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Entropy has been defined in various ways, and with varying degrees of precision, but the term originates in theoretical physics and the second law of thermodynamics, according to which “the material world moves from orderly states to an ever-increasing disorder and … the final situation of the universe will be one of maximal disorder.”Footnote 1 Rudolph Arnheim defines entropy as the “measure of the degree of disorder in a system,” but as he points out, such a definition is necessarily open to interpretation. The terms “order” and “disorder” themselves require clarification. The “entropy principle” characterizes order as “an improbable arrangement of elements, regardless of whether the macro-shape of this arrangement is beautifully structured or most arbitrarily deformed; and it calls disorder the dissolution of such an improbable arrangement.”Footnote 2 Tony Tanner, discussing the appropriation and metaphorical use of the concept in postwar US literature, defines entropy more broadly as “the increasing disorder of energy moving at random within a closed system, finally arriving at total inertia.” Significantly, though, and crucial for the discussion that follows, order, “if it is dedicated to the procuring of ‘uniform motion’, may in fact accelerate entropy and not counter it,” if, that is, it is “that sort of mechanical ‘order’ which induces anaesthesia and ultimately irreversible torpor,” and is thus symptomatic of “the tendency of all things towards eventual homogeneity.”Footnote 3 In Arnheim's terms this would represent the dissolution of an “improbable arrangement.”
Although Tanner suggests there are “entropic hints” in early twentieth-century American fiction – notably the “valley of ashes” in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and the “painters of Decay and Mystery” which preoccupy Tod Hackett in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) – he sees a concern with “the initiations and cessations of movement, the fate of all energy,” as characteristic of postwar fiction, and novels of the 1960s in particular, since “the advanced stages of an industrial, even a post-industrial, society necessarily proliferate processes and actions based on mechanised movement.”Footnote 4 Thomas Pynchon exemplifies this trend amongst US writers most clearly, and Tanner sees the short story “Entropy,” originally published in the Kenyon Review in 1960, as establishing the dominant theme of Pynchon's later work. The story is set in two city apartments, one upstairs and one downstairs, and is concerned, like many other postwar stories and novels, with “the chaos of waste … in contemporary urban landscapes.”Footnote 5 The notion of entropy as an urban phenomenon may be a reflection of the economic and cultural anxieties of a postindustrial society, most clearly manifest in urban environments, though as the later discussion will show, suburban fiction in the 1970s demonstrates a deeper concern with the theme of entropy. In Pynchon's story there is a chaotic party in the downstairs apartment of a character called Meatball Mulligan, the party being “a relatively closed system of people,” and one that is subject to exhaustion and dissipation of energy, eventually leading to inertia.Footnote 6 Two of the partygoers discuss communication theory and signal-to-noise ratio in the process of informational entropy, one commenting that “leakage … noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit.”Footnote 7 Upstairs, meanwhile, the middle-aged intellectual Callisto attempts to restore life to a freezing bird, in a “hermetically sealed … tiny enclave of regularity in the city's chaos,” from where he can observe “the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American ‘consumerism’ discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos.”Footnote 8
Meatball struggles to contain and diminish the party chaos, but finally acquiesces and waits for the inertia that will come with the passing out of the drunken guests. Upstairs, Callisto is unable to transfer heat energy to the bird and it dies, while the temperature outside the apartment remains at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Like Meatball, Callisto and his girlfriend also succumb to entropy, as she symbolically smashes the windows and they wait for “the moment of equilibrium … when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both inside and outside” and “their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion.”Footnote 9 The two forms of entropy in the story, the chaotic disorder of Meatball's party and the ordered hermetic “enclave of regularity” of Callisto's apartment, correspond to the forms of entropy considered at the beginning of this chapter – Tanner's “increasing disorder of energy moving at random within a closed system” (the party) and “that sort of mechanical ‘order’ which induces anaesthesia and ultimately irreversible torpor” (Callisto's apartment). Significantly, the characters in Pynchon's story seem resigned to the inevitability of entropy, and perhaps even desire a kind of existential stasis.
As Tanner argues, fiction of the 1960s by William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Stanley Elkin also displays a concern with entropy, fiction in which disorder and chaos are often shown to be characteristic of overpopulated, frenetic cities. Sontag's Death Kit and Elkin's A Bad Man, both set in New York and published in 1967, are perhaps most emblematic of this thematic concern, though much of the latter is set in a prison, an analogue of the claustrophobic and hazardous city environment. Sontag's Dalton “Diddy” Harron and Elkin's Leo Feldman are both harbingers of decay and chaos, each an embodiment and catalyser of the process of entropy. The protagonists of these novels recognize this process at work in their environment and it is chaotic urban freneticism that galvanizes them, providing a kind of epiphany even as it depletes their energies. In Elkin's Feldman, businessman and criminal, there is “a vast inertia … that made it difficult for him to believe in changes, revolutions, upsettings, rectifications,” and, acutely aware of “the physics of least resistance,” he asks a bemused fellow convict, “what is it preserves in this world that decays? Where age always withers and time's never stayed?”Footnote 10 Succumbing to “a strange Feldmanic inertia when it came to expending any energy on the merely remedial and makeshift,” he is hardly imbued with the entrepreneurial zeal necessary for continued success and expansion of his department store business. Instead, he uses the subbasement of his store to provide illicit services for customers (for no financial gain, but with obsessive fervour), proffering freely the names of corrupt judges and doctors who perform illegal operations, even selling a rifle to a man with obvious homicidal intent – all acts with the potential to encourage lawlessness, destroy order, promote chaos. Incensed by the repeated attempts by a property developer to persuade him to invest in new premises for his department store, Feldman tells him, “we're in the homestretch of a race: your energy against my entropy. The universe is running down, Mr Developer. It's bucking and filling. It's yawning and pitching and rolling and falling.”Footnote 11 Feldman is eventually beaten to death in prison, finally returning to the ultimate state of inertia, fully run down. Sontag's “Diddy” Harron, who works in advertising, is, perhaps even more than Leo Feldman, the embodiment of entropy, unable to withstand the process of metaphysical disintegration after divorce and a failed suicide attempt. Sontag's protagonist experiences “everything running down: suffusing the whole of Diddy's well-tended life.”Footnote 12 For Harron, this running down is a nightmarish, hallucinatory, and often physical experience, as “the walls sag. Empty spaces bulge between objects. The surfaces of objects sweat, thin out, buckle. The hysterical fluids of fear deposited at the core of objects ooze out along the seams.” Diddy's life is “like a house powered by one