One of the many great things about book club is I can never predict who will hate (or love) the book. One of our sweetest members has raved about and read and re-read the bleakness that is The Road, one story I thought she’d give up on. And this time, two people just absolutey hated Lie Down in Darkness, by William Styron.
Quite a few of us stalled out after the first chapter, but we dragged ourselves back to it and by mid-chapter two it had hooked us. (Wonder if a nowadays editor would have made Styron “ramp it up a bit” in chapter one—gotta hook’em tight, they keep telling me).
The sentences are beautiful, though they tell such a slow-motion horrorshow story. But the book doesn’t seem to go anywhere; I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take away from it. Maybe nothing but awe, like at a fireworks show on July 4.
And I was plenty dazzled: Hard to believe the man was in his early 20s when he wrote this (there are three manuscript versions, this book was his third complete revise). The pivotal character is a woman in her 20s, but the main relationship, the people we’re most in the heads of, are her parents, both sick with something (depression, anxiety) that muddles their thoughts and colors their impressions of events—and offers plenty of chances for the writer to show off his powers over narrative, description and timelines.
I think of this story (unlike his later Confessions of Nat Turner, which we read for bookclub last year) as a sort of joy-ride for the writer, where he can show off all the shiny new things his baby (his talent/skills) can do. He revs up with a second-person intro:
you settle back in your seat, your face feeling unwashed and swollen from the intermittent sleep you got sitting up the night before and your gums sore from too many cigarettes, and you try to doze off, but the nap of the blue felt seat prickles your neck and so you sit up once more and cross your legs, gazing drowsily at the novelty salesman from Allentown P-a, next to you, who told you last night about his hobby, model trains, and the joke about the two cllege girls at the Hotel Astor, and whose sleek face, sprouting a faint gray crop of stubble, one day old, is now peacefully relaxed, immobile in sleep, his breath issuing from slightly parted lips in delicate sighs. (p. 10, Vintage 1992 edition)
Then we arrive in Port Warwick, V-a, and into the minds of Milton Loftis, Helen Loftis, their daughter Payton, a mortuary man, a pastor, and various others, back and forth, deep third-person, all in these beautifully rounded sentences, as if the writer is just checking all the gears in his new Mazarati. Then, toward the end, he lets the throttle all the way out—a single paragraph that’s 50 pages long in first-person stream of consciousness of a young woman who is far away gone on a hot August day in New York City, flailing on and on and on until she, well, starts to fly. It’s writing as pyrotechnics, and I’m afraid to excerpt any of the raving, so I’ll do a sad-dad one:
Now he had kissed Peyton, said the wrong words, and he had somehow hurt her. And the smile she wore concealed her hurt—to everyone else, at least—just as Helen’s smile, echoing Peyton’s, concealed only the wild, envenomed jealousy which stirred at her breast. What had she done? Why had Helen deceived him like this? Those smiles. He was chilled with sudden horror. Those smiles. They had fluttered across the web of his life like deceptive, lovely butterflies, always leading him on, always making him believe that, in spite of everything, these two women really did love each other. That, deep down, there was motherly, daughterly affection. But no. Now he saw the smiles in a split moment for what they were: women smiles—Great God, so treacherous, so false, displayed here—himself between them—like the hateful wings of bats. (p. 284)
Outstanding scenes: Milton drunkenly going to a college homecoming party and football game, deserting his wife at the hospital where their daughter is deathly ill; a Christmas scene far worse than any I could come up with back when I dreaded Christmas; and a wedding to cure anyone of sentimentality over weddings. Oh, and the stream-of-consciousness thing. And, in the end, just a young man’s theme:
“Peyton turned to Dick and said, “They thought that they had it.”
“Who, honey?”
“Those people back in the Lost Generation. Daddy, I guess. Anybody who thought about anything at all. They thought they were lost. They were crazy. They weren’t lost. What they were doing was losing us.” (p. 235)
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