Where do the humiliated hide out in the 21st century? It’s not just a question for ex-governors and gadflies, since public personas flee the same thing that hounds us all in a more minor fashion — the constant swirl of the media and its amnesiac appetite for scandal and vengeance. Is it possible for us to unplug from this electronic drip feed (not to mention our BlackBerries), and if we do, what happens to our minds?
These are some of the more pressing questions hanging over Tim Parks’s agitated, engaging new novel, “Cleaver.” As the tale begins, its BBC television presenter hero Harold Cleaver has simultaneously experienced the apex and nadir of his public career. He just engaged in a rousing confrontational interview with President George W. Bush. He was then blindsided by his son Alex’s damning roman a clef, “Under His Shadow.”
Cleaver’s response is swift and understandable. He drops everything and escapes to South Tyrol, a remote region of the Italian Alps. But he has trouble letting go. The book’s early segments ring familiar chimes of the life of an e-mail addict. Climbing up mountains that inspired Wordsworth to write “The Prelude,” Cleaver is far too busy holding one of his two cellphones to the sky, looking for a signal, to feel anything sublime. His first impulse upon finding an Internet cafe is to Google himself.
Parks is a clean, crisp writer and a terrific journalist, and in the early sections of the book it’s hard not to feel that these two sides are somewhat at war with one another. The opening section feels a little too slick, the details of Cleaver’s life falling into a ready-made template. Cleaver’s lifelong partner, Amanda, is a former Guardian arts editor; his angry son’s novel has been short-listed for the Booker. The tug of the real world is strong.
But once Cleaver stops checking his incessantly buzzing text messages and moves farther up the mountain into a vacated cottage, the book becomes weirdly gripping. Unplugged, Cleaver’s thoughts carom wildly across the page, interrupted by the fictional accusations hurled at him by his son’s novel. Sentences begin in the third person and then skitter into Cleaver’s voice, only to morph into sentences Alex published in “Under His Shadow.”
In his head Cleaver answers Alex point by point, but it’s hard not to be somewhat on the side of the son. Cleaver was a true cad, his lovers too numerous to count, his diet a death sentence waiting to happen. He lived like a Roman senator without even being elected, vacuuming up the booze and the sex and going back for thirds, fourths, fifths.
Not surprisingly, emerging from this banquet of self-regard, Cleaver finds the real world is a novelty, a fact Parks hammers home a little too insistently. “All over the world, while I was holding forth on television, men were doing those simple practical jobs,” Cleaver thinks fatuously as he sees one of the villagers going about his everyday life.
There is an element of self- punishment to Cleaver’s exile, and Parks plays that for small chuckles. The former occupant of Cleaver’s cottage may have been a Nazi. All that remains to blunt his anxiety is a doll and a rheumy- eyed dog clearly homesick for the former occupant.
The hard thing about “Cleaver” is that even when Parks’ hero has stopped battling and started doing what therapists like to call processing, it’s hard to summon the pity. Arguing (in his head) with his son, Cleaver angrily wonders why the young man couldn’t appreciate all the work his father did. He wonders why his son couldn’t see how the death of his daughter, Angela, in 1990 destroyed him, drove him toward a life of performing. Sad, and yet Cleaver remains incapable of imagining what it was like to be his son.
In spite of all this, the pity does eventually come, and that’s probably one of the book’s biggest achievements. This self-important, completely unlikable man has — like all of us — true thoughts. A part of him lingers in delayed bereavement. His regrets about his dead daughter, buried in free-associations, sink like stones into this seemingly light novel, their weight not apparent until Cleaver’s story comes to an end, when he emerges from a fog of reflection and looks across the Alps and sees nothing, nothing at all.
John Freeman is writing a book about the tyranny of e-mail, for Scribner.
Fiction
Cleaver, by Tim Parks, $25
