigencies of global finance, partisan politics and the legal system are revealed in local squabbles and pedantic narrative details in the courtroom: Marny suggests that the basis upon which he lives his life cannot ‘withstand this kind of scrutiny’ (334). However, as the story draws to a close, it is unclear whether our narrator has learned, in the light of his sublime glimpses of gentrification’s underlying structures, the kinds of valuable lessons one might expect from a more traditionally lyrical realist novel (and from a historian like Marny). Nolan is found guilty (371); the verdict sparks riots, during which Robert James escapes to Manhattan (387). Marny, without reflecting on the ethical ramifications, wanders around the neighbourhood, making cash by ‘going through some of the burned-​out houses and looking for things other people overlook’ (388). He briefly alludes to the numerous ‘shifts of feeling’ that ‘this kind of life’ involves, and observes that ‘different aspects of reality become available’ (389). The novel’s closing section, after the guilty verdict, contains some of Marny’s most affectless, fragmentary narration. He does not divulge precisely how his feelings have shifted, or what the ‘aspects of reality’ are, and his callousness in scavenging from houses—​jokingly observing that ‘this is more or less what it looked like when I got here’—​is shocking (387). A reader cannot know if he has been traumatised into numbness or is simply indifferent: one cannot know if ‘it matters’ to him. Clearly, for Nolan and Detroit’s other black residents it does matter—​materially, culturally and politically. If a reader is left with the impression that the stakes of urban regeneration are much higher for these people than for Marny, drifting at the close of the action into odd jobs and vague reflection, and Robert James, eating croissants in Manhattan while Detroit burns, then this is precisely the point. For Marny to suggest that the voice claiming ‘it matters’ is ‘unreasonable’ is to betray the privilege of his social position, reflected in his privileged narrative voice. Able to select and reject the elements of his experience upon which to dwell, he neglects to pursue the full implications of what he learns about structure and agency; the simultaneous abstraction from and entanglement with speculative land values and global finance of houses and their inhabitants and the true implications of ‘the real estate problem’: that people like Nolan are expendable as long as land values increase—​they do not matter. The limitations of Marny’s narration are therefore instructive. Despite glimpses of the machinations of big business and politics, and the momentary anxiety they

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cause him, the bigger picture remains fragmented. This is partly because it is, in its terrifying sublimity, difficult for any individual to comprehend, but partly because Marny, as a white, middle-​class would-​be gentrifier, has the luxury of not having to try too hard to understand. As a result, Markovits encourages the reader to work hard instead, to connect the fragments in ways Marny refuses to do. Like Jonathan Lethem’s A Gambler’s Anatomy (2016), which employs chief antagonist Keith Stolarsky as a singular embodiment of rapacious, property-​hungry capitalism, Markovits’s book lures readers into the trap of attributing the negative consequences of gentrification to a manipulative, greedy individual—​Robert James—​thus avoiding the larger ‘dimension of totalitarianism which cannot be understood on the model of despotic command’ (Fisher 2009, 50). Markovits’s critique is precisely of such a disavowal: the metonymic substitution of a symbolic individual for the structure that shapes and enables that individual. Marny’s patchy first-​person narration both demonstrates the inadequacy of the substitution and offers glimpses of an alternative. The final irony, however, derives from the book itself. In a metanarrative moment, prompted by news that Beatrice has written a novel casting Marny as a homeowner who shoots a black intruder (in another allusion to A Meaningful Life), the narrator wonders ‘what should I get for writing this?’, and whether it will be enough to stop him worrying about money, which ‘stops you from worrying about everything else’ (YDHT, 391). The sheer number of twenty-​first century novels about gentrification, many of them written from gentrifier perspectives, testifies to the money that can be made from the subject. Marny’s musings implicate Markovits’s own creation in a publishing industry which is itself gentrified, thus contributing at the level of representation to the very structural inequities the novel addresses. Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston (2014/​1958) The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. New York, NY: Penguin. Baym, Nina (1981) ‘Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.’ American Quarterly 33 (2): 123–​39. Brown-​Saracino, Japonica (2009) A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davis, L. J. (2009/​1971) A Meaningful Life. New York, NY: New York Review of Books. Dumm, Thomas (2019) Home in America: On Loss and Retrieval. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ehrenhalt, Alan (2012) The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Fiddler, Mark (2013) ‘Playing Funny Games in The Last House on the Left: The Uncanny and the “Home Invasion” Genre.’ Crime, Media, Culture 9 (3): 281–​99. Fisher, Mark (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Winchester: Zero Books. Harvey, David (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso.

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Jameson, Fredric (1988) ‘Cognitive Mapping,’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 347–​60. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Jemisin, N. K. (2020) The City We Became. London: Orbit. Joseph, Miranda (2002) Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lethem, Jonathan (2016) A Gambler’s Anatomy. New York, NY: Doubleday. Luna, Cari (2013) The Revolution of Every Day. Portland and Brooklyn: Tin House Books. Markovits, Benjamin (2015) You Don’t Have to Live Like This. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Neel, Phil (2018) Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. London: Reaktion. Nye, David (1994) American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paton, Kirsteen (2014) Gentrification: The Working-​Class Perspective. London: Routledge. Platzer, Brian (2017) Bed-​Stuy is Burning. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Polanyi, Karl (2002/​1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Putnam, Tim (1999) ‘ “Postmodern” Home Life,’ in Irene Cieraad (ed.) At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, pp. 144–​54. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Rolnik, Raquel (2019) Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance. London: Verso. Schlichtman, John Joe, Josh Patch and Marc Lamont Hill (2017) Gentrifier. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Smith, Neil (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Stein, Samuel (2019) Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. London: Verso. Zukin, Sharon (1987) ‘Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core.’ Annual Review of Sociology, 13:129–​47.

6 TEMPORARY CONCERNS The Limits of Meritocracy in You Don’t Have to Live Like This Lola Boorman

In a review of two contemporary works of ‘adjunct lit’, Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021) and Lynn Steger Strong’s Want (2020), Maggie Doherty recalls that ‘Not so long ago, there seemed to be something radical in rejecting the future’: In the 1990s, history was over; the United States and capitalism had won. Strutting conservative televangelists and smug liberal technocrats took turns running the world. Globalization promised more of everything: more productivity, more innovation, more wealth. Economic prosperity and regressive moralism went hand in hand. The nuclear family was once again sacred, and non-​normative sexuality remained stigmatized: Don’t ask, but also don’t tell. Conservatives—​ as well as some liberals—​ supported any policy that promised to protect children, born and unborn, so they might take advantage of the bright future that awaited them. Meritocracy was supposedly thriving, even as inequality prevailed everywhere. (Doherty 2021) On the other side of the 2008 financial crash, however, the prevalent feeling that there is ‘no future’ is less a statement of radical politics than a passive and terrifying realisation—​‘more of a lament than a rallying cry’, as Doherty puts it: ‘The future is no longer something to protect or reject; it’s something that’s slowly being taken from children and adults alike […] Can any of us honestly imagine the future?’ (Doherty 2021). The post-​2008 era is defined by this feeling of an unrealisable or uncertain future, a sentiment that is profoundly linked to the lived experiences of debt, bankruptcy, and precarious or fixed-​term labour which have halted narratives of generational prosperity, and instead confine us to what Lauren Berlant DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-7

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describes as a ‘stretched out now’ (Berlant 2008, 5). Doherty’s potted political history of the near past situates meritocracy at the ideological centre of the 1990s drive for the future. As a number of recent critical studies have shown (Littler 2017; D. Markovits 2019; Collini 2021), meritocracy is singularly concerned with generational ‘investment’, an investment that is orchestrated, predominantly, through the education of the child. A system that sought to dismantle older models of inherited wealth, meritocracy’s emphasis on ‘talent’ or ‘merit’ means that social mobility, economic prosperity, and happiness are understood to be always at the other end of just a little more hard work. Far from guaranteeing a ‘bright future’, Malcolm Harris argues that ‘millennials’—​those born between 1980 and 2000, and the first generation ‘to live entirely inside the mature meritocracy’ (D. Markovits 2019, xv)—​come to find their future over-​mortgaged, dominated by the ‘need to mine more value from the future and spend it in the present’ (Harris 2017, 65). For Doherty, the figure of the adjunct professor is the perfect victim of ‘competitive neoliberal meritocracy’ (Littler 2017) and its conflicted temporal modes, a figure who is both the product of elite education and its engine, providing cheap labour in universities with high tuition rates without much hope of securing a permanent, tenure-​track job. The protagonist of Benjamin Markovits’s award-​ winning novel, You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015), like those of Smallwood and Strong’s, exemplifies the inescapable paradoxes of twenty-​first-​century meritocracy. A perpetual-​student turned struggling academic, we are introduced to Greg ‘Marny’ Marnier some years after he has finished his PhD and is teaching precariously in ‘some Podunk college in Wales’ (YDHT, 8): But after grad school nothing turned out quite right. It’s hard to get a job in America with a British PhD. I shifted to London and supported myself with adjunct teaching, while working my dissertation into a book. At least, that was the plan. In fact, all I did was teach. Since I was paid by the hour I had to put together a lot of hours. Eventually I landed a nine-​month maternity cover in Aberystwyth […] I wanted a permanent job, but the department just kept renewing my short-​term contract. They had me teaching heavy loads, running admissions, sitting on committees, doing the stuff that nobody else wanted to do. (YDHT, 5) Marny’s existence is circumscribed by various overlapping systems of time. The unstable and uncertain time after his PhD (on the subject of colonial American history), which coincides with the immediate aftermath of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, is structured through an accumulation of hourly teaching blocks, each hour monetised, quantified and designed, at first, to provide Marny with a flexible, ‘creative’ lifestyle before collapsing into time-​consuming means of subsistence living. Marny’s adjunct teaching is meant to buy him time to write his book, his meal ticket to a much-​ coveted permanent job, but rather than

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supplementing his own lifestyle, he comes to supplement that of others, ‘doing the stuff that nobody else wanted to do’. Marny’s ‘nine-​month maternity cover’, a post that paradoxically only elongates his precarity rather than ameliorates it, makes visible the meritocratic obsession with futurity, as Marny’s labour is driven not only by the increasing demands of mass higher education but also by the state’s investment in the child ‘born and unborn’. For Marny, maternity cover is not an investment in the future but, instead, results in a process of ‘renewal,’ a series of short-​term contracts that condemns him to living in a cycle of endless termination, constantly starting again and again ‘from scratch’. You Don’t Have to Live Like This charts what happens after Marny decides to get off the meritocratic treadmill and instead embrace what Raphaëlle Guidée calls ‘the utopia of bankruptcy’ (Guidée 2020, 76). After attending his undergraduate reunion, quitting his job in Aberystwyth, and moving back in with his parents in Baton Rouge, Marny signs up to ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch-​in-​America’, a scheme devised and run by his college friend, the Gatsby-​esque Robert James. Capitalising on Detroit’s cheap real estate in the wake of the default of General Motors and in the run up to the city’s declaration of bankruptcy in 2013, ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch-​ in-​America’ positions itself as a ‘Groupon model for gentrification’ (YDHT, 17) providing not only cheap rent on properties that tenants renovate themselves but also the necessary social networking tools to allow ‘a young “creative class” ’ (Kalisch 2021, 202) to band together into ‘settler’ communities. As Guidée notes, ‘while one hundred years ago, people from all over the world came to Detroit because Henry Ford offered wages twice as high as the average national salary, they are now attracted by a metropolis so ruined one can hope to survive on cheap rent and a DIY economy’ (80–81). Throughout the novel we witness Marny struggle to reconcile pervasive myths and ideologies about work, achievement, reproduction, education, and happiness with an environment dominated by material collapse, social fracture, inequality, and generational stagnation or decline. This essay proposes that You Don’t Have to Live Like This is concerned less with the possibilities of bankruptcy, as Guidée suggests, than it is with the paradoxes of telling a meritocratic narrative in an era of financial crisis. You Don’t Have to Live Like This can be read as part of broader critical reappraisal that seeks to examine meritocratic ideology as complicit in the construction of a neoliberal ‘plutocracy’ (Littler 2017, 2). One such critic is Markovits’s brother, Daniel, whose 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap begins, provocatively, with the assertion that ‘Merit is a sham’ (ix), and goes on to argue that, far from eradicating hierarchies and notions of inherited privilege, meritocracy has only accentuated inequality in new and pervasive ways. Moreover, meritocracy ensnares those who profit from it as much as those who don’t, ‘requir[ing] families who wish to transmit caste down through their generations continually to build and rebuild privilege, as each generation must re-​establish its eliteness afresh, by its own accomplishments’ (xv). In this way, a cultural emphasis on meritocracy fosters a logic of generational investment that is at odds with a neoliberal system that engenders a temporal sense

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of the ‘stretched out now’. Markovits’s novel addresses this temporal disjunction by adopting a literary mode defined by Alexander Manshel (2017) as the ‘recent historical novel’ as a means of interrogating the complicit relationship between narrative form and the familiar parable of upward mobility: ‘the capitalist narrative of a new beginning, the frontier narrative of a new world free from the old world’s debts, and finally, the moralizing narrative of self-​sufficiency’ (Guidée 2020, 88). You Don’t Have to Live Like This disrupts its own impulse to historicize and to conform to meritocratic narratives of progress and improvement, pursuing, instead (or, perhaps, in spite of itself), a logic of anti-​development that presents the figure of the child both as an emblem of meritocracy’s regressive ‘sham’ and a figure of optimistic reinvention. Much like the Markovits brothers, who have attended a number of elite universities and hold multiple degrees, Marny is presented as a reluctant but model member of the meritocracy.1 Despite that fact that he ‘didn’t particularly want to go to college’ (YDHT, 3), preferring instead the more romantic idea of enlisting in the army, ‘gold-​rushing or homesteading or something’ (3), his parents insist and pack Marny off to Yale. His experience is consistent with the dominant logic of American meritocracy, which as Daniel Markovits and others have argued, is wielded largely through a hyper-​investment in education from kindergarten through multiple higher degrees, whereby ‘meritocracy transforms education into a rigorous and intense contest to join the elite’ (D. Markovits 2019, 5). Harris devotes lengthy sections of his study Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials (2017) to a discussion of how late-​twentieth and twenty-​first-​century pedagogy has moved increasingly away from philosophies of play and creativity and become largely a means of modelling work. Commenting on an array of statistics that demonstrates how time spent on homework, standardized testing, and Advanced Placement courses have increased alongside a reduction in children’s free time, Harris notes that what contemporary education trains students for is the relentless overwork and overachievement of the neoliberal economy, such that ‘when students are working, what they’re working on is their own ability to work’ (Harris 2017, 22). Competitive, elite education becomes the primary means by which parents invest in and develop their child’s human capital. As Daniel Markovits suggests, ‘Meritocracy sustains dynasties by reconstructing the family on the model of the firm, the household on the model of the workplace, and the child on the model of the product’ (D. Markovits 2019, 116). Marny’s inability to imagine a viable alternative to going to college, beyond outmoded generational models like the draft or gold rushing, is symptomatic of his, and his parents’, entrapment in the meritocratic system, where hard work does not result in satisfaction or material achievement but merely gains Marny access to the next phase of the cyclical labour economy: Later [Marny’s father] said “I don’t understand what the hard work was for. All those grades.”

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“You tell me, Dad. Getting grades is basically the only thing I know how to do.” “So go to college,” he said.

(YDHT, 3)

In this brief exchange, Harris’s diagnosis becomes painfully clear as Marny realises that his education has not granted him access to any specific field of knowledge or even prepared him for a tangible career but has equipped him only to continue to accumulate education and qualifications. Marny continues in higher education after he finishes his undergraduate degree at Yale—​where he encounters a series of ‘kids who might cut a figure in the world one day […] It helps to know important, influential people’ (YDHT, 4)—​but his stockpiling of elite degrees is presented not as a marker of his meritocratic achievement but, paradoxically, as a kind of regression back to inherited wealth: Two days after graduation, two days after throwing my hat in the air, I flew to England. My brother was winding up a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford before going to law school in Chicago. I lived with him for a couple of weeks, then took over the lease on his flat. It was one of these psychologically complicated family financial arrangements. I didn’t win any scholarships but my dad offered to pay my way. And what started out as an MSt in US history turned into a doctoral thesis that took up five years of my life […] For a while it seemed that all of that stupid homework was paying off. A suburban kid from Baton Rouge, going to Yale and Oxford, moving up in the world. (YDHT, 5) Slipping into his brother’s life, although notably not his Rhodes scholarship, Marny’s overachievement is presented as a series of passive concessions (his MSt ‘turned into a doctoral thesis’) that largely glosses over the time and work involved in applying for and attaining these elite degrees. Marny’s ability rests largely on his father’s willingness to ‘pay [his] way’ (a fact that confirms Daniel Markovits’s and others’ claim that meritocracy creates ‘dynastic’ and ‘inherited’ privilege) and the high-​achieving precedent set by his brother. Marny’s disaffection works against the developmental logic of the bildungsroman in the act of narration. But his final two sentences revert to a proclamation of self-​reliance and social mobility that makes his narrative of hyper-​education into a self-​fulfilling prophecy of middle-​ class success, of ‘moving up in the world’. As the novel quickly makes clear, however, ‘all that homework’ really doesn’t seem to pay off in the post-​2008 job market. But throughout the novel Marny is far less concerned with debt and financial ruin than we might expect. In Detroit he interviews a number of Robert’s new ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’ recruits for his neighbourhood newsletter, many of whom have defaulted on their homes or faced

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unemployment, but he rattles off their stories as unexceptional, as merely part of the fabric of American life. Indeed, there is a keen structural similarity between Marny’s catalogue of the lived experiences of bankruptcy and the speech Barack Obama gives later in the novel at one of Robert’s fundraisers (before a pick-​up basketball match against Marny), which similarly compresses and conflates individual experience into a narrative of social unity: ‘You have come here from Albuquerque and Chicago, from Queens and from Cleveland […] You have come because you lost your job or you couldn’t get a job. Because your health insurance ran out or your mortgage was worth more than your home’ (YDHT, 179). For Marny, material facts are less important than the kind of life he wants to live. As he muses in the opening of the novel, ‘there should be a better test of who I am than middle-​class American life’ (4). When he and Robert rekindle their friendship at the Yale reunion they are equally dissatisfied with the rhythms and securities of their daily lives, although in notably different ways. Robert is presented as a model of capitalist efficiency. In college Robert would ask his classmates to distil their reading into talking points: ‘okay, so what’s his deal, what’s his line, what do I need to know. As if you could break a book down into two or three usable ideas. He was famous for walking out of a three-​hour philosophy exam after sixty minutes’ (YDHT, 9). When they meet at the reunion, Robert speaks about a recent business trip to China: “You’ve got two pairs of shorts and socks, a spare shirt, another pair of pants. The hotel takes care of the washing—​they fold it up nicely and hang it outside your door in the morning. You’ve got passport and tickets. And you think, I could just keep going. I could go on like this as long as I wanted to.” “Somebody said you got married.” But he didn’t seem to hear me.

(YDHT, 7–​8)

What seems to some to be a rootless yet repetitive routine, one that privileges hotel service over home life, becomes a kind of fantasy for Robert, free from the expectation of social attachment, a life that is only work. Robert eschews, or is indifferent to, the stability and social happiness afforded by marriage and family, which, in his study of the European bildungsroman, Franco Moretti describes as a marker of ‘an objectively completed socialization’: ‘happiness is the opposite of freedom, the end of becoming. Its appearance means the end of all tension between the individual and his world; all desire for further metamorphosis is extinguished’ (Moretti 2000, 24, 23). Robert’s attitude represents a resistance to the bildungsroman’s narrative of maturation and to the meritocratic investment in the nuclear family, but he also embodies how the fulfilment of meritocratic promise (i.e., happiness) is at odds with the demands of the neoliberal work economy, which demands constant production, overwork and competition.

