In 1909, while serving as director of the New York Philharmonic, Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma attended a séance conducted by the Italian spiritualist Eusapia Palladino on the Lower East Side. Exiting their cars on Broadway and ascending in a lift to the building’s attic, they were met by Palladino, a short, graying woman with large, dark eyes, who ushered them inside and seated them around a small table.
As recorded in Alma’s diary, Palladino went into convulsions almost immediately, while errant lights like will-o’-the-wisps moved through the space and the table shot up to the ceiling. Amid the chaos, Palladino instructed Mahler to look inside a nearby alcove, where he found “everything was in movement” and “bathed in a phosphorescent light.” At one point, a “mandolin flew through the air and bashed him lightly on the forehead.” Nevertheless, a week later Mahler was remarking that “perhaps there wasn’t any truth in it, and we only dreamt it.”
This habit of blurring and reimagining our transcendent experiences is at the center of the English novelist Jonathan Buckley’s new novel Live; live; live. “It has been said that I have misrepresented certain situations and incidents,” Joshua, the narrator, explains at the outset. “We all misrepresent; we misperceive and we misremember.” The novel, Buckley’s second to appear stateside from NYRB after last year’s remarkable The Great Concert of the Night, is a layered history of misremembering, charting the lifelong friendship between Joshua and the medium Lucas Judd.
Joshua grows up without a father, and considers asking Lucas to help locate his absent parent. Lucas befriends an aging neighborhood couple, Kathleen and Callum Oliver, and upon their deaths, receives their house in the will. Accusations of chicanery trail Lucas, though they never amount to much. Later on, he marries a beautiful ingénue, Erin, whom Joshua also has an eye for — they kiss once, chastely, though again nothing catastrophic results. Lucas dies of cancer; Erin decides to move away; and Joshua, now an adult, is left forlorn.
As the gloss suggests, Live; live; live is an autumnal, straitened work. The spry elegance of The Great Concert of the Night has disappeared, leaving in its place a cindered linguistic husk — the novel’s contemplative prose can feel almost timorous at times, obsessing over minor dramas and episodes. Buckley’s protagonists are typically dry functionaries, their lives and observations proceeding along the grooves of an implicit procedurality — urgency is intentionally muted, no sense of time dilating or contracting in the midst of emergency. Impressions are registered measuredly, ad seriatim, as though the world were kind enough to offer itself to his protagonists in discrete, quantumized segments.
In their way of rolling from scene to scene with the neutral intensity of a documentary film, Buckley’s books evince a self-consciously slow model of literature. Drama and event are submerged, tertiary, dissolved in the text’s strangely crepuscular temporality. Everything seems to occur, to use the book’s own words, in the “non-time of a dream.” Buckley’s protagonists, for their part, are dimly-lit, almost anonymous men, scraped thinly across the language they peddle generously. Hesitation and hedging extend Buckley’s sentences, disclosing a latent insecurity — events in Live; live; live unfold in a languorous spiral partly because the mechanism of memory is unpredictable, but also because Joshua is unwilling, at the core, to actively pursue his past.
Buckley’s characters are generally inclined to a certain self-serious atavism — Lucas, for instance, describes himself as “a latter-day mendicant, wandering the length and breadth of the land, dependent upon donations from those to whom he ministered.” Some hoary wind seems constantly to be swirling around the text, nipping at the measured flow of Buckley’s syntax, but for the most part his antiquarianism is most fitting. The gestures of the soul, in Buckley’s cosmology, are medieval in lineament — sweeping, excitable, and binary. When Joshua and Erin steal a kiss, the minor fallout is imbued with a tragic grandiosity:
“In the months that followed the kiss, it was never mentioned by either of us. There was nothing more to be said, because what had been said by the kiss was true. Only when Lucas had gone did Erin talk about the guilt. She had always felt this guilt, she said, but now she felt it more strongly than ever. With Lucas dead, she could no longer appease her guilt by subservience. His spirit can see everything, she may believe.”
The emotions are rarefied, romantic, but since Buckley’s is a literature of frustration, these breast-beating sentiments run up against a general lack — or impossibility — of agency to act. The high-handed composure of his protagonists often seems to mask a medieval desire for punishment and extravagant recompense.
Extravagance is probably one of the better lenses for considering Buckley’s work. Emotion for the most part has been refined away; we get the sense it’s being held at bay, or suspended, at the end of a massive ornamental edifice, which is partly the reason Buckley’s metaphors, at their highest pitch, tend to be baroque and based on antique materials. “The truth might be revealed in a moment; a brief dialogue of touch, in which more is said than by all the words that went before,” Joshua explains. “Or think of an old photograph on glass — at first it seems to be nothing but a rectangle of matt smoky grey, but when picked up, and angled into the light, the object changes in an instant, and the image appears; so the truth appears.”
In a novel so bent on explication and the slow unfolding of detail, it’s a surprise to find some of its most affecting moments hidden away, almost intentionally occluded. Callum Oliver, the husband of Kathleen, suffers for most of his life from bilious bouts of depression; after both the Olivers have passed, Lucas and Joshua stroll through their garden, and one day note an inscription carved by Callum, who had once dreamed of being a sculptor. Domi manere convenit felicibus, the inscription reads. Or, translated, “It behooves those who are happy to stay home.”
For all his interest in the baroque, Buckley is at his best when he’s writing simply; his quietest descriptions carry the most weight. Lucas’s descriptions of his psychic theories are less interesting in the end than his memories of a brief period when he worked as a carpet-fitter:
“It was a pleasure, too, to spend time in the houses of strangers, he said. Rooms can be read like faces, like pages of text. Pictures of course tell one a great deal — not just by their subject, but also by where they are displayed, and how they are displayed. Furniture is informative — its style, its age, its placement, its quantity, its condition. ‘One can interpret dust and damage,’ Lucas pronounced; the poetical phrase had not arisen spontaneously. He talked about a house in which tracks had been worn into the old carpet in the living room, from the door to the armchair that was set squarely in front of the television, and from the television to the window; from every wall, photographs of the husband looked on; the photos had become as pale as old watercolours.”
This is nearly Sebaldian. The prose’s willingness to hover around a few flensed images and ideas (furniture, dust, damage) achieves the same effect as a séance — a condign constellation of objects and personalities summoning, through force of resonance, a spirit from the void.
When it allows itself a lightness of touch, Live; live; live is a startling book. Which shouldn’t be surprising — affinities and auras and other psychic phenomena, after all, are concerned with the just-missed connection, the barely perceived. The pursuit of the dead, as Buckley suggests, is a search for etheric pristinity, for essential motivations — what remains when the minor concerns of the flesh have been stripped away. But on earth, as we know, our minor concerns can often be our deepest; like Mahler, we move from skepticism to belief and back again far more freely, far more lightly, than we’d be willing to admit, so that from one moment to the next our firmest convictions can loosen up, disperse, becoming, in Buckley’s elegant phrase, nothing more than “a fume of memory.”
[Published by New York Review Books on February 2, 2021, 272 pages, $16.95 paperback]