Quote: Fiction is no privileged shore unto which the writer is invited as a respite for contemplation, no haven for making sense of things. If it’s worth the trip, it plunges the writer in media res, usually without a life preserver, and challenges him to find meaning and closure in the swirling chaos around him, maintaining the thrill of conflict at the same time. The writer, if he wants to create good prose, has to rub his face in the account and take an unhygienic swim in the murky depths of the unconscious. There is, as well, a Catch-22 that characterizes all fiction: if the material is life-shattering enough, personal enough, to warrant the gargantuan efforts to portray it, how can the writer pull himself together enough to do so, without losing touch with the trauma at its crux?
The most astonishing novels are those that portray experiences that are normally too overwhelming to talk about. Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream comes to mind, as do some successful novels about the horror of war. Injecting humor into the mix may be crucial if the reader is to be given a way to hold on. White, Christian, a first novel by Christopher Stoddard, successfully faces such challenges.
Christian White, the fragile but somehow dynamic protagonist of the novel, is about to go under when the story begins. Young, attractive, droll, addicted, frightened, cynical, homosexual, infantile, campy, sexually compulsive, he’s a poster boy for a long list of contemporary dysfunctions. He’s a survivor of sexual abuse who finds no intimacy in sex, a boy with a creative mind who can’t garner the discipline and energy to develop it. Certainly, his lover, a drug dealer, is no key out of the mess he is in. Nor is his roommate, a leftover from the past whom he handles with contempt and is paid back in kind. His shop-lifting, fashion-victim friends are far from charismatic. His witty, sensible sister is someone he can count on, but getting him back on his feet would get her too far in over her head.
Few novels begin with the protagonist having painted himself into such a corner; still less challenge the reader to deal with such a plethora of alienating personality traits and disturbing, humiliating scenes. Yet there is undeniably something “adorable” about Christian, even as his involvement in drugs pulls him downward into a nearly animal, physically degenerative state. How could the story go on from there? For Christian, the challenge is getting out of the current mess into which he has sunk. We expect to be treated to a series of AA meetings and sessions of psychiatric counseling, ending finally with rehabilitation and self-knowledge. But our hero decides that the only way to leave his troubled past behind is to “take a geographical,” as they say in the self-help movement: moving from San Francisco to New York to get out of the situation that has led to his addictions and burying the earlier years under the rug.
What happens in New York is, in some ways, even more disturbing. But by this time, we’ve gained an intimate knowledge of Christian’s family and past, chuckled at some of the perversity of his one-night stands, are privy to the bewilderment and loss that haunts him as the result of his brother’s death, and so identified with Christian that we have begun to see ourselves in him and put all our hope in him as well.
White, Christian belongs to a very contemporary and mostly unpopulated genre of novels about the current generation, probably our least articulate generation, and certainly our least literary. Raised on television and the Internet where information comes quickly and easily but accumulates with difficulty into knowledge, viewing formal education as a stepping stone to earnings rather than to an intellectual awakening, most members of this age group are impatient for quick fixes and rewards. White Christian affords a very visceral view into such a mentality. Perhaps Stoddard has understood that the best way to show it is as gone awry, with its heart, needs and longings finally peeking through the hipster defenses that have been ripped open by bad choices. What is more, such a radical excavation of this generation’s mindset has accomplished the unexpected. It has tied the novel to a tradition. This is not a “gay” novel, but another in a series begun in early twentieth century with the Lost Generation, continued after World War II with the Beat Generation and barely skimmed by the Gen X’ers, which represent the last time it was seen en masse. It is the literary tradition of social alienation, about the lone individual who cannot seem to navigate the repressions, hypocrisies and unthinking cruelties of contemporary culture, the degenerate individual whose degeneration serves surprisingly as a critique of our society.
Somehow, without sacrificing his own acute perceptions, Christopher Stoddard has intimately depicted the whirling frenzy of a soul with little insight into itself, then put that soul through the sharp-bladed blender of calamity, the only road to this particular character’s self-knowledge. And he has made it entertaining and relevant to us. But the most amazing thing about this book is the author’s ability to sustain his vision. Rather than appearing as the face of a struggling person peeking for a moment over the edge of a whirlpool, to shout a few words of discovery before disappearing through the eye, he has remained afloat with the character and taken him to a point at which he can squarely face his own past.