A Terrifying Narrator

Dominque Durand, Le Canard Enchaîné (Paris), 20 July 1994

After a well-written essay – Voltaire’s Bastards – of which we said good things, John Saul has released Some Good Americans, a delight under the palm trees, a pitcher of Margaritas on the table, what, in French, we call “miscellaneous”, a collection of fables, mini-stories, reports from the author à la New Yorker, that is to say, rigorous, strict, of high quality, typed on an old Remington.

Saul has set out to draw the portrait of “upper middle class” Americans, (not the true rich, whom no one notices) from the 70s, when many from the Eastside cultivated simplicity in the same way the English cultivated cattleyas – in a hot house atmosphere – what Saul calls “the hair shirt of the very rich.” And yet one can’t help but adore Mrs. Revere, a filthy rich woman in her seventies, who goes fishing for beach boys on the Italian Riviera, all the while complaining that “sex, my dear is so boring. The last sexual innovation goes back to the time when human beings, or whatever we were then, climbed out of the ocean to live on dry land. Doing it on dry land, that, my dear, was something new.”

John Saul excels at stories that we shall call “hourglass vortexes”: the whirlwind which inhales the protagonists, strangles them into a tidy knot and then expels them, backwards, into the nothingness of infinity. Here is a story about Jack-of-the-Beautiful-Boots; his mistress Patty who loses a finger, wins 2 million dollars, sleeps with her would-be killers whom she then busy; Jack’s wife, the Boot-Cuddler, who steals all her ex-husband’s money and then tries to keep him in prison for the rest of his life.

The narrator, it appears, has met a few dictators in his career as a journalist, and resents that he can’t tell us about his visit with the confidante of that little asshole “Hassan II”, Colonel Dlimi, who tells him a huge lie about his role as a willing prisoner in the Ben Barka affair. A lie which Saul says no longer has any importance, “there’s almost a certain eroticism to it.”

After Hurricane Sally blows across Haiti, he interviews Baby Doc, the man with the smallest, most closely set eyes he’s ever seen. Such a simpleton is Baby Doc that he tells the journalist he hopes the story will help free up 200 million dollars in international aid (for his own bank account, of course). In a provincial bullring, there is the Franco-oide Blas Pinar, who plays with a manipulable crowd the way he would with a bull.

In the middle of the book, John Saul digresses on the sad state of the narrator in western literature at the end of the 20th century. He laments the Golden Age of the Narrator, the basic working tool of the writer, when the writer would hide inside his characters and not make off with them, as today’s writer is wont to do.

To illustrate his thoughts, Saul invents the crazy story of an Episcopalian friend, a New Yorker, whose catholic wife runs off with an Irish cop whom she then turns into an Episcopalian. One day she goes to confession at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris only to find that the priest to whom she has confessed is her ex-husband. With abandon, they immediately possess each other, against a pillar near the one where Claudel, unless it was his brother Frossard, had his revelation. And why am I telling you this? asks the author, knowing full well that he gives us great pleasure.

Last but not least, the best part, a real T-bone steak – the end. A psycho thriller, of faux romantic tenderness for the narrator, who, as a student in Paris, lived near and hung out at the bar of the Closerie des Lilas. With the curiosity of an apprentice writer, he follows a man – an American à la Fitzgerald in Paris, a pure Englishman in London – who ends up thinking he is being blackmailed. The ending is horrifying – a pity! – but the victim is sacrificed with great enthusiasm. We discover, with fascination, that the narrator, like Santa Claus, can also be a bastard.