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The Handyman
By Carolyn See
Random. 220 pp. $22.95
Reviewed by Donna Rifkind,
who lives in Los Angeles and writes frequently about contemporary fiction
Sunday, April 11, 1999
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What has happened to Carolyn See, West Coast doomsayer? A nervy, often brilliant novelist, See has chosen in seven previous books to make her central subject no less than catastrophe – large or small, terrestrial or human – in the valleys and canyons of her beloved Los Angeles. By the look of her latest novel, "The Handyman," it seems she has taken a sharp turn toward a far more benign, hopeful view of Southern California life.
This is not to say that there are no emergencies in "The Handyman." There is plenty of trouble, from AIDS to depression and – See's particular specialty – marital discord. What's different here is the bigger picture. Instead of imagining fin-de-siecle Los Angeles edging toward disaster, as she did with a nuclear war in "Golden Days" (1987) and a series of cruel deaths from random car accidents in "Making History" (1991), this time See forecasts the coming millennium as a time for artists to restore belief in art after they "cast off the debilitating angst of the twentieth century." Her protagonist, a 28-year-old aspiring painter named Bob Hampton, puts it this way: "I was beginning to get the idea that maybe you couldn't change the world but you could paint sadness over, brighten the whole thing up. And maybe the bright stuff would bleed down into the interior and start changing it."
In May of 1996, when the novel opens, Bob is an affable but directionless slacker, not yet able to harness the talent that will eventually make him "the preeminent international artist of the New Century." Returning to Los Angeles after a failed sojourn at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he buys a van and advertises his services as a handyman for the summer. Among his clients is a series of helpless housewives who rely on him to do, well, everything – from dishes, babysitting and laundry to filling in for their errant husbands in bed.
Some of Bob's fix-it campaigns have an affectionately comic tone. During a strictly therapeutic sexual encounter with a slightly wacko mom, he describes her as "squirmy and pretty and jittery and vague and drunk. Her lips went all over my face like she was a pony looking for a sugar cube, and I just stood there, letting her do it." Other scenes are more sober. In one, Bob rescues a neglected 3-year-old from the family swimming pool; in another, he helps the widow of a college professor sort through a lifetime of her husband's clothing and papers. The most affecting of Bob's accomplishments, though, is his intervention in the life of an AIDS patient, a sweet 17-year-old from Ohio whose lover, broke and clueless, calls Bob in desperation. There are no Lazarus-like miracles here, but Bob's tender bathing of the terrified, wasting boy is a truly moving act of compassion.
While some readers may object to the serial rhythm of "The Handyman," as Bob steps in to repair one malfunctioning life after another, I found the novel's schematic design to be persuasively appropriate for a book about contemporary Los Angeles. This is, after all, the city where sitcoms are made, whose very episodic nature makes them fairly accurate representations of the tempo of L.A. life. See gets that tempo exactly right, as she does so many of the city's elusive details, from her description of the houses in a Hancock Park neighborhood as "two stories and a lawn, two stories and a lawn, two stories and a lawn" to Bob's recollections of his home town during his brief Paris stint: "I thought of LA . . . all the stucco bungalows on the sides of all the hills and how they faded into that beige background of dead ryegrass. I thought of Salvadorean women on Western Avenue with little kids in strollers and more kids strapped to their backs. Everything I remembered seemed monochromatic and sad."
Considerably less persuasive, though, is Bob's metamorphosis from haphazard Samaritan to internationally famous artist. In a framing device at the novel's beginning, a scholar seeking a Guggenheim grant in the year 2027 to study the "Hampton myth" writes that "part of Hampton's appeal has always been that his vision is often literally inexplicable. . . . the critical vocabulary has not yet been invented, the terms not coined, that explain and define his work." Is this a mystical detail or a novelist's cop-out? In either case, the scenes in which Bob finally discovers the style and subject matter that transform him from just another art-school wannabe into a visionary don't manage to explain his genius in any satisfying way.
And yet "The Handyman," after all, is all about leaps of faith. Who doesn't want to believe that art in the next century will once again have the power to inspire, to console, even to heal? Millennial anxiety has become such a novelistic cliche that few readers even bother to remark on it anymore. By turning toward a little millennial hope, Carolyn See provides a welcome antidote.
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