What We Lost: Based on a True Story

Land and language

Dale Peck has made a name for himself — not simply for the cruelty of his reviews, but for the anger that prompted them and the anger that responded to him. His description of Rick Moody as the "worst writer of his generation" began a debate that had less to do with Moody than with the practice of reviewing. It turned into the kind of row that matters a great deal to a very few people — a shop-floor incident in which none of the players distinguished themselves for their sense of proportion. It may in fact be impossible to keep a sense of proportion about literary reviews: the dimensions are too small. And Peck played his part in raising the stakes: "the 'disinterested' book critic", he wrote in the Guardian, "is a relatively recent invention . . . . If you considered yourself a serious practitioner of any genre, you were expected to weigh in on the aesthetic concerns of the day". Peck has serious intentions; in addition to reviewing, he has written three novels, and this heavily quiet memoir of his father's childhood — which is worth looking at in the light of those "aesthetic concerns". "The question is", he once asked, "how can I begin to make people look at my own books in the context I've created?". The failings of fiction, always numerous, strike him as worse than merely literary. They involve a kind of moral shirking.

It is, perhaps, natural to be suspicious of Peck's motives. Righteousness on its own may be an honourable sentiment. Even ambition has its candour; but when the two serve each other from the same dish, we hesitate to see both appetites satisfied at once. Even so, the idea that artistic failures have their roots in moral shortcomings deserves a close examination. Not all literary flaws are flaws of craft. Writers sometimes flinch from writing the book they should write, because they get caught up in writing the book they can sell: a fault for which editors, agents, publishers, but above all readers deserve their share of the blame.

Peck protests that current literary "tradition has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything". This is the kind of line that seems plausible to someone in the heat of a historical argument, and proves less persuasive in considering particular books. He wants more "prophecy" from literature, though he tends to complain when he gets it (in regard to The Black Veil by Rick Moody, 2002). A common enough predicament: people who feel the need of some kind of faith often argue with its obvious unreason when they find it presented to them. "I can think of no more urgent reason to write books today than out of an overwhelming sense of despair at the state of the world", Peck declared; and elsewhere contested: "make no mistake — every writer wants to save the world. Or, more accurately: art, like political activism, seeks to make itself unnecessary". But writers, like political activists, learn to enjoy the frustrations of the job; in fact, something like failure, and the camaraderie of it, is often what draws them to the task in the first place. Which is almost like saying, all art can do is reflect on its impotence. But artists should have other interests than potency. "Who would write, who had anything better to do?" Byron once wrote. A question that offers the following answer: if you have anything better to do, don't write.

What We Lost: The story of my father's childhood is not quite a novel, nor in Peck's words, is it the novel's "grown-too-big-for-its britches sibling, the memoir"; it is something in between, a son's attempt to tell the story of his father's life through the "old man's eyes". Peck has called it "a book impossible to review badly", by which I think he means that it makes few claims and satisfies them perfectly. The protagonist, Dale Peck Sr, is referred to mostly as "the boy". "The boy" grew up in an overcrowded house in Long Island, the first child of his mother's third and his father's second marriage, surrounded by the subsequent children and the leftovers from their previous unions. His father, Lloyd Peck, is an embittered alcoholic, who squanders most of his pay day by nightfall in the town's bars. His mother is a brutal, squat, grasping woman who hates her son. Part One opens as Lloyd kidnaps Dale to prevent his "one and only boy" from being sent to military school; he drops the thirteen-year-old off at his Uncle Wallace's farm in upstate New York and returns home. Dale is forced to adjust to the austere loneliness of rural life — and learns in the end to appreciate the change: an extended metaphor perhaps for the sort of writing that Peck (Junior, that is, the author) wishes to champion, in which natural simplicity triumphs over the more urban squalor of the boy's Long Island home.

