Inside Strikes and Fading Pop Flies

Over at Maud Newton's literary salon for the contemporary guy and gal on the go, writer and professor Carrie Spell welcomes the arrival of a new novel by that oddball-in-a-good-way pepper-shot mosaic artist, Mary Robison. One D.O.A., One on the Way, it's called, set in a post-Katrina New Orleans moist moonscape where the survivors have to pinch themselves to make sure they're not ghosts. Since Robison is one of my fiction faves, with a rhythm and literary eye that nicks the inside plate with wicked precision, Spell's mini-salute is all the reminder I need to run out and pick up a copy and pay for it with my Barnes & Noble card, or Borders card, depending on how far I wish the M104 to take me.

In the meanie, I hasten to recommend another post-Katrina novel published this year, this one written by a friend and colleague of Robison's, Frederick Barthelme, whose Waveland, with its deadpan cover shot of wooden steps leading nowhere, is one of those deceptively meandering affairs about characters confronting their own aimlessness that draws you in with the sure ease and flow of its forward inertia until you feel as if you're part of Barthelme's small repertory company, looking for some place open late at night. (Some of the smaller Altman movies tugged in the same direction.) The characters spend a lot of time sitting around commenting on what they're watching on TV, and sitting down reading about characters sitting around watching may seem like the Ultimate in Sedentary Passivity, but it's worth it for riffs such as this between the protagonist, a retired architect named Vaughn and a sofa philosopher named Eddie:

"I was watching a rerun of CSI before," [said Eddie]. That's the most popular show on television. That guy on there is really bowlegged."

"He's the most bowlegged guy on television," Vaughn said.

"I guess," Eddie said. "I like that blond woman--she's kind of sexy. And then there's that other woman on there--the black-haired woman? She's kind of sexy. And I like the special effects. I like it when they get that blue light out and start looking at things," Eddie said. "They always find sperm, you know? Every week they pull out the blue light and find some sperm. It's a hoot."

"That's so last year," Vaughn said. "Finding sperm."

What gives the novel depth and weight beneath the attention-deficit plasma-screen zombie viewing is the depiction of the midlife crisis, how malaise washes around in one's head when life has lost its savor, its direct impact. You had hoped to hit a home run, only to pop up in the shallow outfield. A bravura diagnosis of dysthymia sounds like a contradiction in terms, and yet:

You get to a point and things that used to mean something don't mean what they used to mean. The game changes. You don't want what you used to want. You don't care about what you used to care about. You don't need what you used to need. The whole world becomes a backdrop, a kind of cartoonish painting at the rear of the stage to which you pay not much attention. You only half listen to what people say, you only half see what's out the window. Sometimes you see people in stores or restaurants and you can't understand how they got there, what they think they're doing, why they're so got-up, why they're trying so hard, what they're after, what they hope for, what they wish. It's impossible to figure these things out andyou don't care anyway. You drift through the days. They come and go.

But Waveland isn't a miserabilist serenade, an ode to discontentment destined to end up at a trailer park on the intersection of Alcoholism and Alimony; it arranges a generous sprinkling of grace notes that are just enough to chase away the cloudy grays.