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While his situation is markedly different to Robert’s—​despite their comparable education—​Marny expresses a similar, albeit paradoxical, dissatisfaction with structures that provide both financial and social stability. Listening to Marny’s complaints about his precarious position in UK academia, Robert asks him why he doesn’t just move home. Marny’s response is characteristic of his paradoxical relationship to meritocratic systems and social institutions: ‘That’s the problem with Europe—​the welfare state sucks you in’ (YDHT, 8). Lamenting job insecurity and criticising the anaesthetising effects of the welfare state in almost the same breath, Marny’s attitude, like Robert’s, reveals a tension between their aspiration towards a stable and secure middle-​class life and a model of continuous risk. Marny is not unique in viewing the welfare state as a kind of deadening or limitation of social and financial possibility. As Bruce Robbins has shown, the welfare state does not facilitate upward mobility but merely ‘prevents a drastic fall’ (Robbins 2009, 163). The welfare state’s ‘social engineering,’ Robbins continues, ‘aims to relieve the hardships of daily life, sweetening rather than abolishing or transforming them. It also requires a refusal of “middle class morality” of individual self-​ reliance’ (170). Despite this institutional fact, Mary Esteve writes that the postwar liberal welfare-​state was ideologically and economically bound up in the ideal of happiness, understood as ‘America’s uppermost value, it is utility that affirms itself’ (Esteve 2016, 127). But it is the pursuit of happiness that is the foundational component of meritocratic ideology. Marny’s ambivalence about the welfare state expresses disappointment in a failed or degraded system—​while he is a beneficiary of the institutions of the UK welfare state, he is also a member of an underclass of precarious workers who do not benefit from full employment rights—​but it also speaks to his meritocratic restlessness that demands a continuous reassertion of the self into the logic of self-​reliant reinvention. This paradox has a paralysing effect on literary production: Marny’s neighbour, Tony, attributes his writer’s block to ‘to comfortable living’ (YDHT, 61).2 Marny’s belated academic monograph also remains unwritten. Whether happiness lies in stability or risk remains a central question for Marny. Shortly after he moves to Detroit, he finds himself at a party for Robert’s investors at a large lake house outside the city and feels suddenly overcome with uncertainty about his life choices: “I’m thirty-​four years old. I have no job or wife or kids or girlfriend. For some reason I’ve moved here, on your dime.” “Don’t worry about that. I got a lot of dimes.” “I don’t know, Robert. I’m having anxiety-​sadness.” “What’s that?” “There’s a hundred things I’m worried about, but what really worries me is that even if they all turned out okay I wouldn’t be any happier.” “I’m a little caught up in temporary concerns myself,” Robert said. (YDHT, 79)

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It’s unclear exactly what Robert is identifying as a temporary concern—​Marny’s childlessness, his lack of direction or financial security, his ‘anxiety-​sadness’. All Marny’s worries, and especially his primary concern about whether he will ever find happiness, are, for Robert, problems of the now. Yet while Robert doesn’t seem to think much of the concept of happiness, his business model relies on the widespread belief that happiness can be achieved through hard work and self-​reliance, even as he takes a paternalistic stance towards Marny and the other ‘setters’. It is this entitlement that fuels Starting-​from-​Scratch’s neo-​colonial impulses but it is also the primary force driving Marny’s ideologically conflicted narration. The question of happiness emerges again later in the novel in a heated debate between Marny and his high-​achieving brother, Brad. The exchange begins as a different argument between Marny and his neighbour, Nolan, a local Black artist, long-​time resident of the area and a strong opponent of ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’. Marny rejects Nolan’s assertion that the scheme is merely a means of driving corporate profit, claiming ‘it’s not about the money’. When Brad chimes in in agreement with Nolan, Marny attacks his brother’s model-​meritocratic life: ‘Private schools and country clubs. A hundred-​hour week. And then on the weekends, just to relax, a couple of rounds of golf, so you don’t have to see the kids’ (YDHT, 267). Fully subscribed to the ethos of ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’, Marny defends a ‘small-​town life’ that’s free from the endless drive towards economic prosperity and social mobility: ‘Shelter, food and community. None of these has to cost much. You read Walden in college, you know what I’m talking about’ (267). When Marny asks if his brother is happy, Brad’s retort expresses most clearly how meritocracy operates through continuous deferral of happiness in order drive social mobility, the accumulation of wealth, and the investment in the next generation. ‘I don’t expect to be happy,’ he says, ‘The happiness is for my kids. I expect to make money’ (267). According to Brad, people don’t want ‘shelter, food and community’: They want to make money, and they want to make more money than their neighbour does. That’s how you know you’re winning. And you’re kidding yourself, Greg, if you think that Americans want to help each other out. That’s not what I pay my taxes for. I pay my taxes so that other people are not my problem, and I pay as little tax as I can get away with. Have you met my neighbours? That’s why we invented the automobile, to get away from them. That’s why we move to the suburbs […] If we wanted to see our neighbours we’d move to Europe […] And by the way, Thoreau didn’t have any kids […] And he didn’t give a damn about community. (YDHT, 268) The debate between Marny and his brother boils down to familiar binaries between work and leisure, individualism and communitarianism, and whether either of these models can truly lead to a happy life. As Guidée argues, ‘The frenetic

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pleasure of capitalist accumulation is replaced by the luxury of mastering time, the responsibilities toward parents and children by the far less demanding bonds of friendship, the abstraction of credit by the material anchor of an autonomous life lived day to day’ (Guidée 2020, 80). What also emerges from this exchange is Marny’s investment in the ideological project of ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’. We have already seen how, elsewhere in the novel, Marny can’t help but present his narrative through the familiar structures of meritocratic uplift, even when he feels ideologically and materially divested from it. Nolan’s insistence that, ‘Somebody’s making money off this and it isn’t the people of Detroit’ (268) introduces the possibility of some kind of financial conspiracy underpinning Robert’s venture. This suggestion is supported by other incidences in the novel: Robert’s secretiveness, his wheeling and dealing with Detroit politicians, and the discovery, by another member of the ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’ community, of large stores of aluminium in a warehouse Robert owns. Marny barely takes note of any of these suspicious occurrences, least not the revelation of the aluminium warehouse, a plot development that never goes anywhere and which is displaced by the novel’s climactic event—​Nolan’s kidnapping of Tony’s two-​year-​old son (who he mistakes for Robert’s)—​as familial crisis supplants the novel’s financial narrative. The novel’s unwillingness to bring these threads together is less a failure on Markovits’s part than a flaw in Marny’s narration. Marny fails to recognise these details as significant and to follow the money to uncover what’s really going on in ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’. In the conversation with Nolan, Marny transforms Nolan’s material suspicions into an ideological debate about finding a better way to live: ‘Nobody’s making money. It’s not about money’. Throughout You Don’t Have to Live Like This Marny is never quite sure exactly what story he should be telling or where his ideological allegiances lie. It is through this confused narration that Marny’s role as a historian comes into conflict with his (recent) historical narrative. While his academic credentials provide the frame for the novel’s action, and make him amenable to Robert James’s initiative, the reader is rarely given a sense of Marny’s inner life—​any attempts Marny makes to express his emotions are profoundly inarticulate (cf. ‘anxiety-​sadness’)—​nor does he seem to be a particularly reliable interpreter of the historical event unfolding around him. After Marny has moved to Detroit Robert tells him that he: wanted a historian on hand, in case this thing takes off […] Then he spoke about my academic specialty, American colonial history—​he’d been reading up on that, too. It’s an obvious point, he said, but what people forget about the early settlers is that they were shipped over by private companies; it was a business venture. A typical Robert James pronouncement, vaguely general and matter-​ of-​fact. He believed that what we were doing in Detroit belonged to the same tradition. (YDHT, 53)

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Here, Robert’s entrepreneurial ambition to make history, to turn the present into the past, is projected wilfully into the future. It also assigns a kind of conditional significance not only to ‘Starting-​From-​Scratch-​in-​America’ but also to Marny’s position within it, as its official historian and one of its founding ‘colonisers’. Marny is dubious of Robert’s interpretation of America’s colonial history (if not his motives for creating it). But while Marny listens with teacherly scepticism (‘vaguely general and matter-​of-​fact’) he does not offer, either in this conversation with Robert or elsewhere in the novel, an alternative account of America’s early settlement, nor does he make any clear comparisons between the problems of America’s colonial past (or Detroit’s recent racial history) and the neo-​colonial implications of ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’.3 Instead, Marny repeatedly facilitates and accepts Robert’s version of this history, where early colonial settlers are recast as a group of wayward Yuppies looking for cheap rent. Robert outlines his rationale to reporters at the fundraising event attended by Obama: [I]‌n the end what I decided was, [the settlements] should roughly add up to a midsize college campus. There’s a reason people have such nostalgic feelings in this country about their four years of college. And it isn’t just the football team. It’s because college is really the only time in our lives that most of us get to live in the kind of small-​town community that we still associate with the founding of this country. And by the way, the Pilgrims on the whole were young, they were a young group of people, some of them starting out in life for the first time, marrying and setting up a household and raising kids, and some of them had been out in Holland and were having a second or third chance at it, starting over from scratch. (YDHT, 169) In his likening of the project’s neo-​colonial neighbourhoods to ‘midsize college campus[es]’ and ‘small-​town communities’ (echoed later in Marny’s celebration of ‘small-​town life’), Robert superimposes the meritocratic principle of continuous educational training onto the exceptionalist narrative of America’s founding. In doing so, Robert is simultaneously holding up his enterprise as a natural next step in the great American experiment and reshaping history in his own image. He is also, in the insistence that ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’ replicate the experience and environment of the college campus, enforcing a kind of developmental regression. Disaffected millennials like Marny find comfort in the similarities between the campus and the neighbourhood and can rationalise participating as another opportunity to retrain, reskill, and work hard. When speaking to some of the teachers at the public high school about the ‘new neighbourhood’ Marny describes the kind of people who have joined the scheme: ‘I read once that when people don’t know what to do with themselves, when they reach a dead end, they dream about going back to school or becoming an actor. Those are the kind of people we get’ (YDHT, 120). This retreat into institutionality, which for many of the characters results in

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a joyful renunciation of worldly responsibility and financial stress, nevertheless works against the idea of meritocratic development, as many ‘settlers’ from the professional-​managerial class find themselves working blue-​collar jobs. Viewing Marny as a failed historian of Robert’s entrepreneurial venture helps us to work through the novel’s status as a ‘recent historical novel’. While Marny finds it difficult to orient himself ideologically in relation to Robert’s project, he finds himself also encountering problems of genre. Taking on the task of documenting the new experiment, Marny begins to write a weekly newsletter for his ‘settlement’, a project that supplants his ambitions for ‘working his dissertation into a book’ (YDHT, 5). In abandoning his academic work, he not only allows his expertise in American colonial history to be usurped by Robert’s glossier version of events, but he also loses a sense of perspective on the events in question, moving his focus away from a long historical view and fixing him to the present. These broader questions of temporal scale result in Marny’s disorientation within his own narrative: ‘I felt like you do in the middle of the beginning of something, which is just about when you realize it’s the beginning’ (221). The ‘recent historical novel’ is a mode that has risen to prominence since the turn of the millennium and which represents a desire to process, if not to fully reconcile, historicity with the contemporary. These novels, according to Manshel, are driven largely by contemporary crises (9/​11 and other terror attacks, natural disasters, and the financial crash) which ‘allow the reader to mark the passage of historical time’ (2017). Recent historical fiction, Manshel argues, works to enforce ‘a kind of teleology of the present’. The urge to historicize the contemporary comes largely as an attempt to process the present as we understand the past, as a ‘grounding foundation for knowledge and truth’ (Amy Elias, qtd in Manshel 2017). These novels frequently end ‘by effectively delivering their protagonists, as well as their readers, back to the present’: [W]‌ hereas the reader of the classical historical novel encountered war, revolution, and vast change as a kind of ‘prehistory of the present,’ the reader of the recent historical novel is left to evaluate not only the transformative power (or lack thereof) of recent events, but also her own political power (or lack thereof) to make change in the present. (Manshel 2017) While You Don’t Have to Live Like This appears to fit neatly into this category of fiction, largely in its temporal framing as distinctly post-​2008, Marny’s temporal dislocation and the novel’s counter-​logic of anti-​development function as a critique of dominant models of generational social mobility and question whether the reader has any political power ‘to make change in the present’. As we have seen, the novel chafes against the developmental structure of the bildungsroman, particularly in its presentation of Marny’s education. The bildungsroman, Moretti tells us, ‘posits “happiness” as the highest value,’ as ‘freedom’ is subsumed to ‘happiness’ and

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‘youth’ subordinated to ‘maturity’ in its successful close (Moretti 2000, 8). Far from the retrospective narration of the bildungsroman, which gives order and meaning to the narrator’s childishness, You Don’t Have to Live Like This is populated by children who don’t mature and adults who regress into childlike behaviour. Playing with Tony’s son, Michael, who is still breastfeeding at two years old, Marny notes, ‘If I didn’t see him every couple of weeks he turned shy with me. Relations with kids take work, I had to keep starting over’ (YDHT, 281). Rather than emphasising Michael’s development as he grows up, Marny sees children as another means of merely restarting the clock. Marny’s narrative mode is also inherently childish: When I was younger I was never much good at telling stories. If I scored a goal at Pee Wee soccer, which didn’t happen often, I used to try and describe it for my bother over lunch, over the hot dogs, and potato chips. Then he kicked it there and I ran there and he passed it to me there. My brother called these my “this and then this and then this” stories. I don’t know that I’ve gotten any better at it. (YDHT, 1) Guidée reads Marny’s ‘this and then this and then this’ as a ‘narrative of enumeration’ (2020: 87), a mode of the indebted who is always trying to account for himself. But we can also read Markovits’s narrative strategy as deliberately childish, anti-​retrospective, and anti-​historical, a narrative that is intent on rendering the continuous detail of the now in order to call the ‘long view’ expected from a historical novel (and from the historian) into question. Marny’s ‘recent historical novel’ does indeed deliver his reader into the present, which immediately follows the collapse of ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch’ after a series of race riots. Faced with the degeneration of the scheme and the promise it presented, Marny does not reach for any of the financial safety nets available to him, choosing instead to squat in Robert’s ruined mansion, scavenging the decimated houses for items he can sell for cash. This is also the point at which the reader learns that Marny’s friend Beatrice—​Robert’s right-​hand woman—​ has made ‘six figures by writing some novel’ (YDHT, 391) about Starting-​from-​ Scratch. Beatrice’s commercial success mirrors Marny’s failures but also gestures to the continuation of the economic system despite his personal ruin. By the end of the novel Marny’s anti-​bildungsroman is all but complete as he loses the ability to distinguish between his adult and child self: ‘I don’t know how anyone reconciles childhood and adulthood, it can’t be done’ (389). From this new perspective, the end point of his trajectory of downward mobility, Marny appears to be finally able to construct a narrative out of his ruined ambition: ‘Basically I’m treading water, but what you don’t expect from this kind of life is how many shifts of feeling it involves. My point of view is undergoing alteration, and when your point of view changes you see things you couldn’t see before, different aspects of reality become available’ (389). It is also in Marny’s renewed childishness that the novel

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offers its final meritocratic paradox, in which a return to the originary site of meritocratic generational investment offers a glimmer of hope as he recounts a lyrical memory of playing soccer at his local YMCA: ‘Grass in your cleats. God knows what the parents are talking about. Their kids. You keep starting over’ (391). In returning to childhood, Marny’s narrative leaves the reader in an indetermined space, caught between a regression into a meritocratic ‘starting again’ and, in its complex mix of nostalgia and hope, teasing the possibility of a genuinely new beginning. At the novel’s close, Markovits shows just how seductive these narratives of regeneration and mobility continue to be, even in the context of inevitable and undeniable collapse. Notes 1 Daniel Markovits attended Yale, Oxford, Harvard, and Yale Law school, where he now teaches. Benjamin also studied at Yale and Oxford. 2 Tony is also mentioned as having an unhealthy amount of ‘racial rage and violent fear. Which were useful for work but less helpful to family life’ (61). Michael Kalisch has written about how the novel uses interracial friendships to explore ‘both the solidarities and the tensions—​racialised or otherwise—​underwriting American society’ (2021, 209). Kalisch focuses on Marny’s relationship with Nolan, but his friendship with Tony and Robert also help to reveal the complex ways in which we find Marny ‘a little bit off about race’ and about his class politics. 3 The ‘settlers’ fall easily into a pioneer mentality, renaming their neighbourhood ‘New Jamestown’ and patrolling the ‘lawless’ the streets at night in their cars with shotguns under the seats. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the result of this orchestrated gentrification is not, like its colonial models, a new, more perfect society but, instead, a regression to familiar patterns of racial segregation and historical erasure. We soon learn that Robert has set up a ‘Mexican’ neighbourhood populated by people who can provide skilled labour needed to rebuild and renovate the scheme’s holdings and soon the city is no longer selling off land in deserted neighbourhoods but ‘paying people to abandon their homes’ (YDHT, 49), an uncomfortable reversal of the white flight that occurred in Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s.

Works Cited Berlant, Lauren (2008) ‘Thinking about Feeling Historical.’ Emotion, Space and Society, 1 (1): 4–​9. Collini, Stefan (2021) ‘Snakes and Ladders.’ London Review of Books, Vol. 43 (7), 1 April 2021, www.lrb.co.uk/​the-​paper/​v43/​n07/​ste​fan-​coll​ini/​sna​kes-​and-​ladd​ers Doherty, Maggie (2021) ‘Adjunct Hell: The Rise of a New Kind of Campus Novel.’ The Nation, 3 May 2021, www.thenat​ion.com/​arti​cle/​cult​ure/​smallw​ood-​ste​ger-​str​ong-​ adju​nct/​. Esteve, Mary (2016) ‘The Idea of Happiness: Back to the Postwar Future,’ in Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden (eds.) Postmodern/​Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature, pp. 127–​43. Iowa City, IA: University Of Iowa Press. Guidée, Raphaëlle (2020) ‘The Utopia of Bankruptcy.’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 31 (3): 76–​90.

