Off On a Tangent: Jettisoning the Literary Straitjacket, or Notes on a Lost Novel by Donald E. Westlake →
(This essay was originally commissioned by an online publication earlier this year. For various reasons, the piece was killed, but I wanted to make sure it found its way to the public - and could make a last-ditch case for why Westlake’s novel Memory, written in the mid-1960s but not publiished until April 2010, was both worth reading and of literary significance.)
Three years ago, Newsweek had the genius idea to set Donald Westlake and John Banville together for a joint interview. Banville had long been on record as a fan of the tough, hidebound Parker novels by Westlake’s alter ego Richard Stark, and Westlake, as it turns out, was partial to the Booker Prize winner’s carefully crafted meditations on the human condition and his new detour - as Benjamin Black - into crime fiction.
When Banville, who obviously had a vested interest in the subject, asked early on about the differences of writing under one’s real name versus a pseudonym, Westlake presented the clearest answer I’ve ever seen on the subject: “The separation’s in the language. I don’t want to overstate it, but I bring out a different vocabulary. I’ll be going along, and I’ll think, wait a minute, Stark wouldn’t say that. That’s a little flowery. Because the Stark books are a little more of a construct. If I have one voice, it’s Westlake’s.”
That voice looked to have been silenced for good with his death on the very last day of 2008, but it turns out Westlake had one last hurrah hidden away for decades, now published for the very first time by Hard Case Crime. Its excavation from literary oblivion is all the more astonishing for the glimpse it offers of how Westlake’s singular voice might have matured in an entirely different direction - one more along the lines of John Banville instead of the one responsible for comic masterpieces featuring an ill-fated professional thief named Dortmunder.
Memory was written around 1963, when Westlake had fully broken away from soft-porn apprenticeship and, as Stark, found a formula for early success with the first few Parker novels. According to friend, colleague, and occasional collaborator Lawrence Block, when Westlake’s then-agent Scott Meredith attempted to sell Memory to publishers, it was doomed not to work out: “[Meredith was the] wrong agent for it,” Block told me in July 2009. “here’s a lengthy serious existential novel by an unknown writer, and it’s represented by an agent with—-at the time—-a real reputation as a schlock peddler. No end of editors admired the book extravagantly, but nobody would buy it.” There were some half-hearted attempts to sell the book in the 1970s, but after that, nothing - until Block remembered the manuscript and Westlake’s widow, Abby, found the lone existing copy, yellowing and frayed, and gave it to Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai.
By the end of Memory’s first chapter I knew this was a special book. Paul Cole is an actor on the rise, who lives a life primarily concerned with his own wants and needs. If another man’s wife wants to fall into bed with him as reward for an out-of-town performance, so be it. But then Westlake metes out a cruel, but existentially appropriate justice upon Cole’s selfish ways: A vicious beating at the hand of the cuckolded husband damages Cole’s brain and robs him of the ability to make new and retain old memories, turning him into a hybrid of the famous neurological case study H.M. and Guy Pearce’s character in the movie Memento.
Now imagine if that hybrid was determined to find his way back to his old self, and in doing so discovers the earthy, repetitive pleasures of hard physical labor and makes tentative gestures of love towards a woman he’d never have pursued before. Imagine him far from his New York home, unmoored by the inability to place his deep-seated desires in proper context because he can’t remember what they are. And then imagine that he does find his way back to his old life and realizes it may have been an outright lie, a series of ill-fitting gloves grafted on hands two sizes too big. Through a mix of indignity and pleasure, longing and barely formed recollections, Paul Cole becomes a more moral, more worthy man - and yet the ending Westlake concocts for him is so devastating because it accelerates the tragic cycle of loss, the growing horror that for Cole, life is an endless loop of anger and frustration because he exists solely outside the bounds of time and space.
Memory is, without a doubt, one of the most significant literary works of 2010, but because who authored it and how it is packaged, its publication comes laced with cruel irony and a litany of complex questions. For one thing, reading the novel means placing it in context of the career Westlake made for himself in the ensuing 45 years, and asking the obvious what-if - how the book would have fared had it been released in 1965 instead of 2010 - sets up a strange game of alternate history with multiple competing scenarios. Would Memory’s success have cut the Parker series short or killed Dortmunder in the creative womb?
Would we have been deprived of Westlake’s comic voice, or the savage satire given full flower in later works such as The Ax or The Hook? Or, if Memory had been published to failure, would Westlake’s career have followed the exact same trajectory, and the book would be consigned to the same out-of-print bins that currently hold other forays into unclassifiable fiction such as Kahawa, his novel of Ugandan politics, or Humans, a bizarre piece of dystopia starring a bored angel?
The better question to ask is whether Memory’s surfacing will finally blitz the pseudo-barrier between genre and literary fiction. On the one hand, the wall’s been punched through again and again by the likes of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, both of whom integrate tropes from comics, detective fiction and speculation into their later, more literary works; Kate Atkinson, whose meticulous observations of human behavior found a wider audience wrapped in the private eye guise of Jackson Brodie; and Banville, whose true and alter egos are both currently on display with The Infinities (Banville) and Elegy For April (Black.)
On the other hand, that wall is still clearly made from brick. Else why Inger Ash Wolfe, author of the excellent crime novels The Calling and The Taken, is better known for the parlor game about his or her true, literary prize-winning identity, and why Banville himself seems to brush off his pseudonymous work as hackish trifle - to which I would argue that deeply probing works about humanity require different, but not better or worse skill sets, than deeply meditative but strongly plot-driven works of crime fiction.
The larger point to be made about a literary straitjacket is that it can’t filter out works of any stripe that are stubbornly meant to endure. And we should be fortunate that Memory has finally emerged, because it is meant to endure, and illuminate why Donald Westlake’s body of work should, as well.