generator in the basement” so that, as he experiences “an almost palpable sense of the decline of the generator's energy,” he is no longer able to summon the resources to complete the most routine tasks demanded by his work. He sees that the process of decay is also occurring in his environment, happening outside as well as inside, and, forced to attend a conference upstate for his job, he is struck when leaving the train by “the steady deterioration of the surfaces and furniture of this station. On each arrival the floor, walls, columns, bronze statue, information booth, clock, ticket windows, newspaper stand, wooden benches look more indelibly stained and grimier and more thickly littered.”Footnote 13 Yet Harron is also oddly energized by “the monstrous malfunctioning of that generator, gone amok,” and in running amok himself he causes chaos and possibly death, through a random killing, the reality of which is unclear even to Diddy himself. The increasingly fantastical imagery towards the end of the book has Diddy in a large building containing a labyrinthine series of rooms, a charnel house with innumerable corpses and coffins, so that he is literally surrounded by death, though there is a hint that this scene is the fevered imaginings of his unconscious, his dreaming in a hospital bed, from which he fleetingly awakes before being drawn back into the scene, “looking for his death.”Footnote 14
Whilst entropy has been associated with postwar American urban fiction, there has been almost no literary or critical consideration of the notion of (fictive) suburbia as a closed system, yet in 1970s fiction suburbia is a far more entropic environment, with no possibility of the galvanizing, energizing effects of the city apparent in Elkin's and Sontag's novels. It is perhaps not surprising, though, that entropic representations of suburbia have received no critical attention, given the pervasiveness of the image of suburbia presented in much postwar fiction and in social critiques. Most notable amongst the latter is William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), in which the suburb is depicted as a superficial, conformist and isolating environment, symptomatic of a burgeoning (white) consumerist culture, and a narcissistic obsession with appearances, typified by the picture window, a symbol of openness but also of (the need for) external validation, indicative of what David Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd, terms the “other-directed character,” an increasingly dominant character type in Riesman's view.Footnote 15 A similar view of suburbia is presented in Richard Yates's classic novel Revolutionary Road (1961), in which Yates uses the trope of the picture window extensively to suggest the desperate need for validation, having protagonist Frank Wheeler joke to his wife April, “I don't suppose one picture window is necessarily going to destroy our personalities.” Yates highlights the deluded irony of this statement; after Frank has disingenuously lambasted suburban conformity and reassured himself and April of their own authenticity and superiority, Yates comments that “if he'd looked at the window at that moment he would have seen the picture of a frightened liar.”Footnote 16 Frank feels less substantial than April, and undermined by the scrutiny of the window, when, “catching sight of his walking reflection in the black picture window, he had to admit that his appearance was not yet as accomplished as hers,” with only “the brave beginnings of a personage.”Footnote 17 As Lynn Spigel observes, in the mass-produced postwar suburbs, “tiny homes were typically sandwiched together so that the Smiths’ picture window looked not onto rambling green acres but rather into the Jones’ living room – a dilemma commonly referred to as the ‘goldfish bowl’ effect.” The sense of claustrophobia this caused was compounded, Spigel suggests, by “the neighbourhood ideal” which “brought with it an enormous amount of pressure to conform to the group.”Footnote 18 What Spigel calls “the burgeoning television culture,” with its “metaphors of neighbourhood bonding,” was an additional normative, intrusive presence, one that was potentially isolating, since although it “maintained ideals of community togetherness and social interconnection,” it did so “by placing the community at a fictional distance,” allowing suburbanites to “enter into an imaginary social life,”Footnote 19 one nonetheless subject to the sense of “oppressive community” identified by Whyte.Footnote 20
Despite the immense social changes in US society since Whyte's study and Yates's novel there has then been a tendency to view suburbia as a culturally static environment, rather than one in which those broader societal changes are reflected, or manifest, one that functions as what Robert Beuka, drawing on Foucault, calls a “heterotopic space”. Heterotopic spaces are “places that in their very existence serve to mirror the culture at large.”Footnote 21 Beuka suggests that suburbia functions in this way in part because it is “neither urban nor rural and uniform enough to be rendered ‘placeless’,” and so “stands as both a ‘place’ and a ‘noplace’,” one characterized by various social and cultural anxieties. These anxieties are a corollary of postwar societal developments, specifically “a massive expansion of the middle class, a heightened valorization of the nuclear family … a trend – both utopian and exclusionary in nature – toward cultural homogenization,” with suburbia functioning as a “symbolic manifestation of the values and contradictions of dominant U.S. culture.”Footnote 22 If fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s displays a concern, as Morris Dickstein observes, with “material comfort and its dissatisfactions, including anomie, alienation, and a nagging sense of weightlessness; of a turn inward towards the self and its problems of identity,” this is especially true of suburban fiction by Updike, Yates and other writers, such as John Cheever.Footnote 23 Suburbia, as heterotopic space, was, of course, the key symbol of prosperity at this time, of “material comfort and its dissatisfactions.” The first of these dissatisfactions to emerge was with the very circumstances and environment that made such material comfort possible, was actually with the form it took, its manifestation; that is, suburbia. Revolutionary Road and John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) are more explicitly about the suburbs than is the fiction of later decades, when suburbia's ubiquity was established and its debilitating effects on suburbanite protagonists were less clearly definable. By the late 1960s the American suburbs already seemed to be besieged, no longer a safe and comfortable refuge from the tumultuous societal upheaval of the period, as evidenced by John Cheever's Bullet Park (1969) and Joyce Carol Oates's Expensive People (1968). Both novels reflect the anxiety caused by the events of the mid- to late 1960s, and the changes occurring throughout US society – including an increase in violent crime, the assassinations of Kennedy and King, the burgeoning civil rights movement, the continuing war in Vietnam and the (sometimes violent) antiwar movement – but they register them obliquely, through the heightened existential anguish experienced by the main characters and an extremity of violence in response to intimations of contingency, intimations (and violence) that are seemingly incongruous in such an environment. The protagonists of later suburban novels, such as Updike's Rabbit Redux (1971) and Ann Beattie's later Falling in Place (1980), are still less able to insulate (and isolate) themselves against (and from) the national sense of an ever-present existential threat, in the wake of crises that contributed to the sense of besiegement in the US – though suburbia itself becomes an increasingly insular environment. This insularity is reflected in suburbanite protagonists’ near-hermetic withdrawal into an alienated and isolated solipsism, a far more pathological state than the picture-window, other-directed narcissism of the 1950s and 1960s.
