to the Puritan ethic and every bit as firmly fixed in the national psyche was the bedrock belief in something for nothing, the idea that five would get you ten. The free lunch was Marx's Surplus, the bonus of labor that capital claimed for itself. It was the gratuitous vein of gold, the oil gusher, the grabbed land, the stock market killing, the windfall profit, the movie sale. Europeans believed in the zero sum game, that one man's feast was his neighbor's fast. But here the whole continent had been free, almost, for the taking. Or so it seemed to Victor Propp, American novelist.
He did not think of his own mind as being particularly American, however, though he was spawned in Boise, Idaho, the product of a taciturn Swedish mother and a Russian Jewish father who taught high school English and claimed kinship with the great story writer Isaac Babel. Victor had not remotely felt at home in Boise and had begun to find his place in the world only when he arrived at Yale at the age of sixteen and discovered Europe in the comp lit department. While he did not, like fellow Idahoan Ezra Pound, remove himself across the ocean, he did imagine that he stood outside the culture, critical and aloof, quarantined at an Ellis Island of the spirit with the disease of his art. A hundred years after Henry James had fled the raw continent, Victor mused, the consciousness of his native land remained barely half forged. Americans were still radical materialists. More innocent than Kalahari bushmen, who were adepts at reading signs and symbols, Americans took everything at face value—words, signs, rhetoric, faces—as if reality itself were so much legal tender. For Victor it was a treacherous text composed by a necromancer, diabolically resistant to analysis. Even the phrase "face value" suggested to a mind like Victor Propp's a labyrinth of interpretation, of masks and falsity and deceit, divergences of appearance and reality, rancorous divorces between signifier and signified, the apparent solidity of the words collapsing underfoot, feathering out and deliquescing into Derridean twilight, surfaces giving way suddenly, like the street along which Victor's taxi was bucking at this very moment, ripped up and peeled back after a gas main explosion to reveal networks of pipe and wire and rat-infested tunnel.
In a small notebook, Victor wrote Free Lunch... Manifest Destiny... American Mind. This brought his total output for the morning to some forty words, the past three hours having been devoted to the fashioning of a thirty-three-word sentence fragment and six parenthetical phone calls. Writing was self-inflicted torture, déjeuner a blessed relief.
Young Calloway was paying for today's lunch. Propp was intrigued by Calloway's mind precisely because it was so American, so different from his own, standing as if on firm ground where Victor descried quicksand. Calloway reminded Victor of those cartoon characters who were able to walk on the air so long as they didn't know there was an abyss underneath them. Naive, in a word—but an interesting, almost exemplary naivete, having to do with youth and an admirable brashness. Like an athlete, he had a pure, practical kind of knowledge upon which Victor wished to draw. He had launched the careers of Jeff Pierce and several other not insignificant writers at an age when most publishing slaves were still typing letters. Approaching sixty, Propp often worried that he had waited too long to make his decisive literary move, and he was reassured by the rapt interest of the bright young man. Harold Stone and his peers still ran the show, but Propp knew which generation would pass judgment on his own. And in his darker moments he suspected he had exhausted Harold's faith in his genius, as well as his patience. Russell might just accomplish something noteworthy or even spectacular, particularly if given a push, and Victor had an idea he wished to set into motion. Having renounced the world for his priestly
He did not think of his own mind as being particularly American, however, though he was spawned in Boise, Idaho, the product of a taciturn Swedish mother and a Russian Jewish father who taught high school English and claimed kinship with the great story writer Isaac Babel. Victor had not remotely felt at home in Boise and had begun to find his place in the world only when he arrived at Yale at the age of sixteen and discovered Europe in the comp lit department. While he did not, like fellow Idahoan Ezra Pound, remove himself across the ocean, he did imagine that he stood outside the culture, critical and aloof, quarantined at an Ellis Island of the spirit with the disease of his art. A hundred years after Henry James had fled the raw continent, Victor mused, the consciousness of his native land remained barely half forged. Americans were still radical materialists. More innocent than Kalahari bushmen, who were adepts at reading signs and symbols, Americans took everything at face value—words, signs, rhetoric, faces—as if reality itself were so much legal tender. For Victor it was a treacherous text composed by a necromancer, diabolically resistant to analysis. Even the phrase "face value" suggested to a mind like Victor Propp's a labyrinth of interpretation, of masks and falsity and deceit, divergences of appearance and reality, rancorous divorces between signifier and signified, the apparent solidity of the words collapsing underfoot, feathering out and deliquescing into Derridean twilight, surfaces giving way suddenly, like the street along which Victor's taxi was bucking at this very moment, ripped up and peeled back after a gas main explosion to reveal networks of pipe and wire and rat-infested tunnel.
In a small notebook, Victor wrote Free Lunch... Manifest Destiny... American Mind. This brought his total output for the morning to some forty words, the past three hours having been devoted to the fashioning of a thirty-three-word sentence fragment and six parenthetical phone calls. Writing was self-inflicted torture, déjeuner a blessed relief.
Young Calloway was paying for today's lunch. Propp was intrigued by Calloway's mind precisely because it was so American, so different from his own, standing as if on firm ground where Victor descried quicksand. Calloway reminded Victor of those cartoon characters who were able to walk on the air so long as they didn't know there was an abyss underneath them. Naive, in a word—but an interesting, almost exemplary naivete, having to do with youth and an admirable brashness. Like an athlete, he had a pure, practical kind of knowledge upon which Victor wished to draw. He had launched the careers of Jeff Pierce and several other not insignificant writers at an age when most publishing slaves were still typing letters. Approaching sixty, Propp often worried that he had waited too long to make his decisive literary move, and he was reassured by the rapt interest of the bright young man. Harold Stone and his peers still ran the show, but Propp knew which generation would pass judgment on his own. And in his darker moments he suspected he had exhausted Harold's faith in his genius, as well as his patience. Russell might just accomplish something noteworthy or even spectacular, particularly if given a push, and Victor had an idea he wished to set into motion. Having renounced the world for his priestly
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