Indecision: Getting it together

Bestselling author Jay McInerney considers Benjamin Kunkel's first novel, Indecision, one of the smartest, funniest coming-of-age novels in years

We were discussing a certain wunderkind who'd recently been spanked for his second novel. "Anyway, who cares", said my friend, a celebrated middle-aged novelist. "Writers in their 20's don't have much to say to me." I don't know – I guess it's possible, as many friends and not a few critics have claimed, that I'm a case of arrested development, but I remain, long after passing 30 myself, strangely interested in the literary effusions of those in their late 20's or early 30's. I devour first novels, particularly coming-of-age novels. In its modern form the American bildungsroman (the novel of formation) descends from The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Reinvigorated by feminism in the 1970s, urbanised and coked-up in the 1980s, it was grunged-down and nonfictionalised in the memoir-mad 1990s (not necessarily a terrible development since most first novels are quasi memoirs anyway).

Though often disappointed and frequently bored senseless by the antics of Holden's progeny, I still believe there's a type of cultural news that can be delivered only by those who've recently crossed over from the riotous country of adolescence, as well as a new spin on the literary traditions that have long since become reified in the minds of older writers. There are certain zeitgeist frequencies to which young ears are more attuned.

My strange faith seems confirmed by the arrival of Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision, which manages to make the whole flailing, post-adolescent, pre-life crisis feel fresh and funny again, even as it sometimes resembles nothing so much as a self-conscious, postmodern homage/parody of the genre. In the end, though, it might just yearn to be something more daring than that, like, maybe, a post-9/11, post-ironic novel: a tentative response to David Foster Wallace's call for a new generation of sincere anti-rebels "who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles."

If Kunkel ultimately seems to want to move beyond irony and youthful nihilism – and I'm not ready to concede the point just yet – he certainly embraces and rides the hell out of them in the beginning, with deeply satisfying results. Kunkel is deeply aware of the conventions and clichés of the genre – in fact, you get the sense that he's probably read everything from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship to Alix Ohlin's recent novel The Missing Person. Indecision seems at times to have been constructed from a kit in which all the ingredients of the modern American Bildungsroman have been laid out methodically and chosen after deep deliberation.

Kunkel's hero, 28-year-old Dwight Wilmerding, is a likable, self-conscious doofus, contemporary New York WASP hetero version, who realises even before we do that his life is a slacker cliché circa 1994. Dwight feels "like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn't help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it".

Both the author and his protagonist share a kind of reflexive self-awareness. "What is this way you talk, Dwight?" his sister asks. "Everything you say is in quotes." To which he responds: "Everything everybody says.'' So far, so postmodern. What saves this from becoming tedious is Wilmerding's voice, which blends astute and whimsical observation with cerebral gymnastics and tortuously modest, wistful introspection. Kunkel has a masterly ear; Dwight's voice seems at once utterly familiar and weirdly original. "I didn't pay that much attention to New York. It always seemed weirdly pre-perceived, with other people already on the job. But it really was a nice place, if you looked in the right neighbourhood, and imagined people more like yourself and your friends living there."

Like many of those who have followed in Holden's footsteps, Wilmerding teeters at times right on the edge between lovable and cloying, but in the second, wanderjahr section of the book, Kunkel saves him from cuteness by allowing him to behave like a complete jerk.

When we meet Dwight he's living in a dormlike apartment with several roommates. He is underemployed as a techie in the 'Problem Resolution Center' at Pfizer, and under-committed to Vaneetha, a currency trader whom he leaves behind shortly after he is fired from his job. His parents have divorced fairly recently and he wonders, with little conviction, if this might not have something to do with his problems. And he is sort of incestuously attracted to his sister, a radical anthropologist who briefly volunteers to be his psychoanalyst until, after he tries to kiss her, she gives him up as a hopeless case.

Wilmerding is aimless and passive in a Oblomovian way that is, we sense, meant to be representative in terms of his chrysalis stage in life and the dictates of the genre. His inability to commit or make a decision is innate and almost pathological. So difficult does he find it to choose between any competing alternatives that he was once paralysed at a family Thanksgiving dinner with his fork in midair, drooling, unable to decide between the turkey, the stuffing and the cranberry sauce. In other words, Dwight suffers from abulia -- an inability to make decisions.

