Steve Reads

Longtime readers know, and are often confused by, my affection for Ann Patchett’s earlier novel Bel Canto. Reaction to Bel Canto falls into two categories: either that the book is a universe unto itself, an absolutely magical, strangely modern fairy tale (a love story inside of a hostage drama) with an ending that slams the wind out of your lungs; or you don’t get what the big deal is. Needless to say, I’m in the its-own-universe camp: the characters in Bel Canto forget what’s happening right outside their doors and forget that their lovers happen also to be their captors. The reader forgets, too, even though Patchett reminds us time and again that the romance cannot last. She pulls off the miraculous trick of putting both her characters and her readers in the same carefree mindset, until she brutally yanks the rug out from under them. Bel Canto is a masterpiece of the storyteller’s art.

Which is why I’m quite sad to report that Patchett’s novel Run is a paint-by-numbers exercise. Actually, labeling it “paint-by-numbers” is an insult to the majesty and variety of the integers. Run is some kind of morality tale? Maybe? About the possibility of interracial harmony? But not really. What it is, really, is a boring story punctuated by a few moments of intensity here and there. As one of the characters himself puts it on page 255:

Tip had been hit by a car … there was a child and she was lovely but oh, the mother and the child had gone away again. He didn’t think the entire story could possibly take more than ten minutes start to finish, and yet to live it, to actually be a part of its playing out, was an excruciating investment of time.

“Excruciating” indeed. Patchett was contractually obligated, one assumes, to fill up a certain amount of book; she’s consequently required to fill up pages with pointless detail about her characters — details that tell us little about the characters (the young girl likes peanut-butter toast but won’t come out and say it? Joyous!) and don’t advance the story. I was reminded of Umberto Eco’s essay “How To Recognize A Porn Movie.” Porn, says Eco, isn’t just wall-to-wall intercourse; much as people might like to think that’s why they want, such a film would be unendurable. So between the fleshy parts, porn directors are required to insert pointless filler. The filler, he says, is the true mark of a porno:

Pornographic movies are full of people who climb into cars and drive for miles and miles, couples who waste incredible amounts of time signing in at hotel desks, gentlemen who spend many minutes in elevators before reaching their rooms, girls who sip various drinks and who fiddle interminably with laces and blouses before confessing to each other that they prefer Sappho to Don Juan. To put it simply, crudely, in porn movies, before you can see a healthy screw you have to put up with a documentary that could be sponsored by the Traffic Bureau.

By this measure, Run is porn. Though the filler comes between small tragedies: a car accident, a slip on the ice. Small-urban-catastrophe porn, we might call it.

The urban area in question is Boston. Again, those who have read this blog for a while know that my heart is entirely given over to Boston and Cambridge, so you’d think that I’d be pre-weakened to love Patchett’s book. It’s just not so. She describes Boston’s bus routes, the walking path one would take from Union Park to Back Bay station (down Tremont, right on Dartmouth, keep aiming at the Hancock Tower — you can thank me later), and the persistent misery of a Boston winter; what she doesn’t get to is the city’s heart. As near as I can tell, she placed Run in Boston so that she could make some cross-racial, cross-class tension happen, without actually engaging with the city’s painful interracial history. Placing it in Boston also allowed her to pose for the smarmy jacket photo, included at right.

You’d think, at the start of Run, that you were going to get dive deeply into the city’s history. Doyle, the ex-mayor of Boston, has dragooned his college-aged kids — Tip and Teddy — into seeing Jesse Jackson speak at the JFK School of Government. Here we have the very center of Boston Brahminhood — Harvard University — face-to-face with an icon of the civil-rights movement. Neither kid is interested in politics, even Jackson’s brand, despite their father’s endless attempts to sway them. Yet still they keep coming, out of filial obedience. That obedience reaches its end on the night we meet Tip and Teddy. After the Jackson speech, Doyle tries to convince the kids to come along to just one more event: a reception for Jackson at a fellow pol’s house. Tip has reached his limit; he won’t be coming, and that’s final. He’s addressing his brother and father, laying down the law, walking backwards right out onto JFK Street. A woman slams him from behind, he collapses to the snowy ground, the world is a blur, and we realize that someone has just saved Tip’s life. The woman who saved it, named Tennessee (“like the state”), meanwhile, has intersected the business end of an SUV.

Almost everyone you will meet in Run is there at that moment: Tennessee, her daughter, plus Doyle and his two kids. Among the missing is Doyle’s late wife, Bernadette. Bernadette’s ancestry contains a MacGuffin — a statue of the Virgin Mary — that opens the book, but which plays practically no role in the rest of the story. As for the book’s title, it’s hard to say what that’s about, either. Tennessee’s daughter, Kenya, runs quite well. The grace of a gazelle is second nature to her. You can expect that Patchett will make something important out of this; perhaps Kenya’s speed will be The Thing Which Pulls Her Out Of The Ghetto.

Say what? Kenya is black? You have just been zapped with the Patchett Narrative Taser. Behold its force.

Throughout the book, you will get little realizations like this. A mystery novel it is not, however; the realizations amount to a bit of punctuation in a very long, very boring sentence. You’ll amble from the scene of the accident, to Doyle’s house, to the hospital where Tennessee lays sedated, to the track in Allston where Kenya, to no one’s surprise, Shows The World What A Poor Black Girl Has Kept Hidden.

I’ll stop. You’ll periodically meet a book that is not good enough to hold your interest, but not terrible enough to hurl across the room (or hurl onto eBay). This is one such book.

I should note, on the bright side, that Bel Canto is such a joy that I still, even after reading Run, intend to pick up Patchett’s earlier Sorcerer's Apprentice (pre-Bel Canto) and her nonfiction ode to her friend Lucy Grealy, entitled Truth & Beauty. This is in keeping with a reading habit that I’ve remarked upon before: if the first book I read by a given author is good enough, I can power through four or five poor ones before losing steam. Let’s hope the rest of Patchett’s writings are more like Bel Canto and less like Run.

P.S.: The late John Updike, whose novels I’ve always found soporific but whose essay on the occasion of Ted Williams’s last game, entitled “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” is immortal, reviewed Run in 2007. I agree with nearly everything he wrote there.