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Harris. Malcolm (2017) Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials. London: Back Bay Books. Kalisch, Michael (2021) The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Littler, Jo (2017) Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility. New York, NY: Routledge. Manshel, Alexander (2017) ‘The Rise of the Recent Historical Novel.’ Post45, 29 September 2017, https://​pos​t45.org/​2017/​09/​the-​rise-​of-​the-​rec​ent-​his​tori​cal-​novel/​ Markovits, Benjamin (2015) You Don’t Have to Live Like This. London: Faber and Faber. Markovits, Daniel (2019) The Meritocracy Trap. London: Penguin. Moretti, Franco (2000) The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso. Robbins, Bruce (2009) Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

7 STRATEGIES OF SELF-​DETACHMENT AND ‘THE BUSINESS OF DAILY LIFE’ IN THE FICTION OF BENJAMIN MARKOVITS David Brauner

At one point, Greg Marnier, the protagonist of Benjamin Markovits’s seventh novel, You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015), is called as a witness in a trial resulting from a brutal fight between two of his friends. In the course of his testimony, Greg is forced to confront the fact that he is partly culpable for the events that lead to the trial, both because of his passivity during the fight itself—​‘I just stood there, watching’, he confesses—​but also because of a habitual reluctance to engage fully with those closest to him (YDHT, 368). This reluctance is one that he shares with many of the other protagonists in Markovits’s work. In A Weekend in New York (2018), the first of two novels that navigate the complex ‘family geography’ (WNY, 261) of the Essinger family, Paul Essinger finds himself gradually ‘withdraw[ing] his participation’ (WNY, 342) from his roles as lover and father; in the sequel, Christmas in Austin (2019), he retreats further from his family commitments, both physically (relocating from the New York home he shares with his partner and son to a ranch in rural Texas) and psychically, resolving to resist ‘[t]‌he pressure of all these [familial] intimacies’ (CA, 182). In Either Side of Winter (2005), the high-​ school teacher Howard Peasbody finds himself ‘plotting a way out’ (ESW, 93) of his romantic and filial commitments; the protagonist of Playing Days (2010) (who shares his author’s name and some of his biography) decides to bail out of his relationship with a single mother. In this chapter, I explore the tendency of Markovits’s protagonists to retreat into what Stuart Englander, a colleague of Peasbody in Either Side of Winter, calls ‘the gentle protection of uneventfulness’ (161), both as an assertion of self-​reliance and as a way of insulating themselves from life’s vicissitudes. I argue that their strategies of self-​detachment can be read as an expression of a temperamental ‘coldness’ that might shade into psychopathy, or as a form of passivity which might shade into depression and paralysis. DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-8

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Focusing on Either Side of Winter, A Weekend in New York and Christmas in Austin, I argue that these novels are preoccupied, above all, with the perils of intimacy posed by the ‘business of daily life’ (CA, 23) and with the strategies of self-​detachment employed by his protagonists to extricate themselves from the messy contingencies of erotic desire and the tangled commitments of family life. The desire for what might be called a quiet life can be seen as part of Markovits’s poetics of fiction. In 2008, he told Anna Metcalfe that the book that had changed his life was Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) because it had taught him ‘how much, as a writer, you can make out of small events’ (Metcalfe 2008). In 2011, discussing his trilogy of novels dealing with Byron and his circle, Markovits told Benjamin Lustig that ‘the challenge [of] […] Byron’s career’ was ‘to make ordinary domestic life interesting’ (Lustig 2011). Eleven years later, in an interview to promote Christmas in Austin (2019), Markovits reflected that he ‘wanted to write a family novel that moved between different points of view, but also tried to show how packed with small incidents and feelings even an ordinary day is’ (Charlesworth 2019). Markovits’s privileging of ‘small events’ and the ‘small incidents’ of which an ‘ordinary day’ is comprised is both an aesthetic and an ethical position: one that derives from James, but that diverges from him in a number of respects. Whereas for James, ‘[t]‌he daily life of the world is not dramatic—​it is monotonous’ (James 1948/​1884, 34), Markovits finds ‘high stakes and intensity’ in ‘day-​to-​day domestic life’, citing Alice Munro and Anne Tyler as models for the kind of fiction to which he has become committed since becoming a father (Markovits 2017). On the one hand, then, Markovits situates himself within a realist tradition that extends back beyond James to Austen and her Romantic contemporaries (as Peter Graham shows in his contribution to this collection).1 On the other hand, his investment in what we might call ‘restrained realism’ needs to be situated in the context of much more recent debates about the modern novel; more specifically, it might be seen as a response to the ‘hysterical realism’ that James Wood identified as the prevailing trend in contemporary fiction at the start of the new millennium.2 Choosing to identify himself with Munro and Tyler rather than with the authors whom Wood critiques—​Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon—​or with Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike, whom Markovits cites as formative influences,3 he argues that ‘if readers believe that what you are writing is true you can get away with writing about quieter and more plausible events, which is what I like to do’ (Lustig 2011). Yet Markovits is arguably conflating a theoretical attachment to an old-​fashioned notion of realism whose raison d’être is the suspension of disbelief with a practical preference for fiction in a minor key. If there is a sense in some of Markovits’s fiction that, as Greg Marnier puts it in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, ‘[t]he only interesting thing is ordinary life’ (256), there is also a persistent postmodernist scepticism about the category of ‘ordinary life’; a strong strain of self-​reflexivity, and even metafiction, in novels such as Imposture and Playing Days, which complicates any notion that fiction can, or ought to, be simply mimetic.4 It seems to me that Markovits is more

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interested in exploring a poetics of ‘quiet’ fiction5—​and in related ideas of quietude and quiescence—​than he is wedded to the idea that plausibility is a worthwhile end in and of itself.6 In Either Side of Winter and his more recent novels, A Weekend in New York and Christmas in Austin, Markovits subverts many of the conventions of the contemporary novel. Instead of focusing on a single, sympathetic protagonist, the novels present us with an ensemble cast of characters whose self-​ detachment can be alienating. Rather than relying on dramatic incidents, the novels dramatise the difficulties of dealing with ‘the ordinary business of life’, as it is characterised in A Weekend in New York (47). In the place of action, there is inaction; in the place of change, inertia; instead of the frenetic sensory overload of the digital age there is the silent, incremental enervation of what Paul Essinger, in Christmas in Austin, calls the ‘leukemia of boredom’ (CA, 52). Unsurprisingly, these novels have had a mixed critical reception, with a number of reviewers expressing perplexity and frustration at the diffusion of narrative focus and the paucity of plot.7 In her review of Either Side of Winter, Joanne Wilkinson complains that Markovits ‘ultimately […] fails to provide the kind of emotional spark that would make readers care about this carefully depicted world’ (Wilkinson 2005), but for Bliss Broyard this coldness is a consequence of the novel’s insistence on the ‘difficult[y]‌ […] [of] maintain[ing] a comfortable orbit with other people’ and its emphasis on the tension between ‘the seductive allure of fantasy and the exacting reality of daily life’ (Broyard 2005). In his review of Joyce Carol Oates’s collection of stories, Beautiful Days, Markovits observes that ‘the uncertainty about other people’ is the leitmotif of the collection and that in these stories ‘[e]ven years of shared life fail to produce real intimacy’ (Markovits 2018b,15). These comments might equally be applied to Either Side of Winter. Either Side of Winter consists of four stories, each of which is named after one of the seasons, with an additional subtitle: ‘Fall A Thanksgiving Visit’; ‘Winter Second Chance’; ‘Spring A Girl as Fresh as Spring’; and ‘Summer Inheritance’. Todd McEwen summarises it as ‘not a novel in the usual sense, but autonomous, audaciously linked stories of some thrilling, miserable moments in the lives of four characters revolving around a prep school in New York City’ (McEwen 2005). McEwen’s review of Either Side of Winter is excellent in both senses—​ full of praise for the strengths of the novel and very sensitive and thoughtful in its articulation of those strengths. Yet his description of the book is problematic in some respects. Each section does focus on one character, but it deals with many more, while retaining a focus on interiority rather than creating a sense of an extended community, in the tradition of short-​story cycles such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. However, unlike Anderson’s book, or the story collections of James Thurber, to which McEwen refers in his review, it revisits a number of episodes from different points of view. It is also somewhat misleading to refer to ‘thrilling, miserable moments’, given that Markovits’s modus operandi

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relies on the slow accretion of detail and the tracing of incremental change, rather than the sort of epiphanies beloved of many canonical short-​story writers. The second section of the novel begins by establishing the importance of self-​ regulation to its protagonist: ‘He had never been a coward with respect to habits, and could break them when he chose. Even so, Howard Peasbody had his routines’ (51). The protagonist’s name is suggestive. Peasbody has something of the schlemiel about it—​a pea-​like body is redolent both of rotundity and insignificance—​and given that ‘peas’ is a near-​homonym for ‘peace’, it might also refer to Howard’s preference for peace (in the sense of peace and quiet).8 Howard rhymes with ‘coward’, which draws attention to the odd choice of that word in the context of a claim that he is capable of deviating from his habitual behaviour. Moreover, this claim is troubled by the sentence that follows it, which suggests, through the qualifying phrase ‘even so’ and the stolidity implied by the (somewhat archaic) formulation ‘had his routines’, that the idea that he might ‘break them’ whenever he chooses to, is one with which he consoles himself. The emphasis in this opening on the near-​synonyms ‘habits’ and ‘routines’ also invokes the legacy of modernist writers such as Proust and Beckett, for whom, in the words of Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, ‘habit is a great deadener’ (Beckett 1988/​1956, 91).9 As the story progresses, it becomes clear that his habits have hardened into routines and that these have hardened him. Howard has a taste for self-​denial—​he ‘had a sweet tooth and usually starved it’ (ESW, 52)—​and takes pride in his ‘reserves of discipline, of disinterest, of abstemiousness’ (53). These reserves are tested by the disclosure that he has a daughter, conceived with an old college girlfriend whose ‘sharp mind […] required none of the delicate insinuating condescension with which Howard habitually addressed most women’ (53). Now in a relationship with a younger man, Tomas, Howard has reconciled himself to ‘the terribly ordinary course of his [Howard’s] days’ (82), recognising that he is ‘humanly lazy’ (his own term)’ (58) and that to compensate he tends ‘to dress up the monotony of his inner life’ (59), but at the same time attributing this detachment to an uncompromising ‘nobility’ (82) and ‘honesty’: By honesty, he meant rather an undistorted sense of the value of life, of its illusions: he possessed a clear vision of the neutral, loveless landscape in which he found himself. Nothing flowered around him or underfoot; so he walked without hesitation in straight lines. And trampled on phantoms in a way that often seemed cruel to others. (ESW, 82) This passage exemplifies the subtle shifts of consciousness and point of view that characterise Markovits’s prose. It begins with the third-​person narrator relating the process of rationalisation by which Howard justifies and refines his sense that honesty is his ‘distinguishing virtue’ (82). The phrase ‘he meant’ suggests that the narrator is paraphrasing Howard, using free indirect discourse, but it is

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not clear whether the formulation ‘in which he found himself’ is borrowed from Howard’s train of thought (the passive construction his own strategy for avoiding responsibility for his own plight), or whether it represents the narrator’s implicit judgement on his lack of self-​knowledge. Similarly, the metaphor that follows might be Howard’s or the narrator’s, and the closing clause ‘in a way that often seemed cruel to others’ might represent Howard’s recognition that his behaviour might be, or appear to be (a nice distinction) callous, or it might be information of which Howard himself is unaware. The passage is also rich with irony. The words ‘honesty’, ‘undistorted’ and ‘clear’ all suggest an uncompromising commitment to candour; but they are surrounded by equivocations and caveats that render Howard’s vision opaque. The paradoxical image of trampling on phantoms raises a number of unresolved questions. How is it possible to crush underfoot creatures characterised by their immateriality? Does the image refer back to the idea that Howard is intent on destroying all that is illusory, or does it suggest that he himself is in the grip of a hallucinatory self-​delusion? What initially appears to be a positive assertion of the ‘value of life’ becomes, through a phrase that is grammatically in apposition, but semantically in opposition to it, a cynical reflection on the absence of any such value that is obscured by ‘illusions’ through which Howard is able to see. But to free oneself of illusions is to become disillusioned, as well as to be disabused, as the barren landscape through which Howard carelessly makes his way suggests. The revelation that Howard has lived most of his life in ignorance of his family presents him with the ‘second chance’ alluded to in the title of this section of the novel, a belated opportunity to overturn his long-​held conviction that ‘[h]‌e could do without other people’, a conviction that, it is lightly suggested, might derive from his having, at an early age, ‘learned to do without his mother’ (94). Initially, he seems happy enough to reconnect with Annie, his college girlfriend, and to get to know his daughter, Frannie, but it isn’t long before his appetite for this new set of relations, outstripped from the start by Tomas’s enthusiasm, begins to wane and he feels ‘the press of people against him, the reproach implicit in their intimacy’ (94), which then grows into the conviction that ‘everyone was conspiring to push him out of the middle of his own life’ (100). Rather than attempting to return to the status quo, Howard hatches a plan to shed all his commitments. He tells his daughter and her mother that Tomas ‘feels very uncomfortable’ about their role in his life while he tells Tomas that he and Annie have ‘resumed [their] former intimacy’ (104) and that he has decided he cannot pass up the chance to ‘be part of a family’ (105)—​to compensate for the loss of his mother and for the fact that his father ‘wasn’t very good at—​warmth’ (105). The hesitation indicated here by the dash preceding the word ‘warmth’ draws attention to the other words for which it seems to be a euphemism (‘love’, ‘affection’, etc.) and hence hints at the distaste that Howard shares with his father for human intimacy, a distaste (or perhaps bewilderment) reinforced by the odd phrase ‘wasn’t very good at’, which implies that these qualities are skills to be acquired, or even simulated, rather than feelings spontaneously experienced.

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When Antonia Charlesworth asked Markovits which literary character he felt most resembled him, his answer was: ‘[t]‌he bookish geek Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View’ (2019), but of course Vyse is characterised as much by his aloof stiffness (suggested by the fact that his surname is a homonym for ‘vice’) as by his bookish geekiness.10 Markovits’s nomination of Vyse was no doubt self-​deprecating and probably tongue-​in-​cheek, but many of his protagonists share Vyse’s emotional self-​detachment: to put it another way, they are cold fish, or, as Mary Louise, Stuart’s wife, says of Molly Hancock, a rival, in Either Side of Winter, ‘a cold fish posing as a warm one’ (ESW, 141). To invest authorial interest—​and sympathy—​in characters whose own lack of warmth might make it difficult for readers to warm to them is a bold fictional gambit. But Markovits is scrupulously even-​handed in his treatment of all his characters. Clinging to ‘the thin cold atmosphere of his perch’ (55), Howard injures those who attempt to share his rarefied air but arguably injures himself most of all. His story ends with the description of a new routine: every day, after washing his face, Howard looks at the space where his bathroom mirror used to be (it is cracked when Tomas pushes him violently against it, having discovered his deception, and Howard never replaces it), and believes ‘for a second […] that the image before him was his own: those dirty black medicine shelves, mostly empty, a few pill-​boxes, his blade, a bar of wrapped soap’ (107). If Howard’s identification with the bare, barren, soiled contents of his bathroom seem to portend a bleak future for him, it is tempting to feel that this is precisely what he deserves. His manipulative behaviour has left him isolated and devoid of the self-​respect in whose name he has jettisoned all his human connections; his desire for quietude has led him into a life of quiescence. By the end of the story, it is clear that Howard is at best a rather selfish, emotionally constipated man; at worst, a coolly calculating sociopath (at one point he defends the Nazi doctors, opining that ‘it has always seemed to me a very human ambition, rather fine and self-​sacrificing in its way, to wish to experiment upon man’ (97, emphasis original). Yet his self-​protective instinct—​the desire to withdraw from intimacy with others because he perceives it as a threat to his own autonomy—​is indeed very human. Although the metaphor (which might be Howard’s own, or the narrator’s) of a conspiracy to displace him from the centre of his life might suggest that Howard is suffering from paranoid delusions, the fear that intimacy might become oppressive and claustrophobic is common, as evidenced by the fact that the phrase ‘I need more space’ has become a clichéd explanation for the ending of a romantic relationship. It is certainly a fear that is shared by many of Markovits’s protagonists, both within the pages of Either Side of Winter and elsewhere in Markovits’s fiction.11 In particular, the struggle to create, demarcate and articulate the need for personal space while negotiating the complex demands of family life is at the heart of the Essinger novels. A number of reviewers of A Weekend in New York commented on the claustrophobic intensity of the interactions between the Essingers, although they disagreed on whether this was the result of too little or too much communication.

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Xan Brooks observes that the dialogue in the novel ‘put me in mind of David Mamet’s remark that modern US drama is mainly about people not talking to each other’ (Brooks 2018); David Shaftel, meanwhile, found the family arguments ‘exhausting’ but also claimed that they were ‘how they [the Essingers] express intimacy’ (Shaftel 2018). If anything, the arguments are even more frequent and more attritional in Christmas in Austin, but they tend to emerge in the context of what Rand Cooper calls ‘a quiet sadness’ (Cooper 2019) and end in what Benjamin Evans calls ‘open-​ended dramatic irresolution’ (Evans 2019). This sense of muted melancholy and ambivalence is ambient—​it is the atmosphere in which all the characters seem to be suspended—​but it is exemplified and generated principally by Paul Essinger. In A Weekend in New York, Paul is a mediocre tennis professional, contemplating retirement. The novel begins with a gathering of the Essinger clan, in what has become a family ritual: Whenever Paul qualified for the US Open, his parents, his big brother, his two sisters, their various kids, traveled to New York to watch him play. ‘It’s like Christmas,’ his mother used to say. ‘Our family reunion’. (WNY, 1) It is hard to imagine a more low-​key opening to a novel: the contrast with the aphoristic opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—​which is cited, in abbreviated form (‘All happy families are alike …’), as the novel’s epigraph—​could not be greater. In one sense, its undemonstrative nature is a statement of intent—​a self-​ conscious rejoinder to Tolstoy, the implication being that not all happy families are alike, and that they are a legitimate subject for fiction.12 On the other hand, the Essingers are not an unproblematically happy family, as is subtly implied by this opening passage. The analogy that Paul’s mother, Liesel, makes between this ‘family reunion’ and Christmas suggests that outside of that annual holiday it is rare for the extended family to assemble—​rarer still, because the opening clause implies that Paul does not always qualify for the US Open, from which it might be inferred that he is a journeyman professional, someone whose ranking is not high enough to guarantee entry to the major events. On the one hand, the efforts made by the other Essingers to visit New York to ‘watch him play’ express a genuine sense of solidarity, albeit one that is bound up with a sense of individual self-​ interest: ‘like immigrants (even after all this time), the Essingers still felt […] that any kind of advance […] advances the whole family’ (120). On the other hand, there is fierce internecine competition between the siblings, so that Paul’s likely defeat in the first round is anticipated with a degree of Schadenfreude by Nathan, his elder brother, as he calculates that the probability of Paul progressing decreases by ‘about six percentage points per round’, from ‘a forty-​two percent chance of winning in the first round to a twelve percent chance of winning […] in round six’ (72). Even Paul’s father, Bill, feels ‘both inordinately proud of and at the same time

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bitterly disappointed by Paul’s career’ (1). This intense ambivalence is mirrored in Paul’s feelings towards his family’s visits: ‘It was always a burden, getting tickets, finding places for his family to stay’ (2). He shares this particular burden with his girlfriend, Dana, who ‘bears most of the brunt’ [sic] (2) of the arrangements, but other familial demands are not so easily displaced. Over the course of A Weekend in New York, Paul increasingly ‘turn[s]‌inward’, gradually ‘withdraw[ing] his participation’ from family life (342). Rather than bonding with his family, their presence only makes him feel more acutely ‘the awkwardness of being alone with another human being’ (240). The novel concludes—​or perhaps leaves off would be a better way of putting it—​at the start of Paul’s first-​round match, with Dana reflecting that ‘[l]iving with him was like watching him play tennis—​he was concentrating on something else’ (345) but nonetheless, in the final words of the novel, willing him internally to win: ‘Come on! Come on! Come on!’ (346). Even this ostensibly unequivocal expression of encouragement emanates, the novel’s narrator informs us, ‘from a depth of love that was almost like anger’ (346). In this context, the repeated imperative seems to represent an unarticulated impatience—​a frustration at Paul’s habitually non-​ committal, lethargic demeanour—​as much as it does support. Markovits’s decision to end the novel poised on a narrative cliffhanger is similarly ambiguous. It certainly seems appropriate to leave Paul suspended symbolically in a kind of narrative limbo—​a liminal state that reflects the indeterminate future of his marriage. Yet it might also be seen, in pragmatic terms, as a way of incentivising readers to read the sequel, Christmas in Austin, in order to discover the outcome of the match. However, if A Weekend in New York sets up a sequel through its inconclusive ending, it also anticipates Christmas in Austin in other ways, for example in its opening sentence in which the weekend over which the former novel’s (in)action takes place is compared to Christmas; and in a conversation between the Essinger brothers in which Paul confesses to Nathan that he plans to retire, buy ‘some real estate in Texas’ and do ‘[a]‌s little as possible’ (CA, 84). Paul’s motivations for what he himself thinks of as a ‘retreat from the world’ (CA, 52) are somewhat opaque. The narrator of Christmas in Austin observes that ‘Paul was always a low-​key kind of guy, very easygoing, somebody who didn’t get too worked up about anything’ (24)—​but it’s a thin line between being easygoing and being detached; between not getting worked up about anything and not getting involved with anything. At one point in the novel, Henrik, the partner of Paul’s younger sister, Jean, tells Paul that he left his wife to be with her in order to ‘open [himself] to other experiences’, rather than subjecting himself to ‘the same experiences again and again’, which is how he characterises family life (351). In response, Paul confesses that he ‘really do[es]n’t want any of it anymore […] the other experiences’ (351). If he is clear about what he doesn’t want, Paul is less certain about what he does want: he seems to be enigmatic even to himself. When he asks Dana to stay overnight at his new Texas home, ‘he couldn’t tell […] whether […] it was a good idea or if he wanted her to’ (255). Those closest to him find him similarly