In some of the fiction of this period – and most strikingly in Joseph Heller's Something Happened – this insular other-denying interiority is manifested in a preoccupation with entropy, as the suburb becomes a kind of closed system. Heller's novel was published in 1974, the year often regarded as marking the onset of a new cultural and political period – and crisis – in America. Philip Jenkins, for example, argues that the 1960s began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.Footnote 24 The Watergate crisis was one of several factors contributing to a loss of national self-confidence, as Edward D. Berkowitz points out, citing the end of US involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and the oil crisis that precipitated an economic recession (and a stock market in free fall) as the most significant of these.Footnote 25 The year 1974 was also when Prozac was patented, introducing what would become a pharmaceutical solution, or palliative, for the national existential angst and crisis that began in the 1970s. Phillip Jenkins further notes that “the condition of American cities promoted a sense of economic decay … In just eight years in the 1970s, New York City lost half a million private sector jobs. As downtowns deteriorated, new malls and suburban shopping centers flourished, revolutionizing concepts of social space.” Such lower-middle-class suburban spaces are often the location of Raymond Carver's stories, which frequently depict entropic dissolution, though Carver's stories generally take place in suburban interiors, reflecting a diminishment rather than a revolutionizing of the concept of social space. Jenkins goes on to suggest that “in the summer of 1977, it did not seem far-fetched to imagine a systematic collapse of US influence much along the lines of what befell the Soviet bloc in 1989,” since “with Communist parties seeking inclusion in several European governments,” amongst other political developments, “the future of NATO and the Western Alliance seemed shaky,” provoking fears that “the West would be politically and militarily castrated.”Footnote 26 Rather less dramatically, Berkowitz characterizes the 1970s as “a painful decade of transition,” one in which
The previously accepted dogma of urban renewal no longer enjoyed universal acceptance and would undergo a major change in the eighties. In general, the nation no longer possessed the postwar sense of confidence that economic growth and a steady national purpose would set things right in the cities, the suburbs or elsewhere.Footnote 27
Suburbia in the 1970s and 1980s was clearly an exclusionary, homogenizing environment, one in which, as Beuka observes, “architectural and landscape styles” demonstrate “a desire to elide the very notion of difference among suburban residents.”Footnote 28 In this way it exemplifies the tendency “toward … eventual homogeneity” identified by Tanner, and potentially towards entropic equilibrium.Footnote 29 In the texts I discuss here the suburbs represent a tendency towards such (cultural) homogenization and order, and it is precisely these tendencies – towards mechanical order and movement, uniformity of motion – that can be understood as hastening the process of entropic decline rather than arresting it. In Heller's Something Happened Updike's Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and in stories by Raymond Carver, the suburbs are portrayed as entropic environments, in which the suburbanite protagonists are themselves becoming closed, or isolated, systems, within the closed system of suburbia, seeking a kind of entropic equilibrium. These suburbanites display the “widespread fear of the tendency of all things towards eventual homogeneity,” identified by Tanner, their “gradual collapsing towards inertia and death,” which can be understood as a “manifestation of the ubiquitous dread of ‘entropy’.”Footnote 30 Yet despite their dread of the entropic decline manifested in and through their suburban environment, the protagonists seek a hermetic withdrawal, a kind of metaphysical shutting down, which is itself entropic. As Tanner observes, “as long as an individual is not a closed system he … cannot be in a state of equilibrium.”Footnote 31
“MORE AND MORE THINGS SEEM TO BE SLIPPING INTO A STATE OF DISSOLUTION”: INFORMATIONAL, PHYSICAL AND EXISTENTIAL ENTROPY IN SOMETHING HAPPENED
In Joseph Heller's Something Happened, Bob Slocum's narrative is an entropic monologue obsessed with entropy – physical, metaphysical (existential) and informational. In information theory, as Patrick O'Neill observes, entropy can be understood as “a measure of disorganization, of randomness,” but also as “a measure of lack of information … a measure of the disruption of information.”Footnote 32 Lindsey Tucker discusses Heller's novel using concepts from information theory, and characterizes Slocum's monologue as a kind of “closed system,” a term that could also be applied to his portrayal of his Connecticut suburb, and to suburbia more generally. Tucker's description of the language of Catch-22 (1961) as “an artificial construct, divorced from any reality beyond its own self-reflective existence,” describes equally well Bob Slocum's monologue, in which he seeks to stem the entropy that that monologue embodies. Tucker views Slocum as being “intent on establishing his own version of a closed system … working against what he sees as entropic signals coming from both his own consciousness and the outside world.”Footnote 33 Those entropic signals reflect the narrator's society and culture, as various commentators have observed. Susan Strehle suggests that Slocum presents “a vision of America as both corollary and source for his own loss of energy and dissipation of ideals,” and David Seed argues that “the polluted and junk-ridden landscape becomes a collective metaphor of his current state of mind.”Footnote 34
Slocum's job itself (it is not specified but it includes copywriting and promotional work) embodies informational redundancy, since he spends his working life “converting whole truths into half truths and half truths into whole ones.” His first job, a recurring theme (as all the themes necessarily are within the reiterative structure of the narrative), was also emblematic of informational entropy. As a filing clerk in an accident insurance company, he was required to work in a “gloomy, silent, dingy mausoleum for dead and decaying records,” while in his current job he sees “skeletons in decaying winding sheets as I study company reports.”Footnote 35 Like Callisto in Pynchon's Entropy, he tries to create a closed system that is impervious to the disorder and chaos he dreads, and the language of enclosure pervades his narrative. He describes himself as “safely encapsulated” in corporate suburbia; when someone dies “her case is closed.” The opening sentence of the novel – “I get the willies when I see closed doors” – establishes Slocum's obsession, and although he tells us that “the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it,” what he dreads most is the opening of the door, the exposure to external information, thoughts, that threaten to undermine his entropic narrative.Footnote 36 “There are so many things I don't want to find out,” he tells us, and he has “retreated into the suburbs” to avoid finding them out, suburbia as a closed system symbolizing his desire for existential stasis. The street Slocum lives on is called “Peapod Lane,” suggesting both conformity and enclosure.Footnote 37 Whenever he is at home he stays in his study and keeps the door closed, avoiding contact with his family. He claims to be saddened by his son's “shutting me out,” but being shut in is exactly what he desires, since
I see the doors closed to his and my daughter's rooms and think of the closed doors at the company and am reminded squeamishly of all those closed cupboard and closet doors I had to open each morning and evening back in the apartment in the city with those baited traps concealed behind them when we were trying to catch or kill those mice.Footnote 38
What Slocum fears is the inevitability of decay and death symbolized by the dead mice, and in his narrative he associates the suburbs with that process of dissolution, of physical entropy. On his “choice country acre in Connecticut … grass grows under my feet … spring in our countryside smells of insect spray and horseshit.” Slocum dreads spending holidays with his family in their suburban home, and Christmas festivities only heighten his alienation. Christmas dinner with them is transformed into a stark image of entropy:
