“Martens…Yes, sir…they’re of the weasel variety…well, in the winter they climb into your car when you get home, to capture the warmth, you see, and when they find wires they start to chew on them…of course we can fix the wires, but we can’t fix the martens. You’re gonna have to do something about the martens if you don’t want this to happen again. Uh-huh…uh-huh…okay.”
Outside it was snowing again. This is Germany in the winter: a gray blanket that covers the skies for months at a time, the temperature hovering between snow banks and wet brown shit slush tugging at your tires while you drive, the ground never dry. All of our cars are falling apart because of the ice and the snow and the salt. And the martens.
At the counter, the manager had finished his phone call, recommending mothballs or dog hair. He said he didn’t know exactly how to keep either of those in your engine without them burning, but with cars falling apart all around him, he had to let this one go. His attention settled on me and I explained my problems.
“Well, first, she needs an oil change and a new oil pressure switch. She’s leaking oil from there. “ He nods.
“Then, the hood-stand is rattling in the engine, or at least I think it is. The clasp broke a while ago, so I need a new clasp no matter what. Probably just vibrations. When I shift from second to third and simultaneously think of all the loves that I have let pass in my life, all the failures, it’s just this strange rattle. This seems to happen especially when I’m no longer feeding it gas—do you think that could be a metaphor or a message from car?”
The manager, his beard twitching, admits that he isn’t quite sure. He makes a note.
“Oh, and I’m pretty sure the brake discs are warped…awful shudders when I brake all of a sudden. But I’ve noticed that comes and goes, so perhaps not. It’s like when you see a pair of eyes, vibrant and brimming with their own universe, and you are suddenly reminded of that night when you stared into a different set as you sat next to this girl who you were sure was going to define your life for, well, your life, and the way her mouth opened in a half-moon of anticipation for all the words you were saying. And I knew, I mean, I fucking knew, that this moment, this connection, was special. That I was a bird flying and suddenly realizing the air that held me aloft was all around me, was everywhere, that I existed in its space just as it moved through my mine. Hell, I finally knew air was air, that this world was flowing and always moving, that at my most stationary I was still coursing through the entire world. And then, a year later, the shuddering just stopped and everything was smooth and technically correct, perfect, as-advertised, except you had that memory of the shudder and you could only wait for it to happen again every time you drove, the anticipation driving you mad like one of Poe’s murdering characters, the idea of heartbeats, of your brakes failing, fear circulating in your bloodstream. How can you operate a car with those memories?”
The manager asked me how often it had happened.
“With the girl, five to six times a day. With the brakes, it seems to be when the car’s sat for awhile—driving it more smoothes it out.”
He pencils me in for a week from Thursday, hesitates, and asks if there is anything else.
“What’s your name?”
“Andy.”
“No shit—that’s my name, too! Man! Absolutely wild! Say, have you ever wondered about all the people in the world with your name, all those who wear it more proudly than you do and those who it let it fall about them like a tattered cloak, torn and soaked in mud? Don’t you hate all those people? If anyone you know comes in contact with that person, they immediately think, ‘Oh, you’re Andy, too?’ and begin to compare. The person with the strongest personality wins, even if they’re the biggest waste of a perfectly good name. Then you’re always in this cage-match to the death in that mutual acquaintances mind, always fighting for premier rights to that single word. What a waste of energy and organization. I sometimes wonder if she knew another Andy, if I couldn’t beat that Andy in her mind, if being the second-tier Andy switched on something in her mind and I kept losing this American Gladiator style pugel-stick fight with some shadowy doppelganger I hadn’t even met. Oh, sorry. This isn’t to say I think you shouldn’t have your name, of course—it’s just a thought.”
He says there is no offense. The phone rings and he glances at the clock. He says he has to take this. We can talk next week.
“Well, thanks for the help, Andy—I’ll see you next Thursday.”
At what point does a real story told in a fictional manner become subject to the rules of narrative? One would think that if the story is good enough to be fictionalized and told, it can only be for two reasons:
1) The story already exists in this paradigm. It meets the needs of character development, of plot and climax, and ultimately becomes something more than fictional gestalt: its actual reality brings it a sense of gravitas that takes the story beyond the capabilities of pure fiction.
2) The story brings with it a moral necessity to be told. Example: What Is the What, by Dave Eggers, following the painful life and growth of Valentino Achak Deng. Being one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, his story is a story that needs to be told.
The introduction, by Deng, contained this thought which struck me as unusual only after I finished the novel:
Because I was not a writer, I asked Mary to put me in touch with an author to write my biography […] It should be known to the readers that I was very young when some of the events in the book took place, as as a result we simply had to pronounce What Is the What a novel. I could not, for example, recount some conversations that took place seventeen years ago…
(emphasis mine)
The moral necessity exists for this story to be told, but after 300 pages, I found myself dragging through what remained of the book. The first part of the book, the part where it is admitted that the most fictionalization occurred, was the part where Eggers shone as an writer. But where it became less fiction and more biography is the part where I began to wonder about the struggle Eggers must have faced between acting as a biographer and as a novelist.
What I wonder (and have wondered often with other novels based upon fact), then, is this: where is the catharsis, where is the ultimate goal of fiction and tragedy left to go in a story that must be rooted in fact with its conclusions (if we choose to classify the novel as a tragedy—Deng’s life since has been one of only success and wonder in the real world since this story has been told)? We, as the reader, cannot hope that the “characters” as we have come to have known them will suffer a tragic fate for our own growth and satisfaction without violating the story’s implicit moral mandate—in fact, we seem to cheapen our own humanity by doing so.
With the seeming failure of this novel, we suffer in a different and cheap way, wishing for life written poetically and with compassion, to teach us lessons other than the same we can read in a well-written article chronicling those with whom we share this torn and ragged earth. At the end of the novel, I yearned for the same lyricism and beauty that shone through in Eggers’ early writing, and knew it would not be found. The story was no longer in any terms his to tell. Yet, a strictly historical and sympathetic book, Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa, accomplished more in terms of stoking my own reaction to the stories of the Africa’s painful self-realization than this partial-fictionalization that I was presented.
Has this then failed as a novel, or have I simply failed to answer the novel’s implicit question, to create a union of the an imagined and a real world that I simply cannot accept as whole?
