Annotation #5

Bradbury, Ray. Death is a Lonely Business. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

    I doubt if there's a book more applicable to my study than this one, and I doubt if I'll find another so close to what I want to achieve. I first happened upon it not too long after realizing what flowed through my fiction were lonely characters seeking some kind of happiness, success, or redemption, and it was surprising I hadn't come across it before. Though I had already read many of his writings, I hadn't done so comprehensively and wasn't even aware of this novel until I happened to see "Bradbury" from afar while passing over the mystery section at a used book store. As it turns out, the book is not only a masterpiece of handsome writing and an homage to mystery writers, but a meditation on the creative process, and of the worth of living and of striving for that which eludes us.

     The hero of the novel is never named, referred to only as "the kid," or "The Crazy." He's a sort of stand-in for Bradbury in his own youth, starving in a tiny apartment in the dying town of Venice, California in the forties/fifties and writing stories for sci-fi and mystery magazines, his girlfriend far away on a trip. The novel is populated by remnants of better days--worn down and barren show attractions, grotesque people living among them and waiting for nothing in particular, except perhaps for death. Wrecking crews come to demolish the pier on which many of the theme-park style attractions are rotting, and apparently someone begins to do the same to many of the grotesques whom the kid has befriended over the years. There is no direct evidence of murder, but the kid believes someone is stalking those who wish for death and is nudging them over into the abyss.

     For much of the book, the story is enjoyable as an adventure among the strange ruins of this town, buildings and humans both, but eventually the story reveals itself as something much more. Through hilarious dialogues with Detective Elmo Crumley, who it turns out writes fiction in his free time, the kid comes to understand that he isn't only battling a murderer, he is finding the courage to live despite fear of failure, to revel in the challenges presented him, and to shout his joy, not cower in fear of living. The murder victims, it turns out, are all broken people, as described in the following passages from the kids' confrontation at the end with the murderer:

    "Lonelies. You said the word. You described them last month. Lonelies."
     And it was true. A funeral march of souls went by in a breath, on soundless feet, in drifts of fog. Fannie and Sam and Jimmy and Cal and all the rest. I had never put a proper label on them. I had never seen the carry-over that tied them all and made them one (204).

     "The Mikado," I told him. "One song explains you. Your object all sublime, you will achieve in time. To make the punishment fit the crime. The Lonelies. All of them. You put them on your list, in the words of the song, they never will be missed. Their crime was giving up or never having tried. It was mediocrity or failure or lostness. And their punishment, my God, was you" (205).

At the time this book was originally published, in 1985, Bradbury had not published a novel in twenty-three years. Even now, most of his books have been collections of short stories, sometimes linked by a theme, such as The Martian Chronicles. His earlier novels, though unforgettable, didn't seem as polished or coherent as his short works. Perhaps it was too much to ask for him to fine-tune his longer works as well as he had done on short stories, or perhaps he needed more time to grow into a longer format, or perhaps he needed more financial security before he could spend the time he really wanted to on a novel. Whatever the case, by the time Death was published, Bradbury seems to have mastered not only the format but the very substance of his own work, his own creativity, and the driving forces in his life. Death is not simply a portrait of endearing characters, or a suspenseful story; it is a blueprint for the survival of our creativity in life, as evidenced in this paragraph:

I looked out at the surf and shore. Not a sign of bodies drowned, and no one on the sand to know or not know. I didn't want to go but I had a full day's work ahead, writing my stories just three steps ahead of death. A day without writing, I often said, and said it so many times my friends sighed and rolled their eyeballs, a day without writing was a little death. I did not intend to pitch me over the graveyard wall. I would fight all the way with my Underwood Standard which shoots more squarely, if you aim it right, than any rifle ever invented (115).