They sit like ruins in a coffin in their high-backed chairs. The turkey's carved; white meat, dark meat, second joints, wings, and legs lie laid out neatly like tools on a dentist's tray or surgical instruments of an ear-nose-and-throat man about to remove tonsils … There are spiced apples, chilled cranberry molds, and imported currant jams. It's a gelid feast, a scene of domesticity chiseled on cold and rotting stone.Footnote 39
Slocum's desperate, farcical, attempts to avoid intimations of physical entropy only increase his obsession. “I never make hospital visits if I can avoid them,” he confesses, “because there's always the risk I might open the door of the private or semi-private room and come upon some awful sight for which I could not have prepared myself.” When his mother becomes terminally ill he is appalled by her impending physical dissolution and refuses to acknowledge it – or her:
I was silent … with my mother when she had the first of her brain strokes, and am silent also with everyone else I know in whom I begin to perceive the first signs of irreversible physical decay and approaching infirmity and death. (I write these people off rapidly. They become dead records in my filing system long before they are even gone, at the first indications that they have begun to go).Footnote 40
Slocum is appalled that his mother eventually became a “bloodless pulp,” is repelled by his son Derek's carer, who has “gnarled fingers on bloated hands and … a musty collapsing bodice … [a] thrusting front with no suggestion of anything else in back but stale and folding space,” and his own inevitable physical demise fills him with unassuageable dread, as he imagines being “battered by continuing hurricane warnings of bursitis, arthritis, rheumatism, diabetes, varicose veins, dizziness, nausea, tumors, cysts, angina, polyps, the whole fucking shebang of physical dissolution,” which will finally leave him “deaf, dumb, blind, paralyzed, and dead.”Footnote 41
Slocum, however, cannot avoid intimations of physical entropy because of the constant presence of a powerful symbolic reminder: his mentally handicapped son Derek. As Slocum's mother “faded away, speechless, in one direction, Derek emerged, speechless, from the other.” For Slocum, Derek's muteness renders him atavistic, a primitive being, but also emblematic of the physical dissolution, incapacity and speechlessness that he will eventually have to face in old age. When Slocum imagines himself in a nursing home he also imagines “Derek out front … slobbering … with an incriminating resemblance to a secret me I know I have inside me … an inner visage,” and later says, “he's a simulacrum,” but one in which “the architecture's finished. The circuits can't be changed.” In a foretelling of his killing of his other son, Slocum's imagined murder of Derek is also an image of self-extinction: “Derek I smother with a huge hand over his mouth to stifle his inarticulate noises and hide his drivelling eyes, nose, and mouth. (It is not to put him out of his misery that I do it; it is to put me out of mine).”Footnote 42
Slocum's primary narrative obsession, however, is not informational entropy or even physical entropy, but metaphysical, or existential, entropy. For Slocum, as John Aldridge suggests, “we decline from our beginnings … they are only left behind in the meaningless drift of history in which at an indefinable moment something happened to make them unrecapturable.”Footnote 43 His thoughts reflect and embody a kind of amorphous dissolution, since for him they are “circular, spherical, orbicular, a wheel turning like the world in a basin of sediment into which so much of what I forget to think about separates and drops away into the bottom layers of murk and sludge.”Footnote 44 Slocum experiences his consciousness as a bodily phenomenon, and in his dreams he seems to “dissolve while dreaming them,” being left afterwards with “nothing but my eyes and a puddle of tears.” The mental and the physical are conflated as his narration unravels, itself subject to the entropy it seeks to forestall:
Fungus, erosion, disease. The taste of flannel in your mouth. The smell of asbestos in your brain. A rock. A sinking heart, silence, taut limbs, a festering invasion from within, seeping subversion, and a dull pressure on the brow, and in the back regions of the skull. It starts like a fleeting whim, an airy, frivolous notion … it enlarges in space and force like a somber, inhuman form from whatever lightless pit inside you it abides in; it fills you up, spreading steadily throughout you like lava or a persistent miasmic cloud, an obscure, untouchable, implacable, domineering, vile presence.Footnote 45
Bob Slocum's is a “horrible grotesque life,” as Heller suggested in an interview with Per Winther in 1976; his self-contradictory language, as his consciousness begins breaking down, is markedly similar to the unravelling consciousness in Beckett's The Unnamable (1952), the last novel in the Trilogy, following Molloy (1950) and Malone Dies (1951), an influence Heller acknowledged in the same interview.Footnote 46 Beckett's narrating consciousness intones, “I think I must have blackouts, whole sentences lost, no, not whole. Perhaps I've missed the keyword to the whole business,” while Slocum drones, “The cable of continuity is not unbroken; it is not thick and strong; it wavers and fades, wears away in places to slender, frayed strands, breaks. Much of what I remember about me does not seem to be mine … I do not always know where I am at present.” Beckett's narrative consciousness jabbers, “I shall not be alone … I am of course alone … And how can one be sure, in such darkness? I shall have company,” while Slocum babbles, “I have so many people to cope with at night. Many are made of varnished glass wax. There's no such thing.”Footnote 47 As in what Thomas LeClair calls “the fused vitality and futility of Beckett's fiction,” in Slocum's monologue “silence [is] feared and filled at any cost.”Footnote 48 David Seed, however, notes an important difference in Slocum's narrative, its momentum and final dissolution, and a resultant lessening of the monotony that characterizes Beckett's Trilogy. He points out that
where Beckett presents a dwindling self whose physical exhaustion corresponds to the futility of narrating … Heller shows how Slocum's gradual admission of illicit thoughts increases his ambivalence to crisis point so that he begins to break down physically (headache, hallucinations, nightmares) and syntactically (ambiguous pronouns, shifting parentheses, inordinate digressions).Footnote 49
The process Seed describes could be viewed as the ever-increasing drive towards entropy of Slocum's consciousness, which actually generates physical and informational entropy. Heller's narrator also differs from Beckett's narrator in his obsession with the “something” he believes “happened” in his life and in his refusal to face the something that is happening (and his responsibility for it). Slocum seeks a kind of entropic existential stasis; yet, paradoxically, because pain is the one constant in his sense of self, because it is not entropic, he cannot relinquish it. “There is so much liquid pain,” Slocum intones. “It never grows less. It stores itself up. Unlike heat or energy, it does not dissipate. It all always remains.”Footnote 50 His obsession with entropy is constantly underscored by the insularity of his suburban environment, its material comfort failing to assuage the anguish he feels because of this obsession. At the end of the novel, though, Slocum is promoted to a senior position in his company, one that ensures his reclusion, entirely remote now both from colleagues and from his family, as he retreats into what Tony Tanner calls “the consolations of unreachable inwardness.”Footnote 51 As John W. Aldridge observes, Slocum “lives a life deodorized of want and contingency,” yet is “entombed in isolation,” existing only as “a mind encapsulated in a bubble of self-awareness afloat in a void.”Footnote 52 Precisely because of the narrative void, suburbia is largely an absence, referenced obliquely (it is mentioned explicitly only six times), yet it is crucial in Heller's depiction of the process of entropy. While the relentlessness of this process in Slocum's monologue undoubtedly reflects a culture of beleaguered exhaustion in the US in the mid-1970s, the sense of seemingly irreversible entropic national decline and decay, and a consequent undermining of the nation's assumptive identity, are far more explicit and pronounced in Updike's Rabbit Is Rich.
