Something Red, by Jennifer GilmoreScribner, 307 pages, $25
As she did in her first novel, "Golden Country" (a New York Times Notable Book for 2006 ), Jennifer Gilmore tries in "Something Red" to capture some important history by illuminating an era through a multi-generational family story. In Washington, D.C., in 1979, what goes on in the home of the Goldsteins is no less chaotic than what is going on in the outside political landscape of global hostage taking, famine in the third world, and grain embargos and Olympic boycotts imposed on Russia by U.S. president Jimmy Carter. The Cold War that was thought to be waning, in the aftermath of Vietnam, seems to be rekindled by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And the American president reacts without thinking carefully about the negative impact of his anti-Russian policies: the denial of food to innocents, and the ruination of many an American farmer.
Dennis Goldstein, 45, who works as a trade negotiator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, confronts these problems in a genuinely moral way. He is also worried about their implications for his job, which involves traveling often to Moscow to seal commercial agreements. But he spends most of his time harking back to the 1960s and the man he almost once was. He has kept his movement T-shirts and his folk-music posters, and his beat-up old Volkswagen, but because by 1963 he was in a suburb just on the edge of D.C., with two kids and about to turn 30, he now resents having missed the time when everyone was "f---ing for peace and running naked in the streets."
Sharon Goldstein, 42, also yearns for a past she only superficially experienced, including the movement for civil rights and a feminism she understands only imperfectly. She experiments with consciousness-raising in an organization called LEAP (as in "leap from here to exactly where you want to be" ), and through infidelity and work as a private caterer to Washington's elite. Vanessa, their 16-year-old daughter, whose sullenness and quirky unpredictability terrify her mother, and disappoint and puzzle her father, wants "a galaxy into an interior life," the kind promised by the darker songs of Joni Mitchell -- an interior life that ached, and celebrated that ache. But after giving up drugs and the very new experience of sex (which leaves her asking, Is that all there is? ), she, much too suddenly to seem real, feels that her "longing" has been "burned away like fog." Instead of desire, Vanessa now seeks obliteration of the self, wants only "little-girl memories," and slips into bulimia (a word not mentioned by Gilmore ), the reasons for which are not really clear to the reader and are "furtive" even to Vanessa.
Son Benjamin, after living the glamorous life of a jock in high school, with its male bonding and girls waiting on the sidelines to be bedded post-game, imagines a future in sports. But in a completely unpersuasive section of the book (and there are many ), Ben is moved by his radical, ex-Communist grandfather Sigmund to give up athletics and devote himself to activism and the life of the mind at Brandeis University. The school is depicted by Gilmore as little more than an uninhibited hippie commune, featuring a professor who is an irresponsible, radical buffoon teaching a year-long course called "American Protest!" The world history class, by contrast, gets all of one semester.
What makes a legacy?
Everyone experiences a sense of purposelessness. Sharon sleeps with, but has no feeling for, a guitar-playing drifter she meets at LEAP. Dennis sort of believes he has continued his nominally radical youth by working for the USDA for the greater good. After all, what's more "good" or "socialist" than feeding the hungry, a shaky Dennis repeatedly asks himself. He has moments of pride over his "risky" decision to forgo the corporate world and its material rewards, but then wonders whether he has cheated his family by doing so. And then he wonders whether fancy cars, a big house and a swimming pool really constitute any kind of legacy. But if not, Dennis thinks, then what does? His father's socialism? "Bullshit." It had become the Stalinism his father Sigmund himself railed against. Jewishness then? With faulty memories of a Lower East Side crowded with Jews, but not enough of them willing then to come together for religious services, Dennis concludes here too: "Bullshit."
Even though Sharon's parents, Herbert and Helen Weissman, have become more ritually observant since retiring, their daughter, like her husband, rejects Judaism. For her the synagogue does not serve as a vehicle for "self-actualization" or "surrender," words she seems to think mean the same thing. But when all else seems lost -- the promise of her marriage, her connection to her children (significantly Oedipal in Benjamin's case ) -- she at moments misses the wail of the shofar and is positively gripped by the thought of a congregation rapt in prayer.
Losing oneself to something (or to nothingness in Vanessa's case ) is a theme that runs throughout the book. But except for rare moments, in memories of things that may or may not have been experienced, love -- selfless, compassionate, caring love -- is rarely expressed. Instead, Ben and Vanessa lose themselves in the songs of the times, agreeing that "You need to say no to everything but music." Punk, preferably. Listening and dancing in large crowds (that is, bodies that bang against one another ) to ELO, Styx, Insect Surfers, the Clash, Buzzcocks, Bad Brains (get out your old editions of Rolling Stone! ), and especially the Grateful Dead, makes for transcendence, moments when "love and music and fate and beauty all meet up ... Utopia!"
