The Mark and the Void

The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray’s third novel, arriving last fall and four years after his widely praised and largely successful work “Skippy Dies.” Expectations have been high for his return. If Murray’s talent is sustainable, reflecting the easy wit and intelligent humor of the voices in his stories, there shouldn’t be much to worry about. With him you can kind of feel another hit coming.

Mark was promoted primarily as a comedy and an incisive spoof of the modern financial industry. Bordering this timeliness can add urgency to the reading, though some impact is diluted due to terrorism overtaking the spotlight of the western world’s dread. To some the financial calamities of 2008 may seem at least arguably a past era. Still, stocks are falling in China and the uncertainty reigns in the world’s economies so the Mark’s setting is believable.

Claude is a French ex-pat and investment banker living and working in Dublin. We are introduced to his life and history in the early pages of the book by a removed dialogue from an unnamed narrator. Claude’s own voice quickly steps in and settles the story, or at least gives it direction. After a solid investment in pages this direction is revealed as a spiral one, looping backward and over itself in circular self-awareness that a reader could find entertaining or equally head shaking. There is a real fear early on that Murray may be performing stunts to get his story across.

The author dangerously self-identifies in the novel when Claude meets Paul, a floundering writer who appears as a potential, though doubtful, spirit guide. The author as character attempts, amongst other increasingly desperate plots, to make Claude’s life story worthy and deserving of interest from the outside world. Claude delivers his side of these deals as he clings desperately to his new author friend’s promise for the definition of meaning in his life. Such meta-literary territory is usually reserved for first time writers, but Murray illustrates Paul with enough humor and exaggerated failure to keep himself clear of solipsism. Paul is just too pathetic to be real, one hopes anyway.

Another voice would be more in your face and even obnoxious but Murray’s easygoing, almost warm tone is preserved from Skippy and works again here. There are deep layers and heavier philosophy than a first time reading can make apparent, but Murray’s humor makes him the fun friend, the welcome party guest that does not take his barbs into the realm of self-display. He makes the right joke at the right time, smiles and steps away.

Getting to the existential value of the Mark proves to be the challenge of it’s reading. It takes a serious amount of faith in Murray’s skill or promise to deliver a hook to arrive at the near center of the novel where the existential value comes through.

A detached philosophic diatribe starts the later portion of the story. This free-floating chapter, a monologue really, presents plainly the book’s most interesting bits of philosophy. That’s not to say Murray depends on the speech to make his work magnetic. Ideas and concepts do move the story and but Murray is not clever, instead truly bright enough to plant the philosophy and burn it as fuel. The mid-story departure is Murray’s promise that yes; this is going to be as deep as we are hoping.

Still, beguiling intelligence and well-placed humor aside, it takes Murray a while to show where he is going. Claude’s naiveté and Paul’s self preservation clearly set them up as mark and void but there are a lot of chapters, hallmark Murray fringe characters and their shaky lives to get through before the plot finally flips completely over on itself.

The Mark cannot be called brilliant by standards of timelessness or universality but it is intricate, and impressive, and woven through with more threads than a critic should try to identify for fear of missing one and sounding stupid. The research achieved to speak accurately through any of the characters voices is stunning really, unless Murray spent time in the financial industry that his biography does not mention.

Explanations of economic processes are not spoon fed or cleverly injected; they are presented seamlessly into the narrative. Descriptions of the world’s banks failings are unobtrusive. This could have taken an incredible amount of research by Murray though it’s not the breadth of knowledge that impresses but the way it works into the story.

His fellow writers quoted on the Mark’s jacket compliment Murray in the wrong direction. The book is not about the financial industry, not solely anyway, and it is not a spoof of this world or a critique. Mark is an examination of reality, what this term means to us, through the lens of the simultaneously most influential and unreal of all societies institutions, its banks. The banks are a plot device and not the subject.

I have to think that if you took the banks away and replaced them with a steel mill, or a coal mine, or even a force of nature like a river or any other massive, unpredictable, largely ungovernable force that a group of people both try to control and depend on for their realities, you could make this story. But it might not be as funny. And this book was funny fairly often, probably more than I would like to admit.

A spiraling, self-aware story like Murray’s asks to be debated. Even the characters argue the value of their own stories, which make up the one we read, which turns back again into another story they create. Ask yourself if that sounds clever or frustrating. I could not decide until the end and I suppose in that the novel succeeded.

What the Mark does, though not as spectacularly as Skippy Dies, is gracefully present both the bitter and sweet of life in unison. It’s not that there are sad parts and happy parts in parallel, instead the characters are in real pain throughout most of the story but the world they live in is nearly ridiculous. They don’t laugh much, but we do, and not at them but at life around them.

Claude’s coworker, Ish, is his only counterpart with a visible, suffering soul. Her attempts to do the unimaginable and show concern for something outside of herself and the industry her and Claude dwell in go repeatedly ignored. After her latest effort to show real empathy is crushed before her she says, “At least someone will let me care about them.” Her plea and her pain go unnoticed by the other characters. No one says anything to her. The story rolls quickly on. This placement of truth inside swirling comedy illustrates the subtlety Murray can work with at times, and the heart. The wit, like the banks and the schemes and the plots, only carry us to his skill.

