Josephine Hart's Damage (New York: Open Road, 1991) is a novel of astonishing emotional power. Short enough to be read in a single day's confinement to an airplane traveling from Boston to Alaska (the circumstances in which I happened to consume it), it also lends itself well to these cramped conditions-- one's trapped existence on the plane making one feel all the more keenly the doomed claustrophobia of the protagonist, imprisoned by his own deceptions.
In outline an account of a politician who destroys his family and career through an affair with his son's fiancée, this is really not a story about public scandal, but of private disgrace. The fact that the main character happens to be a Tory MP is perhaps conditioned less by any essential role this plays in the novel's plot than the author's own connections to high Conservative circles.
Hart was married to one of the Brothers Saatchi -- those quintessential '80s archetypes who seem to turn up in every account of the art world, politics, and advertising of the era. Top-echelon dealers in painting and sculpture, and experts too in the dark arts of selling things (even things people shouldn't want), Saatchi & Saatchi are perhaps most notorious for having designed the campaign materials that won Margaret Thatcher the general election, the first time around.
For someone so close to the seat of Conservative power, Hart takes a surprisingly jaundiced view of Tory politics. She has a Conservative MP declare early on in the novel, speaking to the protagonist -- his son-in-law -- "That's where Labour makes its big mistake, old boy. They know it's all about economics really. They confuse that with a better economic deal for everyone."
I am reminded of the fact that the original House of Cards -- about a Conservative Prime Minister who lies and cheats his way to the top, ultimately blackmailing and murdering those who stand in his way -- was written by a former member of Thatcher's inner circle.
Perhaps this is just a thing about British Tory politics -- they view themselves and one another as devious slime-balls. I can't tell if I find it a refreshing dose of candor and self-reflexivity on the part of British conservatives, or just the last and cruelest twist of the aristocratic knife-blade, from people who view it all as a shadow-play they put on for the benefit of the proles. I have the same disconcerting feeling in the face of it as I do when contemplating the fact that the husband of Trump goonette Kellyanne Conway claims to openly despise his wife's boss. You think: how do these people actually justify their lives and careers to themselves, and to each other?
Of course, the protagonist of Damage has vague aspirations to become a different sort of Conservative MP than his father-in-law was. He wants to be a Tory with principles. Something of Hart's own political views are perhaps on display in those brief sections.
Yet he ultimately pursues this version of himself with the same cynical dispassion and sense of unreality that he does everything else in his life -- until the love affair that destroys him and his family, which he regards as the first true thing that has ever happened to him.
Hart's depiction of her protagonist's desperate emotional entanglement with his son's fiancée Anna -- and its surrounding devastation -- is, to be sure, not without passages that elicit a smirk. To attempt a tale in the key of high drama -- which Hart most courageously does -- is to deny oneself the easy path out of humor and parody. Instead, the author has to maintain such a firm mastery of event and character that the state of genuine emotional tension holds -- and never erupts into absurd melodrama that makes the reader burst out laughing in amused relief.
For the most part, over a two hundred-page run, Hart achieves this effect extraordinarily well. One reads the book breathlessly, believing every word.
There are other moments in Hart's tale, however, where she seems to be losing this grip -- in part because one of the characters is preposterously tightening his. Our narrator/protagonist in one scene, while watching his son and the fiancée make eyes at each other, predictably shatters the glass in his hand, without noticing how tight his grasp has become. On at least two occasions, likewise, he vomits out of sheer distress. However much these may be favored devices among the movie and soap opera writers, when has any of them ever happened in real life-- even once?
The sad thing is that these stage-managed moments are wholly unnecessary. Hart has already established scenes of intrinsic emotional drama. Throwing in the unconsciously crushed wine glass in one's hand contributes nothing. It's such an outrageously common cliché, in fact, that I was sure it must have been catalogued by now on TV Tropes; and sure enough -- there it is -- though they haven't yet noted the instance in Hart's novel as an example. Perhaps I should add it.
I thought at first (spoilers) that when the son goes over the staircase in a climatic scene and plunges to his death, it was going to be another one of these cases of authorial over-reach. Come on, I thought. We have just had the moment when the son glimpses his father in flagrante with his own fiancée. The jig is up, the pretense shattered -- surely we have enough tragedy and pain that will result from this to keep us going for the rest of the novel. Do we really need to have son Martyn tipping backward over the bannister and breaking his neck on the pavement as well? Seriously, when has anyone ever died from something like that?
I think this -- but then, Martyn's death is what leads to one of the most intense and genuinely heart-rending portrayals of the guilt and grief of a parent who has lost a child -- in part through their own selfishness -- that I have ever read. So, like much else in this novel, I conclude at last -- well, goddammit, it works!
The flaws in the book are particularly forgivable as they are common symptoms of first-novel syndrome. There are the overwrought theatrics, the unnecessary props, and most of all the fact that the only really interesting and living and plausible character in the book is our first-person narrator. This is surely a typical failing among starting novelists -- lord knows I've committed it, on those occasions when I've tried my hand at fiction. Becoming so entranced by the voice in which they are writing -- which seems so like themselves and yet has a distance that allows them to reach a depth of candor they could never do on their own -- the author has little energy left over to breathe life into the people that surround this solipsistic protagonist.