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unreadable: Dana, the mother of his child and long-​term partner, finds it ‘very hard to tell how much Paul liked her’ (24). She wonders if he might be depressed but decides instead that he is practising a form of self-​denial, while he waits for her to decide whether she wants to join him on his Texas ranch: he reined himself in, he had that look of a man in training who decides on how much sugar and alcohol he will permit himself, and the answer was, at least in terms of their intimacy, not much. (CA, 25) The reference to a training regime recalls Paul’s career as a professional tennis player but it’s not clear in this context what he is training for—​unless it is to live a solitary life. The analogy is also problematic because his careful rationing of intimacy is not just about denying himself pleasure but also about denying others access to his feelings, to himself. In common with other emotionally remote characters in Markovits, Paul feels dissatisfied at his own marginalisation—​ ‘[t]‌here was a limit to how much time he wanted to spend at the periphery of other people’s lives’ (52)—​but at the same time, he instinctively chafes against family ties, trying to disentangle himself from ‘all the webs of intimacy’ (149). At times, this impulse to resist ‘[t]he pressure of all […] intimacies’ (182) seems to be a species of psychopathy resembling Howard Peasbody’s. Like Peasbody, Paul’s emotional unavailability is often described in terms of a temperamental cold-​bloodedness. Consider this description of the state of his relationship with Dana in Christmas in Austin: One of the chillier aspects of their relationship […] is that when he commenced sexual operating procedures (a phrase which, in their happier days, he had used to describe whatever he used to do to show her he was in the mood) and she put him off […] he never pressed her anymore […] The atmosphere in their bedroom was friendly and almost polite and about two degrees lower than room temperature. You had to look pretty closely, with extremely finely calibrated instruments, to realize […] that the level of human communication between them […] had sunk to record lows. (CA, 25) While the phrase ‘sexual operating procedures’ is represented as symptomatic of ‘happier days’ when the couple were able to share a joke about their sex life, taken in conjunction with the reference to ‘finely calibrated instruments’ and the frostiness of their current relations, it seems to hint at a clinical detachment in Paul—​a way of viewing human relations instrumentally—​for which the joke no longer provides a cover. What appears initially to be a teasing breeziness has become a chilling objectivity. The reference to the precipitous drop in the ‘level of human communication’ between Paul and Dana anticipates a later episode in

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Christmas in Austin in which Liesel, alert to ‘the delicacy of […] [the] negotiations’ between Paul and Dana, reflects that ‘[w]‌here there has been miscommunication and hurt, it’s sometimes a good idea to be polite, even at the risk of being formal’ (339). It also recalls an earlier scene, in which the narrator observes that ‘Paul still preferred the slight artificiality or coldness of people who measure their words to the alternative, to be one of those people who have to keep apologizing afterward for misrepresenting their positions in the heat of the moment’ (40).13 Liesel’s conviction that it is ‘a good idea to be polite’ where sensitive feelings are concerned might appear commonsensical but because it echoes the description of the chilly atmosphere in Paul and Dana’s bedroom—​‘almost polite’—​it raises the question of whether Paul’s preference for ‘the coldness of people who measure their words’ is congenital. This possibility is strengthened by the fact that Liesel, in spite of her desire to foster familial connections, at the same time feels oppressed by ‘the pressure on your attention, and even on your sympathies’ (241) that the presence of all her relations places on her. Just as Paul rationalises his tendency to ‘measure’ his words carefully by claiming that this is the best way of avoiding what he calls the ‘misrepresenting of […] positions’, so for Liesel ‘being formal’ is a strategy for mitigating ‘hurt’. Politeness in the workplace can spare feelings and can be a sign of tact; in the context of the family, it can harden into a formality that deforms communication and can cause more damage than harsh words spoken sincerely. It can become an alibi for neglect and a strategy for establishing control. In this sense, Paul and Liesel’s shared preoccupation with weighing one’s words carefully, like the emphasis on the ‘procedures’ and ‘finely calibrated instruments’ in the block quotation above, might betray a chilling emotional detachment. Although it is very lightly sketched, there is a further suggestion that this detachment might be traced back to Liesel’s childhood, for which she expresses some nostalgia in her memoirs, in spite of the fact that her parents were supporters of the Nazi regime and that her husband and the father of her children is a Jew. In this context, the pet project of Susie Essinger, Paul’s younger sister, takes on a particular resonance. A scholar of seventeenth-​century literature, Susie longs to write a magnum opus whose subject would be ‘the idea of family as an escape from history, or an insulation from it, from political forces and social pressures and cultural shifts’ (109, emphasis original). Liesel’s devotion to the idea of family can be seen as an escape from the dark history of Nazi Germany. For Paul, an abstract idea of family provides an escape from his actual family commitments, an ‘insulation’ from the ‘social pressures’ of existence as a father and husband (although he and Dana are not actually married). He invests more and more time in plans to develop the 27 acres of land that he has bought in Texas: Paul’s ambition […] involved building a cluster of houses […] for everybody he knew—​or at least everybody he liked or everybody who was genetically related to him—​to stay and hang out in their own private space […] he also wanted

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shared areas […] [where] large numbers of people could go about the business of daily life together. (CA, 23) In one sense, Paul’s vision of communal living is generous, even utopian. Yet there is also something fundamentally selfish and self-​indulgent at work here. The progressive refinement of those whom he intends to welcome from ‘everybody he knew’ to ‘everybody he liked’ to ‘everybody who was genetically related to him’ enacts linguistically the narrowing of Paul’s sympathies, to the extent that the final category on which he settles would exclude Dana, who, not unreasonably, suspects that the project represents an ‘attempt to replace the perfectly viable family he had in New York with other people’ (23). It is significant that Paul prioritises ‘private space’—​and that he conceives of the ‘shared areas’ as spaces that will facilitate ‘the business of daily life’. For this is what Paul likes about the Essinger family reunions: not the renewal of intimacy, but rather how they provide a distraction from his self-​imposed isolation, allowing ‘family business [to be] carried on, clearing up, shopping, getting ready for Christmas dinner’, providing the sensation of contributing to the ‘family business’ without the emotional investment that is required to keep that business functioning (175).14 Reinforcing this point, Markovits’s narrator draws attention to the other pun lurking in the word ‘business’, as Dana seeks to capture on her camera ‘the busyness of their [the Essinger’s] family life […] the constant coming and going and reconfigurations of people, the endless plans and arguments’ (179). Here, Dana seems to be a surrogate for Markovits himself, for it is the busyness—​but also conversely, the lassitude—​of what Greg Marnier calls ‘ordinary life’ that Markovits has made it his fictional business to explore. In so doing, Markovits, in his own quiet way, has produced a body of fiction that radically reimagines the possibilities of the contemporary novel. Against the grain of the ‘big contemporary novel […] that seems to want to abolish stillness’ in favour of exhibiting ‘glamorous congestion’ (Wood 2000), Markovits’s fiction explores the inconspicuous spaces in which quiet reflection takes place. Yet it also demonstrates how easy it is for quiet reflection to lead to self-​absorption; to slip from quietude into quiescence, and from quiescence into an indifference to human intimacy that can be damaging both to the self and others; in other words, to become a cold fish. In Playing Days, the protagonist, Ben Markovits, suffers an injury after graduating from college that leads to a long-​term ‘numbness’ (Markovits 2010); in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, Greg sustains an injury to his jaw that leaves him unable ‘to tell if [he] could feel anything’ (Markovits 2015, 387). Through these symbolic wounds, Markovits dramatises the tendency of many of his subsequent protagonists to protect themselves from the pain that intimate relationships invariably entail by retreating from the world, nursing a sense of numbness as a strategy for self-​detachment.

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Notes 1 In an essay arguing that, contrary to Cyril Connolly’s infamous aphorism that “[t]‌here is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’, parenthood is conducive to the production of good fiction, Markovits cites Walter Scott’s praise of Austen’s ‘talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life’ (Markovits 2017). 2 In ‘Human, All Too Inhuman’, a seminal essay in The New Republic, Wood argued that ‘the pursuit of vitality at all costs’ was deforming the discourse of contemporary fiction, producing a body of work crammed with incidental, improbable detail. 3 In his essay on parenthood and literature, Markovits acknowledges that ‘Bellow and Roth and Updike have meant a lot to me’ before distancing himself from their representations of filial relations (Markovits 2017). 4 Both novels incorporate versions of the author: in the case of Imposture, as part of an elaborate conceit in which a narrator who shares his name with Markovits mediates the story of Polidori’s impersonation of Byron, through a manuscript bequeathed to him by an academic colleague; in the case of the latter, as the protagonist of a semi-​ autobiographical novel who, again, is named Ben Markovits. 5 As Michael Kalisch helpfully pointed out to me, this poetics has much in common with the ‘aesthetic of narrative that is driven by reflective principles’ (Sykes 2017, 1) explored by Rachel Sykes in The Quiet Contemporary American Novel (2017). For Markovits, as for Sykes, quiet fiction represents ‘an interior mode of discussion’ and ‘a discrete articulation of selfhood’ (2). However, if the protagonists of the novels Sykes discusses ‘seek out spaces for reflection in which they can contemplate and interpret the noise of the present from a distance’ (3), Markovits’s protagonists tend to carve out private, quiet spaces for themselves not so much as a way of ‘processing and paying attention in the present’ (3) as in order to remove themselves from the emotional demands of being present in the orbit of other people. 6 This poetics is visible in the understated titles of some of his books, notably A Quiet Adjustment and the three books with which I am concerned here, which all eschew any emotive descriptors of their content in favor of references to the periods of time that they cover. 7 In her review of A Weekend in New York, Lionel Shriver suggests that ‘Paul Essinger might have made an excellent main character, if only he’d been given the space’ (Shriver 2018) and Antony Cummins observes that the book is more ‘a bundle of domestic vignettes’ than a conventional novel (Cummins 2018).The anonymous reviewer of A Weekend in New York in The Scotsman, meanwhile, describes it as ‘a slow, very Jamesian novel’ (Anon 2018); Cummins notes that it is ‘a book to be savoured less for its page-​turning propulsion than for its granular evocation of family life’ (2018); and Shriver observes that it contains ‘intentionally little’ (2018) in the way of plot. In his review of Christmas in Austin, Cooper describes its plot as ‘desultory’ but concludes that the novel’s focus on ‘innocuous little moments of daily marital abrasion’ is ultimately vindicated, Markovits proving that ‘routine family life […] [can] be made interesting and sympathetic if you pay close enough attention to it’ (Cooper 2019). 8 I am grateful to the reviewer of this essay who pointed out that there may also be an allusion here to Sophia Peabody, the maiden name of Hawthorne’s wife’s, given the importance of ideas of ‘self-​reliance’, to the Transcendentalist movement with which the Hawthornes were associated for a time.

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9 Beckett, who wrote his PhD thesis on Proust, is perhaps thinking here of the latter’s aphoristic statement: ‘The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought’ (Proust 1989/​1922, 67). 10 In the Merchant Ivory film adaptation Mr Beebe actually refers to him as ‘a cold fish’. 11 Amy, the protagonist of the opening story, ‘suffer[s]‌from a kind of persistent stage fright’ that deforms her life (16); Stuart, the protagonist of the third story, ‘at each stage in his life […] promised himself to live it more fully […] and yet […] when experiences […] presented themselves to him, he turned them down’ (138); and Rachel, the object of Stuart’s frustrated lust and the protagonist of the fourth story, takes to heart her teacher’s dictum that ‘if you refuse to act, wider worlds open up within’ (216). 12 In this respect, Markovits’s fictional project is aligned not just with Alice Tyler and Alice Munro, but perhaps pre-​eminently with Munro’s contemporary and fellow Canadian, Carol Shields (see Brauner 2010, 88). 13 Arguably, this was part of the attraction that he felt for Dana in the first place: at one point, the narrator of Christmas in Austin discloses that ‘she [Jean] had never really trusted Dana, who struck her as a slightly-​below-​room-​temperature human being’ (250), while Dana herself recalls that ‘[m]‌en used to call her cold’, in the context of worrying that Cal, the son she has had with Paul, ‘had learned to become too self-​contained’ (70). 14 As Michael Kalisch reminded me, there is also an ironic echo here of the family’s commercial business—​the chain of ‘Essinger Brothers’ grocery stores run by Paul’s uncles (WNY, 222).

Works Cited Anon. (2018) Untitled review of Benjamin Markovits, A Weekend in New York. The Scotsman, 7 June 2018, www.scots​man.com/​arts-​and-​cult​ure/​book-​rev​iew-​week​end-​ new-york-​benja​min-​markov​its-​284​239 Beckett, Samuel (1988/​1956) Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber. Brauner, David (2010) Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brooks, Xan (2018) ‘A Weekend in New York—​absorbing tennis drama.’ The Guardian, 4 July 2018, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2018/​jul/​04/​week​end-​new-​york-​benja​min-​ markov​its-​rev​iew-​ten​nis-​novel Broyard, Bliss (2005) ‘“Fathers and Daughters”: Tales Out of School’ (review of Benjamin Markovits, Fathers and Daughter [Either Side of Winter]). New York Times, 6 November 2005, www.nyti​mes.com/​2005/​11/​06/​books/​rev​iew/​fath​ers-​and-​daught​ers-​tales-​out-​of-​ sch​ool.html Charlesworth, Antonia (2019) ‘Author Q&A: Benjamin Markovits.’ Big Issue North, 9 December 2019, www.bigiss​ueno​rth.com/​read​ing-​room/​2019/​12/​aut​hor-​qa-​benja​min-​ markov​its/​ Cooper, Rand Richards (2019) ‘Home for the Holidays, for Better or Worse’ (review of Benjamin Markovits, Christmas in Austin). New York Times, 14 November 2019, www. nyti​mes.com/​2019/​11/​14/​books/​rev​iew/​christ​mas-​in-​aus​tin-​benja​min-​markov​its.html Cummins, Anthony (2018) Untitled review of Benjamin Markovits, A Weekend in New York. The Observer, 19 June 2018, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2018/​jun/​19/​benja​min-​ markov​its-​week​end-​in-​new-​york-​rev​iew Evans, Benjamin (2019) ‘Christmas in Austin by Benjamin Markovits review.’ The Guardian, 17 November 2019, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2019/​nov/​17/​christ​mas-​in-​ aus​tin-​benja​min-​markov​its-​rev​iew

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James, Henry (1948/​ 1884) The Art of Fiction, ed. Morris Roberts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lustig, Joshua (2011) ‘“Writing Against Time”: an interview with Benjamin Markovits.’ OpenLetters Monthly, 30 November 2011, www.openle​tter​smon​thly​arch​ive.com/​olm/​ writ​ing-​agai​nst-​time-​an-​interv​iew-​with-​benja​min-​markov​its McEwen, Todd (2005) ‘Thrilling Times’ (review of Benjamin Markovits, Either Side of Winter). The Observer, 20 August 2005, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2005/​aug/​20/​feat​ ures​revi​ews.guard​ianr​evie​w13 Markovits, Benjamin (2005) Either Side of Winter. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2007) Imposture. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. —​—​—​ (2008) A Quiet Adjustment. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. —​—​—​ (2010) Playing Days. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2015) You Don’t Have to Live Like This. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. —​—​—​(2017) ‘Parenthood has changed. So has the literature that comes out of it.’ The Guardian, 18 June 2017, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2017/​jun/​18/​benja​min-​markov​ itz-​par​enth​ood-​has-​chan​ged-​and-​so-​has-​the-​lit​erat​ure-​that-​comes-​out-​of-​it-​ —​—​—​ (2018a) A Weekend in New York. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2018b) ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ (review of Joyce Carol Oates, Beautiful Days). New York Times Book Review, 11 March 2018, p. 15. —​—​—​ (2019) Christmas in Austin. London: Faber and Faber. Metcalfe, Anna (2008) Interview with Benjamin Markovits. Financial Times, 19 January 2009, www.proqu​est.com/​docv​iew/​229134​623?accoun​tid=​13460&pq-​origs​ite=​sum​mon Proust, Marcel (1989/​1922) Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shaftel, David (2018) ‘A Weekend in New York by Benjamin Markovits—​love all.’ Financial Times, 15 June 2018, www.ft.com/​cont​ent/​83276​370-​6d5c-​11e8-​8863-​a9bb2​62c5​f53 Shriver, Lionel (2018) ‘A Weekend in New York—​an over-​crowded and confusingly transatlantic novel.’ New Statesman, 13 June 2018, www.newst​ates​man.com/​cult​ure/​ books/​week​end-​new-​york-​benja​min-​markov​its-​rev​iew Sykes, Rachel (2017) The Quiet Contemporary American Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilkinson, Joanne (2005) Review of Benjamin Markovits, Fathers and Daughters [Either Side of Winter]. Booklist, 102 (4), https://​go.gale.com/​ps/​i.do?p=​ITOF&u=​rdg&id=​ GALE|A13​8396​893&v=​2.1&it=​r&sid=​sum​mon Wood, James (2000) ‘Human, All Too Inhuman.’ The New Republic, 24 July 2000, https://​ newr​epub​lic.com/​arti​cle/​61361/​human-​inhu​man

8 MANNERS, MORALS, AND THE ESSINGERS A Weekend in New York and Christmas in Austin Michael Kalisch

A Weekend in New York (2018) and Christmas in Austin (2019) are the first two instalments of an anticipated quartet of novels about the Essingers, a well-​to-​do and close-​knit family of mostly academic-​types. Like Markovits’s own family, the Essingers are a seemingly unlikely blend of lineages.1 Liesel, the family matriarch, is German Christian while her husband, Bill, is a Jewish New Yorker. Getting together meant casting aside their own parents, and making a life for themselves in Austin, Texas represented a kind of escape from the narrowness of their respective upbringings, from the burdens of tradition and history. Their ‘vaguely Jewish’ (WNY, 188) children are fiercely loyal to each other and to the family life their parents have established. Nathan, their eldest, has already outpaced Bill’s academic achievements: a law professor at Harvard, he has his eye on a soon-​ to-​be vacant position on the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Susie specialises in late seventeenth-​century literature, though her career has been put on hold to raise her kids and support her husband’s own academic ambitions. Paul dropped out of Stanford to become a professional tennis player, briefly breaking into the top 20 world rankings; but now, in his early thirties, he’s playing on the outer courts and working out what to do after he retires. And Jean, the perpetual baby of the family, is a touch rudderless, too easily swayed by her siblings’ decisions, opinions, and approval. Having followed in Nathan’s footsteps by studying for a Master’s at Oxford, she is beginning to make her way as a producer of documentary films in London, and embarking upon an affair with a married man (who is also her boss). Over the two novels, we are gradually introduced to a host of in-​laws, or almost-​in-​ laws, each of whom offers an outsider’s perspective on the Essinger clan. Nathan’s wife Clémence is a sophisticated, put-​together journalist who spiritedly partakes of the festive chaos in the second book while also remaining a little aloof. Susie’s clubbable English husband David cheerfully mucks in, too, though privately feels DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-9

