Waveland

What a cast of characters: Gail a ditsy gal of the times, Vaughn her ex whom she has asked to leave after twenty years, Greta his new amour, who may or may not have shot her abusive husband Bo in the head, Eddie, the Desert Storm veteran friend of Greta who is missing a hand, lives in her garage and may be gay, Newton, Vaughn's successful younger brother, their deceased Father whom Newton says he never liked and whom Vaughn feels he's let down all entangled in the aftermath of Katrina, perhaps the perfect metaphor for the crazy world we all find ourselves in. This is the modern American novel we all wish we had written. I've learned that Frederick Barthelme's style is considered minimalist. I think of it more as "Dense Simplistic." That's because he is able to express a whole lot in a few words using everyday people in everyday situations. For instance, the possibility that one of the main characters has shot her husband in the head while he was sleeping; happens all the time, just turn on the TV. And of course the TV is always on and, just like the rest of us, the characters all disdain the waste land that it presents, but go right on watching. But lo and behold, life among the ruins still allows the possibility of Phoenix risings form the ashes. I love a happy ending. Michael D. Edwards, Author of the recently released "Royal Ryukian Blues" a memoir of Okinawa.

Other reviewers have already noted the key character descriptions and plot elements, so I won't spend time on those in this review. What struck me most about this book are two things: Barthelme's beautiful prose, so finely crafted that the words themselves--not the simple desire to find out what happens next--propel the reader onwards; and the author's perfect grasp and rendering of what it feels like to be a survivor of life. Through the eyes of the main character Vaughn we see what life is like for someone who tried (but not quite hard enough) at being a husband, being an architect, and being a good son and brother, and who now has to deal with the damage of not having tried hard enough. Barthelme expertly weaves descriptions of post-Katrina Gulf Coast "scenery" into Vaughn's ruminations about his father's death, his failed marriage, and his current state of trying to take things easy. No reader who has experienced a difficult time could fail to be moved by the scene in the Target parking lot, in which Vaughn realizes that sitting alone in his car is the best time he has had in days. Very little happens, in terms of plot points, but everything that is needed happens to Vaughn in this book. I would say that reading it is like therapy, except that doesn't do it justice. Barthelme successfully creates a portrait of a modern-day survivor (and the other survivors in his life) that resonates with the reader. I can't think of many better ways to spend twenty-five dollars.

Important things happen in this short novel about a middle-aged architect living on the ravaged Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina. The confounding shambles, the absence of resources and the gathering cluster of lost souls pries loose the desperate grip on life as it's known. Letting go, in this case forced by circumstance, can be more than a mind-boggling free fall. It can land you somewhere new and better, once you find your bearings. Vaughn Williams and his new girlfriend Greta live in a neighborhood that's been leveled. Their house survives the storm as does the house Vaughn's ex-wife Gail occupies. Little else in Vaughn's life has definition, however. His wife asks him to leave but later wants him to move back. He likes his girlfriend but feels love is an emotion he's moved beyond at his age. He watches television and expects little. He and Greta live with Eddie, a wise but lost soul, who is supposed to live in the garage but spends most of the time in the main house. They all exist like so much else post-Katrina, in a state of suspended animation. Despite Vaughn's vocation, he's no longer compelled to create, which would seem the natural thing when living in a neighborhood of downed houses. But the desertion is profound. Everything contributes to a dull and uninteresting hollowness that presents certain challenges to the reader. Persist, if you can. Most of the book is taken up with the struggles of the aimless. At Thanksgiving, Vaughn summarizes, a bit too well, the feeling: "When you're a person of a certain age everything changes and the world ... which used to be attractive, possibly charming at times, turns out to be a sewage hole of immense proportion, unimaginable proportion, overrun with dimwits." He calls the dinner "a tragic mimicry of holiday kitsch -- four empty husks repeating a performance that long ago lost meaning for all of us." Katrina triggers the tearing down of Vaughn, Greta and Gail's lives. The inability to exist in a vacuum seems to be the impetus to the rebuilding. Greta designs house interiors, which complements Vaughn's expertise. But she was once a suspect in the murder of her husband, who was shot while asleep in their bed. While exonerated, suspicions never entirely dispel because her husband abused her. More abuse occurs when Gail's boyfriend beats her, rather severely, and she winds up in the emergency room. She asks Vaughn and Greta to stay with her. They move in and Eddie stays behind to watch the dog and the house. The small, makeshift community is complete when Gail summons Vaughn's brother. Barthelme, a former architect himself, is a southern novelist whose style has been labeled minimalist for the meandering, disaffected characters he brings to life. His descriptions of ordinary life, such as TV watching or gambling or Vaughn's guilt over the way he failed his father at the end, are pathetic and hilarious. But after 50 pages of detail about characters lacking direction, reading on becomes a q

