Ghost Ships on the Hudson
Benjamin DeMott
The New York Times, Sept. 27,1987

In the beginning the world of "World's End," T. Coraghessan Boyle's third novel, seems deja vu. A workday peters out. An unpromising 22-yearold named Walter Van Brunt is discovered shar ing joints and beer in a bar called the Throbbing Elbow. His companions are Hector Mantequilla ("ragged wild hair") and Mardi, who's wearing a hand-dyed paper miniskirt with matching panties - a dress "so short as to expose the nether curve of her buttocks." "I got something for you, man - something special," says Hector. taking Walter's arm. "In the men's room. you know?"

Certainly we know, or at least we assume that we know. Following Hector will admit us to the confines of a familiar school of contemporary fiction (c. 1965-85). In this quarter weed and literary allusion proliferate, narrators and characters alike speak sardonically, plot is minimal and the backward reach of time stops at the Vietnam War. Lead on, Hector, we think without zest. Explore the drug culture. Meet the need for views of whacked-out layabouts "doing lines" in the men's room.

But within moments we're turned around - surprised and genuinely engaged. Widening his angle of vision, the writer shows us that drink, dope and sex are merely incidental influences on the party night in progress. Wane and his mates are in Peterskill, N.Y., ai hour up the Taconic from Manhattan, not on the Coast or Mexico-bound. When midnight deviltry dumps them into the Hudson, swimming for the moorings of a fleet of mothballed merchantmen, the sounds of their roistering commingle with eerie murmurs. On the deck of the U.S.S. Anima, a rusted hulk, Walter Van Brunt catches sight of the ghost of a vanished elder amidst a crowd of "ragged, red-eyed, drooling" bums. ("'America for Americans!' Walter's father shouted, and the phantom crowd took it up with a gibber and wheeze that wound down finally to a crazed muttering in the dark.")

A minute later, the novelist directs our attention away from the roisterers, sending us back three centuries to a "five-morgen farm" close to a Hudson River trading post, the turf on which Walter's ancestors (a father, a mother, three children) began their American life. Hollanders indentured "for all their days on earth," the family is obligated to pay the patroon, within six months of their landing, "five hundred guilders in rent, two fathoms of firewood (split, delivered and reverently stacked in the cavernous woodshed at the upper manor house), two bushels of wheat, two pair of fowl, and twenty-five pounds of butter,"
DURING the first 30 pages of "World's End" we watch these settlers thrive and endure catastrophe. In the same stretch of writing we also see a battle in a modern-day Peterskill kitchen between Walter's father and those he charges with kidnapping his son; we leave the Throbbing Elbow for good and listen to a Kitchawank medicine woman chanting against pukwidjinnies - ghost spirits and devils; we witness loss of limb by gangrene (1663) and by motorcycle crash (1968); we hear a patroon's agent coldly evict a helpless child (the only survivor of the indentured family) for defaulting "the conditions of your agreen3ent"; we learn how a portion of the ancient Moawk and Kitchawank tribal cultures entered the nod of Walter Van Brunt; we come to know a decendant of the original patroon - an ancestor-obcssed, mid-20th-century factory owner named Depeyster Van Wart, father of the miniskirted Mardi (in time he will become Walter's employer and surrogate-father).

The narrator who speaks to us of these matters seems concerned not alone with registering the hum and buzz of another age - the terror of Lowlanders transported to a "barbaric new world" teeming with trees, demons, savages, strange animals - but with Continued on page 52 Benjamin DeMott's book about the study of literature, "Close Imagining," will appear this winter. He teaches English literature at Amherst College.

such problems as that of rendering correctly the thunder, in our own day, of revved-up Norton Commando motorbikes. His apparent assumptions are that it's still feasible for a fiction writer to shape helpful historical and social perspectives on more or less contemporary lives, and that there are continuities within change.

And his world has scale, levels, density. In these pages fathers struggle for their sons' respect, lose it, and live to see their sons caught in the same cycle. Farm girls gather eggs at peaceful dawns, tomahawks are hurled in fury, people quarrel at checkout counters. Oppressors oppress. Guests drink and dance at weddings (the drinks are "'Sopus ale, cider and Hollands out of a stone jug," and the music comes from penny whistles, overturned kettles and "a bombas that made use of a pig's bladder for a sound box"). Fearful punishments are meted out to the unlucky - from a week in the stocks to solitary at Sing Sing (originally Sint Sinks); fearful political frustration explodes on the right and left. As light fails and the grave beckons - the book's title is derived from the name of a nautical graveyard in the upper Hudson - characters remember (as real people in that neighborhood might be expected to do) good times on the water: "They were out on the river in his father's boat ... He'd spread a blanket for her in the bow, there was that peculiar sicksweet smell of exhaust, the sun was high, the wind had fallen to nothing. What's that, she asked, over there?. That point across the river? He sat at the tiller, grinning. Kidd's Point, he said, after the pirate. ... She felt the water swell beneath her. She looked up the river to where the mountains fell away in continents of shadow and seagulls hung in oceans of filtered light. Above that, and around the bend, he told her, it's a clear channel up to West Point. Then we hit Martyr's Reach. He knew an island there, in the middle of the river, beautiful spot, Storm King on the one side, Breakneck on the other. He was thinking maybe they'd land and have lunch there." Yesterday the label "wit writer" seemed apt for the creator of this world. In four works of fiction published between 1979 and 1985 T. Coraghessan Boyle showed himself to be lively and language-intoxicated - but determinedly disengaged. There were two volumes of short stories that were long on black comedy and included a number of pieces that originated seemingly as funny bits or turns - games of which the grandmasters are S. J. Perelman and Terry Southern. (The premise it of one story: What if a scientist doing language research with primates fell in love with a chimp?) There was a novel - "Budding Prospects" (1984) - on marijuana farming in California's Mendocino County; its self-teasing began with the title and subtitle ("A Pastoral"), the dedication ("This book is for my horticultural friends"), and the epigraph (Ben Franklin: "Plough deep, while Sluggards sleep, and you shall have Corn to sell and to keep"), and continued to the closing page. There was a picaresque lark - "Water Music" (1981) - a retelling of the African adventures of the 18th-cen tury explorer Mungo Park that was packed with comic conceits. (Example: shoe-blacked herring and frogs' eggs peddled as caviar under the trade name Chichikov's Choice.)