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that there is ‘a kind of self-​involvement or self-​importance’ about the Essingers that strikes him as ‘bad form’ (CA, 313). And Paul’s girlfriend Dana, with whom he has a young son, Cal, is a central figure in both novels; it’s often through her eyes (and, in the second book, the lens of her camera) that we see the family. An only child, Dana is at once perplexed and enamoured by the Essingers’ urgent involvement in each other’s lives and their near-​constant bickering. ‘This is just what intimacy looks like’ (WNY, 59), Paul tells her. ‘There are too many of us’ (CA, 3), Liesel announces in the opening line of the second book, and she’s not wrong. As Markovits notes in an interview, novels aren’t generally good at coping with this many people, and usually the result is that some characters remain sharply in focus while others fade into the background (Markovits 2019a). The problem is that none of us would like to think of ourselves as a minor character in our own lives; each of us is a protagonist, if not always perhaps a hero, in the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Markovits’s solution to this problem is to attempt to resist the temptation to divide the fictive space of the novel into major and minor characters, and instead to try to distribute his attention as evenly as possible between the many Essingers.2 In doing so, Markovits stress-​ tests the limits of domestic realism and, as I argue towards the end of this essay, reimagines the possibilities for what I will call, with Lionel Trilling in mind, a certain kind of ‘novel of manners’—​a form in which ‘social observation’ and the contestation of ‘moral problems’ (Trilling 2008/​1950, 212, 219) are made to coalesce, and in which domestic and political themes are made to rhyme. Initially, the first novel appears to be organised around Paul; it is to watch him play in the first round of the U.S. Open (for the final time, it turns out) that the Essingers are gathered for their weekend in New York. As in Playing Days (2010)—​his semi-​autobiographical novel about a basketball player’s lonely season struggling in the German lower leagues—​Markovits seems drawn to the intense inwardness of athletes, and to the fact that sport entails an unforgiving exposure of the limits of your talent. As Bill puts it, ‘Half the time you saw him play, in the big tournaments, you watched him lose’ (WNY, 2). In an interview, Markovits suggests that his work is also drawn to sportspeople because on some level they seem never to have given up on the idea of themselves they had as children; their career resembles an extended adolescence (Markovits 2019b). Paul’s plan for life after tennis is to leave New York and build a big house back in his hometown of Austin, surrounded by a ‘cluster’ (CA, 23) of buildings for his family to come and stay. ‘It’ll be like when we were kids again’, he says, pitching the idea to Nathan, ‘just riding our bikes, hanging out’ (WNY, 85). But it’s less clear where Dana and Cal figure in this childish fantasy. ‘What does Dana think?’ (WNY, 85), Nathan repeatedly asks to no reply. Paul’s retreat from adulthood recalls the plot of Markovits’s previous book, You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015), in which protagonist Greg ‘Marny’ Marnier ditches a stalling academic career to sign up for ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch-​in-​ America’, a back-​to-​the-​city project aimed at reviving run-​down neighbourhoods

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in Detroit, a city which witnessed many such so-​called ‘regeneration’ initiatives after the 2008 financial crisis, when much of the novel is set. Academia, like elite sport—​and this may be the only way in which the two are alike—​is also an occupation that can elongate adolescence. As Lola Boorman explores in her essay, Marny finds himself in his thirties a precariously employed ‘early career’ historian at a professional crossroads and tipping into a kind of ‘existential trouble’ (CA, 28), as Dana describes Paul’s state of mind. The wider political context of Marny’s decision to opt-​out and change tack is clear. Backed by Goldman Sachs, ‘Starting-​from-​Scratch-​in-​America’ seems a quintessential neoliberal start-​up, a ‘private-​public partnership’ aiming to attract a young ‘creative class’ (YDHT, 55) to rejuvenate the Rust Belt city. It’s the brainchild of Robert James, an old friend of Marny’s from Yale with deep pockets and grand political ambitions, who hopes it might attract the attention of the newly elected President; Obama in fact has a brief cameo in the book, shooting hoops at a fundraiser, as Joshua Clayton discusses in his essay. One of the reasons that Robert invites Marny to join is the hope that his specialism in ‘American colonial history’ will enable him to ‘take the long view’ (YDHT, 53) and to situate the Detroit project within a proud American pioneering tradition. But, in fact—​as James Peacock explores in his essays in this collection—​ this historical context only brings more sharply into focus the uncomfortable racial politics and colonialist echoes of Robert’s effort to re-​populate traditionally African American, working-​class neighbourhoods with white liberal drop-​outs like Marny. Connections such as these to larger, ‘national’ themes are more oblique in the Essinger books, and Paul’s story becomes just one of many playing out within the family. More immediately striking is the novels’ focus on the general quotidian ‘busyness’ of domesticity, as David Brauner suggests in his essay: ‘the constant coming and going and reconfigurations of people, the endless plans and arguments, the quantities of food consumed’ (CA, 179). Both novels spill over with a superabundance of mundane detail—​Bill delights especially in dissecting travel arrangements—​and we become slowly enmeshed in the finicky organisational toil of life in a large brood: ‘family as information-​producing machine … decision-​ requiring machine … argument-​ creating machine … catering and cleaning service … childcare and school’ (CA, 181). The Essingers suffer from a form of ‘conversation tendinitis’ which keeps ‘flaring up’ because they can’t ‘resist repeating certain arguments’ (WNY, 256). Their endless talk is underlaid by a dense network of micro-​aggressions and micro-​affections, characterised by ‘cross-​ currents of sympathy’ (WNY, 273) and ‘the pull of different allegiances’ (CA, 159) decades in the making. With the Essingers, Dana feels, ‘you’re always in the middle of some argument, not an argument, but it’s like that, and everyone’s having it together and whatever you say it’s connected to something somebody else said, and has a different opinion about, and so on. And it never ends’ (CA, 44). The novels’ exhaustive focus on these ‘complicated arrangements’ (WNY, 273) can be, well, exhausting. One of the subtle innovations of Markovits’s narrative style in the Essinger books is the space left for characters’ attention to drift and their minds to

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wander, for fatigue to set in. The story of family life is a story of ‘people getting bored and restless, people resting, people arguing about where to eat’ (WNY, 236). All this can get ‘pretty tiring’ (WNY, 98). ‘When you’re tired everything seems to matter, when really it doesn’t’ (WNY, 28), and the Essingers are often tired, up half the night with small children or groggy with jet lag. The plot, too, seems to drift somewhat somnambulantly. In the first book we find the family killing time in the lead up to Paul’s U.S. Open appearance, passing an afternoon apartment hunting (Bill and Liesel are vaguely mulling a move to the city). There is a similar focus in the second book on the pre-​Christmas interregnum, when afternoons can feel as though they are ‘slipping away’ (CA, 107). ‘What had they done with the day?’ (107), Susie wonders, a little aghast, as the light fades. Jean turns up to the first family lunch in New York wearing a top she has bought from a shop in Camden called the Random Number T-​Shirt Company (it’s a running joke that she’s a terrible dresser). Staring at the series of digits emblazoned on the shirt, Nathan insists, despite Jean’s protestations, that there must be ‘a sequence’ (WNY, 65). When you look closely, a certain pattern or order also seems to emerge from the novels’ apparently shapeless narratives, and a wider political context comes gradually into focus. Like You Don’t Have to Live Like This, the Essinger books are novels of the Obama era, carefully framed as belonging to a specific moment in recent American political and cultural history. In Christmas in Austin, Susie says that she and her husband David struck a bargain over whether they would move to the U.K. so that David could take up a job offer at Oxford. ‘The deal was, that if Romney won, I said we could go, but then Obama won’ (CA, 201), and they end up agreeing to move anyway. It’s an ambiguous statement about the relevance of larger political forces to family fortunes: personal decisions might turn on a national election, but then again, they might not. Susie has a vague idea for a book ‘to be called something like The Invention of Family’, exploring ‘the idea of family as an escape from history, or an insulation from it, from political forces and social pressures and cultural shifts’ (CA, 109, emphasis original). But, Markovits suggests, family might equally be the site for the substantiation and elaboration of these forces, the stage on which they subtly play out. Other details establish the novels as Obama books. In Christmas in Austin, the Essingers discuss the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, which has prompted Nathan’s students at Harvard to start a petition calling for gun control reform. He is hesitant over whether to sign it: the fight seems ‘almost completely hopeless’ (CA, 225), he has a lawyerly disregard for petitions as a crude form of civic engagement, and, more self-​servingly, is ‘reluctant to get his name in the papers’ (225) lest it damage his shot at a judgeship. The New York Times, meanwhile, has contacted him about writing an op-​ed on the war in Afghanistan, which occasionally features in the novel, playing out on the TV in the hospital corridor where Bill sits visiting his sick sister (CA, 208). In the first novel, we discover that Jean is working on a series of films about the growing refugee crisis in Europe: ‘There are all these people hanging out at Calais, trying to make it over on one of the ferries. Mostly

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from Africa—​Eritrea, South Sudan’ (WNY, 68). It’s a topic that casts a subtly different light on the Essingers’ drawn-​out apartment hunting (and, more broadly, their protracted ‘hanging out’), and which faintly echoes the family’s own history of European migration. We also learn that Nathan has written an opinion piece rumoured to have been cited in a White House memorandum justifying the legality of the Obama administration’s use of Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) against oversees American citizens suspected of terrorism—​what became known at the ‘drone memo’, which was made public, in a redacted form, thanks to a long crusade by the ACLU and the Times (Jaffer 2014). Nathan does not confirm nor deny the rumour, but his family are troubled by it. Privately, Bill disagrees with Nathan’s opinion piece and worries that his son may have his head turned by ‘people from the Justice Department trying to woo him’ (WNY, 218). He is loath to broach the topic with Nathan because he knows how such disagreements within a family are rarely disinterested and never understood as such. ‘He thinks it’s personal for me. Professional jealousy. Maybe he’s right’ (WNY, 218). Liesel shares her husband’s unease about the piece, telling Nathan that, ‘It’s not just a question of making an argument but what the argument will be used for […] there is a purpose to the law, which the law serves. Lawyers should serve it too’ (WNY, 262). When Jean confronts Nathan about the memo, political disagreement and familial tension also overlap. After Nathan tries to explain how a specific dispute concerning the legality of the Obama administration’s extrajudicial killing of a U.S. citizen needs to be separated from a broader argument about the morality of drone warfare, Jean’s reaction is that of the younger sibling, telling him to stop talking to her ‘like I’m one of your students’ (WNY, 259). Following their conversation, Jean reflects that she feels as though she has been ‘engaged in this basically constant low-​level warfare’ with Nathan since he arrived ‘and I don’t know why’ (268). As a 2010 report by the UN’s Human Rights Council on ‘extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions’ concludes, the increased use of UAV ‘targeted killings’ by the U.S. and others against suspected terrorists ‘had the very problematic effect of blurring and expanding the boundaries of the applicable legal frameworks’ (Alston 2010, 1). In the case of the U.S., which massively expanded the use of such ‘surgical strikes’ during the Obama administration, the report’s specific concerns relate to ‘the scope of the armed conflict in which the U.S. asserts it is engaged, the criteria for individuals who may be targeted and killed, the existence of any substantive or procedural safeguards to ensure the legality and accuracy of killings, and the existence of accountability mechanisms’ (Alston 2010, 8). In the court of public opinion, the moral case against such extrajudicial killings was built upon a feeling that the remote-​operation technology of drone warfare obscures and abstracts the reality of taking a life; a comparison to ‘playing a video game’ was often made in coverage of such strikes, including by those who had experience of operating UAVs (Brown 2013). The case was strengthened by the sense that, as the UN report suggests, the use of drones in such attacks extends conflicts beyond conventional theatres of war into the territories of sovereign states, meaning parameters of and

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justifications for this kind of military action become opaque. As Nathan tells Susie’s young son Ben, who is trying to follow the adults’ argument, ‘it’s not always easy to say what a war is’ (WNY, 257). The ‘basically constant low-​level warfare’ waged between the Essingers and the covert drone war waged by the Obama administration are thus brought into contact, and continue to refract one another as the novel unfolds. At the core of the case regarding the legality and morality of UAVs are complexities of accountability and responsibility, complexities which Nathan is keen to stress in defending his opinion piece. But when Jean confesses to him about her affair with her boss, Nathan appears to have no difficulty in apportioning blame, with legalistic dispassion: ‘There’s a moral responsibility here. The primary obligation is not yours, it’s his. But there are people who will be affected by what you do. No just the wife […] but the kids. You have a minor but not insignificant duty towards them’ (WNY, 163). Questions of culpability lead indirectly but inevitably back to WWII, which has in different ways shaped the destinies of both the German and the Jewish sides of the family. Liesel has written a memoir of her childhood growing up in the Third Reich which—​much like the book that Susie plans to write—​argues that ‘even in the middle of terrible political events, pockets of ordinary, innocent and happy family life remain possible’ (WNY, 192).3 Asked by Nathan’s daughter Julie whether her great-​grandfather had wanted Germany to win the war, Liesel replies, ‘That’s not an easy question. He was a German, but he didn’t like Hitler’ (WNY, 311). She tells her granddaughter a story of how as a child her school teacher had asked her class to raise their hands if they had a picture of Hitler at home and to describe it: ‘She asked the first row one day, and the next row the next day, and I was worried that when she got to me I’d have to keep my hand down, because my parents didn’t have a picture on the wall’ (WNY, 69–​70). Upon telling this to her mother, Liesel’s parents bought a postcard of the Führer to prop up on a bookshelf so that she could ‘be like everyone else’ (WNY, 71). Such stories of quotidian complicity clash with what Liesel takes to be a very American ‘idea of purity, there are no half-​measures’ (WNY, 201), and also gesture to the novels’ broader interest in sticky questions of personal responsibility and political agency. In the second book, Liesel is reading her father’s wartime letters, some of which are ‘upsetting’: ‘Her father wrote things he shouldn’t have written, about their prisoners of war, about shooting the deserters and the outcomes of certain battles’ (CA, 16). Though she argues that ‘you have to make allowances’ because ‘people living in the middle of history are in a tunnel they can’t see out of’ (CA, 16), Liesel’s willingness to explain and contextualise her father’s actions clearly echoes Nathan’s equivocations about the legality of drone warfare. As a teenager in his first flush of political righteousness, Nathan had been deeply troubled by his grandfather’s role in the German war effort—​‘He built ships for the Nazis, that was his job’—​and he ‘used to argue with Liesel about what her father could have done differently […] for some reason it seemed very important for him to make his mother admit, there was culpability there’ (WNY, 311, emphasis original). Yet now he recognises that there is a ‘flavor of complicity’

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to his own professional life, built as it is on favours, compromises, and backroom deals, and worries that he might be in danger of becoming a ‘company man’ (WNY, 312), as he once disparagingly described his grandfather. In actual fact what he seems to have inherited from the German side of his family is Liesel’s ‘pragmatic view of legal argument’ (WNY, 311) and what Trilling would call a tragic sense of history. Still smarting from his argument with Jean, Nathan says to himself that, ‘You can make your documentaries, about the immigrants at Calais […] about all the avoidable tragedies that can only be avoided at the expense of some other tragedy. Which doesn’t matter, because you never have to choose between them. But being serious at some point means being serious about power’ (WNY, 313). In the second novel, the tragic history considered, obliquely, is racism in America. The novel opens with the story of the ‘little shack’ (CA, 6) in the backyard of the Essingers’ ‘1920s plantation-​style colonial’ (CA, 7) in Austin, where, before the family bought the house in the 1960s, a black domestic servant, Mr. Mosby, had lived; later the shack became a playhouse for the Essinger children and grandchildren.4 For Liesel, coming from Germany, finding the shack was to be confronted by ‘the kind of thing you read about the South in books’ (CA, 7). Julie—​now a teenager, who has inherited her father’s passion for justice and taste for an argument—​is horrified to learn the story, which makes her feel ‘like a spoilt little rich white kid’ (CA, 240, emphasis original). She is also outraged by her grandmother’s efforts to historicise it, in a conversation which closely echoes their discussion of Liesel’s father in A Weekend in New York. Haltingly, Liesel suggests that Mosby may not have ‘wanted to sleep in the house’, under the same roof as his white female employer, and that he may have been more ‘comfortable’ (CA, 231) in the shack, before attempting to draw a larger moral from the story: ‘people, in spite of terrible … somehow at the same time they manage to maintain […] in spite of everything, people as human beings sometimes …’ (231–​2) but her granddaughter cuts her off. Hoping to channel Julie’s anger at the historical injustice, Nathan suggests his daughter visit Dodie, an elderly neighbour who remembers Mosby and the neighbourhood in that era. ‘When we bought this house, in 1951, everybody got along’, Dodie tells her, ‘You saw a lot of black faces’ (277). In a conversation that makes Julie increasingly uncomfortable, Dodie asks, ‘How many black people live in Hemphill Park today? Nobody. If you see somebody now you reach for the phone’, and notes that, though she ‘voted for Obama’ the ‘first time around’, she backed Romney in 2012: ‘It’s getting so you can’t even talk about anything anymore’ (277). Julie is left chiding herself for not ‘condemning or challenging’ the ‘racist things’ (279) Dodie has said, and she resolves to spend a night in the shack, to ‘see what it’s like’ (240). But, like signing a petition or making a documentary, it’s unclear what such a response can achieve, and how seriously to take it as a political act. Her 12-​year-​old cousin, Ben, is quick to mock what he perceives to be Julie’s self-​righteousness; like his English father, David, Ben has little time for people who take themselves too seriously. In a key scene in the book, Ben plays a prank on Julie the night she sleeps in the playhouse, creeping into the backyard

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and throwing pebbles onto the roof of the shack, to ‘scare her, a little’ (296). When one of the pebbles goes astray and breaks the playhouse window, Julie flees in fright and Ben is soon forced to come clean. ‘What he did was evil’, his mother, Susie, says, ‘It’s not a big deal, it’s not the worst thing in the world, but it was evil’ (328), closely echoing Nathan’s response: ‘What Ben did was not forgivable, but it was also not a big deal […] You don’t forgive someone who picks wings of ants […] but you stay out of their way’ (366). His wife Clémence chides him for being ‘too absolute in these things’ (366), and David likewise dismisses the prank as ‘schoolboy stuff’ (327), complaining that ‘The Essingers turn everything into a moral dilemma’ (328). ‘David is probably right’, Liesel concurs, ‘I think sometimes in this family we worry too much about right and wrong’ (341). ‘Not everything is a moral act’, Nathan tells Paul, a little unconvincingly, in the first novel, to which his brother replies, ‘I don’t believe you believe that’ (WNY, 80), and indeed both novels foreground and problematise questions of morality, whether relating to personal conduct or political positions, and ask us to consider how the scales of private and public life align and diverge, and the extent to which family dramas refract wider political realities: what, after all, is Ben’s prank if not a covert airstrike? There is of course a long tradition of state of the family fictions doubling as state of the nation novels, and of imagining the domestic as a scene for the political (the shack in the yard is a version of Uncle Tom’s cabin). But Markovits also asks us to pause before making too neat a link between the two. One of Clémence’s gigs as a journalist is ‘presenting features for This American Life’ (CA, 155), and she has scheduled some interviews during her stay in Austin to research a promising story for the radio show on the 37th Street Christmas lights—​a community-​organised, outlandish festive display that began with a few neighbours putting up decorations and has since grown into a well-​known tourist attraction. Clémence hopes that the story will provide ‘an angle’ (155) on Austin, a city that, like Detroit, has witnessed rapid gentrification in recent years; the focus would be on one of the original organisers of the display who has been forced to sell his home on 37th Street to developers in order to help pay for his mother’s healthcare costs. As Clémence’s eager young producer, Kurt, sees it, the story is about ‘all kinds of things coming together, a historic and unique community tradition […] slowly dying out because of lots of others things that are going wrong with this country, urban creep, healthcare …’ (348)—​the sort of editorialising and narrative framing typical of the long-​form radio journalism that This American Life helped inaugurate. But, as she digs deeper into it, Clémence begins to simultaneously feel that ‘there was too many things going on’ with the story and uncertain whether ‘there was enough there’ (249). When she speaks to the organiser and discovers that he had in fact planned to leave 37th Street even before his mother’s care costs rose because he ‘got sick of the frat-​house atmosphere at Christmas’, Clémence reflects that, ‘Whenever you talk to people it turns out that the story is more complicated than you thought it was, and usually in quite boring ways’ (380). Markovits thus draws a subtle distinction

