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Back when Spike Lee first made Do The Right Thing,
I remember his saying in an interview that one of his goals for
the movie was to have heat be a character - he referenced some Hitchcock
movie where this was done - to have something intangible, or without
a voice at least, be as meaningful an actor as any of the human
actors. Seattle-based playwright Lawrence Krauser has done something
similar in his debut novel, Lemon - in fact, he's not only done
it, but he's made the act of doing so the biggest theme in the book.
The titular inanimate object becomes the most important thing in
a man's life without ever demanding much direct focus, not to speak
of ever saying a line.
In Lemon, a professional memo writer named Wendell,
whose longtime girlfriend has just left him, gradually fixates on
lemons in general (first noticing the little bin of lemon wedges
behind a bar), then on one lemon in particular, which he nearly
trips over in the lobby of his apartment building. He becomes increasingly
reluctant to be without the fruit, keeping it on his desk at work,
in his pocket at the bar, and on the table at cafes (causing confusion
with waitresses). He loses his job at a firm run by a descendant
of Buckminster Fuller (what the firm does, exactly, is never shown,
but Bucky delivers lectures via videotape in the office's entryway),
and eventually shacks up with the lemon in a house-sitting gig by
the beach, in the cold pre-season.
That's what happens. Wendell is not what you'd call
an action hero. In fact, that most tempting phrase to someone writing
a review of Lemon - "growing obsession" - is more or less rendered
moot. Nothing grows; Wendell starts the book as an odd duck, and
pretty much stays that way. Of course, I may also believe this because
I already knew what was going to happen. The spring-1999 issue of
McSweeney's, the literary journal edited and published by Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers, essentially published
an outline of the novel, in which each 2- to 10-page section (on
average) was boiled down to a single, numbered line. Lemon is the
first novel to be published by Eggers' McSweeney's Books imprint.
If I have more to say about the way things are written
in Lemon than about the way things happen, that's why: I was always
dimly aware of my lack of surprise at the way Wendell's lemon encroached
on his thoughts. The book's third-person-limited voice seems not
to be surprised at anything that happens either. It lovingly paints
every small contour and detail of the life Wendell finds himself
passing through: "Obviously under normal circumstances there is
no great danger of confusing a lemon with the ringing of a telephone,
a fruit with a bell-like sound, but when it's just you, a lemon,
and a ringing telephone in the middle of a tantamount nowhere, similarities
magnify as much as differences, and the human nervous system attunes
to minor variations in a minute theme ..." At times Lemon almost
feels like a Nicholson Baker-esque novel of ideas, although one
wonders if it's still a novel of ideas if the narrating consciousness
is basically nuts.
Wendell's general passiveness would be irritating
if it weren't for the sense of play the book's narrative voice grants
him. And the stylistic quirks, like a chapter entirely in verse
and brief flights of fancy about races of giant lemons roaming the
earth, would be annoying if it weren't for the feeling of the protagonist
(and the author) lurking behind them like quiet, weird, brilliant
kids. In the book's second section, Wendell tells the lemon a story
about his childhood attempts at flying: "I knew, as do many children,
that the simple reason human beings do not just flap their arms
and fly is a collective self-delusion that we cannot ... I could
have done it, I could have flown all the way to the refrigerator
and hovered there eating ice cream at a grownup's altitude. But
Heisenberg prevailed; that event was completely, irretrievably altered
by my folks' observation of it. ... No matter how lovingly they
looked at me, their thoughts bombed me out of the air."
Wendell's "consummation" of the relationship with
the lemon is simultaneous with his gutting and preserving it like
a cross between a taxidermist and a schoolteacher leading crafts
period. "Holding the sticky fruit at its ends between his thumb
and forefinger, he dips it into a bowl of sea salt, rotating until
evenly covered. He sets it down again, squeezes out some Cadmium
alongside it, and pulls off the tiny plastic silo from around the
bristles of a brand-new paintbrush." For the last three (short)
sections of the book (there are five sections total), Wendell carries
this made lemon with him everywhere, the relationship growing more
intimate after the physical opening-up, of course. In this part
of the book, it's hard not to think about the book's status as a
made, crafted thing itself - the author hand-illustrated the cover
of each of the 10,000 copies of the book's first hardcover printing,
and (on the copies at my local bookstore, at least) a faint pink-orange
ghost image of the drawing on the cover of the copy on which it
rested overlays the back cover as well.
The really surprising thing is how readable and accessible
Lemon is, given all its dreaminess and mannered passages. It helps
that the other humans in the book have such distinct voices and
characters - Nort the barkeep, Wendell's closest friend Bill and
his mate Sally (whose voices have a normalcy which the rest of the
book renders mysterious), his block's hallucinating beggar Gloria,
his co-worker Michelle who mostly speaks in cross-cubicle glances
and emailed limericks. Krauser's other vocation as a playwright
is evident here. He's not a bad poet, either - the frequent drops
into verse could have been cloying, but Krauser balances rhyme and
rhythm casually and intriguingly. Throughout the book, he has a
wonderful way of giving you clear images without just handing them
to you. Listen to this: "I'll fill you with music now. Steady .
. . Someday there will be the technology to bathe the whole earth
in the same song, an earphone on each polar cap." (The ellipsis
is in the original.)
If you have no patience for the lengthy ruminations
of brilliant madmen, Lemon isn't for you. But you read Mindjack,
so you're probably into that sort of thing, right? The point of
Lemon is not that there is a point, a plot, or an epiphanic climax.
The point is the journey, which takes you into and out of a very
peculiar spot without ever making you feel like you're moving very
much. It's got plenty of story, along with plenty of affably postmodern
showmanship, and its language begs to be read aloud. If this novel
is any indication, the McSweeney's house style of innovative prose
surfaces, plus old fashioned wonder, plus fascination with very
unorthodox opinions and states of mind, seems to be heading somewhere
good. In the long term, Lemon could appeal (sorry) far beyond the
confines of a cult audience.
b
i o :
Mike Sugarbaker
is the creator of indexcards.com,
which would be more popular if it were a weblog. He previously
reviewed Radiohead's Kid A for
Mindjack.
buy
this book at Amazon.com
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