A Hero for Our Time (Page 3)

Once Dwight escapes from New York, his surroundings grow more exotic but more superficial. His challenges get fewer and duller, and the novel is at a loss to introduce characters as difficult and dynamic as the Wilmerdings. Among the Ecuadoreans, there aren't even any real speaking parts, and poor Brigid is hardly more than a stalking horse for Alice. This is another glaring example of a kind of cowardice that mars the novel. The vanishing of the Wilmerdings might clear the way for Dwight to transform, but it also renders that transformation totally illegitimate. Our families don't just precede us in the fossil record; they are the most irreducible facts of who we are, and who we feel, too often, forced to be. Rather than reckon with his origins, and the origins of his indecision, the all-new, all-decisive Dwight just writes off his family in a couple of slapdash, too-glib e-mails from Ecuador; if they respond to him, we do not read it or hear about it. In keeping them silent, Kunkel has failed his own work.

Nietzsche once wrote, against Wagner, "I believe that artists often do not know what they can do best: they are too vain. They are intent on something prouder than these small plants seem to be which grow on their soil." Whether it's ambition or pride, Kunkel seems unable to recognize that Indecision is at its funniest and most touching in its depiction of Dwight's family; it's a tremendous letdown when, about halfway through the novel, all the other troublesome, colorful, loud Wilmerdings are "disappeared" like dissidents. Haven't we read enough novels about young men shipping out to sea, rafting down the river, driving cross-country, playing hooky, running off? But Dwight still has to strap on a backpack and see South America like Che Guevara. It's probably not fair of me to be disappointed that Kunkel wrote his own book and not The Corrections, or The Oresteia. But he's a better novelist than he is a tour guide, and had Dwight stayed home, Kunkel might have given us an epic, or a poem.

But we stay worried about the Wilmerdings even after Kunkel has hustled them offstage. Let's forget, for the moment, Mom's celibacy and Dad's drinking. The most pressing issue in the Wilmerding clan is the kiss Dwight plants on Alice's lips. That he wasn't going to slip her the tongue really isn't any excuse, or consolation. That it's the morning after September 11 makes the whole thing that much worse. For the record, the only brothers who ever really want to fuck their sisters are found in Faulkner novels, The Aristocrats and Greek myths, when the dating pool was much smaller. It's a literary problem, not an actual one. At least Kunkel gives Alice an ingeniously simple and semi-heartbreaking theory of why Dwight wants to keep it in the family. "Look, the trouble is not that you and I or any siblings actually want to fuck one another. The trouble is that we don't--everything would be so easy if we did," opines Alice. "I'm the one girl you actually got to know in the right way. It was gradual, it was inevitable--obviously we didn't have any choice in the matter." Alice says all this before the kiss. After it, she points Dwight out the door and says, "What do you think it means to be a family? We're the people we never get over. Now go!"

Dwight doesn't have to get over her, because Kunkel, like a clever tax attorney, exploits for his hero a heretofore unexplored loophole in the incest taboo. In a surprise twist, Dwight's whole trip to Ecuador turns out to be a blind date, elaborately staged. Sister Alice and doppelgänger Brigid (secretly grad school colleagues) have conspired to insure that Dwight falls for the one whose genes don't match his. This is indefensible and cheap: The novel sanctions his incestuous desire rather than forcing him to confront, outgrow or even apologize for it. And it's yet another decision that Dwight takes credit for, without having actually made it. In Indecision, resolutions and epiphanies are not so much earned as given away like gifts to a spoiled child.

So we have every reason to doubt Dwight's last-second conversion to a particularly swashbuckling strain of democratic socialism--not least of all because it takes place mid-orgasm, mid-drug trip. Che himself might have skipped the leper colonies if he'd known that one could become a socialist merely by drinking the boiled juice of a cactus and then humping your new girlfriend in the jungle like Adam and Eve, post-apple. But it would be a stretch to say that Dwight has decided to become anything. Brigid's enthusiastic beliefs have just bled into him, in the same way that an airplane flight saturates him with nowhereness. It's just more osmosis. After he's been thoroughly socialized, Dwight will dedicate his life to publicizing the plight of Bolivian coca farmers, about whom the "news is not great." But every night Dwight stays up late and, underneath the Southern Hemisphere's superabundance of stars, writes the book in our hands. Despite the government-sanctioned beating of the farmers and the US-funded burning of their farms, Dwight is still far more focused on the poverty and oppression inside himself. His socialism is never a coherent ideology or a concrete political solution. It's just another form of self-help.

Don't get me wrong. I don't begrudge Dwight his happy ending. I'm glad he didn't end up stopped like a watch at the bottom of a river or run through with a poisoned rapier, having already poisoned or run through everybody else. But it's impossible not to feel let down when the novel gets sillier and sloppier the deeper into the rainforest it goes, until it becomes like some lost Hope and Crosby comedy--Road to Ecuador. Dwight evolves over the course of Indecision from an entirely empty vessel to an empty vessel with political platitudes to embrace and a substitute sister to fuck. The rest of us, in our indecision, will have to look elsewhere, in other books or in ourselves, to find out how to make meaningful, creative, passionate choices. Our lives will be hard, will need to be worked at, where Dwight's will continue to be easy, and easily skated through. Benjamin Kunkel may become a serious novelist, but Indecision is not a serious novel.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• 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.