Novelists have been feeling downright apocalyptic

Sat Mar 24 09:07:20 CDT 2007

Novelists have been feeling downright apocalyptic

It's boom times for the end of the world -- what's
behind all the gloom?

By Scott Timberg
Times Staff Writer

March 25, 2007

IN one, a thick layer of ash covers everything as a
nameless man and his son push their cart through a
shattered land of absolute silence and darkness
without end.

In another, the world inexplicably floods, sending a
watertight hospital full of sleep-deprived doctors and
their young patients bobbing on the waves like a new
Noah's Ark.

And in a third, the Manhattan Company dispatches a
team of rogues from a mysteriously devastated
Northeast to settle an untouched part of tidewater
Virginia inhabited by a 21st century Pocahontas.

They're all recent or upcoming novels with literary
heft: Cormac McCarthy's solemn and elegiac "The Road,"
Chris Adrian's ironic-religious "The Children's
Hospital" and Matthew Sharpe's black-humorous
"Jamestown," respectively.

It's not just Mel Gibson, Feral House and the "Left
Behind" books anymore. Long the province of the
paranoid left and Christian right, apocalypse has
moved indoors, and it's going highbrow. Literary
novels with end-of-the-world settings  these books
and others by respected writers such as Daniel
Alarcn, Michael Tolkin, David Mitchell and Carolyn
See  are surging at the same time as serious
filmmakers engage a subject most often left to B
movies.

Based on P.D. James' 1992 novel, Alfonso Cuarn's
well-received 2006 film "Children of Men" shows a
world in which human fertility has died out and
fascism reigns. Over the next year, Hollywood will
release a slew of "class" films involving
environmental destruction, among them M. Night
Shyamalan's "The Happening" and James Cameron's
"Avatar," in which the beleaguered planet Earth turns
on its inhabitants.

The notion of apocalypse  the word is from the Greek
for "the lifting of the veil"  has been with us, in
various forms, for a long time. But it's still worth
asking: What does it mean that the dream life of the
richest, most scientifically advanced nation in
history is troubled by nightmares of the end?

The simple answer is that the attacks of 9/11 and the
Iraq war have brought a sense of unease and
vulnerability to both artists and audiences. Growing
worries about global warming and the greater
visibility of the Christian right  Protestant
fundamentalists, for whom the apocalypse is not
metaphor, are thought to have swung the last two
presidential elections  have brought the end of the
world in from the shadows.

See, whose 2006 novel, "There Will Never Be Another
You," centers on chemical warfare, said that even more
important was the fearmongering that followed 9/11.
The worry over anthrax and other threats, she said,
"lodged in a sick part of our unconscious. It turned
something ordinary, like 'yellow cake' or opening a
letter, into something that would kill you in a
fearsome and disgusting manner."

Literary issues are also at play.

"I think to a certain extent it's a delayed reaction,"
said Steve Erickson, a novelist who edits the Cal Arts
journal Black Clock. "It's been going on in popular
culture for a while, whether with the Clash's 'London
Calling,' " which imagines a nuclear attack on
Britain, "or 'Blade Runner,' which conveys a feeling
that outside Los Angeles the rest of the world has
kind of dropped off."

This new emphasis also has to do with a blurring of
lines between literary and genre fiction, said
Erickson. "Twenty years ago, there was still an
insularity to a lot of fiction, especially work put
out by the New York publishing houses. It was still
doing Raymond Carver and that neorealist minimalist
thing. It regarded the futurism that's kind of
implicit in apocalyptic writing as kind of lowbrow."

Now, Erickson said, "there's a new generation of
writers who are more involved with other things
happening in the culture."

One of those writers is Matthew Sharpe, 44, whose
second novel, "Jamestown," comes out next week and has
been getting strong early reviews.

His uncomfortably funny book was written from Wesleyan
University, where he teaches, out of anxiety for the
future as well as what he calls "frustration and rage"
about recent U.S. policy, he said. His bumbling
settlers look for oil, food and water in scenes meant
to highlight our current short-sightedness. "One item
in the writers toolkit I draw on a lot," he said, "is
hyperbole, to intensify and exaggerate the situation."

His exaggerations come from historical models. When
Sharpe started researching the 1607 Jamestown
settlement, which was mercantile in inspiration, for
his job advising middle school teachers, he "was
fascinated by the sheer extremity and weirdness of it:
100 guys, and they were all guys, getting on a boat
and coming to a continent they expected to be so
narrow that a river would run through to the Pacific.
And expecting to find, like the Spanish, gold in the
ground. And then they got here and promptly started
dying."

As he wrote, after the 2001 terrorist attacks and
during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he saw parallels
between English foreign policy of the 17th century and
America's in the 21st. "This sense of exceptionalism,
that we are the moral arbiters, that we know better
than they do."

Brushing up on disaster

SOMETIMES the impetus for this kind of book is more
idiosyncratic. Chris Adrian, 36, was a medical student
in the years he conceived of his well-reviewed "The
Children's Hospital." "It started out as a story about
being stuck in a hospital day and night and not being
able to get out. Sort of a typical story of
residency," he said from his home in Cambridge, Mass.

"But after 9/11, a lot of new ideas moved in."

He was forced to rethink the book's tone, and his
approach also became more concerted.

