SLPAD - 95 - "Low-Lands" - 8

[Michael Bailey]

(Re: New World Writing -  "& so forth" doesn't mean trailing off in a long
tail, either: Algren, Margaret Mead f'r Pete's sake, Ionesco, Gide,
Ellison, Donald Barthelme, Wendell Berry, Dylan Thomas - it's almost as
exciting as looking at the authors in old issues of, in a different genre,
Ramparts Magazine eg.

(Mea culpa - there's lots of great writers now & I can hardly name any.
Just read a Hernan Diaz book, _In the Distance_ though - beautiful,
depressing in a bearable way, because thought-provoking  - hypothetical
movie pitch: "ya know Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_? It was ever thus, even
if you were a big Swede." Probably will follow up with reading his new one,
_Trust_. Also kind of stoked about Zadie Smith's new one.)




The Flange abode perched on a cliff overlooking the Sound. It had been
built vaguely to resemble an English cottage back in the ’20’s by an
Episcopal minister who ran bootleg stuff in from Canada on the side. It
seemed everyone living on the north shore of Long Island at the time was
engaged in some kind of smuggling, because there are all kinds of little
spits and bays, necks and inlets which the Feds still have no idea exist.
The minister must have taken a romantic attitude toward the whole business:
the house rose in a big mossy tumulus out of the earth, its color that of
one of the shaggier prehistoric beasts. Inside were priest-holes and
concealed passageways and oddly angled rooms; and in the cellar, leading
from the rumpus room, innumerable tunnels, which writhed away radically
like the tentacles of a spastic octopus into dead ends, storm drains,
abandoned sewers and occasionally a secret wine cellar.


What does this say about Flange?
I don't see him as an inheritor of wealth, but he had to have had some
familial help - maybe he is an inheritor after all: he put in his time in
the Navy and segued (afaict from the text) right into bringing Cindy to
this house which, I mean yes there were some great deals in those days, but
on savings from Navy wages? & I don't imagine him as a fixer-upper person.

Maybe he finished law school & went into the Navy as a (communications)
officer, coming out into a prearranged job?

Anyway, not to overwork Bartleby (he would prefer not to comply anyway) but
I'm convinced Flange is an attorney, and has become  disgusted with what
he's been doing in that capacity to the extent that he's developed a
malaise so familiar to readers of all the excellent tales & explications in
New World Writing et al  that the only text required to summon a full
picture of the loathsomeness of his work is what he tells somebody's
secretary at Wasp and Winsome: "Flange. No."

Though, at some point, he did put in the immense work of passing the bar
etc and made enough sense in interactions with less-disaffected attorneys,
clients, and superiors to sojourn at Wasp and Winsome for seven years,
reaping rewards commensurate with that position. So on the one hand, I
respect his intellect for success on those terms *and* his discernment in
rejection of a career many times depicted convincingly as soul-destroying.
But on the other hand, what he's going to do instead, even in its inception
in the rumpus room, is quite unattractive IMHO. At least at first blush.

But that's getting ahead of the wave, as it were.

This house description is a generous, if not downright lavish, detailed
description, foreshadowing Slothrop's desk, or the desk at the beginning of
M&D.

And we'd best unpack it a little.

But right now, all I can think about is what it says about Flange: if he's
not a one-percenter, he's got to have something going for him, whether it
be familial largesse (though we get nothing about his roots) or amazing
competence at the practice of some very lucrative and miserable branch of
law, or oh! maybe it's Cindy's family money (nothing in the text to suggest
that, tho': he supposedly "dragged" Cindy from her mother's flat in Jackson
Heights, which is nice but not posh, right? Or maybe her mother's divorced
from a posh father who dotes on Cindy manifesting in a house as a wedding
gift?) - whichever way he got there, Dennis Flange is perched on a catbird
seat, we already see enough to surmise he will be letting things slide - is
this to be a cautionary tale or something else?