“RUNNING OUT OF GAS”: ENVIRONMENTAL, PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL ENTROPY IN RABBIT IS RICH
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the twenty-six-year-old protagonist of Rabbit, Run (1960), is constantly on the move, seemingly frightened of succumbing to suburban normalcy and stasis, since he is afraid, as Zbigniew Lewicki suggests, that “immobility facilitates entropy and thus helps destroy human beings,” yet his motion is without direction (alternately away from and towards both his wife, Janice, and his lover, Ruth).Footnote 53 In the first novel in Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, Harry could be seen as an example of the “increasing disorder of energy moving at random within a closed system” (the suburbs). His movements are impulsive, undertaken with no thought for his destination, and as the novel progresses, as Gerry Brenner suggests, “Rabbit's escapes become increasingly aimless, panicky, valueless,” prompted by “instinctual fear.”Footnote 54 In Rabbit Redux (1971), the second novel, Harry has ostensibly acquiesced at the age of thirty-six to suburban homogeneity (if not normalcy), and in his passivity appears to surrender to “that sort of mechanical ‘order’ which induces anaesthesia and ultimately irreversible torpor.”Footnote 55 While the concept of entropy is an underlying concern of the first two novels, in Rabbit Is Rich it is arguably the dominant theme from the opening sentence, as Harry, now forty-six, muses on decline and dissolution – of his body, his environment, and his country: “Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be … dollars are going rotten.”Footnote 56
Rabbit Is Rich, set in 1979, is pervaded by a sense of cultural malaise and is set against the backdrop of the ongoing oil crisis that precipitated an economic recession. In Rabbit's internal monologue these compound his sense of existential dread and his fear of environmental, physical and metaphysical, or existential, entropy, which intermingle in his consciousness, and are often conflated. After noticing that traffic has become “thin and scared,” Rabbit returns to the office of Springer Motors, where he is now the senior salesman, following the death of his wife's father, Fred Springer, and sees that the photographs and clippings on the office wall, reminders of his former glory as a high-school basketball player, are themselves thinning and dissolving. The glass under which they are kept is no protection, since “the clippings keep yellowing … resurrected from the attic where his dead parents had long kept them, in scrapbooks whose mucilage had dried so they came loose like snakeskins.”Footnote 57 The clippings, then, are reminders of physical decay and dissolution, of the loosening and weakening of flesh that Rabbit sees in his own body and the bodies of those around him.
The bleak tone of much of Rabbit Is Rich seems at odds with the ostensible happiness Harry Angstrom has found in the material comfort and comparative security of middle age. Updike himself commented to Melvyn Bragg that this novel is “a happy book. I was happy, I was feeling rich. My own exuberance spilled over,” but he also acknowledged in the New York Times that the novel was set against the backdrop of a “flimsy America” experiencing “a sort of deflation of expectations … [and] malaise,” and pervaded by a “general sense of exhaustion.”Footnote 58 It is, of course, precisely Harry's stolid contentment that gives him the time and space for reflection, inevitably leading to angst, as his name suggests. Updike allows Rabbit's consciousness to dominate this novel far more than in Rabbit, Run or Rabbit Redux, a consequence in part of his affluent suburban slothfulness, as Peter J. Bailey observes:
Rabbit is the author's preferred medium for the registering of sensations and perceptions, and the insularity of his prosperous middle-class existence combined with his improved attitude toward the world allows Rabbit is Rich, to a greater extent than the previous novels do, to foreground rendering – the evocation of Harry's subjective impressions – by minimizing plot.Footnote 59
The problem with this “improved attitude toward the world,” though, is that it conflicts with the (spurious) identity Rabbit has cultivated as outsider in the first two novels, now that, in middle age, “his diminished energies threaten his idea of himself.”Footnote 60 “Your selves die too,” he reflects, thinking back to the turbulent events of his life ten years earlier, remembering the self of that time which “had shriveled and been overlaid.” For Harry, this sense of depletion undermines all relationships and diminishes their reality, but especially that with his son Nelson, now aged twenty. In the overgrown vegetable plot in his garden, with Nelson just returned from college, Rabbit is forced to admit to himself that “he and Nelson have been through enough years together to turn a cedar post to rot and yet his son is less real to Harry than these crinkled leaves of lettuce he touches and plucks.” The plot in the suburban garden, a symbol of tranquil retreat, only heightens Harry's dread of entropic dissolution, the nullifying effects of growth and decay: “Grass that won't grow in the lawn where you plant it comes in here wild to multiply. Seed, so disgustingly much of it, Nature such a cruel smotherer. He thinks again of the dead he has known, the growingly many.”Footnote 61
Suburbia itself, experienced as closed and entropic, reminds Harry of the homogenizing process of entropy and of death itself: “Town after town numbingly demonstrated to him that his life was a paltry thing, roughly duplicated by the millions in settings where houses and porches and trees mocking those in Mt. Judge fed the illusion of other[s] … that their souls were central and dramatic and invisibly cherished.”Footnote 62 Any solace or comfort that Harry's newfound suburban wealth might bring to console him in this knowledge that life is “a paltry thing” is, as Marshall Boswell suggests, undercut by his imagining of “the inflationary cycle in entropic terms, with money as a closed system from which its buying power leaks,” so that even “the dollar is bound to keep leaking.”Footnote 63 When he buys thirty krugerrands and shows them to his wife Janice they make love amongst the coins on the bed, but Updike has them lose one, so that “the missing coin suggests a depletion of energy,” another unwanted intimation for the narcissistic Harry that his fate and the planet's are intertwined, as “the world is running down fast” and “mother Earth is drying up.”Footnote 64
Rabbit Angstrom, like Bob Slocum in Something Happened, is virtually unable to see his environment, the people he knows, or himself except in entropic terms. As Harry drives through his suburban hometown of Mt. Judge and the city of Brewer he looks around and “everywhere … structures speak of expended energy.” In closed gasoline stations there are “shrouded pumps … a new industry” and “the acres of dead railroad track and car stops and stockpiled wheels and empty boxcars stick in the heart of the city like a great rusting dagger.” Even the car that Harry drives is an emblem of entropy, with its “tin getting dusty and rusty, the chrome developing pimples. Metal corrodes.”Footnote 65 He thinks of his body, his physicality, in the same way, of “the face far behind him, crew-cut and thin-jawed … [which] exists in his present face like the chrome bones of a grille within the full front view of a car and its fenders.” Now “a chaos of wattles and slack chords blooms beneath his chin,” and in the morning he sometimes notices “an old man's sad sour body smell … [a] faraway odor like a corpse just beginning to sweeten.” In bed with Janice, his wife, he hears “her voice sinking into the pillow like the dust of a mummy's face, so weak,” and even the prospect of a new human life cannot divert Rabbit from his obsession, as he watches the heavily pregnant Pru, his future daughter-in-law, sleeping, “her belly shiny like one of those puffballs you find in the woods attached to a rotten stump.”Footnote 66
Harry's reaction to his intimations of mortality, to the images of the entropy he sees everywhere, is to withdraw and isolate himself still further, having already alienated those close to him in the earlier two novels. Driving, he “sits snug in his sealed and well-assembled car,” and in bed with Janice asleep “he is not displeased to be thus stranded, another consciousness … is a responsibility, a snag in the flow of his thoughts.”Footnote 67 Like Bob Slocum, Harry Angstrom tries to turn himself into a closed system, resisting entropic thoughts and images from his environment, yet seeking a kind of entropic stasis of self, an “inner dwindling” to assuage his angst. The relentless onslaught of entropic imagery, sensations and thoughts, however, that Rabbit seems to register impassively, render him finally unable to “refute the world's rumors of universal death.” His obsession with the past, with his former selves and the people he has known who are now dead, becomes part of the onslaught of diminishment: his mother and father; Becky, his baby daughter who drowned; Jill, his former lover; Skeeter, the black militant he briefly lived with; Janice's father Fred Springer; and Tothero, his former basketball coach – all become conflated with his self at different times of his life, with his sense of existential depletion and decay.