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between the kind of storytelling and cultural work that the novel can do and that which shows like This American Life are capable of: unlike the neatly packaged ‘features’ on the radio, in which the domestic and political need to elegantly align, the novel can instead take up the messy, ‘complicated’ (and occasionally ‘quite boring’) American lives of a big family like the Essingers. Asked in a 2019 interview whether he was comfortable being described as an American writer and compared to authors like Jonathan Franzen, Markovits reflected that, in the Essinger books he had tried to ‘blend’ American and British literary traditions. While admiring ‘loud voiced’ American writers (like Franzen) ‘who can talk about massive subjects’, he also revealed an appreciation for ‘quiet domestic’ British novels in which ‘not much happens, but because of class consciousness every detail can be rendered with accent-​sharp precision’ (Markovits 2019b). In an interview from 2008, he similarly confessed to liking ‘safe middle-​ class novels: I like books in which not much happens. The trouble is, they are very hard to do’ (Markovits 2008). The Essingers are certainly middle class and both novels display a keen class consciousness. There is Julie’s discomfort over the playhouse and the vivid awareness of her privilege it provokes. There is the careful rendering of David’s public school affability, and his precise interpretation of his wife Susie’s fashion sense: ‘She looked in other words like an American mother of a certain class, upper-​middle, vaguely hippiesh, but at the same time financially comfortable and modestly old-​fashioned’ (CA, 326). And there is the broader delineation of the difference in status and outlook between Bill—​the son of Jewish immigrants, whose uncles ran a grocery business with ‘stores all over the state’ of New York (WNY, 222)—​and his prosperous, professional Texan children who no longer suffer from ‘immigrant’s [bad] luck’ (WNY, 223). But these novels are also loud-​voiced enough to speak of bigger political contexts and historical narratives, whether in their portrayal of the Obama years (and, one imagines, the Trump years in the remaining instalments of the series), or their consideration of the legacies of racism in America or, more indirectly, WWII. Another name for what Markovits describes as a blend of American and British literary traditions might be the ‘novel of manners’, as outlined by Lionel Trilling in his 1947 essay, ‘Manners, Morals, and the Novel’, from which my essay takes its title. By manners, Trilling means ‘a culture’s hum and buzz of implication […] the whole evanescent context in which explicit statements are made’, hinted at by ‘small actions […] by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm’ (Trilling 2008/​1950, 206). The realm of manners is below the level of art, religion, or politics, and yet is related ‘to all these highly formulated departments of culture. It is modified by them; it modifies them; it is generated by them; it generates them’ (207). The ‘great novelists’, Trilling suggests, ‘knew that manners indicate the largest intentions of men’s souls as well as the smallest’ and understood ‘the shifting and conflict of social classes as ‘the field of the problem of knowledge’ (211–​2, 209) for the genre. The English novel, with its ‘thick social texture’ (212) and ‘special concern with class’ (211), fulfilled this ‘classic intention’, Trilling argues, but this kind of novel

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‘never really established itself in America’; only Henry James understood that ‘to scale the moral and aesthetic heights in the novel one had to use the ladder of social observation’ (212). Towards the end of the essay, Trilling pairs James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886) with E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907) as novels that ‘take scrupulous note’ of ‘differences of manners’, that ‘both have as their leading characters people who are specifically and passionately concerned with social injustice’, and that ‘both agree in saying that to act against social injustice is right and noble but that to choose to act so does not settle all moral problems but on the contrary generates new ones of an especially difficult sort’ (219). Through a close attention to manners, these novelists craft a form of what Trilling elsewhere calls ‘moral realism’: ‘not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life’, shaped by ‘the understanding of the inextricable tangle of good and evil and of how perilous moral action can be’ (Trilling 1964/​1943, 11–​2). This is also the terrain of the Essinger books. ‘We have the chance to lead unusually good lives’, Nathan tells Paul, which means not only ‘material comfort’ and ‘a range of experiences, like travel, like art’, but also ‘doing actual and significant good’ (CA, 324). For Nathan—​the character most obviously ‘passionately concerned with injustice’—​the perils of leading a good life are keenly felt, in his effort to reconcile his ambition with his morality, and in facing the sometimes tragic compromises that come with wielding political power. The ‘inextricable tangle of good and evil’ is explored in both novels, whether in Julie’s stay in the playhouse, Liesel’s effort to make sense of her childhood, Jean’s humanitarian documentaries, or Paul’s quandaries about his responsibilities to Dana and Cal. It is in each other’s company that these quandaries become vivid for the Essingers, such that family life becomes not an escape from history, as Susie hopes, but a kind of moral theatre, in which positions, beliefs, and arguments can be rehearsed and performed. In their ‘scrupulous’ consideration of ‘small actions’ and the variations of ‘tone, emphasis, or rhythm’ of family life, these novels create the ‘dense social texture’ Trilling describes, in which attention to manners and class generates larger moral questions. Unlike ‘loud voiced’ American novels, Markovits lets us hear the hum of the ‘endless plans and arguments’ (CA, 179), at once minor and vital, of a group of people intimately bound to and implicated in one another’s always-​flawed efforts to lead good lives. Notes 1 Markovits’s parents are both law professors at the University of Texas at Austin; his brother, Daniel, and sister, Stefanie, are both professors at Yale, of Law and English respectively; his sister, Julia, teaches Philosophy at Cornell. 2 My thinking here is shaped by Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (2003). 3 Liesel’s memoir somewhat resembles Imperfect Justice: An East-​West German Diary (1995), by Inga Markovits, Markovits’s mother, a work that seeks to document ‘the

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non-​scandalous, everyday aspects of socialist law […] Because it is not through its excesses but through its familiar, commonplace habits […] that the past will longer exert its hold over the future’ (3). 4 In an interview with Robert Faires for the Austin Chronicle, Markovits describes the Essinger house as ‘one of the main characters in the book’ (Markovits, 2019c).

Works Cited Alston, Philip (2010) ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Addendum [A/​HRC/​14/​24/​Add.6].’ United Nations Human Rights Council, 28 May 2010, www.dig​ital​libr​ary.un.org/​rec​ord/​685​887?ln=​en Brown, Mark (2013) ‘Life as a US drone operator: “It’s like playing a video game for four years.”’ The Guardian, 28 July 2013, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2013/​jul/​28/​life-​us-​ drone-​opera​tor-​art​ist Jaffer, Jameel (2014) ‘The Drone Memo Cometh.’ ACLU Blog, 23 June 2014, www.aclu. org/​blog/​natio​nal-​secur​ity/​targe​ted-​kill​ing/​drone-​memo-​com​eth Markovits, Benjamin (2008), ‘A General Love of Books: An Interview with Benjamin Markovits by T Bunstead.’ 3:AM Magazine, 24 October 2008, www.3amm​agaz​ine.com/​ 3am/​a-​gene​ral-​love-​of-​books-​an-​interv​iew-​with-​benja​min-​markov​its/​ —​—​—​ (2010) Playing Days. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2015) You Don’t Have to Live Like This. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​ (2018) A Weekend in New York. London: Faber and Faber. —​—​—​(2019a) ‘Interview with Mariella Fostrup.’ Open Book, BBC Radio 4, www.bbc. co.uk/​pro​gram​mes/​m000c​c1q —​—​—​(2019b) ‘Interview with Alex Clark’, recorded at Jewish Book Week, 10 March 2019, https://​vimeo.com/​322738​528 —​—​—​(2019c) ‘Interview with Benjamin Markovits by Robert Faires.’ Austin Chronicle, 17 December 2019, www.aust​inch​roni​cle.com/​daily/​books/​2019-​12-​17/​interv​iew-​with-​ benja​min-​markov​its/​ —​—​—​ (2019d) Christmas in Austin. London: Faber and Faber. Markovits, Inga (1995) Imperfect Justice: An East-​ West German Diary. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Trilling, Lionel (1964/​1943) E.M. Forster. New York, NY: New Directions. —​—​—​ (2008/​1950) The Liberal Imagination. New York, NY: New York Review Books. Woloch, Alex (2003) The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

9 A CONVERSATION WITH BENJAMIN MARKOVITS Benjamin Markovits and Kasia Boddy

This interview, with Kasia Boddy asking questions, took place in London on 21st September 2022. I’d like to start with a phrase from a blurb on the cover of The Sidekick: Jonathan Lethem praising the book’s ‘classic American voice’. What do you think he means by that? In his original blurb he offered something longer, which has been cut back a bit. I think some of what he wanted to be nice about was the racial anxiety in the book. So when he talked about a ‘classic American voice’, he was being a little … not ironic, but trying to shade it with some sense that this is no longer the voice that can speak confidently. I think that’s what he was getting at. I like the cover. It was probably me who cut down the Lethem blurb to that phrase because I thought people might go for it. I don’t know if that’s true. The paperback will have a different quote on the front because my editor was less convinced that the classic American voice is one that people want to buy. Is there something else to the comment? Something about the sound of the voice? It’s hard to answer because I’ve been in this country a long time now. My sense of an American voice comes from when I was still living there full time. The country has changed since I left and the sorts of things that a white guy from the 80s would say, they don’t say anymore. And in some ways, I try to make use of that in the book and give Brian Blum a freer rein than he might have had if he really had gone through the twenty years of American history that I kind of skipped. One of the things I struggled with when I was starting to write novels—​I think I may have

DOI: 10.4324/9781032614892-10

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talked about this before—​was what to do with your education. If you’re a novelist there’s a pretty good chance you’ve read a lot and studied a lot and there’s a tendency for what you’ve read and studied to slip into your work in ways that seem meaningful when you’re in the middle of writing but then less and less meaningful as you step away from it. Because who cares that you can quote various people? One of the things that I try to work on is writing in a language that you can use in your daily life, that doesn’t require a particular education … Not that Brian Blum is stupid but his voice doesn’t have that veneer. Is that what made him an attractive character for you? Yes. I grew up in Austin, I was obsessed with basketball, but there are big gaps between my life and Brian Blum’s, which I put in intentionally. I sometimes think my dad is a real American in a way that I’m not, because I spent so much of my time in Europe and because my mom is German. A lot of my literary associations were with the German side of my family. When I was younger I wanted to write poems but it wasn’t until I started writing novels that I realised I had as much to gain from what I’d inherited from my dad as I did from the literariness of my mom’s family. So some of my father’s voice is in the book, too. I want to come back to what ‘classic’ might refer to, not just in terms of voice but also perhaps in terms of The Sidekick’s relationship to other books of friendship, particularly other books of interracial friendship—​the classic example would be something like Huckleberry Finn, which you’ve written about yourself. Were you thinking about Twain’s novel at all? I know that in 2015 you wrote an essay … I wrote about writing race in The Guardian, and I talked about Huck Finn and then Baldwin’s response to reading Huck Finn.1 Did that sow the seed for this book? I wrote that in relation to You Don’t Have to Live Like This, and I was talking about how hard it is to write different races, increasingly hard. I don’t really have a solution to the problem. I think the argument of the piece was that bad writing is synonymous with cliché and cliché is synonymous with prejudice and so if you write badly about your own kind you’re just a mediocre writer, but if you think shallowly about other people it comes across as worse because it is worse. But I’m not sure that means you should stop writers from trying it. Who would stop them? Publishers? Readers? The publishers and the market, publishers and readers stop them; I think it’s become harder, don’t you think so? And that seems a shame. But there are strategies you can use to protect yourself. Both The Sidekick and You Don’t Have to Live Like This have first-​person narrators we’re not supposed to agree with all the time and that seems to me a fair out. But I don’t know if it strikes readers that way.

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Having written about these issues in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, did you feel you had unfinished business? I don’t think you can write about basketball in America without writing about race. It was one of the strangest features of my childhood that my only real contact with African Americans happened when I played basketball. That left an impression on me that seemed worth writing about. If something makes you uncomfortable it’s a good indication that it matters to you. Marcus was hard to write partly because he was framed by Brian’s resentment of him … and then there was the question of how warm I wanted their friendship to be. I tend not to do warm that much. I don’t think my characters are jerks but I just … I feel bad writing warm stuff. At least, it can be warm at the end but it has to get there after a lot of not-​warm. And I wanted to suggest that … this is making it seem more of a conscious decision than it was … that there would be a massive barrier to intimacy between them, even though they grew up together and shared important moments together, because of racial distrust. Sorry to keep coming back to Huckleberry Finn, but of course there Jim is Huck’s sidekick. Right. Although looked at from another point of view, Huck is Jim’s sidekick because Jim has the more important journey to make. Yes. But the ‘classic’ story is always about the black sidekick to the white hero … Yes. I think that was part of what interested me about writing the book in the first place; it was less a response to Huck Finn than to the modern NBA. You have a world in which the millionaire superstars are overwhelmingly African American. I listen to a lot of sports podcasts and I follow the NBA pretty closely, but it’s not something that gets talked about much—​the way race inflects the power relations in pro basketball. Because people don’t know what to do with that story? People don’t know what to do with it and they don’t want to talk about it. And there’s a general sense that if there is a complicated imbalance in the league, it’s offset by so many more significant imbalances the other way around—​in normal life but also in ownership structures. You probably didn’t follow it, but an NBA owner has just been suspended for a year for creating a misogynist and racially charged workplace. I assume that goes on all the time. Whatever sort of resentment Brian might feel is complicated by the fact that he’s missing the larger picture. Which comes through a lot in the book in his arguments with his father about favouring Marcus. It seemed interesting to explore because it inverted a lot of the usual power relations.

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I wonder if it’s also in some ways about friendship structures more generally. Is there always a star and a sidekick in male friendships? All friendships? I was interested in a piece you wrote about your favourite friendship books—​you said that you realised that friendship plots serve as a foil for all the other plots. I wondered first of all what exactly a friendship plot is?2 There was a first draft of that piece and I can’t remember what survived, in which I talked about … did I mention the mug that was given to me by my students? I don’t think so. It’s one of those Penguin mugs, and the book on it is called Friendship Doesn’t Matter by Ben Markovits. Apparently, I said this in a workshop once. I felt like too many of my students were writing stories in which the thing that counted was an undergraduate friendship, and I wanted to say, Other stuff will happen in your life that counts for more … As you get older friendships become more competitive because what you’ve made of yourself is more measurable. Younger friendships are also super-​competitive but the competition doesn’t matter as much. Maybe you do a little better on a test when you’re a student and then suddenly you’re forty and you have a bigger house or a smaller house, you don’t have a fulltime job, you’re publishing/​you’re not publishing, whatever it is. So my students gave me this mug, affectionately but also a little mockingly, and a few years later I wrote a book about friendship. I wondered also about from a writing point of view, whether the kind of story of a friendship, the trajectory of that, is a different plot structure than, say, a marriage plot or a family saga plot, the fact that different relationships have different plots. Yes. And sport also interestingly opens up another kind of relationship. In A Weekend in New York, Paul talks about hanging around with people whom he doesn’t know very well and who don’t know him. And in The Sidekick, there are various scenes where the focus is on the hangers-​on and what they want from their proximity to the star. I guess I’m asking you really about how different kinds of relationships shape your books. I think that’s true. I don’t think the friendship plot solves as many plot problems as the romance plot, don’t you think? You can more or less get from the beginning to the end of the book with just a romance plot. Yes. And I think the friendship plot requires you to focus on other parts of their lives. The Sidekick jumps back and forth in time, but the overall structure I had in mind begins when they meet and ends when Brian does the thing that will sever their relationship

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forever (by writing the article). That was the frame I had for it, but it’s a structure that offers more frame than arc. The arc of the novel has less to do with their friendship, and more to do with Brian’s sense of himself and what he’s made of his life. What Paul is going through in Weekend in New York—​some of that is just middle-​aged stuff, don’t you think? One of Marny’s friends says in You Don’t Have to Live like This, There’s not a scene in my life that I want to be involved in—​the after-​school pickup scene, the Thursday night work drink scene … And I feel that more than I did when I was a kid. Wherever your demographic lands you on a Thursday evening some part of you thinks: are these my people? how did I end up here? Right. One of the sliding doors moments in my life was when … I had just quit playing basketball in Germany and was living in Oxford with an old friend, working at George and Davis (a café in Jericho), and finishing a first draft of The Syme Papers. That was the year I started going out with Caroline, who became my wife. Anyway, I needed something to do next, that wasn’t scooping ice cream. One idea was to sign up for an MPhil at the local university and another was to get a job teaching high school in America somewhere, and the third was to apply for an internship at ESPN. And I got an interview at ESPN … I can’t remember exactly how the dates played out … in Bristol, Connecticut. I remember sitting at an empty station afterward, on a hot summer day waiting for the train, and wondering, is this where my life is taking me. But when I didn’t hear from them I figured I hadn’t got the job. The only teaching offer I had came from some semi-​military high school in Maryland. Then I was accepted onto the MPhil and went back to Oxford. Nine months later … I was home for Christmas … I got a call saying, “You got the internship.” I hadn’t realised ESPN had a rolling list of people they were working through. But by that point I was in the middle of the MPhil. Maybe I would have been a sports journalist. Would you get as sick of basketball as you get sick of whatever it is you have to teach every day if you’re a teacher? I don’t know, probably yes. Brian Blum is 35-​years-​old and he’s lying in bed watching basketball games and thinking, what the hell happened to my middle age, this is not how you’re supposed to live. I noticed those kind of junction points in several of your books, a kind of tension between a desire to start over, and the pullback into the past. I think when Brian arrives at his old house, he says, ‘It’s like going back twenty years’, as if those years haven’t happened. Right. And then, against that pull, there’s an urge to start over with new jobs, new relationships, new pregnancies—​different things for different characters. I like writing about seeker types, people who seem restlessly dissatisfied with wherever they’ve ended up and want something else. They tend to not age well

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because usually people who stick to relatively conventional paths get what they want and the people who keep on searching for something don’t. They keep looping. Right. And there’s also … I partly like them because there’s a kind of self-​importance that ironizes … the earnestness of the seeker type. And yet they’re clearly right, some of them are clearly right, the conventional life you’re living doesn’t seem like the answer to the big questions. That mix of somebody being obviously insightful at the same time that they’re being delusional, that’s an attractive combination to write about. When you were saying a minute ago about being in a situation and watching and thinking: how did I get here; why am I here? A phrase that some of this book’s essays have picked up from You Don’t Have to Live Like This is ‘periphery guy’. There are versions of that phrase and that kind of character in other novels too. In literary terms he is what, going back to Conrad, Fitzgerald or Roth, has been called a participant observer, a person on the sidelines observing somebody else’s life. What attracts you to that figure? There’s a workshop I give on The Great Gatsby in which I talk about the difference between the first-​person central narrator and the first-​person peripheral. I guess the classic first-​person central is Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and the classic peripheral is Nick Carraway in Gatsby. I think … quite apart from the fact that the peripheral narrator reflects my experience as a half-​German, half-​Jew, half-​American, living in different countries and going to different schools—​I was always the periphery guy—​there are some narrative advantages you can get from that peripheral role. For example, you can push the story along by letting the reader find out more about what’s already happened … because the narrator wasn’t there to witness it at the time. That’s a common way that many of us experience plot—​ Did you hear what happened to Bob? His contract ran out at the symphony and he started playing piano on a cruise ship, where he met a guy who told him to buy shares in … and so on. That’s usually how we find out about what happens to someone we know, that kind of story, and so the peripheral narration allows you to reproduce that in a novel, which is easier to do than making the action unfold in front of the reader’s eyes. But there are costs, too. People sometimes misread first-​person narrators and interpret them as more passive than they really are, just because they have to serve as the recording eye. In You Don’t Have to Live Like This, Marny does many things that I wouldn’t have the guts to do—​he quits an academic job, moves to a decimated rust-​belt city as part of some quixotic scheme, gets a job teaching at a local school, involves himself with various people in the community, etc. Yet most of the essays in this collection treat him as a largely passive figure—​which I can see, I put it in there, it’s just that it’s worth giving credit to him for all the steps he takes.

