AMERICA | BERT RECOMMENDS

How We Are Bored.

I am reading Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man. It is a novel written during the Second World War in which a man waits to be drafted into the army, he quits his job but due to a series of delays, he ends up spending a year doing nothing. It is a novel about what Tom Wolfe called ‘anaesthetic solitude’. About passing time, desperately, being bored, being idle in a time when that kind of thing was deemed a luxury, wholly inappropriate to the war effort. It is Bellow’s first novel, and it has dated in much the same way as those existentialist novels by the likes of Camus and Sartre, that were coming out of Europe at the same time, now seem dated. The ideas contained in these novels, once shockingly new, have soaked into the cultural language, been mimicked, parodied, expanded on, so that, out of their original context, they now seem a bit obvious, and worse, humourless. Still, Bellow’s prose holds up, it is precise and elegant, though personally I’d recommend The Victim if you’re wondering what all the fuss is about. He has a knack for conveying anxiety and dislocation. But, reading Dangling Man it occurs to me that it might be a precursor, an American take on something like Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground, or Kafka, for what has become a central concern of contemporary American fiction, boredom.

Fast forward to contemporary America, where the endurance of boredom has become maybe the final heroic act in fiction. In David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King, a group of I.R.S. employees perform endless, tedious tasks which are described in great detail. One character experiences ‘boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt.’ The dullness and monotony of the office-space is also explored in Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End, in which the narration is all first-person plural, like Jeffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides (another novel about white, suburban ennui) – ‘We had a meeting and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting.’ A collective voice that is still somehow detached and wry, a neat trick. Amy Hempel’s short stories are like found Polaroids. Her characters are neurotic, her narratives ooze a kind of existential malaise. ‘Jesus Is Waiting’, from The Dog Of The Marriage is a travelogue of an apparently aimless road-trip through America. It is all mundane, oblique observations of filling stations, fast food restaurants and motels. At one point the narrator questions whether her symptoms are a loss of faith, or faith in loss. She writes; ‘I am often moved to tears when the lane I am in merges with another.’ Amy Hempel’s protagonists act bored, but really they are damaged, their world’s have stopped making sense.

Indecision by David Kunkel sees a character so paralysed by his inability to make decisions that he agrees to trial an indecisiveness-curing drug called Abulinix. Personally, I found the novel a little too Zach Braff. Tao Lin’s novels are punctuated with descriptions of neutral facial expressions, he writes sentences like ‘He feels tired. He feels bored.’ In Eeeee Eee Eeee he throws in some talking animals, aliens, Elijah Wood, but you still feel depressed. His latest novel, Richard Yates, is about a relationship between two characters named Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning. Nothing much happens. You have to keep putting it down so you don’t get annoyed.

Reading these novels is like an act of endurance in itself. Perseverance is required from us, just as it is of the characters, no matter how torturous, frustrating, or pointless it might all seem. It should be revelatory, humanising, but it turns out to be quite painful. What we end up with is novels in which people think about their thoughts, a kind mental masturbation. When boredom is expressed accurately though, perhaps, as Tao Lin does, by using an extreme, almost clinical form of minimalism, the results, contradictorily, turn out to be quite funny. Our initial response is to laugh, maybe it’s funny in the same way that horror movies are funny. Freud might’ve said it is the revenge of the pleasure principle over the reality principle. The French philosopher Henri Bergson claimed that humour occurs when we are physically reduced to mechanism, the automatic response. Man reduced to an object, albeit momentarily, like working in a cubicle, or running into a brick wall. When this becomes a constant state, like say an animal in a factory farm, it becomes tragedy. We are laughing at our own condition, because we still have the capacity to recognise our own condition.

Tao Lin reduces us each to our most basic mechanisms; ‘It’s depressing that people are different. Everyone should be one person, who should then kill itself in hand-to-hand combat.’ It makes for an uncomfortable experience. There is a reason that people in soap operas never watch soap operas, ultimately we don’t really want to be reminded of our own lives, we just want our distractions to resemble what we think other people’s lives are like. Which brings us back to Dangling Man, and the pay-off, which is that ultimately boredom is a phase. In terms of the American novel, it is either a symptom of a late-adolescence or senility. Joseph, our main man, expresses his failure at not having known how to use his freedom, like that bit near the end of Easy Rider. You get the impression that what he really desires is the loss of freedom, to be put out of his misery. ‘It’s enough to pray for change,’ he writes, ‘merely change, any change, to make one worship experience-in-itself.’ Personally though, I’d rather read about boredom than war or wizards. At least we’re spared a sequel.

Roberto Pastore set up the Cult Book section in Waterstone’s The Hayes in Cardiff, Wales. As such, he has gained a literary cult following of his own. He will be blogging about books linking to each issue’s theme. This is his first blog for The Raconteur.