The movement of the novel is towards immobility and stasis, and when Harry tells Nelson, “you've got to keep moving. That's the thing about you. You're not moving,” his tone is almost plaintive, his son a mystery to him, so different from Harry at his age, “attempting to rediscover himself by running.”Footnote 68 In Rabbit Is Rich, his attempts at running are only a bleak reminder of his dwindling energy, and lead to thoughts of the ever-growing number of the dead, who “reach up … catch at his heels.” Rabbit and Janice move at the end of the novel to an upper-middle-class, “overgrown, mature suburb” where “his life stretches emptily on all sides, and it seems that moving in any direction he's bound to take a fall.” Harry has become stationary, still, and in the scene that ends the novel he is watching television and holding his granddaughter in his arms, “another nail in his coffin.”Footnote 69 Frederick R. Karl describes the primacy of Rabbit's consciousness in Rabbit Is Rich as “intense, almost claustrophobic,” since “his inner life … is a wasteland,” and he views this as a limitation, if not an actual failing, of Updike's novel.Footnote 70 It is true that Harry's reflections never lead to greater understanding, or afford sustained insights into his own consciousness or his environment; they simply fade, dissipate, dissolve. This, though, is surely the point of foregrounding Harry's consciousness: the highlighting – and heightening – of his sense of entropic decline and nullity, his conviction throughout the novel that “there is nothing to know. We are each of us filled with a perfect blackness.”Footnote 71
“EVERYTHING GOES”: ENTROPY AND DEATH IN THE STORIES OF RAYMOND CARVER
The suburbanites of Raymond Carver's stories have little in common with Updike's Rabbit or Heller's Slocum; Carver's lower-middle- and working-class characters mostly strive only for psychic and emotional survival, for a semblance of self strong enough to withstand existential crises and, often, unrelenting material hardship. Carver's stories are almost always set indoors; his people exist in stark physical and emotional interiors, characterized by domestic drudgery and dread. Flashes of insight, muted epiphanies, cause their lives to abruptly unravel, or bring an implacable but indeterminate sense of menace and uncertainty. In an interview with John Alton in 1986 Carver described the conflicts in his stories as “domestic,” but acknowledged that “domestic conflicts can quickly escalate into existential conflicts.” Although he claimed that in his writing he wasn't “emphasizing the dark side of things,” he said in the same interview that the tone of his stories was “grave … and sometimes dark.”Footnote 72 The suburbs of Carver's earlier fiction in particular are usually quiet, almost silent, environments, their inhabitants sometimes prone to angry or frightened outbursts, but more often to emotional implosions, though in either case life continues and little, if anything, changes. The setting of the stories is crucial in this, as Graham Clarke argues:
The suburbs in which they [Carver's characters] seek resolution (or simply a way to get through their day) consist of vacant habitats where death exists as a kind of continuing reminder of personal limits. Death frames Carver's world and suggests an underlying nothingness: the existential terms of an America sans its transcendent possibilities.Footnote 73
If Carver's suburban interiors suggest domestic confinement, transcending this confinement is both potentially liberating and frightening, though for most of his characters, finally impossible, since, as Clarke suggests, “in Carver's America there is nowhere to go. The culture has reached the limits of its own exhaustion. The entropic state … has been locked into the everyday atmosphere of suburban America.”Footnote 74 There is undoubtedly a muted and stark interiority in Carver's suburbs. They are isolated, cut off not just from the outside world, but each house and its occupants from neighbouring houses and occupants, and each house's occupants from each other – creating a sense of closed systems within closed systems. Houses define and circumscribe characters’ sense of self; household items comfort and oppress, suddenly become malign presences instead of being neutrally utilitarian.
Carver's concern with entropy, and in particular with what Margaret J. Downes calls “the inevitability of entropy and failure in love relationships between men and women,” is apparent in many of his stories, and can be seen in his very early fiction, in the story “Furious Seasons.”Footnote 75 The story concerns an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister, in which the brother murders his sister by slashing her throat after discovering she is pregnant, and is set against a backdrop of torrential rain, in a cold and dark winter landscape. The imagery is of watery dissolution and death, and airless claustrophobia. The brother watches his breath disappear “until only a tiny circle, a dot remained, then nothing,” while the breakfast coffee he made “slopped over the cup and the brown drops ran slowly down the side onto the table.” His memory of his father slaughtering a sheep – “the blood gushes out … the gray guts slide out of the steaming belly” – foreshadow the killing of his sister, and the story ends with the brother standing motionless in the rain, as “the gutter water rushed over his feet, swirled frothing into a great whirlpool at the drain on the corner and rushed down to the center of the earth.”Footnote 76 Such stark imagery is strongly suggestive of entropy, matter being reduced to its original undifferentiated state through liquefaction. In a later story, “Collectors,” from the 1976 collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, an out-of-work divorced man living alone receives a visit from a vacuum cleaner salesman, who tells the man that people are surrounded by their own decay in their homes, that “every day, every night of our lives, we're leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind … you would be surprised how much of us gets lost,” deposited into mattresses and onto car seats. The salesman demonstrates the effectiveness of the vacuum cleaner, afterwards showing the man the filter, now “alive with dust, hair, small grainy things,” but the man tells the salesman he can't afford the machine, and he should write him off as a “dead loss.”Footnote 77 When the salesman leaves he picks up a letter addressed to Mr. Slater, and puts it in his pocket, removing the man's decaying self along with his dust and hair.
