Peter D. Kramer will always be known as the author of Listening toProzac, his 1993 work that both described a new, psychopharmacologically based "climate of opinion" in our culture and helped bring it about. But if he doesn't become known, too, for Spectacular Happiness, that will not be the fault of this daring first novel. Starting with the fact that it is fiction, Spectacular Happiness defies our expectations of Kramer. It breathes life into a certain kind of radical politics in a way that makes you wish Kramer had tried fiction sooner. None of our more practiced leftish novelists--including Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and E.L. Doctorow--has generated as tantalizing a vision of contemporary radicalism minus dogma. This book establishes imaginative continuity with the sixties--as Bill Ayers's recent memoir Fugitive Days, for example, utterly failed to do--and with older radical traditions.
The book also reverses the positions on drugs with which Kramer has famouslybeen identified. Spectacular Happiness is emphatically anti-antidepressant. All of the things that have been whispered about Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)--that they enforce conformity and rob you of your distinctiveness, your identity, your soul--are seconded by this novel. Kramer considered these negatives at length in Listening to Prozac, where, while trying to maintain a semblance of evenhandedness, he nevertheless came down solidly in support of SSRIs' potential to make you feel "better than well." Spectacular Happiness comes to the opposite conclusion, judging wellness through drugs to be worse than unhappiness without them.
What may deny Spectacular Happiness the consideration it deserves, however, is neither its politics nor its position on drugs, but the events of September 11. As it happens, Chip Samuels, the book's main character, is a self-proclaimed terrorist. It doesn't matter that he never kills or injures anyone--not the guilty, not the innocent, not even himself. It doesn't matter that sometimes he doesn't even destroy property (to achieve results, he can merely let it be known that he's thinking about doing so). Chip has little more in common with the perpetrators of the September 11 massacres than the label "terrorist." His grand ambition, in fact, is to give terrorism--or at least the anarchism from which, to his mind, it springs--a good name. After September 11, of course, that is a tough sell.
Chip is an ecoterrorist, to be precise, and as sane and gentle a man as youwould ever hope to have handling sticks of dynamite. There are no traces ofmalice or fanaticism in his character. In fact, the most irritating thing abouthim is his absolute incombustibility: his unshakable, slightly stuffy, maybe evenslightly stuck-up air of benevolence. (Mannie Abelman, his therapist, faults himfor lack of passion.) Chip more than compensates for this flaw by being a shrewd,scrupulous writer, with real talent for knowing where exactly in a piece of textto plant the fireworks. The novel, set primarily on Cape Cod but also in New YorkCity, takes the form of a journal that Chip addresses to his teenage son, Hank(over whom Anais, Chip's ex-wife, has sole custody).
Chip becomes a sort of folk hero and television celebrity. After all, it'shard to hold a grudge against someone who basically just makes it easier to goto the beach--which is what Chip's group, FtB, or Free the Beaches, sets out todo. The group consists entirely of Chip and Sukey Kuykendahl, who grew up nextdoor to him in the fictional town of Sesuit, on the Cape, and have been friendsand sometime lovers since. When they reconnect once more--after his failedmarriage, and in the wake of her alcoholism--they propose to open the Cape's longstretches of private beaches to the public. When Chip decides that a particularlyostentatious or illbegotten residence has hogged too much shoreline for too long,he tunes in to its death wish. With Sukey's help, he puts assorted "seasideabominations" out of their misery.
He could--if he cared to disown the identity of terrorist, which he doesnot--style himself a residential thanatologist, an architectural euthanasiast,the Dr. Kevorkian of regrettable real estate. Chip spares no effort to achievethe "tailoring of disruption to site" that is always his political andaesthetic goal. "Last winter and spring," he writes of one action, "I feltcompelled to sit in a neighbor's house and discover a fit means of destruction,the performative equivalent of the mot just."
