Seven Books for Grossman by Morris Lurie & Uphill Runner by James McQueen

Perhaps too many relatives, constant rain, and excessive New Year celebrations have left me cranky and cheerless, but Morris Lurie’s latest novel, Seven Books for Grossman, did little to improve the general malaise. It is a slight volume. It certainly lacks the insight and compassion of some of Lurie’s short story collections like Dirty Friends. It also lacks the humour. The plot of the novel concerns one Fielding, a Professor of Literature. Deep in gambling debts, Fielding disguises himself as a woman (what else, to be really grotesque?), hires a hotel room and proceeds to write ‘pornography’ for a Jewish editor, Grossman. The seven ‘books’ of pornography are parodies of Faulkner, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Salinger, and other celebrated scribes. I found the Hemingway parody quite good; but then The Old Man and the Sea has always seemed to me like ‘Papa’ Hemingway parodying himself: Everything about him was old save for the mast of his manhood which was a proud purple at the tip and then along its fine length strong and brown and decently blotched and knowing. The cojones of the old man were like hills like white elephants except they were not that colour. Similarly the Salinger ‘porn’; slick, easy to insert the red hunting cap and the adolescent accent. But with Faulkner, Lurie seems to come unstuck. I think he has confused Faulkner with Erskine Caldwell, or Steinbeck at his worst. Be that as it may, it all seems fairly pointless, and not really very humorous. He helped his pappy up onto the bed, listening to the shucks moving in the thin mattress, raised him up to fit between the spread white lard thighs and his pappy coming to rest along the whole vast length of her and his mouth fixing itself on one of those pink-nosed dogs and straight-away set up a guzzling the likes of which he’d only seen that time old Sam Grope’s hog bust out of the pen and got into Mrs Farquarson’s greens, that prissy schoolmarm, while Minnie just lay back with her hands tucked back neat behind her gaudy flowered hat and looking up at the ceiling with profound disinterest and whistling softly between the gap in her teeth. Fielding writes, dresses up in drag. Grossman pays the money and establishes with Fielding a father/son, teacher/pupil, etc. relationship. One chapter is a send-up of Freud (which needs to be done but not quite so clumsily), another of punk-rock females, yet another of boys’ public schools, complete with whippings, masturbation, carving foul and misspelt epithets into school desks. Presumably Lurie is having a jibe at many sacred cows; and a very heavy-handed swipe at the relationship between writers and publishers, academics and writers and publishers. The chief problem is that most of the cows are not only non-sacred, but dead. There seems little point in lampooning transvestites, academics, Jews, women. Lurie does have a wonderful sense of the absurd but it loses its effect in this book because of its repetitiveness, and its Jewishness. Jewish humour, like Irish or English, is appreciated, but tends to pale after fifty pages. I may be strange but multiple references to ‘schlongs’ penetrating ‘quims’ becomes about as exciting as watching a broody hen! I assume the detailed name dropping of clothing tags and accessories is a send-up of such ‘popular’ writers as Judith Krantz (Princess Daisy): Fielding, collecting himself quickly, entered, in tweed. Tweed jacket, tweed tailored skirt. Oh very Burberry British, just a hint of ravishing lace beneath. His blouse was bone, the trim petite collar held in place with a stylishly simple Georg Jensen silver pin … And about his shoulders, loosely knotted, artfully careless, femininity finally proclaimed an Yves St Laurent silk square, a flash of midnight blue cut through with bands of red and electric green. His scent was Patou’s Joy. But again, is such trivia worth lampooning? One leaves the novel with an awful sense of ennui; too slick, too contrived, too sexist. Ultimately, very boring. Lurie can do a lot better than this, so we live in hope. Quite a contrast then to the fairly unmitigated gloom (at first sight) of James McQueen’s collection, Uphill Runner, with twenty short stories. Gloomy most of them may be, but McQueen, unlike Lurie in his latest novel, does seem to have a genuine regard for people as individuals – no caricatures, no stereotypes. As with all of McQueen’s writing, Uphill Runner is directed by a very masculine voice, but fortunately it is one that lacks the macho stridency of a Wilding or Moorhouse. There is a slight echo of Hemingway in the retreat of the male protagonists – in ‘A Pale Wolf in Winter’ and ‘Uphill Runner’ – to the natural environment, both describing a peculiarly masculine escape from pressure through suicide ‘by natural causes’. In the latter title story, Gerry shoots himself at a weekend rabbit hunt which he and the narrator have attended with friends since they were teenagers. There is a deep poignancy about the men who attend the rabbit shoot. They are depicted as vulnerable, desperately trying to escape age, commitment, the responsibility, and ennui of suburban middle age, to recapture for one weekend a year the spontaneity and relative innocence of youth. In this story, as with many in the collection, McQueen captures what is often difficult for authors: the deep emotional, but unstated, bonds between males, most often expressed in our society through the rituals of sport and outdoor activities. It’s supposed to be living, but I swear to Christ that sometimes it feels more like fucking dying. This is the final sentence of ‘Funeral at Tautira’, perhaps the most memorable story in the collection. The narrator and his lover travel to Tahiti. There is an oppressing sense of despair in the story – the girl’s heroin addiction, her desperate need for a fix, grotesquely but fittingly in the middle of a funeral procession, the narrator’s love for her expressed in pity, exasperation, enormous compassion. All of this is narrated in a detached, almost objective, voice which serves to accentuate the despair, the frustration, the commitment, and love which imbue the relationship. All McQueen’s stories rest on a sense of personal commitment. He explores with great compassion and insight the loneliness and frustration of his characters, the desperate need for hope in a world and society where everything seems pitted against them. In ‘A Matter of Self Respect’, Blue, the gun machine operator, is discovered drunk and derelict in a water pipe near the town. The mine manager cannot understand why Blue would have nine brand new lamp mantles in the pipe with him when there wasn’t even a lamp. The foreman, Sandy, explains: You saw how he was. How bloody low. Can’t get much lower, can you? But he had to have something to hang onto, see? Couldn’t just walk in and buy a bottle of metho, right? So he pretended he wanted it to prime a Tilley. And every time he bought a bottle, he bought a lamp mantle too. Just pretending. She (the shopkeeper) knew, of course, everyone knew. But he had to have something, didn’t he? Similarly in ‘Hero’, the unsuccessful war veteran, snubbed by his RSL ‘mates’, fights a huge surf to rescue a stranger. He fails to find the other man and returns exhausted to the beach. Finally he let his body collapse on the still-warm sand, the coarse grains mottling his wet skin … And fragments of broken thought rose to the surface of his mind: What day is it? ... And what in Christ is it all about? … And: ... of course … just so that someone mustn’t … mustn’t feel abandoned at the end … but I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell anyone why … ever … In all the stories McQueen stresses the need for commitment, for courage; not courage in the sense of conquering, but in fighting on. McQueen’s stores are poignant, but never sentimental. I feel he is not at ease with his female characters but brilliantly evokes the vulnerability and sensitivity of the men in the stories. It is not a happy world that McQueen evokes, but he neither sneers at nor preaches about it. His characters gain their strength from their willingness to struggle on, even if this means death, despair, humiliation. To quote a tired phrase, his characters demonstrate the triumph of the human spirit in adversity. Always as a backdrop to a rather sordid world there is the hint of a rejuvenating natural world; a blue crane, snow fields, bracken covered hills, a block of land up the river where an insipid clerk, Vercoe, plans to gain ‘An Aim in Life’ high on smack and drifting off to nirvana. It’s difficult to review two such different works; the mature, restrained insight of McQueen, the frivolous bubbles of Lurie.

Frances McInherny

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