The theme of entropy is developed more fully in Carver's 1981 collection What We Talk about When We Talk about Love. In “Why Don't You Dance?” a husband has transcended the limits of his suburban domesticity, but in the only way possible for most of Carver's characters – through its complete dissolution. He is finally outside, but the outside has become the inside in an ironic inversion, his yard full of the entire contents of his house, now for sale, and most significantly, the bed, or at least mattress, he shared with his wife. The man has re-created the interior faithfully, so that “things looked much the way they had in the bedroom – nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.”Footnote 78 He has even run an extension cord into the yard so that the lamps, blender, television and stereo all work, and the young couple who stop and browse can enact their own future domestic life, which, Carver suggests, is no more likely to withstand entropic dissolution than the man's: the first thing the boy does after getting out of their car is to plug in the blender and turn the dial to mince; the girl tries out the mattress and asks the boy to join her, but he just sits and stares at the television, a preview of the future breakdown of communication between them. The couple ask the man how much he wants for the bed and the television, try to haggle, failing to understand his need simply to be rid of everything, and when the boy asks him how much he wants for the desk, the man waves his hand “at this preposterous question.”Footnote 79 “Everything goes,” he tells the couple, but they only see the items for sale in the yard. The parodic staging of a mock-idyllic suburban domesticity (the neighbours are watching the spectacle) highlights its illusoriness and powerlessness to protect, or to endure, as Daniel Lehman notes:
Without a meaningful home to surround them, the domestic items arranged in the driveway lose their significance and disintegrate … Artificial light (the lamps) or pictures (television) or sound (the record-player) or intimacy (the bed and couch), Carver seems to be saying, can't hold back the darkness, even as the objects of a relationship can't create or sustain the relationship or stave off the despair of its dissolution.Footnote 80
As the girl and the man dance drunkenly to music on the stereo (the man seems to be permanently drunk) she says he “must be desperate or something,” but doesn't realize the significance of her question. She seems to have intimations of a possible understanding, perhaps experiences incipient empathy, but telling her friends about the incident later, finds she cannot explain its significance, and “after a time, she quit trying.”Footnote 81 As is so often the case in Carver's stories, there is a shift in perception, but the girl is denied an epiphany, or rather she has what Gunter Leypoldt calls an “arrested epiphany” characterized by a
distinct disparity between the character's feeling of revelation and his or her lack of understanding of what sort of insight the revelation is supposed to provide. That is to say, the centers of consciousness realize, with an often disquieting sense of menace, that there is something out of joint in their world, that at some level they are on the brink of making a tremendous discovery, but they remain far from grasping what exactly it could be.Footnote 82
Carver's preoccupation with entropy is even clearer in “Preservation” from Cathedral (1983). The imagery and symbolism in this story are entirely concerned with decay and dissolution. Sandy's husband (unnamed) has hardly moved from the sofa since being “terminated” three months ago, and now, far from “putting roofs on new houses,” cannot prevent the unravelling of his own domestic life. He has been reading the same book for three months, Mysteries of the Past, but Sandy sees that he isn't “making any progress”; he is still on the same page, with a story about a petrified man who was discovered after being buried in a peat bog for two thousand years, and in the accompanying photograph “the man's brow was furrowed, but there was a serene expression to his face.” Sandy comes home from work one day to find that their fridge freezer has broken down, its contents already thawing and liquefying, producing a stench that makes her “want to gag.” One of the key symbols of suburban domesticity, of consumerist affluence and plenty, has become a harbinger of entropy, of irreversible decay. Her husband, meanwhile, assumes a corpse-like form on the sofa: “he lay still … his arms down … [at] his sides,” resembling the man buried in the peat bog for two thousand years.Footnote 83 The husband seems to be in a state of neither sleep nor wakefulness, but in a somnambulant trance, passively receding into near non-existence. Sandy sees in a newspaper that there is an auction for fridges and other household appliances that evening and remembers going to auctions with her father, but these too are now associated with decay and death since at the last auction her father went to he bought a car that “leaked carbon monoxide up through the floorboards and caused him to pass out behind the wheel … The motor went on running until there was no more gas in the tank. He stayed in the car until somebody found him a few days later.” The car, another emblem of suburban convenience and affluence (and without which there would be no suburbs), has also become a symbol of death, a force of entropy, which “went on running” but finally ran down, ran out of gas, as the man's body decomposed. Before going to the auction Sandy (sand being the chemically inert matter left after the slow decay and erosion of rocks) cooks all the rapidly perishing food but the meat no longer resembles food; like the fridge freezer and car it has also mutated symbolically into an image of death (her husband's), and “looked like part of an old shoulder blade.” The final image of the story is of puddles of water from the thawed food collecting on the table and dripping onto the floor of the kitchen, matter returning to its original form. Sandy is transfixed by the sight of her husband's feet next to the water, but “she didn't know what to make of it yet,” another of Carver's arrested (or at least delayed) epiphanies.Footnote 84
In the story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” the imagery is less stark, but Carver again shows a movement towards dissolution and finally stasis; from light to darkness and from conversation to silence (and from sobriety to drunkenness). The interior is, as in “Preservation,” a suburban kitchen, and the conversation at the beginning of the story is animated, lively, as two couples discuss their experiences of love and find themselves incapable of communicating its essence, and eventually of communicating at all. At the beginning of the story, Nick, the narrator, tells us that “sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink.” In trying to agree on what “real love” is, the couples discuss domestic violence, suicide, a car crash, physical disfigurement, suffocation, as “the afternoon sun … the spacious light of ease and generosity” begins slowly “changing, getting thinner.” The tone of the conversation grows menacing as Mel, the narrator's friend, becomes increasingly aggressive, telling his girlfriend Terri to “just shut up for once in your life.”Footnote 85 Significantly, Mel says this very quietly; he is extremely controlled, but Carver shows that his capacity for violence is similar to that of her former partner, Ed, who abused her and eventually killed himself when she left. Nick tells us that Mel's movements when sober “were precise, very careful,” but as he starts to get drunk his control lessens. His self-absorption and aggressive defensiveness exclude those around him and at one point he looks at Nick's partner Laura “as if he could not place her, as if she was not the woman she was.”Footnote 86 As the light starts “draining out of the room, going back through the window to where it had come from,” the conversation dwindles to silence and the characters, like Sandy's husband in “Preservation,” become inert, stuck in place at the kitchen table as the darkness envelops them. Earlier in the story Mel says that if he could come back in a different life he would be a knight, protected by armour (and so, of course, invulnerable and detached), but then realizes that knights, as well as serfs, were “vessels to someone … But then everyone is always a vessel to someone.” Terri tells him the correct word is “vassal,” but the image is clear – the examples of love discussed by the couples involve some kind of subjugation and control, but also an attempt to fill an existential emptiness. At the end of the story the talking has stopped completely, and in the silence and emptiness the narrator “could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making.”Footnote 87 As Margaret J. Downes observes, the story is “a narrative about unsuccessful narratives – about the uselessness of striving to know ourselves better through talking about love or through telling stories about love.”Footnote 88
If imagery of physical and metaphysical entropy pervades many of Carver's stories, death and entropic decay, and the existential crises they precipitate, are the main narrative focus of others. Death is generally the result of dramatic acts of violence, and such acts, as Kirk Nesset suggests, “attest to the inevitable course of buried violence in Carver's stories – to the return of the repressed, and to the extremity at the heart of all conflicts, and of all stories.”Footnote 89 This is clearly exemplified by “So Much Water So Close to Home,” in which male characters actually leave oppressive suburban interiors, but Carver's narrative foregrounds female narrator Claire's interiority.Footnote 90 For her, as for most characters, as Graham Clarke notes, “Carver's world never offers an escape route … no matter how or where his characters travel, the primary movement is inwards, towards a found emptiness: an interior condition beyond the words of its own naming.”Footnote 91