Vanessa wants everyone to be a "single entity," like all those nesting dolls her Russian grandmother Tatiana gave her, all "digested by the biggest one. Whole." And Ben at a Dead concert, even before the music starts, is "instantly" drawn to the "sense of community." He thinks he is changed by this -- "completely, utterly, powerfully." Of course, all of this mind alteration is aided by acid, lots of it. And much continues to change, with a rapidity that seems incredible, even for adolescents. When Ben, for example, finds himself leading a campus protest against the boycott of the winter Olympics in Russia, he, like his father, mistakenly thinks he is following in Grandpa Sigmund's footsteps and is finally "discovering what it really meant to be alive." His mother also comes alive, her own youthful dreams fulfilled through her son, when she hears that Ben is at a rally, and this before she even has an inkling of what the rally is about.
Unshakable weight of dreams
Unfortunately, at its heart, the book does not know what it's about or where it is heading any more than the characters do. Most of it concerns either grown-ups stunted by the unshakable weight of past dreams or young adults who cannot or
will not emerge from adolescence. Gilmore captures some of the poignancy and terror of growing up, especially in the modern world, and she gets at some of the foolishness, naivete and faddism of youth, but she is weaker on the dead (and sometimes deadly ) seriousness of the compulsive and single-minded search for "true meaning," by any generation. Gilmore knows that something about the second half of the 20th century really "stinks." Some variation of that word appears on nearly every other page, describing the odor of burnt flesh and the smell of vomit, the stench of old beer and the reek of men's sweaty balls. Perhaps Jennifer Gilmore wants to suggest that the whole culture is redolent of rot. But why has everything gone so wretchedly wrong? Gilmore, even with her creative imagination, does not provoke us into enough reflection.
Ultimately the novel is made of dorm-room stuff and ought to have been called "Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll," or "In Search of Lost Time." But Gilmore is no Ian Dury or Marcel Proust. One verse of Dury's song (unmentioned by Gilmore ), released in the late '70s, when "Something Red" takes place, implores young people to choose an alternative lifestyle over the stultification of middle-class suburbia: "Here's a little piece of advice / You're quite welcome it is free / Don't do nothing that is cut price / You know what that'll make you be / They will try their tricky device / Trap you with the ordinary / Get your teeth into a small slice / The cake of liberty."
Such advice is reflected, too, in Grandpa Sigmund's injunction -- "live your lives taking chances. Commit yourself in your hopes and dreams." And Gilmore's chief protagonists, those in their 40s and those still in their teens, do take chances, but rarely do these risks have any connection to genuine commitment. The Goldsteins also ask important questions: What did in fact happen to me over the years, and what did I have to do with it? Who am I now? Who will I be in the future? Do I really want to grow up? Can it be true that who I was in the past isn't who I think I was? How did we get here, so separate -- from each other, from our children? I want to do the right thing, but what is it?
These uncertainties are often the stuff of good literature, but the characters in "Something Red," unfortunately, are caricatures, and they ask their questions ad nauseam. In far too many places, it is difficult to know whether Gilmore is writing parody or is trying to say something meaningful, or at least authentic.
Either way, no one in this story seems to have anything to latch onto except perhaps two tabs of LSD for the younger generation, or four martinis for the older. Benjamin, for example, long before college, and very much like his parents, had rejected the faith his anti-Communist Grandpa Herbert apparently found in synagogue once a week -- in "that heavy story, stored in scrolls." But Grandpa Sigmund's leftist faith in working people, in every protest song, speech, man and movement, also eludes Benjamin, or so he comes to believe. In any case, his attempt to build an identity by reliving the '30s, or the '60s, does little more than illustrate the aptness of Marx's aphorism: History repeats itself -- the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Yet memories, whether distorted, selective or partial, abide. Indeed, the departed spirit of Jewish radicalism, like the ghosts of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the images of their abandoned children, hover over, as well as pockmark, this novel. And Dennis, after the American imposition of the grain embargo and the use of food as a political weapon against the Soviet Union, no longer believes he is "doing good" at the USDA.
When he finally feels himself to be in deep moral and existential trouble, Dennis, who has jettisoned any vestige of Judaism, does think of praying, and even longs for those hard pews of the synagogue where someone up front, "knowledgeable and good and righteous" will interpret the past for him so that the present will have more meaning. With such a "solution" unavailable to him, however, Dennis desperately needs a "real protest," one with a link to his father and the leftist family tradition. That Dennis, and Sharon, too, who were once interested in civil rights and social justice activism, do not turn their attention to (or even mention ) the distressed D.C. black ghetto practically next door to them is inconceivable. And that this failure goes unexplained by Gilmore is a giant-sized lacuna in this novel.
Dennis does find a "cause," however, even if obliquely and only semi-wittingly, one closer to his mother's homeland. To say more would be giving too much away, but suffice it here to quote Dennis, who, at the end of this tedious novel, which does not know where it has been, says, "Where are we supposed to go from here?"
Gerald Sorin, Distinguished Professor of Jewish and American Studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz, is the author of many books, including "Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent." He is currently working on a biography of the Jewish American Communist writer Howard Fast.
Haaretz Books, April 2010,