There are a couple of previously-mentioned statements to which I feel the need to respond. One review below mentions that the setting of post-hurricane Katrina is insignificant. I believe the opposite is true, and that the setting is highly significant (not in terms of "meaning too much" but in terms of just being important), seeing as how these characters have already blown up their own lives. The Mississippi Coast, then serves as a perfect place for them to rebuild, both literally and figuratively. I am unsure how characters can be both too ordinary and too quirky, but I found these characters to be neither. They were interesting, and weird, yes, but thank goodness for that. Another review says it is "painful" to hear the characters "prattling on" about Ipods and TV like "disaffected young adults." That reviewer seems to be saying to the characters, "Get back into the ricking chair where you belong, old fogies!" More importantly, the characters "prattle on" about a great deal more than Ipods and TV. They prattle about their pasts, about aging, about their families, about love (most of all), about the world around them and where it was and where it's going and where they fit and mostly don't fit. In other words, they prattle on about things much more universal than electronic fads. Rick Barthelme's writing is spot-on, as usual, and his eye for detail is razor-sharp. WAVELAND made this reader's heart ache for the characters, it made my heart soar during the moments when they brushed away enough weeds to find a glimmer of something lovely here and there, and it made me laugh out loud. Those are my "big three" requirement for a piece of fiction, and WAVELAND delivers.

--Sort of. It's not for me to recommend that you actually buy this book since I got a copy absolutely free. What are they charging for this thing? Twenty, twenty-five bucks? There are very few books worth that much money in my opinion and this isn't one of them--at least I'd never have paid that much for it. That's not to say it's a bad book, it isn't; it's actually a good book, a book well worth reading, interesting, absorbing, original, and, in its own peculiar way, heartfelt. I just don't think its worth more than say five dollars. Vaughn is a guy of nearly fifty. He's living in a post-Katrina coastal town with a somewhat rough-around-the-edges gal named Greta, who was once a suspect in the murder of her abusive ne'er-do-well husband. They have a housemate, Eddie, a one-armed Gulf War veteran who's a bit on the edgy crackpot side. Vaughn used to be an architect; now he's not much of anything. Since his divorce, he's been drifting through middle age into oblivion. His flaky ex-wife gets herself into some trouble and asks Vaughn to move back in with her until she gets herself straightened out. He can bring along Greta and even Eddie. That gives you some idea of how flaky she is. That Vaughn, Greta, and Eddie accept this absurd offer gives you some idea of the sort of quirky, eccentric, never-to-be met-in-real-life characters they are, too. Anyway, this damaged and dysfunctional "family" attempt to come to peace with themselves, each other, the world, and the whole big messy enchilada of life. It's all a bit preposterous in a Seinfeldian way but this is fiction, after all, and, like most things, if you don't look at it too closely and pick everything apart, it makes sense in an exaggerated way. Barthelme has a distinctive style--rather stark, staccato, elliptical. He does that affectless, emotional flatline things familiar to readers of Brett Easton Ellis and his ilk. Sometimes it sounds as if Barthelme's characters are really Ellis's rich brats who'd somehow aged thirty years overnight and taken a huge financial hit during the recession. It can be a little painful to hear Barthelme's middle-aged cast sounding like disaffected young adults, prattling on about TV shows and Ipods and boredom as they too often do in "Waveland." But the despair underneath sounds real enough; that comes through loud and clear. The end of "Waveland," which refreshingly comes on without a whole lot of pointless padding and dawdling and dancing-in-place as you'll find in most novels today, seems a bit of a non-sequitur. As if Barthelme were determined to heed the advice of someone who said, "Come on Fred, how about giving us a peep of hope this time, some sort of flicker before the abyss at the end of the tunnel?" And so he does to mixed success, I think, about half of it ringing true, the other half not so much. If you wait a while and get this book used, or even when it comes out in what will still be an overpriced paperback, I think you'd be better served. This