One of Dwight's roommates, a medical student, informs him that there is a cure for his condition – which is apparently more wide-spread than we might have imagined – a drug called Abulinix. Unfortunately, it takes a week or two to kick in. While he's waiting for this to happen, Dwight flies off to Ecuador in response to a casual invitation from Natasha, an old prep school classmate who seems, suddenly, like she might just possibly be the girl of his dreams, although he hasn't seen her in ten years.

The object of his affection disappears the day after his arrival in Quito, and Dwight is left to commiserate with her roommate, Brigid, a Belgian anthropologist who spent several months living with a tribe deep in the Amazon before she finally discovered that another anthropologist had preceded her, asking pretty much the same questions in pursuit of pretty much the same thesis topic. Upon meeting her Dwight observes to himself: "Certainly she would make a welcome addition to any threesome". Now he finds himself alone with Brigid, who proves to be an extremely earnest and socially conscious foil to our feckless hero.

"So I am surprised, yes." Brigid says about Natasha's disappearing act. "But also not surprised. You can see?" Brigid is in many ways a softer, euro version of Dwight's angry socialist sister. After they decide to travel through the countryside together, Brigid tries to awaken Dwight's dormant social conscience. At this point in the novel, the contrast between Dwight's stubborn passive resistance and Brigid's uptight euro-intellectual sincerity keeps us in the comic mode.

"In New England with your wealth you also have freedom, relatively speaking, yes?" she asks as they tromp through the jungle.

"'Yeah", Dwight replies.

"'And yet in South America as you notice the people are quite poor and lack genuine freedom with their economies?"

"Sure," he says, before adding: "She was making me feel like one of those dumb yes-men in Plato's dialogues who just keep on going Yes, Socrates, right Socrates until they've been led unwarily by their own dull answers into serious extremities of contradiction."

So far, Indecision is on pretty familiar ground. But something funny, or rather something serious, happens on the way back to Quito. The change of tone is relatively subtle and Kunkel is clever and skillful enough to finesse it under the guise of romance and drugs. Eventually, of course, Brigid and Dwight end up naked, high on some jungle hallucinogen. While they are entwining, a secret is revealed and Natasha's disappearance explained. But while romantico-sexual fulfillment (to borrow Dwight's sister's term) is part of the coming-of-age formula, radical political conversion is not. In the traditional Bildungsroman, young Torless or Tom Jones is eventually integrated into the traditional social order.

Kunkel reverses the 19th century convention (as well as Joyce's negation in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Dedalus renounces the social order for the priestly vocation of art): as a result of his drugged-up romantic consummation, the protagonist becomes socially conscious; that is, alienated from the status quo and politically awakened. While they are playing at Adam and Eve in the Ecuadorian forest, Brigid invites Dwight to envision a fruit which, once eaten, allows you to know the history of every product that comes into your hands – including the labour and suffering that produced it. Dwight's epiphany plausibly takes place under the influence, but unexpectedly persists and develops into a full-blown social conscience and a budding altruistic vocation. You may ask yourself, as the realisation sinks in, is he kidding? But after two readings I have to say, I don't think he is. And at some point I remembered Foster Wallace's much-discussed essay (E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction ) on irony and its discontents.

If Kunkel had stopped his novel in mid-sentence some 20 or 30 pages earlier, he would merely have written the funniest and smartest coming-of-age novel in years. In fact, he seems to be trying to do something more ambitious by somewhat abashedly presenting the birth of a social conscience as a genuinely redemptive moment, albeit one finessed through a psychedelic episode and the comic medium of Dwight's voice, which retains its self-deprecating humour, making fun of his fledgling idealism even as he lays it out for us. The tentativeness with which Kunkel approaches this fairly radical conclusion may just be an indication of the narrowness of our contemporary literary idiom. My paedophobic novelist friend may be rolling her eyes at this point, but it seems to me that Kunkel manages, just barely, to preserve the superb comic tone of the novel, even as he gestures, like some literary voice in the wilderness, toward a hazy new frontier of hip sincerity, of irony subordinated to a higher calling.

JAY MCINERNEY
Jay McInerney's seventh novel, The Good Life, will be published in January 2006

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