Is there anything more delicious than kicking off your shoes, taking a load off and cooking up a stew of your own hatred?
Everyone does it. How else can you explain the prevalence of reality TV, the popularity of very hate-
worthy teams, such as the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Lakers, or even the president?
No doubt a great deal of George W. Bush’s popularity with supporters (and opponents) has to do with the ecstasy of hatred he inspires. Oh, it feels so good to know exactly what’s wrong with him!
Owen King knows a thing or two about our yen for hate, and he has made it a potent subtext of his literary debut, “We’re All in this Together.” Just watch the tornadoes of loathing rip up the flowerbeds and obliterate the crops in these stories. No one escapes unscathed. King’s characters are too busy nipping and snarling at each other like a pack of feral dogs to notice that they are actually smack in this twister’s path.
The biggest dog pile takes place in the collection’s stupendous title novella. Set in southern Maine, the one-time epicenter of New York Yankee hatred, it revolves around a 15-year-old Mainer named George who is hell-bent on sabotaging the romance blossoming between his mother and her cheesy new boyfriend, Dr. Vic, a Bush-supporting, BMW-driving oncologist straight out of a Richard Russo novel.
George has a few allies in this project: his left-
wing grandfather, Papa, and the old man’s friend, Gil, a hedonist cancer patient who spends days toking up on medicinal marijuana and nights searching for nudity on cable.
In the wee hours of every morning, Gil joins Papa and George in their vigil for the paperboy, whom they believe steals the travel sections out of Papa’s “New York Times.” They are also convinced he is the one defacing a sign Papa erected on his front lawn. The notice is actually worth quoting in its entirety:
“Albert Gore Jr. won the 2000 election by 537,179 votes, but lost the presidency by 1 vote. DISGRACE. The leader of the free world is now a man who went AWOL from his National Guard unit, a huckster of fraudulent securities, a white-knuckle alcoholic, and gleeful executioner of the mentally handicapped. CRIMINAL. Our nation is in the midst of a coup d’etat, perpetuated by a right-wing cadre that destroys the environment in the name of prosperity, hoards in the name of fairness, intimidates the voices of its critics in the name of patriotism, and wraps itself in the word of God. FARCE.”
Next to this message is a “solemn ink drawing” of Gore and a caption that reads: “THE REAL PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
Now, it’s a testament to the phony gestures of fairness that the media require of us that I feel obliged to say something along the lines of: You don’t have to actually agree with Papa to find this story amusing, a terrific spoof of the way political hatred can spiral out of personal loss. But of course I’d be shoveling you a load of that stuff Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt has been writing about.
In all truth, I can’t see anything wrong with this sign. Nor, for that matter, can George or anyone else in this story. That is, except for the agitated way they await its besmirching. An opinion turns into something else when its purpose is to goad, after all.
Some critics will insist (as they did with Nicholson Baker’s “Checkpoint”) that this book is essentially a literary form of argument. But that would be a mistake. This is fiction, not cant, and there’s a point to the pitch of hatred Papa reaches. It’s a metaphor for the way George needless polishes his own bubble of pique, keeping his mother, Vic and anyone else out.
Eventually, there is a comeuppance to this self-indulgence, as there is in the other four stories collected herein, but King isn’t quite so skilled at managing this as he does the atmosphere of hate. Taking down someone’s flight of fantasy is always less fun than building it. Look at Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and you’ll discover King is in good company in suffering this problem.
Like Roth, King has an ability to toggle between lyricisms and rage that is totally disarming. One moment George is chewing on his lip with anger, the next he is driving home at night in a car with his mother, the air filling “up with sweet night smells, oak and wet lawns.”
This gentleness keeps “We’re all in this Together” from calcifying into something hard and unbending, the way some of George Saunders’ farcical stories occasionally do. That said, he does come up a little short in a few of the stories that round out this collection.
“Wonders,” the tale of a baseball player who takes his pregnant girlfriend to a circus freak to get an abortion ends with a brutal twist. Similarly, “Frozen Animals,” the story of a dentist’s last-minute work on a trapper’s wife, tongues its weirdness like a sore tooth.
These are small flaws in an otherwise unique and important debut. Some day, when historians are frantically looking for artifacts of our Age of Hate, I think they will stumble upon “We’re all in this Together.” It has that whiff of longevity. Let’s just hope it gives them a chance to see that we saw the way things were going and listened to those, like Owen King, who showed us our folly, if not our sorry state – and not the other way around.
John Freeman lives in New York.
We’re All in This Together
By Owen King
Bloomsbury, 223 pages, $23.95