Writers of stature - Robert Coover and William Gass among them - praised Mr. Boyle's work. Here and there a story that began as a comic bit would seem to grow restive, as though assailed momentarily by a hunger for seriousness. (One such story - "Caviar" - was awarded a Pushcart Press prize in 1977.) But caprice and mugging were the norms, and the career seemed to point in the direction of superior literary horseplay, not heft.

"World's End" totally transforms that outlook. It isn't a pontificating work, and the wit writer hasn't disappeared. He has, however, powerfully challenged his own disengagement - the constraints of automatic knowingness and habitual irony. And this movement of mind creates space for moral and emotional as well as esthetic reality, producing a narrative in which passion, need and belief breathe with striking force and freedom.

The book's pivotal 20th-century events - one actual, the other imaginary - are the Peekskill riots of 1949, wherein locals attacked "kikes and niggers" up from the city to hear a Paul Robeson concert, and a late-60's act of sabotage against the Arcadia, an invented countercultural peace and ecology ship moored in the Hudson. Key roles in each event are played by representatives of the Van B.runts and Van Warts, Dutch immigrants whose ambitions first became entangled when the doomed, indentured Van Brunts commenced scratching a living for their almighty patroon. A major concern throughout is power and its mutations, and a behavioral phenomenon under frequent'' scrutiny is treachery.

Links exist, as I said, between this book and the author's earlier work. Black comedy and literary allusion erupt occasional:.,, a61 the presentation of Van Brunt, who in 1968 is an accident-prone college dropout with a 4-F deferment. (Walter's first collision with history - he bangs into a historical marker while cavorting or his Norton - costs him half a leg; we're told often that his avowed hero is YIeursault, Camus's famous nihilist.) Traces of the ungenerosity toward bottom dog dreamers and others that blemishes some of the author's shorter fiction also surface in "World's End." (The mockery, in Mr. Boyle's story "Greasy Lake," of those for whom Bruce Springsteen became a spokesman enters this novel in an account of a rock concert at Vassar College.)

But belief in human range and possibility is stronger here than in any of Mr. Boyle's previous books, and it generates a dozen or more characters - Indians, merchants, hippie idealists, others - sufficiently various to experience complex reactions and stimulate them in readers. Even young Walter himself - undisciplined, half-educated - has a grainy nature. He can distinguish "mindless, brick-throwing racist[s]" from people mildly infected with Bircherism, and he possesses, in addition, a strong imagination of guilt. He's tormented by the version of his father as traitor that's come down to him, through his mother and other relatives - partisans of the Socialist Left who are convinced that his father =colluded with the moneyed Van Warts to set `.hem at the mercy of the antiCommunist mob during the riots. (A substantial portion of the narrative follows Walter's struggle to ind his father and to penetrate the mystery of his behavior.)

It's not primarily the sense of character, though, that lies at the root of this book's distinction; it's the ceaseless reaching for broader contexts, more comprehensive views - the push for a vision of interrelationships, the obvious impatience with self-preoccupation. As "World's End" interweaves, fugaily, the lives of long-gone peasants, slaves, landholders and displaced Indians with those of last season's activists, wantons, rentiers and factory hands, we're conscious of recurrences and echoes. Past and present, sharply separated by the chapter structure, are fused in motifs and unstressed parallels. The themes that emerge aren't riveting when stated abstractly. We knew before "World's End" that, in many ages, the powerful have done poorly a'. conjoining power with remorse, have been incapable either of seeing their opposition as other than rude, crude and lawless or ,1f remembering the rude, crude, lawless acts by which their own ascendancy was gained. Neither is it news that, in many ages, the powerless, blinded by rage and uneducated into the complexity of things, have settled for stereotypes of their masters, asked impossible heroism of themselves and failed their best hopes.

But themes like these are deepened and freshened when they are developed in a narrative that shuttles between epochs usually understood as discontinuous. We gasp in new terms their connection with the American social and political experiment. We see their pertinence to the succession of conflicts involving flimflammed Indians, manorial lords, spies, patriots, Stalinist provocateurs, enemies of "the Communist-inspired, anti-American, long-haired hippie outrage." The continual summons is toward unaccustomed speculation - thoughts about permanence and change, forces and processes that seem independent of persons. The ultimate effect is to move us beyond ourselves.

And it is, of course, history - that "peculiar call of the spirit," as G. M. Trevelyan termed it - that holds the key to the accomplishment. When religious commitments collapse, science deflates itself, and political illusions are universally seen through, history may well be the only call anybody's spirit can heed, the only resource left for slaking our hunger for seriousness. But what an immense resource! This is what one feels, engrossed in Mr. Boyle's evocations of riot, insurrection and the days between. "World's End" is a smashing good book, the peak achievement thus far in a career that seems now to have no clear limits.