FICTION
Multilayered ‘Waveland’ slowly reveals its charms
Angst and introspection bear uncommon fruit in Frederick Barthelme’s sophisticated, and wry, new novel, “Waveland.” Layered, like the waters lapping Waveland’s shores, it is a treasure of a book — that at first seems to go nowhere, then has much to say.
And who better to say it than the seasoned Barthelme, who, not so incidentally, teaches but miles from the novel’s setting— the barren, post-Katrina landscape of the Mississippi Gulf Coast?
“Even before Katrina, when Waveland was all there, it wasn’t a high-toned beachfront town; it was more like ten miles of down-on-its-luck trailer park,” muses the novel’s protagonist, Vaughn Williams. “After the storm it was ten miles of debris, snapped telephone poles, shredded sheets in the trees. More than a year later there were only a couple of new houses on the beach highway where doctor-types had picked up the distressed property, the better to spend a couple of weekends each summer looking at the Mississippi Sound, a muddy sump you could walk straight out into for a mile and the water wouldn’t rise much above your ankles...”
It is here that we find Vaughn, a disillusioned, mostly drifting architect, and his new girlfriend, Greta, who Vaughn finds “pretty in a beat-up way, kind of a casualty.”
Add to this pair Gail, until recently Vaughn’s wife, a needy and unpredictable creature who is also a master manipulator, and you have a trio that, like the landscape, seems to have no direction, no purpose, no future.
“The courtship with Greta was offhand,” Vaughn tells us. “They started going to dinner, going to stores together, seeing movies, trading ideas for her ongoing renovation of (her) house. That put them together a lot of the time. He was glad, too, because most of the time since he and Gail split had been dreary, as though the light was always filtered through tarps.”
Greta has an acquaintance renting her renovated garage, a gay, “one-handed white guy who was a veteran of the first Gulf War,” and Vaughn has a brother, Newton, who is wildly successful (and loathed by Vaughn) and lives clear across the country.
These two — along with Vaughn’s late father and a cashier Vaughn encounters at a “hamburger joint” — pretty much complete Waveland’s cast. And, at first, we are lulled by the randomness, the aimlessness and seeming endlessness of Vaughn’s Waveland. But Barthelme has a sea change in store, at least for Vaughn.
The treat, for us, is his wit, and his prose — which, like Hemingway’s, is just enough and getting deeper all the time. (Why explain the restaurant is high-end when you can say, “The baked potato was thirteen-fifty”? Why mince words when the truth is, “I didn’t take care of my father and then he died. That’s the trouble. I think that’s the trouble.”?)
Gail, never a good judge of others, gets mauled one night by Tony, a boy-toy she is dating, and persuades Vaughn and Greta to move into her home for “a bit. Just a week or something. A couple weeks, maybe.. ”
Vaughn, Greta, Gail — all three are center stage now in this morality play, and Vaughn compares his two Gs: “At close range, they weren’t, after all, as different as they may seem. . . They looked like sisters.”
And then slowly, almost imperceptibly, Vaughn lets down his guard, in time bypassing society’s big goals for something smaller and more meaningful.
Newton comes to town and we see him as but Vaughn’s alter ego — “condescending, presumptuous, controlling, devious, self-centered, narcissistic.” The cashier at the hamburger joint doubles as psychic, telling Vaughn that every day, for her, is a better day than the last.
Vaughn considers longing— “powerful and sweet but not as sweet as the thing itself, whatever the thing was.” He wonders “how he’d gotten from twenty to nearly fifty.” He tells Eddie, “We’re used to knowing
how something works and thinking that how it works is what it means. But how it works is only how it works.”
In time, Vaughn moves from feelings of dislocation and dysfunction to a real epiphany: “Where once you thought not wanting what you used to want was punishment, suddenly you think it may be a blessing.”
Awakening is Barthelme’s intention here. A brother of the late and better-known fiction author Donald Barthelme, he has been firmly gaining in status in recent years — and coming to some terms of his own.
In a December discourse on the writing of “Waveland,” he said he was “surprised about how little seems to matter any more, and also by what things the things are that do seem to matter,” citing “a world of decreasing nuance, subtlety, edge. A buffoon’s marketplace.”
“People will die all around us,” he wrote. “It will be sad, but it will not matter. But parents die and that does matter. So that becomes a part of what wants to be written. Spouses and partners will be switched and it will be sad. We will want to be generous in this process.”
So, in “Waveland,“ Barthelme set out to create a novel whose heart would turn “toward a presentation of new values— toward a call for generosity, understanding, affection generously deployed.”
He wanted a novel whose characters would “care about what they actually care about and . . avoid the high volume cultural chatter that sounds like gunfire all around us.”
In this, Barthelme more than succeeds. His “Waveland” is a triumph of meaning — and writing.
Waveland By Frederick Barthelme Doubleday 229 pages, $24.95
Karen Brady is a retired News columnist.
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