My all-time favorite quote comes from this book, and not coincidentally it's one that is easy to remember. The kid describes his writing method as such: "'Nobody knows how the brain works, not writers, no one. All I do is throw up every morning, clean up at noon'" (65). This is his way of telling us to write while our minds are free from the corruption of daily influences, and to revise later when we're perhaps a little less energetic but more shrewd. The beauty of this novel is that it appears Bradbury spent many a noon cleaning it up, probably long after his stomach had turned to throwing up other things. Take this paragraph for example:

Among all those pale faces, fixing their eyes upon the flickering past, was he there? The mourner on the train, the pacer along the canal rim, the leaver of three-in-the-morning rains, was that his face over here, or that one over there? Colorless moons trembling in the dark, a cluster of souls in front, another back halfway, fifty, sixty people, dreadful suspects on yet another fog excursion rushing to collide with nightmare and sink with no sound, only the great suck of the sea going back for reinforcements (74).

The kid is wondering where he'll find the murderer he unwittingly encountered late one night on a lonely trolley in his fog-covered town of Venice, and it's a very simple thought initially, but Bradbury goes to great length to make the kid's thought very vivid and poetic. This paragraph is not at all unusual in the novel, in fact it's the norm. This is part of what separates the novel from Bradbury's earlier novels, namely Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Whereas those novels only reached for this kind of poetry inconsistently, Death is written this way from front to back. Even the characters speak in their own, unique, individual, everyday kind of poetry. I can't imagine the amount of revision (or else sheer experience) this must have required, and it's a shame more writers don't put forth the same effort. It's what I strive for but am also intimidated by. That is probably why Bradbury offers up his advice, to throw up our writing in the morning before fears of inadequacy prevent us from getting it down on paper. After all, there will always be time to revise and perfect it later in the day.

Beyond the overall advice and wholesomeness of this book, there are aspects of his storytelling that I don't see often enough in other writers' works. Something I find thoroughly fascinating is when a character for a moment perceives his or her world very differently, not necessarily an epiphany of understanding, but simply a hair-raising momentary perception of the world as being topsy-turvy. A good example is early in the novel, on the fateful night of the murderer breathing down the kid's neck:

I came running, head down against the rain which suddenly cleared and stopped. The moon broke through a rift of darkness like a great eye watching me. I walked on mirrors which showed me the same moon and clouds. I walked on the sky beneath, and--something happened....(5).

These kind of pulse-quickening moments are extremely important to fiction, particularly to the fiction I enjoy. For that's how life is, as I see it. We endure through long lulls, only to have everything turned on its head in a moment, throwing into question everything we thought we knew. There are parallels to this in the sciences, in history, in evolution in particular. Vast stretches of normalcy are punctuated by short periods of rapid change, and to my mind a novel should focus on these moments, even seek to increase their frequency.

Crumley's position as both detective and writer allows he and the kid to step out of the story just a little, without breaking the continuous dream of the novel, and to wonder at the driving forces of the murderer they seek, of the victims who may or may not be victims, and of themselves. In doing so, Crumley coins a phrase likely to go up on my bulletin board: "Shakespeare's full of it, you're full of it, me, everyone. Meaningless malignity. Don't that have a ring? It means someone running around doing lousy things, a bastard, for no reason. Or none we can figure" (140). The emphasis is on "none we can figure." The characters are trying to figure out who's next on the murderer's list, and why they have been stalked as well. Before the book is finished, the murderer's motivation is clearly understood, as well as what part the victims all played in their own downfall.

Bradbury never fashions characters out of cardboard. They are human--complex--and he doesn't waste a word in conveying this. After finishing this novel, I dwelt for a moment on how deep many of the characters seemed, then went back to see how many words had actually been devoted to each. Bradbury excels at getting the most mileage out of his few, choice words, for there isn't alot of unnecessary text devoted to fleshing out characters. Many contemporary novels seem overly devoted to their characters' histories, and this may be what some readers are looking for, a kind of literary soap opera, or perhaps biography, that can be read obsessively, but what I much prefer is a good story with characters finely tuned to propel that story, and that is what Bradbury achieves with more success than any other writer I can think of.

All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws