Undying
by Todd Gitlin (Counterpoint)
Ever since the German poet Rilke published “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” writers with little appetite for the rigors of the traditional novel have had an attractive alternative model. Rilke’s novel, released in 1910, purported to be the diary of a failed young poet wasting away in Paris. In place of the intricate, dramatic plot, lengthy, sharply etched individual scenes and stages full of colorful characters found in the conventional novel, Rilke offers red vignettes, passing observations, memories, fragments of overheard conversation, philosophical musings — what seemed, deceptively, not so much a finished novel as the raw material for one.
Malte was a book engaged with illness, death and dying. A diary is an often claustrophobic form that records the preoccupations of a single consciousness. Rilke’s choice to cast his novel as a diary was doubly appropriate because nothing turns the mind upon itself like serious illness and — trust me on this! — no one lives in his head as much as the writer.
Political historian Todd Gitlin’s latest novel, “Undying,” is like Malte, the diary of a sick writer. It is the fall of 2004. The combat-evading George W. Bush denounces war-hero candidate John Kerry for his “policy of weakness.” Donald Rumsfeld declares that there are “unknown unknowns.” Alan Meister, a professor of philosophy at an unnamed university in New York, “teetering on the far edge of middle age,” is diagnosed with lymphoma.
A philosopher’s job is to search for connections. The Kerry-supporting Meister, the very model of the right-thinking Upper-West Side liberal, wonders if there could conceivably be a connection between Bush and his cancer, but “it might be the kind where dimensions intersect in some other reality, the way parallel lines meet in infinity.”
The panicking Meister “lugs his body down Broadway” and reflects about the generic-seeming people he passes that his pain “is of no interest to any of them.”
Despite his political populism, Meister’s is a Mandarin sensibility, which means that he can’t say anything as straightforward as that he likes a stiff drink before dinner but has to euphuize it into “I have come to appreciate the power of the restorative twilight martini… In my old age, as I like to say, I have come to appreciate the incremental state of suspension or smooth evasion that arrives so readily and reliably as to expunge any guilty hint that intoxication must be earned by self-sacrifice.”
You have to be a Nabokov to pull off a passage like this, and to paraphrase another political candidate that Meister might approve of, “sir, you’re no Nabokov.”
Meister’s feckless, uncommunicative daughter Natasha returns to sullenly care for her father. She reveals that she has been a courier for a gang of Jamaican drug dealers and that she is pregnant from a one-night stand and has no interest in finding the father. Despite the promise of her Tolstoyan name, she is a kind of cipher who seems to represent an alienated and culturally undernourished young generation.
As he goes through his treatment and struggles towards health, Meister wrestles with a work on Nietzsche, a philosopher for whom the battle with illness was the central battle of his life. Meister concludes, quite reasonably, that Nietzsche’s philosophy, his belief in the will to power, was an extended therapeutic exercise necessary to keep his illness at bay.
But the struggle with his illness gave Nietzsche such unforgettable insights as “A joke is an epitaph upon the death of a feeling” and “Every master has but one true disciple, who must betray the master, because he, too, is destined for mastery.”
Meister’s misfortune delivers us such commonplaces as the observation that home life can be like a bad domestic drama where the actors forget their lines, or that life is provisional and that personal catastrophe can make it seem like a Sci-Fi horror movie.
There are good and great novels that are indebted to Rilke’s fragmentary example. Sartre’s “Nausea.” Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights.” Renata Adler’s “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark.” Max Frisch’s Man in the “Holocene.” What makes these mostly drama-free works succeed is the sharpness of their observations, the intensity of their interior worlds, the high quality of their prose. On these counts, “Undying” doesn’t quite come to life.