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There’s also the moment in The Sidekick where Marcus says to Brian, ‘Here, what makes you think you know me?’ And we don’t really. At the end of Fitzgerald’s novel, it’s Carraway you feel you know, not Gatsby. You could say that telling a story is an act of putting yourself not on the periphery but at the centre. If you had a first-​person Gatsby it would be very hard to romanticise him, there’d be no mystery there, he just becomes another explainable dude. And does it matter that Brian doesn’t really understand Marcus? He wants to dispute that. I also think it’s something people say to each other when they’re having a fight, ‘You don’t actually know me at all’. Especially if there’s a racial barrier between them. From Brian’s point of view, he might say that Marcus knows him less well than Brian knows Marcus, just because so much of Marcus’s attention is directed at winning every encounter, regardless of how trivial it is or how unrelated to his career. My suspicion is that most people who become as good at what they do as Marcus does are like psychopaths. Because they have to block everything else out? Yes. Imagine, all you want to do, all you can think about, is getting better and better at various skills connected to bouncing a ball. I love it but it’s not normal. Add to that the fact that basketball players are usually much taller than their peers and so make quite awkward adolescents. You have this idea of athletes as golden boys and high school studs, and they are to some extent. But if you’re eight inches taller than the nearest girl, it’s not that easy being fifteen years old, which might explain why you go out and shoot hoops all the time. It turns out that doing something over and over makes you better at it than people who don’t. Musicians are probably similar. If you’re a professional violinist, you didn’t have a normal childhood. We have circled round from how friendship plots work in relation to, or shed new light on, other plots, romantic plots or family plots. I want to come on to your quartet in progress, the Essinger novels, and thinking about what writing about family there allows you to do differently than in a novel like The Sidekick, although of course that’s also about family. There’s a line in Christmas in Austin about family as an ‘argument-​creating machine’. Is part of the appeal for you in those novels, staging those arguments? Probably. It’s just that family was very important to me and everything else was kind of unimportant in relation to it. Conventional lives have a weird shape. You spend the first eighteen years inside a family, and then if you have kids you get a certain number of years outside family life, until the kids arrive, at which point, you’re back in. Until they leave home, I guess. And each period of your life when you reach it feels like the new permanent reality, even if it turns out to be relatively short-​term. In my case, I preferred being inside a family to living outside, and part of the benefit of writing about family … I know there’s a benefit for me,

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I don’t know if there’s a benefit for readers … is that I like stories in which nothing unusual happens but the stakes are still real, and that’s what the argument-​producing machine of family life … actually produces, that’s the output. You were saying about personally liking being in the family but in your novels, there always seems to be a push-​pull. We get that with Paul Essinger. So Paul provides the frame narrative in both books because he’s thinking of walking out on one kind of family life. I don’t think he would put it that way, he wants Dana to come with him; it’s just that she doesn’t want to move to Wimberley. Understandably. The problem I was dealing with is this: how do you dramatize how much family life means? Well, you can threaten to withdraw it. Then you’ll see what it meant to you. On the other hand, people also romanticise their families. I love it when my parents come to visit and … the phone conversations are easy … but then they arrive and you realise oh, there’s an actual person there, not just the person that I had in my head. Then you get a little … buffering, like when magnets are the same positive/​negative end they don’t want to quite … And it takes a while to get used to each other. Yes. But there’s also this idea of … in an essay on Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master, you say he’s exploring the possibility of a character who exists without relations and complications, ‘entirely for himself’. There are moments where characters like Paul (but he’s not the only one) have fantasies about what it means to live like that, although it never lasts very long.3 He wants to go back to his childhood and he thinks that they will all, his brother and sisters and parents … they will all come with him. To Austin, or the new house in Wimberley. Like, why am I hanging out with people I love less than my family? Let’s all go back together. But that’s not going to happen. We get that a bit with Brian in The Sidekick—​he moves back then he moves out and then he kind of comes back again. Yeah, he comes closer … and then his sister dumps her husband and suddenly it’s a lot easier to pretend that you’re re-​enacting the whole thing. I wrote in the foreword to this collection that the books tend to be less happy than the characters’ lives deserve and part of that is just … and this can happen, if you’re the kind of realist who wants to get at what “really” seems to be going on, you lose some of the froth. I mean, some of the ordinary pleasure. Maybe I focus too much on a different kind of family conversation, where you step outside the daily concerns and try to have the honest conversation with the people that you’re closest to, where you can get a quite cold sense of what motivates them. So I think Nathan and Paul, even though they are fractious for part of the book, what unites them is this equal sense that …

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One of my favourite dipping-​in books is Required Writing by Philip Larkin—​do you read that much? Not recently. In one of the interviews he says, You reach a point in your life when you realise there’s a limit to what other people’s personalities can offer you and there’s a limit to what your own personality is in itself.4 That’s a great line. And the conversation about those limits is really only possible with people when the love is unquestionable. Paul and Nathan would agree on that quote. You once wrote of Nabokov’s Pnin, you said it was one of your favourite books because it’s so warm. A moment ago, you said that you don’t write warm books but the first word in Lethem’s blurb for The Sidekick is ‘warm’. Do you really think your books are cold? No, I think some of that is just … I hope they’re not particularly sentimental and that any warmth is earned and not laid on to make the reader feel good—​that’s a low bar. One of my former students managed a bookshop and invited me to their book club to talk about A Weekend in New York; I wrote about this in The Guardian. I’m sitting in a room with twenty mostly retired people and I do a little spiel at the beginning about how the facts of Paul’s family more or less resemble the facts of mine … I go on for about five minutes. And then one woman raises her hand and says, ‘I didn’t like anyone in this book and I don’t think they liked each other either’. She just thought they were all miserable bastards. Maybe they are … but they seem to me, the characters, they seem to me fairly close to each other. Like, the measure of a family is closeness, it’s not happiness, it’s not sentiment, it’s closeness and they’re all deeply involved in each other’s lives. But the woman just thought, people who have these cold thoughts about each other are horrible people. Maybe if it’s not your professional business to try to say honest things, whatever that means, it’s a normal human response to look at these characters and think, ‘Why are they having these terrible, terrible thoughts all the time?’ So warmth is not sentimentality but intimacy? I guess. This makes me think back to what we were just talking about with Brian and Marcus and Marcus saying, ‘You don’t know me’. And even though Marcus has been part of Brian’s family, he hasn’t felt the warmth … I guess what Brian would say, and he does say it to his dad, is: You know that if you play basketball against Marcus he will do everything he can to beat you, everything he can and that’s not because he hates you, it’s just because this is as intimate as it gets from him. And so when I write a story about Marcus’s personal life—​even if it costs me my friendship with him—​I’m doing the same thing. This is what I do and even though he doesn’t … I think Brian would say, this is intimate, right? This

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is us going at it now like we used to when we were teenagers. It’s not a failure of warmth but the opposite, don’t you think? On the other hand, I can see why Marcus wouldn’t want the piece to come out. Why he might say, you have no idea what my life is like, at this level of fame. You don’t understand what you’re getting into. But shortly before he cuts off contact, Marcus says to Brian, man, I just want to make the play-​offs again, because he can’t help himself. Brian’s the guy he talks to about this stuff, about his ambition. And in whose eyes it matters. I keep coming back to the idea of push and pull because of these tensions between intimacy and detachment or nostalgia versus a desire for something new. Another push and pull you have written about is in terms of structure. You wrote a piece for the Edinburgh Book Festival a few years ago about liking structural asymmetry, a kind of balance between ‘chaos’ and form that destroys a sense of naturalness.5 I wonder, looking back over all your books, how much that push and pull preoccupied you. On the one hand, you seem to have an enduring interest in what Peasbody in Either Side of Winter calls ‘uneventfulness’ or Ben in Playing Days calls ‘nothing happening’; also, in contingency, what another Ben, in Home Games, imagines as the moment when the ball’s in the air and ‘anything can happen’. On the other hand, in The Syme Papers, your very first novel, Pitt tells himself to ‘find the shape and stick to it’. You seem to give yourself what Jean Essinger calls ‘sets of constraints’, particularly, in the Byron trilogy or now the Essinger quartet, the constraints of larger formal structures. Sorry, a long set-​up, but can you say more about this push/​pull? One of the basic problems when you write a novel is … if you don’t have structure you have mess, but the structure itself can feel like it’s forcing your hand. The old divide between novelists as gardeners and architects, you need to find a balance between the two. Also, any move you make as a writer, after you’ve identified it as a move, you become a little suspicious of unless … I say this to students and think I believe it (it’s not always easy to work out how much of what you tell your students you actually apply yourself or if it just seems a useful teaching shorthand) that … plot is our word to describe how something happens to someone. As much as possible you want the narrative structure to reflect your real understanding of events; it shouldn’t just be a convenient device that produces the necessary results. But again, that divide isn’t always clear cut, and to make something feel real you learn to follow certain kinds of pattern, you want what happens to seem both surprising and inevitable. Which is obviously a contradiction. The Sidekick is a more formally structured novel, has less asymmetry than most of my books, because I play a relatively regular game of jumping back and forth in time … On the other hand, I made a decision when cutting it up into chapters that not all chapters would alternate, that I preferred it if there was some asymmetry. I wasn’t going to write a chapter just to get back in time because that’s what the structure dictated.

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Can you reflect on some of those decisions in earlier books? There’s a bit in The Waste Land where Eliot uses onomatopoeia to suggest the fall of water and he goes, ‘Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop’. I always liked that ‘drip drop’; he could have done it different ways. Anyway, in Either Side of Winter I have a kind of ABCC structure, the first story is kind of unrelated to the second story, is kind of unrelated to the third story and the fourth story then is a different version of the third story, and it ties together not in neat or predictable ways. Did you write them in order? I wrote them in order yes, because it’s seasonal. The seasons also give the structure … The seasons are also the structure but I didn’t feel the need to tie all the stories together. I think the heroine of the first chapter does briefly appear in the last one (it’s been a while since I read it), so that was another form of asymmetry. Another example is A Quiet Adjustment, my second Byron novel. It’s got a kind of Jane Austen plot except the story keeps going after they marry. The little game I play is … there are three sections in the book and the first section is the courtship and should end in the proposal that leads to their marriage, but it doesn’t. It ends in the proposal that doesn’t lead to their marriage and so little things like that suggest a bit of the messiness. That was a hard one to end. It’s easy to end a book in marriage and I guess it’s easy to end in divorce if that’s the structure you want, but I chose the burning of his memoirs, at which point Lady Byron thinks she has total control of the story, though that of course turns out to be a delusion. In all of the books I try to keep up some idea of asymmetry, some sense of a structure that is not as perfect as it should be. Which was the hardest to figure out in terms of structure? The one that got rewritten most was You Don’t Have To Live Like This. The first draft had a long section set at Yale (I published part of it separately in Granta).6 I figured I would start with that, since that’s what I knew how to write. But then I ultimately decided to get to Detroit sooner and some of the Yale stuff had to be spliced in later. That was tricky because whenever you have two or three things looming in a story, it’s more difficult to know where to begin and to end. And obviously Detroit and Robert James were big in the book. But I didn’t want to do the Carraway thing of beginning with his meeting with Robert James and letting Robert James shape the whole thing. And so the frame I eventually settled on when editing it was: this is an account of how a middle-​class child of an academic from Baton Rouge ends up living homeless on the streets of Detroit. How does he get there? I wanted to make it seem like a reasonable decision, which ruled out drug addiction or gambling or any kind of equivalently obvious vice or flaw. Then there

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was the question of how to mix that story with the selling point for the book, which was the Detroit experiment—​that was hard. With the Essingers, what made you think of four books? I’ve only done two so far. But you’ve decided on a quartet? That’s what I sketched out; I don’t know if I’ll … I’m taking a break from them still. Some of that happened because I started writing A Weekend in New York and a section that was supposed to take 20,000 words turned out to be 80,000 words. Mostly it was just realism proliferation, like if I keep asking myself, I’m uncomfortable with shorthand, do I need to add a little more here? Do I need to slow down? Like the old Russian proverb: ‘If you’re late slow down’. And suddenly what was just an episode in New York turned into the whole book. Is the gap between those books partly something similar to Updike’s Rabbit books, his idea of spacing them out –​ He did one a decade, I think. Which allows him to do a state of the nation snapshot, a report what’s going on at that particular moment. What’s the gap between A Weekend in New York and Christmas in Austin? Not very long, a year and a half. I didn’t want to write state of the nation novels. Partly because I don’t live in the nation anymore, but also because the point of the books is to suggest the way family life insulates you, or tries to insulate you, from the bigger historical events going on. Of course I needed some gap between books because you can’t write every day of their lives. A Weekend in New York is what, fifty/​sixty hours of their lives and it’s 90,000 words, whatever it is. You have to have some gaps. And some things have to happen in the gap. And some things have to happen in the gaps because the pressure that you want to build towards is not sustainable. Otherwise it becomes a soap opera. Right, you would have to keep on coming up with more and more stuff. And the other thing that you can do with these family reunion stories, which seems to me not just a narrative device but true, is that people save up news. If you see each other every fifteen months or every year, all of the news comes crashing in at once because that’s your chance for talking about it. I wanted to save up news; I didn’t want to write the kind of day-​to-​day book in which they argue about pencils the whole time; I wanted things of longer-​term significance to be going on.

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Reviewing a recent novel, you talked about ‘the kind of book America currently wants’ as one which ‘flags’ certain themes?7 How much are you aware or wary of flags and themes? Do you ever think I should tone this down or emphasise that? To some extent, You Don’t Have to Live Like This was received as a state-​ of-​the-​nation novel, and of all your works, it does seem most directly to engage with broad political and cultural issues. Was that something you’d been thinking about for a while? Some of it was. I just think it’s really hard to write a state-​of-​the-​nation novel; it’s much easier to say profound things about a domestic relationship than it is about a massive country. And I did think when I wrote it … at some point I should see what I can do along those lines. Even so, there are a lot of domestic relationships in You Don’t Have To Live Like This and I tried to, as much as possible, root what was going on in Marny’s and Nolan’s particular problems, not America’s problems more generally. But I also wrote it out of the feeling we talked about earlier, the sense that there should be some different way of living than the way we’re living. I had the Detroit idea not initially as an idea for a novel but just like, if you could get your pals together and move somewhere where the houses are $500, it doesn’t have to be Detroit, it could be anywhere, could you live a very different life? And what would you do when you got there? That’s not just an issue for novelists who need to come up with plotlines. It’s also an issue for any kind of utopian project. Right, and as soon as you start writing about a utopian project you think: what are the plots here? Because utopia is not a plot really unless … Well, utopias generally fail. Even with the failure of the utopia you need somebody to do something: it needs to fail for some probably predictable reason, like the couple that were behind it all split up and then it’s just a divorce story again. And how are you going to dramatise the failure of a project that involves one or two thousand people? Or it’s about how the ideals of the project get compromised. Then it tends to be a normal corruption story in which case it’s a kind of office story where people are supposed to do things a certain way and they don’t. All of these plots turn out to be plots that don’t rely on a utopia for you to have them. More stories are about the end of utopias than their beginnings. I think Marny at one point says, you set out to be a pioneer and then it turns out you just end up reproducing the life that you left behind. That seems like it’s probably true to me. It’s partly why I needed some other thing to be going on to shape the stories. The story is really shaped as I said by Marny’s relationship to all of this stuff, not by the project itself.

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And that was also a way of navigating the push-​pull between writing about, or the filtering through, a flawed individual and the state of the nation statement? Right. And he’s spent the last five years in Britain, so he came to the nation afresh. The other thing that people say to him, which seems legitimate, is this: you have an idea that you can go and be honest and you’ll get the outcome that you want. And their argument with him is … if you think you can tell the truth about what Nolan did or what the project was up to and get any kind of justice, then you’re completely deluded. Some of the essays in this collection talk about this delusion of his. The only thing I would say in response is … it doesn’t seem to me that easy to give up on the idea that in the end you have to go back to saying things you think are true, regardless of the consequences; it’s really not that light an idea to jettison. And so if Marny is reluctant, it’s not because he’s totally a fool. So writing is about intimacy but also honesty? I am thinking of Liesel’s book in A Weekend in New York—​her sense of moral responsibility to tell the story truly, but then also her feeling that in the telling it becomes in some ways untrue. It seems much cosier than a story about the Third Reich should seem? She says: ‘None of this is true anymore. If you talk too much you make everything up’. I wonder about how this might chime with your own sense of your writing about real people, as you are quite open about using your own experiences and your family’s stories. Do you feel a sense of moral responsibility to be truthful? Or is the responsibility to say what you want to say and if that means distorting things that have really happened, well that’s part of your job? Most jobs require you to do some things or have an effect on you that can be … morally detrimental, don’t you think? So if you’re a teacher you might get in the habit of talking too much, which seems to me a deep problem, not a shallow one. Bankers work too many hours and then expect money to solve the problems of their free time. And I think if you’re a writer, you make use of stuff that has happened to people you know and you distort it in ways that they would legitimately resent. But I’m not sure that that kind of moral failure is so different from the other kinds that a profession involves you in. But you see it as failure rather than the inevitability of writing anything? I think it’s inevitable; it’s not nice for the people around you, but I think most jobs you do require some not nice bits for the people around you. Do you run your books past your family? No. I show them to them and actually for the most part my family have an admirable indifference to how they’re presented. Probably because … if something is true, then it wasn’t distorted. And if it’s not true, then it’s not you.

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So you’ve never changed anything in response to … I wouldn’t say it that strongly, but it’s not a big feature of the writing process that I have to go to them. Regardless of what happens when a book gets published, when you write it, it’s … let’s say, Tuesday morning at eleven and it’s raining outside and you’re not going to see anybody for four hours: the idea that what you’re doing is public just seems ridiculous. And the other side of it is, to go back to the warmth question … it doesn’t seem to me like an awful or even a cold way to spend your days, just to sit around thinking, what was my childhood like, what about the people I love, what shaped their lives. I’m more or less at peace with all of that but also the best way to get something ignored is to publish it, right? It’s not like I’m making movies with this stuff. Not yet! But there at least these three examples of writer characters who are told off for being honest and so I wondered. The Brian Blum one came partly out of an experience when I interviewed LeBron James and the magazine I was writing the story for didn’t want the version of the piece that I had written. They thought it didn’t put him in an attractive enough light. And then Nike got involved; I don’t know if Nike actually cared but there was this whole battle going on in which they wanted me to say … They worried it was going to tarnish the value of the brand? Nonsense; nobody cared. But still, because publicity organisations are weird and they don’t really distinguish between small potatoes and big potatoes, they always think: let’s control the message. So that was partly what lay behind the Brian Blum story. You seem interested in the phenomenon of celebrity more generally. Do you mean Byron? Byron, yes, but also Obama and Lance Armstrong making guest appearances. And The Sidekick is very much about celebrity, and also the idea of celebrity as inevitably reductive. Brian observes at one point that ‘if you get famous, your life takes on the quality of cliché. It becomes less real’. I think this is true of the Byron books, too. Part of what made me want to write The Sidekick is the sense that when you become famous enough, part of what happens is that you get denatured. I’m not totally sure what I mean by that except that you know it when you see it. Is it also linked to what you said about bad writing and to stereotype? Right; you become less full. Brian thinks that’s what happened to Marcus, and not just in hard-​to-​pin-​down ways. There was a weird story about … and this is going to get deep into the weeds of basketball … LeBron James and Dwyane Wade.