"I knew I couldn't set a story during a second flood
without knowing something about the first one; I'd
never read the Bible before." He found himself digging
in deep to get what he calls a background in
apocalypse. "There's a lot out there besides
Revelation. Most of them involve a person who's had a
vision that's mediated by an angel."

For a culture that doesn't like to talk about death,
he said, the apocalypse may be a way to discuss the
subject indirectly.

Adrian went so far into both mainstream and apocryphal
books of the Bible that he's now halfway through
divinity school at Harvard. "Though the difference
between those books and mine," he cautioned, "is like
the difference between a real mouse and Mickey Mouse."

The trick for a literary writer is to avoid the
obvious, which may be one reason 9/11 has taken so
long to show up in the serious novel.

"I think we're just sort of figuring out how to talk
about it," said Erickson, whose next novel,
"Zeroville," comes out this fall. "It's all so
immediate it risks becoming a cultural clich before
we even know what to do with it
. It took a while to
write about Pearl Harbor, I think. James Jones' 'From
Here to Eternity' didn't come out until 10 years after
the attacks. The culture has to process these things."

Erickson himself felt the lure of apocolypse back when
he was writing his first novel, in the early '80s,
which he recalls as "a scary time" despite today's
Reagan nostalgia. " 'Days Between Stations' started
out as a love story. And suddenly, about a quarter of
the way through, I was burying Los Angeles in sand. I
hadn't planned on doing that, and for about half an
instant I resisted it, because I thought it was the
kind of thing that happened in fantasy or science
fiction."

His was not the only '80s novel set after Earth's
destruction: Other notable examples included Denis
Johnson's "Fiskadoro," a mythic tale in which shards
of pop culture are worshipped as religion, and Carolyn
See's "Golden Days," in which nuclear war is, for some
laid-back Angelenos, good news.

Now, as then, the end of the world allows for a lot of
powerful writing in a range of styles.

McCarthy's "The Road" is the bleakest of the bunch,
written in raw, bitten-off utterances.

"By dusk the day following they were at the city. The
long concrete sweeps of the interstate like the ruins
of a vast funhouse against the distant murk. He
carried the revolver in his belt at the front and wore
his parka unzipped. The mummied dead everywhere
. like
latterday bogfolk."

By contrast, James' "Children of Men" reaches Keatsian
notes only hinted at by the film. "The children's
playgrounds in our parks have been dismantled
. Now
they have finally gone and the asphalt playgrounds
have been grassed over or sewn with flowers like small
mass graves. The toys have all been burnt, except for
the dolls, which have become for some half-demented
women a substitute for children."

Adrian's protagonist in "The Children's Hospital"
wonders if what she is seeing is real: "They were more
likely experiencing some cruel experiment  black out
the windows and blow in some aerosolized LSD and get
Phyllis Diller to hide somewhere with a microphone and
claim to be a sweet, creepy angel  than the end of
the world."

The roots of these doomsday novels predate America's
founding, according to Thomas Schaub, a University of
Wisconsin professor who edits the journal Contemporary
Literature.

These books, he said, resemble the jeremiads that
Puritan ministers issued in the 17th century to
awe-stricken audiences. "They preached the day of doom
as a way of bringing the flock back to our original
mission. 'The wrath of God is upon us, we have
forgotten what America was supposed to be.' That's a
fairly consistent dynamic in American history."

What's new, he said, is an increasing pace of change
as well as an explosion of ways to bring that change
to us. "The hyperawareness delivered by the media
provides a sense of implosion, an immediacy, a sense
of imminence."

This has led the latest wave of apocalyptic writing to
have a different tone than the work of a generation or
so earlier.

"In 'Jamestown,' it's annihilation without the
revelation," Sharpe said. "Certainly revelation is not
visited on anyone in the novel. The settlers are
really bumbling around, not knowing what the hell
they're doing."

The work of William Burroughs, Robert Coover, Thomas
Pynchon and Norman Mailer  who credited fear of the
bomb with the creation of the Beats and other
subcultures  saw destruction as a chance to wipe out
a corrupt order, "The System."

Instead of renewal, Schaub said, he picks up "a sense
of real limits 
 and a kind of regret," from both his
students and new fiction.

Have things really gotten worse? "This is the most
uncertain time since the early '60s, since the Cuban
Missile Crisis," said Erickson, "where it's difficult
to have much confidence that things will turn out OK.
If the times get any crazier, I think you're going to
see more and more of this."

Said Schaub: "There's no question that the country is
wealthy, but the middle class has declined since the
'70s. There's a general sense of the intractability of
our problems. The race problems, the religious
problems, in the Middle East and in our country," and
the limits offered by resources and the environment.
"It's mind-numbing really."

Strikingly, given the dead-serious subject matter,
some of these novels are genuinely funny. "You
couldn't approach this with a straight face without
seeming ridiculous," Adrian said.

Without humor, Sharpe said, "I think it would be
unbearable to me as the person who has to sit there
writing it every day for several years. I would pause
from time to time and say, 'This is really grim, can I
go on with this? Why am I writing this?' "

His answer ended up being that however nasty the
subject matter, the novel and the future were
important. "And I realized," he said, "I had to face
up to it."

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/la-ca-apocalypse25mar25,0,229936.story

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