Wallace is a disciplined and dignified figure, who "speaks less than any man he has ever met, and the boy has set himself the challenge of seeing how long he can save him from the need to use words" — a difficult, though useful undertaking for any would-be writer regarding his characters. Under Wallace's patient eye Dale acquires the values of hard work and accountability, and a taste for the pleasure to be got from simple and useful relations with the natural world. Peck has a fine feel for what William Carlos Williams might call the thinginess of the farm; though many of the insights into his father's mind suggest rather the growth of the writer's own: "Here and there a constellation of white leaves marks a dogwood, and earlier in the year he'd seen a lone redbud, glowing in the shadows like a barber's pole. It takes him just as much time to tick off these names as it does to run past his uncle's land, and something seems fitting in that, as if a true correspondence existed between the land and language, the living trees and the forest taking root in his head". Wallace, estranged from his only daughter, becomes deeply attached to his nephew and treats him as his own son. When Dale's mother shows up a year later to take the boy home, he feels torn between the claims of his new happiness and the supplications of his countless siblings and half-siblings.

Wallace offers Dale Sr a full inheritance if he stays, and threatens to cut him off entirely if he doesn't. The choice Dale makes determines the course of his life — and by implication, the life of his son, the writer, Dale Jr — and eventually leads him to take his first drink from one of the bottles of cough syrup he steals from the glove compartment of his father's car.

Part Two describes a road trip the writer takes with his father ("the boy" from Part One) on the way to a family reunion. They stop off at the town where Dale Sr spent that year of his long-ago childhood. They ask after Donnie, a farm labourer the father knew in his youth. It turns out he still lends a hand with some of the "ladies", as milking cows are known; and, as they wait to see him, the daughter of the current farmers, Gloria Hull, offers the Pecks lunch. This episode is told, for no particular reason, from Gloria's point of view: she has her own worries, an upcoming marriage, a mother being tested for cancer, but her kindness allows the father and son a rare afternoon of easy intimacy — for which reason, presumably, the younger one partly dedicated the book to her. If this episode seems tacked on, that is because it is: the story has the awkward shape of a child's piece of pottery, on which excess clay has been stuck to balance what did not grow into its form organically. Uncle Wallace once told Peck pere that his father's first marriage produced another son named Dale, and "the boy" spends much of his childhood feeling like an imitation. The memoir ends with the brothers' embrace: a gesture Peck is careful to underplay. "It's good to finally meet you brother, he says, his voice light, his words meaning no more than what they mean." Yet in spite of such scrupulously weighted sentiments, the book has not quite got the measure of its subject matter. In the first place, the prose suffers from the breathlessness of present-tense narrative. Everything is always on the verge of becoming the past, possibilities and choices radiating in both directions. But this suggestiveness does allow Peck to dispense with grander plot trajectories, which is no doubt his purpose. He is selling ordinary life and deserves credit for keeping the story small.

Not much happens, and, to compensate, Peck presents us with the richness of the perceived world: the "force field" odour of the father's alcoholic breath; the alabaster beauty of fresh milk; the subtle adjustments of the seasons. Paragraphs are heavy with similes, many of them splendid: "the outgrown boots squeeze his feet like a huckster's handshake". But after a while such density suggests only the weight of the writing, not of the world. Immediacy, which the prose attempts to convey, is different from intensity; and "the boy" is never quite careless enough, bored enough, with his perceptions to be utterly believable. What We Lost would be more plausible as a "Year in the Life". Dale Peck has chosen to trace his filial inheritance to a single decision, but decisions matter less than the characters who make them, and we see too little into these. If Peck wants to convince his readers otherwise, he needs to offer more of the history at the heart of the book — his own relations with his father — but the heart of the book is absent. Even so, something hard and nourishing survives these failures. The book does have the virtue of memoir, the high mineral content of something true. It is hard to believe that What We Lost would satisfy its author's critical self; but then again, the criticism would hardly satisfy the novelist.

Benjamin Markovits's first novel, The Syme Paper, was published in the UK earlier this year.

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