Uneasy Rider (Page 2)

Haskell titles each of his seven chapters after one of the seven deadly sins, but such parallels with Dante probably proved more useful to the author than they will to the reader. Dante's pilgrimage through purgatory was the arduous ascent of a fearsomely steep mountain, while Jack's loose trip rolls horizontally from coast to coast. And Jack is accompanied, in place of Dante's Virgil, by a changing cast of hippies, dropouts and artists, all of whom dispense real or ersatz wisdom with the earnest dippiness of American seekers. Alex, the yoga practitioner, advises Jack to

"Take it off of yourself and put it into the world.... It won't go away if you keep pushing it away." Trying to get rid of it, he said, was just another way of holding on to it.
   I still wasn't sure what the "it" was we were talking about, but that was all right.

"It," we understand, even if Jack does not, is Jack's temporary anger (or sin number two, wrath) at Anne's disappearance. The passage serves as well as any other to illustrate Haskell's tolerant comedy. Alex may be sententious and slack, but he's not unwise.

The same might be said about Haskell's narrator himself. At first his dully throbbing voice symptomizes a state of dazzled grief. Later on, the carefully careless prose acquires the feel of letting go. When Jack recalls having given up the ambition of being a playwright, the analogy with seeking fugitive Anne goes without saying: "Growing up in Chicago I had, I don't know what to call it, a dream, I guess.... I felt I needed an identity, as a person. I needed something I could be, some thing, and I thought a playwright, that was something I could be, I could live with that." But Jack is a failure as a playwright:

Maybe I had the wrong dream. But I didn't want to say that, I didn't want to admit defeat.... And I was walking along, in New York, on Wooster Street, it was Wooster Street because the sidewalk was bumpy and I had to keep my eyes down so as not to trip, and I was walking along, and all of a sudden I felt it snap. It snapped. The dream. The dream died. And I let it die. It didn't feel that bad. In fact it felt good. It felt like what it must feel like, or what I imagined it must feel like, when a dream comes true.

No other writer I know could wring such feeling from the prefab phrase "a dream come true."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.