tsarina

MALFEASANCE
Maggie Paley

UNION ATLANTIC
Adam Haslett
New York, Doubleday/Nan Talese
$26.00

Early in the novel Union Atlantic, Charlotte Graves, one of its main characters, remembers childhood summers in the house in Finden, Massachusetts, where she now lives: “ … the screen door on the back steps slapping behind her; watching the slow, dying flail of the greeny-black claws of lobsters held between her father’s thumb and forefinger just before he dropped them into the boiler; … mosquitoes bouncing against the porch bulb after dinner …” It’s a small moment but significant. That slap of the screen door, the flail of the lobster claws, the way the mosquitoes bounce—these are practical details that anchor the story and reassure the reader, who understands at once the tender and precise quality of the writer’s attention.

Union Atlantic is by Adam Haslett, and it follows his auspicious debut, You Are Not a Stranger Here, a short story collection that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 2002.

Too many stories, published in all the best places, are formulaic; they do what they think is expected of them, and they’re half-dead on arrival. But the limitations of the form are a gift to a writer like Haslett, whose stories are as seamless as if they’ve tumbled out full blown, and whose ear for emotional truth is so keen as to amount to a kind of sympathetic vibration.

In Union Atlantic Haslett sets himself a daunting task: to make sense of the present moment in American history—with our failing economy and eroding values and military adventurism—and to do so within a novel based on character. The book is partly a passionate defense of old-fashioned liberal ideals; partly a coolly devastating attack on our age of greed—one of its great accomplishments is to explain international banking and bank malfeasance and make them dramatic; partly a dark tale of lives unraveling, partly a coming-of-age story and a romance of sorts. It’s surprising, moving, provocative, entertaining, instructive and occasionally very funny.

The year is 2002. Banks are becoming financial institutions, and Union Atlantic in Boston, formerly a regional commercial bank, has become one of the country’s biggest, thanks in large part to the manipulations of Doug Fanning, head of Union Atlantic’s foreign operations and of its Department of Special Plans. Doug is all action, brilliant at his job, and interested in “Influence. Power over information. Control. Something bigger than rules or good taste. The more permanent instincts.” When the novel opens he has just built a McMansion in Finden, next door to Charlotte Graves’ proudly dilapidated family manse, on property her grandfather left to the town as a nature preserve. Charlotte and her two dogs, a mastiff and a Doberman, stalk the neighborhood. Charlotte is enraged and the dogs, who’ve recently begun to talk to her, are none too happy, either.

Charlotte and her brother Henry, WASP aristocrats of late middle age, are the moral centers of the book, tutored by their lawyer father, who prosecuted securities fraud in Roosevelt’s SEC and imbued his two children “with a patriotism for process and an aesthetic revulsion at display of whatever kind.” We meet Henry in a Florida hotel; it’s one fifteen in the morning, and he’s dreaming about his childhood and his sister, when he’s awakened by an urgent phone call. “For a moment,” we learn, “the yearning for a world saturated with meaning pulled him back toward sleep.” But not for long. Henry is President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and he does his job, keeping the financial system on course, with rectitude if with some misgivings. He wonders, as we do, whether he’s correct, in his position, to countenance the fraud and chicanery that whirl around him. The answer seems to be yes, since there’s no viable alternative.

Charlotte, a few years Henry’s senior, has been fired from her job teaching history at Finden High, for doing what Henry doesn’t do—speaking her mind. “Am I not allowed a patriotism of ideals? Is that what we’ve come to?” she wants to know. She is still called on, sometimes, to tutor history, and this is how Nate Fuller, a Finden High senior whose father recently committed suicide, ends up in her book-strewn living room. Charlotte pays no attention to the requirements of the exam he needs to pass, lecturing him instead about the history she thinks he should understand – which happens to have to do with taxes, corporations, banking. A brilliant and learned woman, driven half-mad by grief and the failure of the world to live up to her expectations, Charlotte is a triumph of a character, a harridan whose passion and lack of pretense make her oddly seductive. Nate, who’s been devastated by his father’s death, can’t talk with his stunned and inconsolable mother, and with his friends he just hangs out and does drugs. From the beginning he finds Charlotte’s presence, and her interest in him, comforting. “It was a relief to tell someone about it and not receive in return awkward condolence. To just say it and have it heard.” After the tutoring stops he continues to visit her. Once they make an hilarious excursion to a Chinese restaurant in town. The place is empty. The imperious Charlotte berates the waiter because the special they were offering three years ago – she’s saved the clipping—is no longer available. The waiter suggests the Pad Thai special. Pad Thai is a Thai dish, of course. “’You are a Chinese restaurant, aren’t you?’” Charlotte says. “’Not next week it won’t be,’” says the waiter. “We’re closing.’”

While he’s in Charlotte’s neighborhood Nate also encounters Doug who, with his handsome face and buff body, looks to Nate like a piece of gay internet porn come to life. Nate is immediately smitten. Doug, when he bothers to find a partner, has his sex with women; nevertheless he doesn’t mind letting Nate come around and adore him. He has no feeling for the boy beyond “a passing sorrow as he watched [him] breathe.”

Doug has built his huge house in Finden as a skewed sort of payback, because his single, alcoholic mother used to clean houses there when he was a boy. But he barely furnishes the house, and that lack of furniture could stand in for his inner life. Left to himself he flashes back to his miserable, helpless childhood. He abandoned his mother for the Navy when he was eighteen and he hasn’t been in touch with her since. F rom his point of view feeling is a dangerous weakness.
Haslett has strong ideas and opinions, but he never takes sides about his characters. He’s interested in what moves them, and in what they do to propel themselves forward. When called upon his empathy extends particularly to Doug, who turns his back on what he needs most.

The novel is not as seamless as Haslett’s stories. The earliest pages must be spent setting up the premise. Later on, as the plot thickens, the reader can sometimes feel the gears working. There’s a great deal of talk about normally dry subjects like finance and history. But Haslett is deft.The conversations about history and finance are woven into the story and deepen our understanding of the characters. For this reader, at least, watching the gears turn becomes part of the pleasure.
In the end a piece of fiction is only as good as the voice in which it’s told, and Haslett’s voice is extraordinarily supple – the expression of a capacious and generous intelligence: sophisticated, humane, and committed to emotional truth.

Charlotte, thinking about her sessions with Nate, remembers a visit to the Metropolitan Museum years ago with Eric, the lost love of her life: they’re looking at a small painting, a Daubigny. “Before she uttered a word of praise, Eric took her hand and said that from whatever he read or studied, all he wanted was the power to describe how a human being could arrive at the lucid sympathy this man must have felt for what he saw. A lucid sympathy. Those were his words. As if he’d reached into her, discerned an emotional thought still unformed, and allowed it definite shape. Difficult not to think you could live a lifetime with another person and never be as richly acknowledged.” Lucid sympathy – it’s a good description of Haslett’s view of people and the lives we lead.

Does his novel explain what’s happened to us, as one of its blurbs would have it? Not really. What it does is give us a glimpse of who we are: the old guard, committed to decency; the new entrepreneurs who imagine money is the answer; the young, who are lost.

 

Maggie Paley is the author of Bad Manners, a novel; The Book of the Penis, non-fiction; Elephant, a chapbook of sestinas; In One Door, a play; and numerous magazine articles and book reviews. She lives and works in New York City.