Books and writing are powerful presences in Spectacular Happiness. At a time when many novels aspire to be films or Web pages rather than what they are, Chip's--and Kramer's--unabashed love of literature is no small part of this book's appeal. When Chip met Anais at Harvard University in the sixties, literature, as ever, was his private underground (preparation, in a sense, for the clandestine pursuits of FtB). But as the son of a carpenter, he also was good with his hands; this, in Anais's eyes, made him a fair approximation of "that romantic figure, the New Man ... who would parse a sonnet in the morning and shingle a roof in the afternoon." For Anais, Chip was the "worker-student alliance" in the flesh. He, in turn, loved her looks, her smell, her high-strung idealism, her fraught, moody commitments--and, not least of all, her reading list.
He'd already read Marx when he met her, though on the whole he preferred Zolaand Dickens, who "expressed the same ideas with more complexity, noticing thegaps in the system, the interstices where kindness endured." Anais rerouted hisreading in the direction of the Situationists, French theorists of the day, whomade a permanent impression on him. The Situationists were, in effect,meta-leftists: Whereas leftists might leaflet against the War in Vietnam, theSituationists, in turn, might leaflet the leafleters. They warned the leftagainst its own certainties, telling it, as Chip puts it, that "ours is not thesociety of the dollar but of the spectacle" and that activists were in constantdanger of being subsumed by the spectacle of their own protest. At bottom,Situationism was a critique of the media's ability to simulate experience andcounterfeit human interactions.
Situationists maintained that the old forms of social struggle were uselessagainst the society of the spectacle; well-articulated programs and objectiveswere sitting ducks for co-optation. Situationists aimed to be part WalterBenjamin and part Che Guevara, guerrillas in flaneur's clothing, probing forplaces where "situations"--moments, in Chip's words, "of freedom, of play, ofprivate desire"--might occur. Sukey sums up FtB's peculiar interpretation ofSituationism by alluding not to Marx, Mao, or Danny the Red but to Jerry Seinfeldand his sitcom about nothing: "'Nothing,' she said. 'A campaign about nothing... .We create nothing ... and the culture fills the void.'"
When Anais and Chip married and moved to his Sesuit cottage, she remained thefirebrand; he, if anything, her disciple. Anais took up pottery and became, notwithout ambivalence, a mother. When she disappeared now and then--for therapy,pottery, or possibly, one time, even adultery--it was always with Chip's support,part of the understanding they'd had from the beginning. In the journal, Chipproudly describes the Anais of those years as "Emma Goldman crossed with GretaGarbo, a revolutionary with a need to disappear from view." One summer, after asomewhat longer separation than usual, she returned to Sesuit on antidepressantsand declared her life to that point to be an exercise in futility.
Gone are the jokes at the expense of "Disney happiness, Nintendo happiness,Gap happiness" that had been a staple of family banter. Gone is Anais'slong-standing rebellion against her mother, a conspicuously consuming suburbanitewith whom she now learns to shop. Gone, too, is the "fierce beauty" that framedher ideals. She now brands her pottery AnnieWare and promotes it through high-endBoston outlets. Hank all of a sudden becomes "honey," an endearment she had neverused before. She promises to do "better as a mother," but, as Chip confides toHank in the journal, it seems that she is "better able to be near you but lessliable to remember your name." When Chip reminds her of certain "formulations"that they had but recently held in common, she pronounces him "covertly andchronically depressed ... stranded self-righteously in the sixties."
Converted to the new pharmacopoeia, Anais believes that drugs are just thething for Hank, as well. Harriet, the boy's school principal, wants to put him onRitalin--to settle him down and jump-start him into literacy--before promotinghim to second grade. When Anais rushes to agree, this is the breaking point forChip. He had spent the summer of Anais's absence close to his son, calling it the"summer of reading," though he might just as well have called it the summer ofsurf. All Chip and Hank seemed to do was read and swim. Hank relishes bothactivities, and Chip is glad to find that with patience and good readingmaterial--the Oz books do nicely--that Hank, too, is a book lover. At summer's end, fit and relaxed, they turn up in Harriet's office for Hank's reading test, which he passes easily--too easily for her. As Chip records (addressing himself, as always, to Hank): "Instead of congratulating you, Harriet looked at me in horror. What did you do to this child? she wanted to know, as if torture were an effective method of teaching reading."
