Up Close And Personal

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2004 by Filbin, Thomas

Up Close And Personal

"Johnny, keep it out of focus. I want to win the foreign picture award."

-Billy Wilder, to his cameraman John Seitz, during the shooting of Sunset Boulevard, 1949

THE CREATION OF THE CORRECT MEASURE OF EMOTIONAL DISTANCE in a novel is something the author must get right coming out of the gate. Should we readers hear the story from inside the breast wherein dwells the beating heart, as in Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, or hover a hundred feet above, not knowing the inner mind of characters but seeing their behavior, as in Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels? Where the writer positions us is a strategy and a choice, although writers would more likely say it is innate to the particular story being told, discovered by them intuitively in the act of composition. Weighing the impact of the narrative as it goes along is what decides the matter, like viewing the daily rushes in filmmaking. Point of view is partially the determinant: first person narratives are usually close-up shots, while the third person vantage point can deliver a wider angle for panoramas. Jay McInerney's 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City was written in the second person, and although criticized as a gimmick by some, it achieved the desired effect of satiric know-it-all narration coupled with sympathetic subjectivity.

Beyond the choice of person, styles of expression also establish degrees of distance. The stream of consciousness method favors stories where the internal state of the main character is at the center of the drama, while traditional linear narratives with large dollops of exposition and description are more suitable for the view above the battlefield of historical fiction, or novels of politics and events.

There is no official template or guide available; every author is on her own in deciding how close to stand. All aim to make the focus, angle, distance, and the effect of the light work to execute the artistic intent and move the reader to understanding, emotional acknowledgment, and aesthetic appreciation. Some recent novels reveal that in any story told well, the writer has figured out how much of the scene to show before framing it.

In Jean Thompson's City Boy,1 Jack and Chloe are both edgy, unhappy, and fraught with tension and anxiety. Jack is obsessed with Chloe's beauty and mystery, and Chloe has reached the point in life where she tires of being attractive, confused, and alcoholic. Marriage seems the solution to their problems, but of course it is only a stage on which to act them out. Jack is an erstwhile novelist, more blocked than productive. He tries to write every day, but finally, "He stopped even pretending to work on his own writing. It no longer seemed possible to believe that the people he wrote about were real. Just as California had ceased to be a place he wanted to live, he didn't want to write about it anymore. He . . . thought of James Joyce writing of Ireland from the Continent. California would be his Ireland. He would reveal and expose the country of his youth (its beautiful surfaces and shallow depths) with his gifts of silence, exile, and cunning. Except he wasn't Joyce. Funny how he hadn't noticed it before."

He sometimes takes assignments as a substitute teacher but spends most of his time in self-doubt, or being tormented by Chloe. She has turned her back on an academic career in favor of business, and to her surprise finds she is excelling in a management training program with a large commercial bank. They live in an apartment in a rundown neighborhood of Chicago (Jack sees it as romantic, Chloe as seedy) with a noisy upstairs neighbor, Rich Brezak, "Rasta Boy," as Jack calls him for the blaring reggae music and smell of marijuana that emanates from his apartment. Brezak has two heartsick, unhealthy girls vying for his limited affections, making Jack wonder if he himself has the whole love matter straight in the first place. Brezak cares for neither of these girls but seems untroubled, while Jack loves Chloe intensely and it makes him more miserable daily. The life they live, struggling to save money, avoiding the deeper probes that will reveal the growing rift between them, sends them daily closer toward the fault line of their relationship. They argue, Chloe drinks and is depressed, while Jack's temper erupts without notice. At a baseball game, he pummels a man he thinks has deliberately spilled beer on Chloe's mother. Psychologists would say he is a candidate for anger management classes, but perhaps he is really only in need of a better life. He rages at Chloe, and their silences and hostility increase. Meanwhile Jack has a dalliance with one of Brezak's girls whom he finds stalking Brezak in the building, while Chloe in turn has been having an affair with her boss. They try counseling, but it is too little too late: in truth neither has a wish to change.

Thompson is a skillful writer, astutely making most of the story come from Jack's viewpoint, and we become bed partners with his anger, resentment, and immaturity. Chloe is unmasked through Jack, and she reveals herself as cool, callous, and deceitful. Few writers have the courage to write tragedy these days; happy endings, bitter satires, or farce seem to be the thing. This is a genuine tale that does not end cheerfully, only with the bitter taste of experience. Insightful, vivid, and moving, it offers no glib answers, only a well-drawn portrait for our instruction.