Three Delays
by Charlie Smith
2010, Harper Perennial
In a recent issue of The Believer, included in the one-page book reviews was a review by novelist Rick Moody of a book I was unfamiliar with by an author I'd never heard of. I am possessed of some particular fascination with Rick Moody himself; this fascination probably stems from his rather divisive reputation as a practitioner of modern literature. (On a side note, I eagerly anticipate reading his new novel, The Four Fingers of Death.)
The review in question was of Charlie Smith's Three Delays and Moody's praise was so effusive that I was at once utterly convinced of the necessity of my reading this novel. Having completed it, I can safely say that Moody's hyperbolic praise is just that, but even so Three Delays is a stunning vision of the powers of lyrical and lofty prose. Despite a certain amount of aimlessness in plot and structure and a definite staidness of development of character, the distinguishing feature of Smith's novel is the simply sublime prose itself.
The plot of the book is basically a stormy love affair between Billy and Alice, ill-fated childhood sweethearts. Billy narrates the novel and describes a period of about ten years during which Billy and Alice fall continually in and out of love and Billy falls off and climbs back on the wagon of sobriety.
Billy and Alice met as a children at a mock wedding ceremony performed for the amusement of local townsfolk and fell in love. They spent adolescence together in presumable bliss, but where the novel picks up in early adulthood, Billy's drug habit and Alice's manic alternations between passion and malaise have marred their otherwise passionate love affair.
At the novel's beginning, Alice has left Billy and he in turn has found a shabby semblance of solace in abusing drugs. The earlier portions of the novel are chiefly characterized by Billy's aimless wandering and endless soul-searching, caused by/the result of the procuring of drugs. Most of the soul-searching adopts the kind of fiery, passionate wording of passionate diatribes; to wit:
She looked at me, embarrassed, shy of herself, explicitly focused. Everything inside her was expressed in her face. She was like an infant. It was the same as always. Hurt, fear, chagrin, some wild Arabian nights kind of thing, slyness, the slyness apprehended, misery, an ancient ungovernable sadness, hatred, disgust, a Daffy Duck idiot wiliness, bafflement, lust, blank feral staring, love - the were all there. She was better than jai-alai, better than the movies, better, almost, than drugs, and she always had been.
Alice's love for Billy is without question as strong as his. They fall into and out of each other's bodies as animals unable and unwilling to control themselves and with the same regard for psychological and physical safety. To describe their love affair as stormy would be a marked understatement. Both are described as assaulting each other physically repeatedly throughout the book, undergoing blows to most sensitive areas on the human body.
Moreover, the two do substantial psychological damage to one another. When Alice is married to one her two other husbands in the course of the novel's events, Billy gleefully engages in the role of stalker, at one point even kidnapping her and an adopted child. Alice is by no means innocent in their destructive cycle of inflicting harm and making contrition. Her unpredictable temper seems to indicate ferity. As Billy describes it:
Roughly she grabbed me, sank her claws into my body, snatched me from air into the fiery substrate she breathed...turned wildly against me cursing, her body shaking, fire in her eyes, the old demonic business, the devil in human form, all that, so familiar to everyone out in West Miami, beauty as banshee, all that, no stopping her if you weren't armed.
As you can clearly read from these cited examples, the prose we're talking about here inspires awe. Smith's mixing of high and low forms of speech, archaic and vernacular forms, profanity and sacred language alike, is jaw-dropping and exciting.
But these examples also lead me to the inevitable problem with the novel itself, from a purely thematic standpoint, which is: to what extent is this an accurate portrayal of the ferocity of love?
Love is a tricky bastard. It leads one to self-doubt, self-esteem, self-flagellation. Love is often (but not always) passionate, desperate. Perhaps the most pressing question of life is why one hurts the people one loves most in life? Intimacy tends to inure one from sensitivity, and it is this sense of numbness to another's feelings formed simply through familiarity that is perhaps communicated in Alice and Billy's callousness to one another.
And yet, love doesn't inspire most people to strike their partner, or leave them. Alice and Billy's romance, while eminently dramatic does not strike me as realistic. Even in the scenes of domesticity towards the end of the book are marked by an almost cinematic expression of discontent: after returning from work, Alice remains in the car to knit, refusing to torture herself with sharing space with Billy, for example. A more realistic, albeit admittedly prosaic, depiction would be Alice going out for drinks with her girlfriends.
Smith works, justifiably, to make Billy and Alice's fiery affair significant, tortured, doomed, special. But ultimately his prose is so good that the narrative itself need not be heightened to the same histrionic expressions of drama.
Recently I was camping with a friend who finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road and we briefly discussed some of the more unique strengths of that novel. The first thing that came to my mind, despite its being three years since I'd read the book, was McCarthy's muscularity in his prose.
McCarthy's prose is muscular in its singular devotion to syntactical precision; the sentences are structured so that each one communicates its thought in the most direct and concise manner possible. When asked to elaborate on what I meant by syntax, I focused in on McCarthy's use, or lack thereof, of commas; McCarthy's sentences are so compact that they render unnecessary asides, superfluous modifiers and messy clauses virtually impossible.
As a demonstration, I flipped open to a half-dozen pages of his copy of The Road in search of commas and found fewer than five. I then picked up my then-unfinished (but overdue) copy of Three Delays, flipped to a random page and counted no less than thirty commas. On one page.
I am struck now at the thought of what is perhaps a false dichotomy. The point I was making, of course, is that McCarthy's restraint was the favored technique. To write beautifully, but carefully, is better to write beautifully, but sloppily. Or so I thought.
Smith's prose is so prone to stunning description, to leaps of baffling connections, to a completely unrestrained and effulgent view of life that the book as a whole is invigorating. Electrifying.
I cried twice in reading this book, once at a lengthy description of Alice's fatal miscarriage in the novel's last chapter, and once at the following passage, which in its tone of life-affirming desperation and utterly flamboyant prose perfectly encapsulates the gestalt of the experience of reading this baffling, provocative, sumptuous novel:
I looked straight up. The stars were a trail of dust across the sky, dust that might someday form itself into something, some way of expressing things. Or maybe only dust that had already been used up, dust from the pulverization of worlds no one remembered anything about. I wished I was more careful in my life, more respectful, got more the hang of things.
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