AMERICAN PURGATORIO
By John Haskell
Farrar Straus Giroux. 238 pp. $23
What holds us to this earth? What if the laws of gravity and mortality were suddenly repealed? What if they've been repealed all along? Ever been on a mountain road and suddenly felt your car getting lighter and lighter -- tuning up, perhaps, to fly? Ever tried to read about quantum mechanics, prose that produces a feeling of profound dizziness, not because we can't understand it but because it "proves" what we've known all along: that tables aren't solid, that people may manage to be in two places at once, that most of what we know or think we know is just one big, ignorant lie?
Changing the subject just a little, ever eaten a chocolate-chip cookie or a white anchovy and then wanted another and another and another until the mere thought of a cookie or an anchovy fuels your contempt for all things material until you see one of those flat-screen TVs as big as a sailboat, and then you want it, want it, want some more? Ever had too much sex -- enough that you begin to think seriously about convents and monasteries -- until the next time you want sex?
And this is the scary thing. Do you ever experience any of this even if you think of yourself as a man or woman of moderation, able to take trees, cookies, anchovies, movies, the beach, flowers, kisses, mean remarks all in your stride, take them or leave them alone?
Jack, the protagonist of John Haskell's novel "American Purgatorio," thinks of himself above all as proudly, profoundly ordinary: "I went to New York, married a girl named Anne, and was in the middle of living happily ever after when something happened." He assures us immediately that he is "always good at making adjustments," so when he goes into a convenience store by a gas station at the side of a highway in New Jersey to buy some snacks while his wife gasses up the car, he's worried and furious to see when he comes out that his wife and car have disappeared, gone, fled the scene -- but he's not all that surprised. Still, how did they do it? And why?
Jack looks around. He looks for the car. He queries the gas station attendants, who seem curiously vague. Finally, at a total loss, he walks home to Brooklyn, where he and Anne have shared an apartment. He calls the police, who seem indifferent to the whole thing. He even phones his mother-in-law, whom they were supposed to visit, also to no avail.
Where is she? Where is Anne, his wife? The reader may already be thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Wakefield," where a husband leaves home for no reason, or Dashiell Hammett's famous "Flitcraft" vignette in "The Maltese Falcon," which takes place along the same lines, or perhaps even the mysteriously missing wife in Todd Goldberg's brilliant novel "Living Dead Girl," but the reader would be barking up the wrong three trees.
After a day or two during which Jack perversely destroys the pretty little garden that he and Anne have planted together, he finds a map among her possessions, sees a route scratched on it and decides somewhat irrationally that this is a signal to drive across America to find her. (After all, she may not have driven off of her own volition. She may have been kidnapped, abducted.)
Jack discovers a determinedly uninteresting America out there, a lot of curiously disaffected people who seem somehow to come from a different age. Some of them live in yurts, for example, the way they did in the 1950s and '60s. Or they throw parties where the punch is laced with LSD. No one seems to be doing anything much except hanging out. As he goes farther west, Jack encounters the Hopi and other Indian tribes. They pointedly ignore him.
His car begins giving him trouble, and that's perhaps when he first notices his own curious anomie. He misses Anne, but he's not frantic, just grim and sad about his loss. He spends Hell's own amount of time trying to communicate with a tree. He accepts advice about his increasingly delinquent car but can't seem to act upon it: All the stuff about filters and tubes and clogged gas lines seems like too much to even think about. Soon he gives away everything he's brought with him: his carton of CDs, his books, his photos, finally his backpack. By the time he gets to the Pacific, Jack should feel light, but he doesn't. He's met a girl, Linda. He wants to want her, but he can't. He desires his life, but he can't muster up the desire.
The ending here took me by surprise. It's what every writer strives for -- an event both surprising and inevitable. "American Purgatorio" is a serious, admirable novel, well worth reading.
