No Exit
By LEE SIEGEL
A DAY AND A NIGHT AND A DAY
By Glen Duncan
244 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99
It’s impossible to tell whether Glen Duncan is making a deliberate allusion to Steinbeck’s book, but the echo would work nicely if he were. Augustus Rose, the biracial hero of Duncan’s new novel, “A Day and a Night and a Day,” is a journalist turned restaurateur turned terrorist who is tortured for precisely that period of time. But Rose has another experience that lasts a day and a night and a day, one that’s the complete opposite of the hell he suffers at the hands of his torturer, a jaded, perversely loquacious, cheerily nihilistic American agent named Harper. In Barcelona, not long before Rose is abducted by the Americans, he reunites in a hotel room for that same fragile space of time with his long-lost great love, the white and wealthy — and tragically incestuous — Selina.
Duncan writes what used to be called novels of ideas, though his argument here seems to be that there are no ideas worth living or dying for. There are only what Duncan movingly calls the “durable habits” of loving and caring for one another, which sustain us through all the barbarism wreaked by brutish impulses hiding behind lofty concepts of how to live a good life.
Duncan himself, however, seems to have alpine cerebrations embedded in his very molecules. One idea in particular drives this novel through its hairpin turns from poeticizing prose to vertiginous reflections: hybridity. Just as Rose is torn between the absolutely bad memory and the absolutely good, his fate as a man has been determined by the fact that he is half black and half white. (Among other things, Duncan has struck gold in the relevance sweepstakes.) And since life itself is hybrid, unfolding along the border of — to borrow a phrase — being and nothingness, Augustus Rose is something of a representative man. “A Day and a Night and a Day” seems meant to be a novel that captures the pulse of our age.
Holed up on an obscure island somewhere in Britain, physically broken from the torture, cared for by a young runaway in flight from her vicious, pimpish boyfriend, who also happens to be a British cop, Rose scours human existence for meaning: “It astonished him that those around him went about their business as if the world — as if being alive — was uncomplicated and unmysterious.” He remembers growing up in Harlem in the 1950s as the son of an Italian-American mother and an absent black father, falling in love with Selina against the wishes of her parents and experiencing some of the radical late ’60s and early ’70s with her before their breakup, an agonizing event caused by Selina’s fatal passion for her brother. After that denouement, Rose becomes disillusioned as a journalist covering Central America in the ’80s, then flourishes back in New York, running several successful restaurants. Finally, he joins a group known by many names but most often called the Sentinel, a shadowy terrorist operation that kills other terrorists — in other words, kills members of Al Qaeda — and schemes to assassinate current “members of the administration.”
Duncan shifts rapidly between lyrical description, psychological insights, social perceptions and intellectual generalizations. At times, these are stunning tours de force — Duncan can be clairvoyant about how people live now. But this is also where the novel’s own hybrid nature, divided between the poetic and the philosophical, occasionally runs aground on its own dizzying ambition.
Perhaps “hybrid” is too stable a word. “Schizoid” would be more like it. In one aspect, Duncan’s book recalls “Crime and Punishment” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” novels in which the intersection of politics and ideas is explored by means of acrobatic intellectual exchanges between interrogator and victim. Harper is Porfiry Petrovich and O’Brien rolled into one, with a dash of Goethe’s Mephistopheles thrown in for good measure. Not to mention the compulsively commentating narrators in Saul Bellow’s fiction. “We’re suffering representational saturation,” Harper says, as Rose hangs from the ceiling by his wrists, his feet momentarily resting on a chair. “We’ve written too many books, made too many movies. By the time you’re 18 you’ve already encountered representations of everything important, you already know the scripts.” He concludes: “You don’t need to describe or evoke, you just name it and put ‘the’ in front of it. It’s like compressed data files: The suburban nightmare. The dirty war. The mom who knew.”
In a sense, Harper (dressed in “Gap casuals”) stands for the hip, knowing, self-conscious, weary, ironied-out, so-like-over-it-and-two-steps-ahead-of-it West, whose empty, hedonistic way of living once plagued Rose. As a restaurateur, he “did nothing extraordinary, ran the business, watched TV, read the newspaper, surfed the Web, bought a new coat every now and then, dated women — black, brown, white — consumed pornography, smoked, met friends for dinner, dreamed, honed anecdotes, got minor ailments.” He experienced, in other words, “a state of tolerable vapidity overlaid with entertainment.” Sometimes Rose sounds just like the jaded Harper. But when a bomb blast overturns Rose’s emotional world, he is seized by the desire to take revenge.
Although it’s a novel of ideas, “A Day and a Night and a Day” also recalls the surreal compressions of a writer like John Hawkes. As a result, Duncan’s breathtaking intellectual leaps and bounds are often lost under layers of literary writing. He’s so consumed by his language that he never bothers fully to explore Rose’s decision to throw in his lot with a gang of cold-blooded killers. The novel’s near-fatal flaw is that Rose’s bizarre moral choices and his situation as a victim of torture appear to be taken for granted, so eager is Duncan to use such conceits to examine Rose’s nature as your everyday Western man.
This Promethean ambition seems to hamper Duncan’s ability to say anything plain. He writes of airports’ “harried polyglotism.” Space is “scalloped by physics.” Harper’s voice enters Rose’s ear with a “tympanic trickle.” The reader’s attention trips over Big Vocabulary Words like “rhotic”and “phatic.” After Harper has Rose’s eye gouged out, Duncan writes of the “nerves’ deep grieving.” It’s like having your imagination cornered by a drunk in a Dublin bar. When Harper says that “to talk about atrocity is to make it less atrocious,” you wonder whether writing about atrocity with such polish is, if not atrocious, at least shallow. There’s nothing, it seems, more “uncomplicated” and more “unmysterious” than the act of torture.
And yet “A Day and a Night and a Day” does leave you with a sense of having been brushed by something uncanny, so close does Duncan get to saying the unsayable. Perhaps that’s why his language wants to gambol on the page, almost as if it wished to unfurl as an image in time, like a movie. After all, Duncan’s themes — terrorism, torture, incest, murder — nowadays are really the stuff of the big screen. Or as Harper puts it: “The truth is I need action, in-the-world action, flesh and blood and physical movement. . .. I find I’m addicted to the times.” Some readers will find Duncan’s hyped-up, performative language thrilling, a probe deep into the heart of our age. Others will want his self-conscious phrase-turning to get out of the way of his bracing and original perceptions.
No Exit
Lee Siegel’s most recent book is “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” He is a visiting lecturer in cultural criticism at Rutgers University.
www.latimes.com
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