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'Ghost Lights' takes inward glance
By Josh Emmons |
November 25, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
AT a glance, 2011 seems to have been a banner year for the Internal Revenue Service in fiction. It began with "The Pale King," David Foster Wallace's orphaned novel about employees at an Illinois branch of the organization. Now comes Lydia Millet's "Ghost Lights," in which an IRS agent goes looking for his wife's missing boss in a Central American jungle. If Philip Roth puts out the story of a retired tax collector's amour with a young libertarian by January, we might look for fireworks over the Treasury Department.
What, if anything, does all this literary attention mean? That fiction has run out of interesting subjects? That taxes really are as inescapable as death? Possibly, although a closer look should reassure us, because it reveals that in Wallace the animating (sic) theme is actually boredom, and in Millet the hero's occupation is incidental to the book's primary question: whether recognizing that your life has become a sleepwalk allows you then to wake up.
The hero of "Ghost Lights" is named Hal (the connections with Wallace end here, or once it's noted that Hal lives in Southern California, as Wallace did). He's married, in his early 50s and the father of a 20-something daughter. He would be happy, except that his wife is cheating on him, and his daughter is paraplegic as the result of an accident for which he blames himself. Also, he has for some time been in limbo, bored by his colleagues, by Los Angeles and by himself.
At a dinner party one night his wife, Susan, announces her plan to hire a search-and-rescue team to find her boss, T., the protagonist of Millet's 2008 novel, "How the Dead Dream." T. recently went down to Belize to inspect one of his properties, where he mysteriously disappeared. Drunkenly, stung by the glimpse he caught of Susan and her lover that afternoon, Hal volunteers for the job. He's a career office worker and unqualified to find or save anyone lost in a foreign country, but he wants to respond to the adultery forcefully, manfully, and he waves off his wife's faint objections.
And so the novel's action moves south into the murky geography and politics of Central America in the early 1990s. The aftershocks of nearby civil wars, postcolonial politics and environmental degradation are still being felt, and it's grim: "Here and there a bedraggled brown palm tree struggled to look exotic." After checking into the hotel where T. had stayed, Hal prepares for an upriver hunt that will take him far from civilization. The good news is that "Ghost Lights" belongs to the revelatory-heartbreaking camp. It powerfully examines how self-acceptance and self-castigation coexist in the same person and how easily one attitude can displace the other.
Millet is operating at a high level in "Ghost Lights," and the book provides a fascinating glimpse of what can happen when the self's rhythms and certainties are shaken.
What, if anything, does all this literary attention mean? That fiction has run out of interesting subjects? That taxes really are as inescapable as death? Possibly, although a closer look should reassure us, because it reveals that in Wallace the animating (sic) theme is actually boredom, and in Millet the hero's occupation is incidental to the book's primary question: whether recognizing that your life has become a sleepwalk allows you then to wake up.
The hero of "Ghost Lights" is named Hal (the connections with Wallace end here, or once it's noted that Hal lives in Southern California, as Wallace did). He's married, in his early 50s and the father of a 20-something daughter. He would be happy, except that his wife is cheating on him, and his daughter is paraplegic as the result of an accident for which he blames himself. Also, he has for some time been in limbo, bored by his colleagues, by Los Angeles and by himself.
At a dinner party one night his wife, Susan, announces her plan to hire a search-and-rescue team to find her boss, T., the protagonist of Millet's 2008 novel, "How the Dead Dream." T. recently went down to Belize to inspect one of his properties, where he mysteriously disappeared. Drunkenly, stung by the glimpse he caught of Susan and her lover that afternoon, Hal volunteers for the job. He's a career office worker and unqualified to find or save anyone lost in a foreign country, but he wants to respond to the adultery forcefully, manfully, and he waves off his wife's faint objections.
And so the novel's action moves south into the murky geography and politics of Central America in the early 1990s. The aftershocks of nearby civil wars, postcolonial politics and environmental degradation are still being felt, and it's grim: "Here and there a bedraggled brown palm tree struggled to look exotic." After checking into the hotel where T. had stayed, Hal prepares for an upriver hunt that will take him far from civilization. The good news is that "Ghost Lights" belongs to the revelatory-heartbreaking camp. It powerfully examines how self-acceptance and self-castigation coexist in the same person and how easily one attitude can displace the other.
Millet is operating at a high level in "Ghost Lights," and the book provides a fascinating glimpse of what can happen when the self's rhythms and certainties are shaken.
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