In “So Much Water So Close to Home” a group of male suburbanites go on a weekend fishing trip in a familiar suburban ritual, attempting to “play out the myth of a rugged America,” but death intrudes shockingly when they discover the body of a girl in a river in the woods.Footnote 92 Rather than abandoning their fishing trip and reporting their discovery to the police, the men decide to wait until after the weekend to inform the sheriff's office. Claire, the narrator, tells us that one of the men,
It might have been Stuart [her husband], he could have done it, waded into the water, and then took the girl by the fingers and pulled her, still face down, closer to shore, into shallow water, and then took a piece of nylon cord and tied it around her wrist and then secured the cord to tree roots, all the while the flashlights of the other men played over the body.Footnote 93
The man's touching and binding of the woman, and the other men's voyeuristic gazing at the body, suggest prurience and physical threat, if not actual violence. His morbid fascination with the girl's body (he periodically returns to look at it, supposedly to check that it is still there) prefigures the entropic dissolution of his relationship with Claire. When Claire says that her husband “could have done it,” the implication seems to be that he might have been capable not just of binding the girl, but of killing her; earlier in their relationship Stuart had told Claire that “someday this affair … will end in violence,” and when she rejects his sexual advances for the second time after the finding of the girl's body, he throws her on the floor and tells her “I hope your cunt drops off before I touch it again.” Like Mel in “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” Stuart is unable to conceal his anger and there is a constant danger of its erupting into psychological or physical violence, or both. The threat of male sexual violence is also clear when Claire drives to the murdered girl's funeral; she pulls over to let a pickup truck overtake, but the driver stops too, walks over to the car and asks Claire to open the window so they can talk. He looks at her breasts, stares at her legs, and tells her she's “going to smother in there.” “I want to smother,” Claire replies, “I am smothering, can't you see?” She increasingly comes to identify with the murdered girl, in an alienated and passive self-objectification: “I float toward the pond, eyes open, face down … I am carried into the lake where I am pushed by the breeze.”Footnote 94 The girl's death has precipitated an existential crisis and in her anguish Claire experiences her life unravelling, with no sense of control or agency. Like Heller's Bob Slocum, who feels that “much of what I remember about me does not seem to be mine,” Claire cannot make sense of her past and tells us, “I cannot be sure that the things I remember happening really happened to me.”Footnote 95
In this story, as in Something Happened and Rabbit Is Rich, the suburbs foster, or engender, a kind of somnambulant fatalism, and passivity; in Heller's novel (with Slocum's mother's demise and a girl's suicide) and Carver's story, death shatters the tenuous equilibrium, the precarious emotional balance, that the characters strive to maintain. The violence in Something Happened (Slocum's killing of his son) and in Carver's story does not (cannot) provide catharsis, cannot stem the inexorable forces of entropy. Claire comes to realize this in her identification with the dead girl, whom she imagines drifting and directionless in the water, carried along by the river's current, and she reflects that “nothing will be any different. We will go on and on and on and on. We will go on even now, as if nothing had happened.”Footnote 96 Stuart's denial of this – and his resultant affective (and perhaps moral) numbness and obliviousness – is shown by his reaction to finding the girl, his fixation on the stasis of death, a state finally beyond the forces of entropy. It is Claire who begins to understand the extent of her husband's alienation and self-estrangement, and the implications for their relationship.
Winifried Fluck argues that “experience has no redeeming force of initiation or transformative potential for the weak identities of Carver's characters.”Footnote 97 This assessment, though, discounts the often subtle shifts in perception that those characters experience. In a 1983 interview Carver said of his characters, “It's their lives they've become uncomfortable with, lives they see breaking down,” and in a later interview said that in his stories “things perish. Ideas and ideals and people's goals and visions – they perish.” The characters may not understand the full significance of the forces of entropy, of things perishing and their lives breaking down, but they don't always reject or deny their muted existential insights. Whilst they may experience muted epiphanies, though, they do not gain a sense of full agency and control over their lives, but instead feel that they have no choice but to “go on and on and on and on.”Footnote 98
The notion of entrapment is a familiar one in fiction about the suburbs and it is precisely the sense of being shut in, in a kind of closed system, that allows the development of the theme of entropy in the texts discussed here. The suburbs heighten and catalyse their inhabitants’ sense of entropic diminishment. The protagonists of these novels and stories all experience a sense of existential depletion – Slocum's “festering invasion from within” and “lightless pit inside,” Rabbit's “inner dwindling,” Carver's characters’ oppressive suburban interiors in which finally “everything goes” – and entropy is, of course, a kind of depletion, a dispersal and diminishment of energy within a closed system.Footnote 99 In each case suburbia provides an environment in which characters can isolate themselves, shut out others, and close down. For Heller's Bob Slocum there is only “stale and folding space” and “seepage … destroying my loved ones”; for Updike's Harry Angstrom there are increasingly “patches of burnt-out gray cells where there used to be lust and keen dreaming and wide-eyed dread … the self … all scattered and distributed”; and the lives of Carver's characters “have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop.”Footnote 100
The sense of detachment experienced by Heller's, Updike's and Carver's protagonists is also a defining characteristic of suburbanites in later US fiction, a corollary of the continuing process of individual and collective societal retrenchment. It is particularly apparent in Richard Ford's The Sportswriter (1986) and in the subsequent Frank Bascombe novels, and also in Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life (1999) and Aloft (2004). The narrator protagonists of these novels are detached and distant from others, yet present their disengaged alienation as a form of sovereign individualism, as a privileging of selfhood over interpersonal relations. Christopher Lasch sees such solipsistic withdrawal as an ongoing reaction to “the turmoil of the sixties,” following which Americans “retreated to purely personal preoccupations, and “having no hope of improving their lives … convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement.” Lasch argues that the “consciousness movement … arising out of a pervasive dissatisfaction with the quality of personal relations,” provided “self-defeating solutions” since it advised people “not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive dependence on others.”Footnote 101 The narrators of Ford's and Lee's novels are illustrative of the consequences of adopting such advice, in an environment that countenances an isolated, affectless disconnectedness. In this literary concern with suburban solipsism there is a clear thematic continuity, since, as Tony Tanner notes (in reference to Thomas Pynchon's 1963 novel V), with “the acceleration of entropy” there is a concomitant “avoidance of human relationships based on reciprocal recognition of the reality of the partner,” so that “entropy and the dread of love may well be linked in some way, for they show a parallel movement towards the state of lasting inanimateness, and share an aspiration to eradicate consciousness and revert to thing-status.”Footnote 102
The period from the late 1980s to the early twenty-first century has also seen the reemergence, and dominance, of social critiques and satires of the suburbs, novels that could be seen, in part at least, as updates of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955). A. M. Homes's Music for Torching (1999), Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010), and Tom Perrotta's Little Children (2004) and The Leftovers (2011), all offer social and political analyses of the state of the American Dream in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century suburbia. David L. Ulin describes Perrotta's The Leftovers as illustrative of the author's role as “a satirist who likes to poke fun at the vagaries of contemporary [suburban] life,” a description that could also perhaps be applied to Homes and Franzen.Footnote 103 The pervasiveness of the postwar conception of suburbia in early twenty-first-century America – as a superficial, conformist, culturally vacuous environment – seems, then, to have provided an opportunity for these authors to reinvigorate the tradition of satirical social commentary. Such a conception of suburbia, however, does not seem conducive to a full exploration of its fictional possibilities, to a consideration of how the suburbs might function as heterotopic spaces in Beuka's terms, revealing contemporary existential concerns and anxieties. In recent suburban fiction such concerns seem to have been elided in favour of those that are, perhaps, more easily explicated and understood.