City on Fire

City on Fire had been in my sights for a long time. Rumors floating around the book put their hooks in me nearly a year prior to its release. 900 plus pages, a setting in late seventies New York, connections to the Bowery punk scene, I’d buy into a whisper of any one of those alone. And of course, the hype. Oh the sweet, indulgent hype. Sugary and colorful and determined to pull me in. Not a few newspapers and magazines reported Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel had snagged him a multi-million dollar advance before it was finished. I first read an article about the book in mid 2014 and from then on waited patiently. Hell, I pre-ordered the thing in hardcover.

Weight of expectation like this can only set you up for disappointment, right? I won’t make you wait like I did; this one was a let down. City on Fire is a safe story. The end is lightly triumphant for the characters but largely tepid. The plot is a formulaic even as it tries a few stunts and turns. So, am I really going to bash a guy and a book for a thousand words? There has to be a reason I crawled through nearly a thousand pages. I’ve set down other books that I’ve found disappointing or even offensive but I stuck through City. Why?

1977 starts (or 76 ends) with a crime that we expect to drive the story and surprise us in its resolution, only of course, much later. For a while I did want to know who was guilty. But, the narrative departed from the mystery too often and at too great a distance to keep me curious. The question of the book’s length has to come into play here. I’ve never shied from a heavy page count, the best ones go by faster than anything half their size, but I needed to be reminded in later chapters just who the victim was and why I should care about them. By the time I got near the end, my empathy faded.

Perspective does shift through the lives and viewpoints of its characters quickly enough to produce some momentum. We have the young punk rock grrl and victim of the crime, two children of the New York elite, their lovers in various states of abandonment, two villains fighting for the stage both in the reader’s eyes and with each other, and more than a few stray characters that each get a fairly random magnifying glass held over them at points in the story. An inability to fully commit to one of these lives leaves a lack of depth to them all. When the particularly shallow ones arrive the pace grinds down with them.

The plot swirls back and forth through decades but keeps as its flashpoints the crime on New Years Eve and the blackout of 77. Through such a swirl connections should be made and revealed, bells should ring and revelations had but really, they aren’t. If they were, I misjudged their weight. Everyone is connected and these links pop up often but they seem to be calling for recognition of their cleverness, not meaning.

When the ends of storylines appear frayed at best or completely unfinished I start to doubt myself. I’m sure I missed something, the author is too smart for that and I just wasn’t paying the right amount of attention. A reference must have been lost by some skipped required reading of my childhood. But in City I could trace the flaws through devices the author even flat out mentions. A gun goes off in the story. Another doesn’t. One is identified right out as Chekovian and the other ignored as such. But for however many times Chekov’s famous rule shows itself it is thusly broken. Or at least bent. Guns go off, just maybe at the wrong time. There are other unclear moments I can’t shake. One character may have died or may not have. I missed it. I guess that’s on me but still, how can that be blurry?

Before City’s release it’s weight and breadth drew comparisons to Don Delillo’s Underworld. City is not pure historical fiction and neither is Delillo’s masterpiece though the predecessor here runs its dueling plots along fragments of real events, tracing the motion of history. Hallberg uses events as fence posts to keep his story penned in.

Amongst the myriad things Delillo got right but City misses was the jumping timeline, the shift between decades not past to present or back again but a seemingly random but in fact orchestrated leap between epochs. Hallberg’s leaps land on shaky legs. He doesn’t tell his story in order, which is fine, but he gets the disorder wrong too. I don’t understand why he jumps from the 70’s to the 60’s to the later 70s and even the 80s and back again. Delillo moves to a particular decade because something that happened at that time represented to him the America he was trying to understand. Hallberg jumps to events his characters experienced in their earlier and later lives. When we don’t care about the characters, the foundation slips.

Even though the lights did go out in New York in 77, City is pure fiction set in the past. Underworld needed the times it took place in to achieve Delillo’s goal of understanding cold war America. Hallberg could set his story in nearly any generation and maintain the same plot lines. For his story 1970’s (and 60’s and 80's) New York is pure backdrop.

The book jacket promised explorations of the power of youthful discovery and rock n roll. This could have been what kept me going for over a month. But you better deliver if you’re claiming that hallowed mythology, Bro. Enter Charlie Weisbarger, far from the center of our story but maybe the most broken spoke on the wheel. His is a believable life of teenage confusion and anger drawn forth by his tutelage in the underground punk scene. We can believe in him. Charlie is an honest portrayal of a lost kid and I wanted something special for him separate from the other characters. He runs from the suburbs to the city following punk rock, and a girl, and finds himself twisted into evil undeserving of his blatant if not expected innocence. You kind of want him to be ok. In the end Hallberg portrays him honestly, not as a saint or a hero or even a victim, but realistically as an annoying and broken down kid. I nodded both to Charlie’s spirit quest and it’s ending. His counterparts in the story call him the Prophet and it could be said he grew into just this after his wounded and largely forgotten finish. Charlie was good. He should have made a bigger splash. He cried a lot and that was okay.

Charlie’s journeys through the East Village and Bowery are probably what kept me going. I wanted to see the neighborhood and learn something about it. I wanted to see a movement, a time, a generation, explained or symbolized by the art it created and I needed this done through a good story. A very, very tall order.

I hung on for the knockout Patti Smith reference. There were a few nods, and I’ll admit they weren’t terrible, but the story as a whole falls far short of a revealing picture of life in those times. Looking back to well over a year ago, I can’t recall now any of the hype promising the boiling inspiration that made Patty or the Ramones or Talking Heads take a stage. In the end I’ll have to take the blame for unrealized expectations.