We have a novelist character show up in one scene in the novel, for instance, who observes the protagonist crushing the wine glass. He accurately diagnoses his problem, warns him off his relationship with Anna in no uncertain terms, and then delivers lines like the following, by way of closing: "I carry more secrets than you can imagine. We will almost certainly meet again. From my demeanor you will doubt we ever had this conversation."
As Mark Hamill once said, on being handed a page of George Lucas dialogue: "Who talks like this?"
Anna, likewise-- the object of Martyn's and the protagonist's shared obsession -- is nothing close to a recognizable human being. She is a walking problem -- a sort of "MacGuffin" whose function in the plot is just to be utterly and abjectly desired, to an extent that leads to crisis -- the reasons why don't particularly matter. The fact that she herself would want to be entangled with any of the mooning and desolate male characters in this book is never adequately explained.
It is a kind of role for a female character that one expects to find in a Roth or Mailer novel, say, but is somewhat surprising here. This is part of what leads me to think this dynamic stems not only from male chauvinism, but from a besetting temptation for novelists more generally -- the desire to write a book with only a single character, the narrator -- because the great appeal of this character is that they can speak for one's shadow-self -- and to forget that life in fact involves many characters, acting independently and for their own reasons, and this is what lends it its true drama.
What redeems Hart's novel from these failings is the concomitant advantages of the first-novel syndrome: the cold clearness of the voice of that single protagonist, and the interest inherent in his steely outlook on the world. Hart's prose, while writing inner monologue, often displays a kind of aphoristic genius. An example plucked at random from an early chapter: "Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to slaughter." Hart ultimately has a capacity for emotional suspense and devastating observation of the human condition that makes Damage one of the most live and riveting books one could hope to hold in one's hands during a six-hour plane ride -- or in any other condition of life.
This does not make it sui generis, however, and one feels one can detect certain literary echoes in reading it, and wonders if they were intended. As a tale of romantic and erotic obsession, and the destruction it brings, it has many traits in common with Ernesto Sabato's El Túnel -- not least of them the narrator's existential angst, and the mixture of violent passion and a sort of weary compassion with which he describes the world. The uneasy combination of cruelty and humanism lends to both novels a shared emotional and moral hue.
The oedipal love triangle, meanwhile -- with father and son falling in love with the same woman (though not anyone's mother, in both cases) -- seems to owe something to the Carl Dreyer film Vredens Dag (1943)-- except here it is the father who betrays the son, rather than the other way around.
It seems an unlikely influence on the novel, but the resonances are striking. Even the names of the characters are similar. Anne--> Anna. The son is Martin in the film; the son is Martyn here. The two works also share the climactic death by staircase -- though, in the Dreyer film, it's the father who collapses and dies immediately after learning the truth about Anne, while rushing up the steps crying "Martin, Martin!", rather than the son walking backward and slipping to his doom.
On the other hand, the name Martyn also appears to have been chosen by Hart for the purposes of servicing a strange and needless pun -- another device that tries to emphasize what is already obvious. Anna's brother, with whom she had an incestuous entanglement before he killed himself, is named "Aston." Martyn -- who, it is eventually revealed, physically resembles the brother (*gasp!*) -- is her way of reenacting the tragedy. (*Oh my!*) And while I should have gotten the joke -- Aston and Martyn -- I admit I was too thick to notice it until a character heavy-handedly points it out, toward the end of the book.
Again, the book does not have a surfeit of subtlety, for all its many other virtues.
If only Hart had realized that we don't need devices and props and puns, because her writing is so in command. There are passages in this book like a cold blade, and this is more than enough to carry us through in a state of rapt attention. "Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision -- the ability to select the elements vital to survival while ignoring the great truths," she writes. Or this, on the subject of funerals: "They are [...] the ultimate letting-go. For which of us would willingly join the body in its coffin in earth or fire or water? Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge is the beginning of our cruelty and our survival." Yes! Give me more of this sort of thing! Leave the portentous advice-spewing novelist characters to one side.
A final splotch to point out, in an otherwise fine novel:
The more one reads in the less familiar publishing houses, I am discovering, the more it becomes clear that a book entirely unblemished by typographical errors is actually a rare and blessed thing. The world's copy editors seem to be asleep at the switch. I noticed a striking number of these mistakes in this edition -- published in 1991 by Open Road -- and it is really not that long of a book -- one thinks someone could have noticed these, before it went to press.
Since I hope for many future editions of this book -- and think it deserves them -- I point out the following corrections to editors-to-come, free of charge:
p. 13: "My Wifeswife." Huh? No, the wife doesn't have a wife. This is just a bizarre typo.
p. 27: "singificant"
p. 57 "Well, you've very busy" Folks, we need either a "been or a "you're"
p. 67 "I've very grateful" We seem to have a problem with "'ve"s
p. 127 "beside table." I suppose such a thing as a "beside table" could exist, but I've never heard of it, and it looks very much like a typo.
p. 141 "It's over'" -- missing initial inverted comma.
p. 163 "And syou." Come one! Surely that one would have been hard to miss.
And now adieu, adieu, to syou and syou and syou.
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