A gathering of middle-aged men in Upstate New York after the death of a friend prompts uneasy confessions and questions of who we really are.
In his new novel, Subtle Bodies, Norman Rush brings a large number of characters to the isolated Upstate New York home of the recently deceased Douglas. Iva, his widow, has summoned the four men who, 30 years earlier, were part of an intellectually pretentious undergraduate circle led by Douglas. These include the chief narrator of the story, Ned, as well as Gruen, Joris and Elliott, the latter Iva’s lawyer and adviser. Much of the novel passes as these middle-aged men, and Nina, Ned’s wife, wait to see why Iva brought them together and what she wants them to do.
Rush makes the setting mildly ominous at first. Ned arrives on a dirt road amid dripping trees and dark evergreens. The collapse of an embankment killed Douglas, which makes the whole landscape unstable in Ned’s eyes. The estate features a tower with a crenellated rim, and the friends (before Nina arrives) sleep there on cots, like fairy-tale prisoners. Later, Ned discovers that someone has made many push-pin holes in Douglas’s portrait, which hangs in the house.
Meanwhile, Rush gives us a fountain of small events and themes. He introduces perhaps the most important and the funniest in the first sentence of the novel, “Genitals have their own lives, his beloved Nina had said ….” Ned and Nina, his wife of three years, exult in their love, and Ned (usually after sex) wishes he could live forever. Their sometimes hilarious attempts to get Nina pregnant and their clever commentary are threaded throughout the book.
Each of the former coterie members is given confessional space. Gruen confides only that his sex life with his wife is “pastel.” Joris goes on about his married-woman fetish, his affair with Iva, his visits to prostitutes and includes a repugnant description of a prostitute’s genital surgery. Elliott details the aftermath of his prostatectomy in a passage that is much too long.
Nina, who never met Douglas, repeatedly calls the old clique a circus and Douglas the ringmaster. The whole crowded novel can be seen as a sort of circus. One ring would be preparations for the delayed and vaguely defined memorial; a second the unexplained influx of media representatives who fill the house and outbuildings; a third would be Nina’s sleuthing around to learn more about Douglas; a fourth the reunion of the old friends; a fifth Ned and Nina’s sexual antics; and a sixth the attempts of Ned and Nina to befriend Hume, Douglas’s eccentric teenage son. Each of these has comic and serious aspects, which Rush manages with a sure touch.
Curious motifs and inserts give the language a crowded feel. Nina sees Ned as a secular Jesus, as her curly-haired lamb. She speaks of herself as a savage, evil and going to hell, although she is not bothered by the idea. There are phrases that seem like quotations, such as “sick unto death.” Rush includes the text of a second-grade essay by Hume and a letter from his school principal, a French surrealist poem, a passionate eight-point lecture by Ned on why the United States should not invade Iraq and a long quotation from Boswell.
Nina’s mother (appearing by telephone) contributes the idea that each person has a subtle body or essence that emanates from him or her. Nina, the sleuth, tries to pay attention to people’s subtle bodies so as not to be deceived. Ned, more attuned to connection, sees the subtle body as the true inner self of a person, the part one befriends, the part that remains the same over the years despite age and experience.
The concept of subtle bodies is compatible with the storyline but seems imposed. It does lend humor, however. With all the sex, breasts, prostitutes, prostatectomy, Gruen’s fat, and Hume running shirtless through the woods, there is little subtlety to the bodies in this book.
Rush handles language with great facility, the humor is clever and amusing, and Ned is a thoughtful narrator. But while the characters wait to see what Iva wants them to do and why the media is there, the reader might do well to prepare for disappointment. It is not that Rush leaves us hanging. We learn something of who Douglas was and why Iva wants to put on a show for the media. But there was so little drama to this point, which forces a clinging to anticipation, that we may be forgiven for wanting a more dramatic climax.
In the first paragraph of the book, Ned thinks, “When you’re traveling you’re nothing, until you land, which is what’s good about it.” Ned has traveled to New York, but in the last chapter he is back home in San Francisco, marching to stop the invasion of Iraq. This is who he is; his sojourn in New York has dissolved into nothingness. The novel can be seen similarly, as a bagatelle, fun to read but ephemeral.
Alice V. Leaderman writes fiction, studies Chinese, hikes, skis cross country, gardens, and volunteers with a group that promotes the use of native plants. She lives in Maryland with her husband.