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They were star teammates at the Miami Heat who signed together in Miami, partly out of friendship but also to start a kind of dynasty, which didn’t turn out quite as successful as they might have hoped. They had just lost in the NBA Finals. Anyway, after the season, LeBron and Wade get on a flight together. I don’t know if it’s to some Nike event or whatever, but they’re on a plane for several hours just as LeBron’s contract renegotiation is coming up. And Wade later confessed to a reporter, ‘I never asked him about it’. They never talked about it. There’s an understanding at this level of fame that you don’t get in their business. Even though you’ve been colleagues for four years, even though you moved to the same place in order to work together, even though your whole professional lives have been based on mutual support, you don’t ask them because they’re that famous. In the end, LeBron moved to Cleveland and Wade never got another chance at winning a championship. You write a lot about sport in non-​fiction as well, but there’s a way in which fiction and sport both overlap and contrast. At times, sport seems to be the ultimate real, in the sense that you once said preferred Byron to Wordsworth because swimmer-​boxer Byron ‘always privileged the real world over the imagined one’. Is part of your interest in writing about sport to do with wanting to capture the reality of what it is ‘to live in a body’ (a phrase from Christmas in Austin)? Sports is just a very rigorous way of sifting better from worse, and literature is not. I was a super-​competitive kid, but I think most people are super-​competitive, they just deflect it. My mom is not at all interested in sports but that’s partly because she is too competitive. She once chipped a tooth playing ping pong; she got mad and threw her paddle and it bounced back and hit her in the mouth. That’s the thing, if you play a lot of sports you have to lose all the time. But if it’s not sports, it’s something else. Everyone wants to win. I see kids interacting with their friends competing to see who can tell the nerdiest fact … It’s relentless. So there’s a continuity between sports and life? In terms of measuring your relative position … And your place in the world. Yes. If you get in an argument with somebody about intellectual matters, you’re not quite sure that you’re right, you’re not quite sure that they are wrong. But there’s a bit in A Weekend in New York, Nathan is watching Paul play tennis and just watching him hit the ball … There’s no room for delusion in that: you either hit it where you want it to go or you don’t. And in order to be the person who hits it where you want it to go, you have to spend thousands of hours being hard on yourself. And that’s what I’ve always admired about … every millionaire footballer who seems to have nothing to say for himself must have spent an unbelievable amount of time thinking: when I hit that pass, I didn’t hit it quite right, I need to do that again.

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But then the end result is to make it look easy; not every sports star makes it look easy, with some of them you can see the work more than with others. Even the ones who make it look easy must have spent a lot of time thinking: did I do that right? They’re like total nerd editors poring endlessly over sentences. You once wrote about not particularly liking Federer because you couldn’t see ‘the sweetness of struggle, of obstacles overcome’. I guess. The cult around him was part of it; for some reason the cult around Michael Jordan never bothered me as much but the cult around Federer always struck me as annoying. Like David Foster Wallace’s essay. Right. He was a really smart writer, it’s just that everything he wrote made you feel how smart he was. But some of the claims he makes about Federer’s … synapses, those would be true of any tennis player, he’s not describing anything in a way that really distinguishes why Federer is better than everybody else. The whole point of sports is to be able to distinguish why one guy has a slight edge over another. You’ve written about basketball’s narrative, and in some way every sport has its own distinct narrative structure. When you are writing about a game of basketball or tennis, do you think in terms of narrative arcs and so on? Or is the shape of a novel and the shape of a game or a season too different to compare? It’s hard to make use of the structure of a sports game because the narrative tension of an actual game comes from the fact that it’s real and that no writer is controlling the outcome and that the players on some level are shaping their fates. That’s just not true when I write it. And so you’re unlikely to care as much; also, you can’t get readers to care about outcomes if they haven’t been supporting the team that you made up. But having said all that, I think if you’re going to write about basketball you have to focus on some of the moments when the game comes down to the last shot, even though by most narrative standards that seems much too obvious a twist. I would never do that outside of sports, I just think if you’re writing about basketball that’s the contract you’ve signed. You can ironize it in one way or another, like it can be the shot where somebody misses … or in The Sidekick I deliberately chose, not the NBA Finals’ game winner, but the last shot of a regular season game, where the only thing at stake is whether a mediocre team makes the playoffs. I felt like I had to undercut it somehow, but still, it’s a last second shot that shapes the outcome of the story. It’s their narrative crux and your narrative crux. Right. I can’t remember if I really had this conversation with one of the guys I played with in Germany or not … but I used it in Playing Days: if the ball goes in, you’re a winner, if it goes out you’re a loser. That’s what the stakes are and

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that’s great, that’s what you want from the things that happen in a novel, that your characters are shaped by what they do. Sports terms can be useful to thinking about how fiction works. You once wrote about moments in stories in terms of progressions, the fact that a scene in a good novel will progress in five or six ways, whereas a beginner’s piece maybe can only progress things in one way or two ways.8 Novels don’t have to work that way, but especially if you like realism, counting the progressions seems a useful test. In any normal day you probably have ten things going on and novels tend to reduce that number, sometimes too much. I don’t know if this is the American Football term but I think a progression … a quarterback when they step back to pass is supposed to go through their progressions. So, if the cornerback is pressing, throw it to the wide receiver on a fade route; but if the safety covers, look to the tight-​end crossing in the flat; if the linebacker hangs back, try the running back coming out the backfield, and so on. A good pro quarterback can work through five or six of these and a college quarterback might only have time to look at one or two. And there’s just a measurable difference between how much reality these quarterbacks can process, and you can see in a novel how much reality the writer can process. Probably the book I wrote that scores highest on this front is Christmas in Austin. There are about ten significant characters, each of whom is involved in various plot lines. I want to come back to what you were saying about the singlemindedness required of an athlete like Marcus. In particular, the scene where they’re playing Dungeons & Dragons and he can’t kind of really work out why you would want to invest in characters who had flaws. Someone tells him it’s ‘to enjoy sucking sometimes’. Is that what you feel that writing novels allows? To enjoy sucking? To enjoy exploring what it feels like to suck. I’m thinking of what in A Weekend in New York you describe as ‘the internal adjustments required by acceptance of failure’. That seems a very rich subject. Most people at some point accept where they end up, maybe they don’t call it failure. But the D&D thing … Did you ever play D&D as a kid? No. I played a lot of D&D and my son plays D&D, my daughter plays a little bit. There’s something very appealing to a high school mind about D&D because on some level it’s a big metaphor for getting grades. Characters are measured on a scale of 3–​18 in terms of strength and charisma, wisdom, intelligence, etc. If you play properly, you’re supposed to embrace characters who suck in various ways but because it’s a lot of high school nerds playing, they actually just want really high scores, they want the equivalent of straight As. Except in charisma—​the traditional D&D nerd

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always dumps his worst character score on charisma. Marcus’s point, which seems reasonable, is: why would you spend all this time imagining somebody who can do things that you can’t do, when you could go away and practice how to do some actual cool stuff? So the two sides of your adolescence? I was amused both by Marcus’s amusement and by the idea of Brian’s friends being amused by Marcus’s inability to understand why you would want to imagine yourself cooler than you were. What literature does that sport doesn’t is give space to something that’s not about measuring. Right. Even if you’re competitive, you probably know that some of the stuff you’re competitive about is stupid and meaningless, so it’s important to keep up some sense of yourself that isn’t defined by these things. At the end of the book Brian watches Marcus and thinks that he has found ‘a perfect medium of self-​expression’. But there’s another moment where he thinks that what Marcus is doing is turning himself into an asset. Yes. I was wondering about the balance between those two things. You’re talking about sport but maybe it also applies to writing. There’s the moment of self-​ expression when you’re writing on a rainy Tuesday morning, and then when you publish, you are an asset who has to perform. I’m thinking about the foreword to this collection, when you talk about feeling aware of how you measure up … The books are sort of dead to me by the time they come out. Because of the long gap in time? Because there’s a gap and because you can’t change it anymore. When you’re writing the novel, the fact that you can still change it makes it feel quite life-​like, the characters can still adapt and shape themselves; I mean they don’t do it, you do it for them, but whatever. And then by the time it’s come out it’s this object … I’ve got piles of author copies on the floor of my study and it’s slightly embarrassing. What are you supposed to do with them? Give them away? But who wants them? My main feeling about it by that stage is, it looks like a nice book, I mean physically like a nice book, a lot of work by other people went into producing this thing, but by that point I’ve started writing something else. And then the processes of doing interviews and readings. You do an event with a writer and their book is not really like your book at all, but you’re trying to make conversation and … it’s not uplifting. I’m not one of those

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ecstatic writers who sits down blissfully happy at the computer every morning but I do actually like writing. As soon as the book has been sent to others it loses some of its charm. As a teacher of writing, as well as a novelist, reviewer and journalist, you know the various literary institutions and power plays pretty well. It’s a different world from the sports world, but there are similarities. There are. I guess I’m more protected … I was really miserable playing basketball, it was the worst period of my life. Sports and writing share one basic problem, which is that they’re much too intense to fill your whole day with, but everything else outside of that … takes up the energy you need for the sports or the writing. So we practised twice a day and the rest of the time I hung out alone in my team-​ paid-​for apartment or went biking around the countryside. I didn’t know anybody else in Landshut, apart from my teammates; but I already saw too much of them and didn’t want to spend all day with the people I had to measure myself against professionally. I’m much better insulated against that now, I have a family, I have a life outside of publishing. And actually an academic career offers some insulation. I’m not very ambitious about it but it’s good to have some career progression that’s not dependent on people buying your book. You’ve written novels set in New York, Austin, Detroit, Philadelphia, Missolonghi, Oxford, Landshut. London frames The Syme Papers and features in the Byron novels, but have you ever thought of writing a wholly contemporary London novel? I have. I feel like I should because it’s been my life for the past twenty years. Is it that it’s too close? Partly, but the English are also hard to write about. It’s a stupid example, but when Woody Allen made his tennis movie and someone in it referred to the Tate Modern, everybody said, ‘No, no one says the Tate Modern, it’s just Tate Modern’. It’s actually not true. I’ve heard English people say the Tate Modern as well, but you have this sense that you’re stepping into a tangle of regional and class indicators. But you must have observed some juicy ones. It just feels more limiting. If I write a character from, let’s say, Baton Rouge, that detail says something about him but maybe not that much. Whereas if I choose an equivalent place in England, I would have to know all about the place and exactly how it shaped them … Maybe the pressure to get that kind of thing right is even greater for an American author. And I would rather talk about people who aren’t so clearly defined. Like, I’m from Austin, but people can’t hear it in my voice and it’s meaningful to me but it’s not the whole picture. And in fact Austin is being increasingly settled by people who have no particular connection to the place. For them it’s just a nice city, with a good food scene, where they can get a job. Having

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said all that … I wrote a short story recently about London life, about an academic coming up from his family holiday in Cornwall for a modernism conference at Senate House, it’s called ‘The Conference’.9 That’s the longest sustained piece of London writing that I’ve done. Did that make you feel you want to write more? I would like to do more, maybe about Americans in London, outsider types of one kind or another. The main character in ‘The Conference’ is English but spent two years on a post-​doc in Virginia and still feels a bit of an outsider. Byron was easy because I felt like I had as much access to his Englishness as anybody else. When I was fourteen, I went to William Ellis in North London; my big sister was at the girl’s school next door. They had a prom, whose theme was cloudless climes and starry skies but they spelt climes ‘climbs’, because they got it wrong. She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climbing. Anyway, Byron seemed like fair game. Are you tempted to write historically again? No. I really do love Byron and I guess The Syme Papers is also historical. But I’m not that tempted anymore. Even though I fudged some of the historical facts in the trilogy, and got some wrong, I had spent so many of my teenage years reading Byron, then I did an MPhil on the Romantics, where I thought about him for two more years … it’s hard to reproduce that kind of immersion. I’m not a good researcher, I could do it because I really liked the stuff and I’d hesitate to tackle another historical subject without that level of obsession. We should probably finish up now. Is there anything else we haven’t covered that you’d like to add? The tendency of my answers has sometimes been … when you asked for a literary reference or inspiration I tended to answer, I was really just thinking about D&D or I was really just thinking about basketball. That’s largely true, but there may be some self-​protection in it. I talk about that in the foreword, that some of the critics in this collection identify certain elements in the novels as tropes, when they originally just struck me, when I was writing them, more as features of their … World? Yes. But that’s their job. We’ve talked about the differences between sports and literature today but literature is a competitive sport, too; it’s just less clear how you win. Even though I have mixed feelings about being an academic, it’s been very nice to talk to you, and to have my books thought about … academically. Obviously, academics have more space than the average reviewer to write about a novel in depth, but they also play a role as conduits to the culture, it’s a privileged position. I say that to students in my American literature class, ‘Some of you are going to be teachers or academics and maybe the book that I pick on this course

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will be one that mattered to you, and later you can pass on to your students why you think it matters’. That’s an important way to get the word out. Notes 1 See Benjamin Markovits, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: how to write about race in the US’. The Guardian, 1 August 2015, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2015/​aug/​01/​ huck​lebe​rry-​finn-​mark-​twain-​reread​ing-​benja​min-​markov​its-​race-​us 2 Benjamin Markovits, ‘Top 10 Stories of Male Friendship’, The Guardian, 29 June 2022: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/29/top-10-stories-of-male-friendshipthe-sidekick-benjamin-markovits 3 Benjamin Markovits, ‘Colm Toíbín, The Master’, in The Good of the Novel, eds. Liam McIllvaney and Ray Ryan (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), pp. 186–200(196). 4 ‘Though I think that a point does come in life when you realize that there’s a limit to what you can get from other people and there’s a limit to what your own personality is in itself’. Philip Larkin, ‘An Interview with The Observer’, in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–​1982. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 47–​56 (56). 5 Benjamin Markovits, ‘On Ambiguity’, in The 21st Century Novel: Notes from the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, eds. Jonathan Bastable and Hannah McGill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 144–6 (144). 6 See Benjamin Markovits, ‘To Detroit’. Granta, 16 June 2015, https://​gra​nta.com/​to-​detr​ oit/​. Markovits also published some related material in ‘Editorial Outtakes: You Don’t Have to Live Like This’. American Short Fiction, 23 September 2015, https://​ameri​cans​ hort​fict​ion.org/​editor​ial-​outta​kes-​benja​min-​markov​its/​ 7 Benjamin Markovits, ‘In the Footsteps of Nabokov’ (review of Gary Shteyngart, Our Country Friends), Time Literary Supplement, 21 January 2022: https://www.the-tls. co.uk/articles/our-country-friends-gary-shteyngart-book-review-benjamin-markovits/ 8 Benjamin Markovits, ‘What Makes Fiction Good?’, Prospect, 7 December 2018: https:// www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/42024/what-makes-fiction-good 9 See Benjamin Markovits, ‘The Conference’. N+​1, 24 June 2022, www.nplu​sone​mag. com/​onl​ine-​only/​onl​ine-​only/​the-​con​fere​nce/​

INDEX

academia 4, 7–​10, 18, 69, 87, 91, 109, 111, 130; Markovits’s career in 139, 140; precarious employment in 81–​3, 111 Austen, Jane 4, 22, 25–​7, 32–​3

German: basketball xi, 1, 4, 49, 53, 110; characters 8, 56, 70, 109; history 54, 104, 114, identity x, 2, 49, 58, 121, 125; language 5, 49, 51, 54, 61

basketball 4, 18, 52–​7, 86, 110, 121, 126, 128, 134; and Jewishness 51, 58; Markovits’s playing career x, xi, 5, 49, 124, 139; movies 60; and narrative structure 60–​1, 136; and race 50, 122 Bellow, Saul 59, 96 Byron, Lord George Gordon 4, 7, 20–​2, 51, 96, 129, 130, 134, 135, 139, 140; and Childish Loves 29–​34; and Imposture 22–​5; and A Quiet Adjustment 25–​8

James, Henry 4, 5, 22, 25, 26, 32, 60, 96, 118 James, LeBron 50, 134 Jewishness x, 2, 51, 58–​9, 109, 114, 117 Jordan, Michael 50, 59, 60, 136

capitalism 3, 45, 66, 72, 73, 75, 77, 79 competition 6, 40, 123, 135, 138; in academia 9, 140; in capitalism 72, 82, 86; in education 84; in the family 101; in sport 53, 60 failure 3, 5, 14–​16, 18, 35–​48, 89, 91–​2, 132, 133, 137 family life xi, 5, 50, 56, 58, 84, 86, 95–​6, 99–​105, 109–​14, 116, 118, 123, 126–​7, 131, 133 financial crash, 2008 2, 50, 81, 82, 91, 111 gentrification 3, 44, 52, 64–​5, 68, 71, 73, 75–​9, 83, 116

Lethem, Jonathan 79, 120 Markovits, Benjamin: Christmas in Austin 1, 4, 48, 56, 95–​7, 102–​5, 109–​12, 114–​18, 126, 131, 137; Childish Loves xi, 4, 20–​2, 25, 29–​34, 51, 54; ‘The Conference’ 4, 140; Either Side of Winter 3, 4, 5, 36–​7, 38–​43, 47, 48, 95–​100, 129, 130; Imposture 4, 20–​5, 29, 33, 96; Playing Days x, 4–​5, 7, 18–​19, 49–​61, 95, 96, 105, 110, 129, 136; The Sidekick ix, x, 1, 5, 6, 120, 121, 123–​9, 134, 136; The Syme Papers ix, x, 3–​4, 7–​19, 20, 50, 124, 129, 139, 140; A Quiet Adjustment 4, 20, 21, 25–​9, 130; A Weekend in New York x, 4, 5, 35–​6, 48, 50, 56, 95, 97, 100–​2, 109, 111–​17; You Don’t Have to Live Like This xi, 2–​3, 7, 36, 37, 43–​8, 50, 52, 55, 64–​79, 81–​93, 95, 105, 110–​11, 121–​2, 124–​6, 130–​1, 132

Index  143

Markovits, Daniel 3, 83, 84, 85 mediocrity 5, 9, 16–​18, 40, 121, 136 meritocracy 3, 10, 81–​91, 93 neoliberalism 45, 67, 82, 83, 84, 86, 111 Obama, Barack 3, 44–​6, 50, 74, 86, 90, 111–​15, 117, 134 race 71, 73, 121, 122; racial anxiety, conflict, injustice 2, 46, 50, 52, 55–​8, 69,

71–​3, 75–​6, 111, 115–​16, 120–​2, 126; see also basketball and race real estate 64–​7, 71–​2, 75, 83, 103, 112, 113 realism 2, 96, 110, 118, 131, 137 sport 2, 5, 50, 52, 110, 111, 122, 123; sports novel 1, 5, 59; see also basketball, competition in sport; tennis tennis 5, 49, 50, 101, 103, 109, 110, 135, 136, 139 Trilling, Lionel 110, 115, 117–​18