When his wife and son disappear into an upscale midwestern suburb followingdivorce proceedings, Chip doesn't grow bitter or morose. He is sure that Anais'ssimulated happiness is only temporary and that she and Hank will return.Meanwhile, he draws on superhuman reserves of patience, tolerance, andforbearance. And he blows things up. He calls these actions "installations," andyou'd think, by the way he chews them over, that they were avant-gardepresentations in light and sound.
Sukey, a Realtor, can guarantee access to targeted sites and make sure that noone will be about. But Chip is determined not only to avoid injury but also toavoid making too much sense. He doesn't want to give the impression that there issome "grand program" or "defined ideology" behind what has come to be known asthe Sesuit bombings. "Boldness and purposelessness" are his watchwords. AndSituationism, for him, is a way station back to older, naturally literarywellsprings of inspiration. "Ours is not the era of the straight path," hereflects. "I was aiming for stories that would remain out of focus, set in apicaresque and even whimsical progression, a hypermodern style that reaches farback, to the 'Quixote' or Rabelais."
Though the evidence is largely circumstantial--Chip lives in Sesuit and hastaught the literature of anarchism at his community college--the FBI suspectshim. And the media seizes on him. Drafted into explaining the Sesuit bombings andvarious copycat actions on prime time, Chip tiptoes along the edge betweenactuality and celebrity. He is the television personality as hero/culprit and, inthis new light, shows up on Anais's screen. She does come back, literally settingoff fireworks on the way, a sign of returning to her old principles and self.Best of all, after a long swim--the novel's honored mode of transportation--thelonged-for reunion with Hank takes place.
Meanwhile, across the country, Situationism à la Seinfeld catches on. There are outbreaks of "conspicuous generosity" throughout the land. By way of rehabilitating himself in the public eye, a crime boss steps forward totake responsibility for the Sesuit bombings. FtB supporters sport signs that read, "Random!" And Chip defines himself on-air as "myself, a man who flounders."
But how much of Chip has become counterfeit? Did Anais come back to him or toa celebrity? Chip gets slightly more doubt than even he would like at the finale,but he'll take it; it beats the tragic end of most stories about anarchists withbombs. Spectacular Happiness concludes on July 4, with all of them--Chip, Anais, Hank, and Sukey--gathering to watch fireworks.
This elegantly crafted novel restores faith in politics. As Mannie says, youcan change the world, at least a little, by playing with it. Once a New Yorkcelebrity in his own right for his best-selling book So This Is Love, Mannie has retired to the Cape to complete the sequel, So This Is Nausea, which, he tells Chip, is a history of throwing up from "late eighteenth century romanticism to our epidemic of bulimia." Many things make Mannie himself nauseated--certain houses (Chip and Sukey know which ones) and certain economic systems--but mostly what drives him back to Sartre is the predictability of his patients' stories. Faced with their lack of imagination, he decides that his role as therapist must be to "give patients access to a greater range of denouements."
The old ways of doing this are worn out, he thinks. Freud may have been apsychoterrorist in his day, when all you had to do was talk about sex to reallyshake up a patient, but that doesn't work anymore. "If it's not new, it's nottherapy," he tells Chip. "To reach people at all, you have to surprise them." Andso, near the end of the book, Kramer, by way of Mannie, lets it be known thatpsychology has all along been the puppet master. It appears that a nauseatedMannie, and not some mob contact, as Chip had assumed, first directed Sukey tothe store of explosives used by FtB. Thus did Mannie contrive to introduce allconcerned to a greater range of denouements.
Chip does, at one point, consider shucking his label. "Terror," he reflects,"may be the wrong word for what I have practiced--many people seem lessfrightened than amused." But that would have been contrary to his therapist'sinclinations.
And it would have denied the slim area of similarity between FtB and theattacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Both do, as Chip says,"redistribute anxiety." Both do make people think and think again. But FtBdoesn't kill, maim, or terrify; instead, with the bounty of luck andcircumspection possible only in fiction, it kindles a national situation of hope.Based on his work so far, Peter Kramer deserves to be thought of as one of thewriters most deeply attuned to our culture's changing moods. He was right aboutthe turn toward drugs. And he is right again, in this novel, about a nationalturn toward politics. He couldn't have had any idea, while working on the book,how right he was.
