FICTION:The outstanding memoirist Greg Baxter has turned his hand to fiction. It's too big a leap
LITERATURE HAD a good year in 1890. Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a man seeks immortality out of self-love, and Bram Stoker began seven years of research on superstition and folklore for a tale, communicated through newspaper clippings, letters and reports, of an aristocrat reversing evolution and the order of life and death in Dracula.
The time was alive with multidisciplinary experiment. Science, history, art and monsters: all were mined for fiction. In that same year, Chekhov undertook a dangerous research trip to a remote penal colony. The intense suffering he encountered is detailed in his study Sakhalin Island and his experience on the trip is reflected in his short stories as a style relegating the writer to witness and the reader to morally hapless interpreter.
Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger, meanwhile, portrays a failed writer who wanders around Christiana (Oslo) starving and paranoid, in search of the next article to pay his rent. Hamsun’s stream-of-consciousness method traps the reader in the hallucinations of the protagonist, without the reference points that distinguish what is real from what is not.
The case can be made that fiction and nonfiction – the invented and the real – are close cousins. Chekhov’s account could well be transferred into fiction, and Hamsun’s novel is in part doubtless autobiographical. The notion that writers of nonfiction should have trouble with a novel seems as illogical as asserting that the short-story form must be mastered before a novel is attempted. Human events surely don’t contain codes limiting their scope and treatment.
Greg Baxter’s novel The Apartment follows his successful memoir, A Preparation for Death. Near Christmas, a 41-year-old American, with hazy origins in a US desert town, wanders the streets of an unnamed European city in search of an apartment. He is sick of living in a hotel since arriving some weeks before. Accompanying him is Saskia, a 25-year-old who is platonically enamoured of him, and she has circled promising newspaper notices for rentals.
In the course of a day, the reader meets, among others, Saskia’s friends Janos, a cafe-dwelling intellectual, and the fun-loving Manuela; a professor of music called Schmetterling; and a dodgy fellow American referred to as “Early”, who takes the narrator sightseeing. Along the way the narrator reveals insights on: the war in Iraq; intelligence work; the tsunami in Thailand; a brief history of the violin; technique versus spirituality in the performance of Brahms’s Chaconne; and how pointless it is for European men to think they can play the blues. Various situations ensue, and the novel ends later that night.
The opening pages are pleasingly reminiscent of Hamsun, and some of the snow sequences are very poetic. Using the formula of American 1980s minimalism, Baxter’s narrator speaks in the present tense and employs linked short sentences that very often begin with “I” and exhibit frequent repetition, as in: “. . . and then we went to an automat so I could buy more cigarettes, and he said, Get me a pack too, so I bought him a pack. He put that pack in his pocket and smoked the cigarettes in my pack.” This syntax draws attention to itself too much at times, so that it can be difficult to differentiate between descriptions, as all employ the same flat-toned sentence structure, and pages of it: pages of detail about taking an elevator and looking for a bus, until you want to run out and hail one just to move the novel along.
Pacing aside, the dialogue is wooden and appears to function as a means for characters to deliver abstractions in language no different from the narrator’s. The effect is that everyone is one character:
She says, Bad artists trade on people’s refusal to accept their work as art. I accept their work as art, so that there is nothing for their work to hide behind. That makes sense, I say.
No, it doesn’t. These bumper-sticker observations are everywhere, appearing incongruously. The fatal flaw is that the narrator remains supremely confident, affecting a complacency that preserves him from the events in the plot. He undergoes no transformation, and neither does anyone else. Because our narrator controls the point of view, the reader is wedged against a studied nonchalance, transmitted in treatise after treatise, a laundry list of controversial topics with no evident connection between the issues they address and the narrator’s thought process. That one of the lectures is on perspective makes this flatness seem unfortunate. It’s like having someone sit opposite you in a hotel lobby, sharing random pieces of insight and then blowing smoke in your face while staring at you.
Greg Baxter is acknowledged for his outstanding memoir. However, The Apartment lacks credibility. Craft may be nothing more, ultimately, than a means to an end, but creating interesting characters, in particular a less controlling narrator who is more vulnerable to his own circumstances, would have better accommodated what here amounts to a series of pop-up sermons and lessons disproportionate to the action and divorced from characters’ belief systems. It’s hard to identify with ideas mounted on stilts. In The Apartment, fact and imagination hang starving from the same vine. The characters are silhouettes, the situations contrived. In all these matters that constitute what we call fiction, this novel is wanting.
Gerard Donovan is the author of Julius Winsome, published by Faber and Faber
