THE GHOST IN THE WHEELCHAIR
It’s poor taste to quote another novel when reviewing someone’s book, but there’s a sentence from William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow” that keeps haunting and informing and grounding my understanding of the strange and beguiling experience that is “Foregone,” the new novel by Russell Banks.
“In talking about the past,” writes Maxwell, “we lie with every breath we draw.”
If this is true, if we are somehow unreliable to the core, then how can we ever expect to come clean with ourselves? More to the point, on our deathbed, is there any hope of laying to rest the so-called choices and mistakes we have left scattered behind us? Or are we poisoned at the source? Do our attempts to let our situation speak only serve to obscure and muddy the waters of our lives even more?
These are the questions that churn under the surface of “Foregone” and make it such an unsettling and lasting novel.
At age 77, dying of cancer, Leonard Fife has agreed to give one last interview for a documentary about his life and work. He is a much-admired filmmaker in Canada, famous for bringing to light the perils of Agent Orange, and his protégé Malcolm MacLeod has arrived with a film crew to pay homage to his teacher with this final retrospective.
There in the darkened apartment in Montreal, windows blacked out, Leo Fife sits in a wheelchair and proceeds to unspool his past, speaking directly to his wife Emma, whose presence he clings to. “If he dies without having told her the truth,” he believes, “then she’ll have loved and married and been the forty-year partner of a purely fictional character. He’ll have turned her into a fool.”
As the interview progresses, the novel alternates between two realities: here and now we have the gritty realism and discomfort of Fife’s audience in the room as they take what he is saying; and far away we have these long takes of Fife’s disembodied voice from the semi-darkness. It’s in these almost-hallucinatory memories that Fife wants to bare his soul. He reveals past marriages, children he has abandoned, betrayals of friends and family, his desertion to Canada during the Vietnam War, as well as all the magic ifs of the past, all the regrets and confusions and sins. Yet through some combination of tone and voice, some alchemy of storyteller and audience, a third reality begins to arise from the novel: a very real vertigo of fear and emptiness at the center of our lives.
“When you have no future and the present doesn’t exist, except as consciousness, all you have for a self is your past. And if, like Fife, your past is a lie, a fiction, then you can’t be said to exist, except as a fictional character.”
Fife is, in the end, a lie that tells a truth about our condition. No epiphany, no final grace, and no firm center to a person ravaged by time and cancer, just a hologram without any central or abiding self, without any central or abiding truth. In telling his story, “Fife is not trying to correct the record, he’s trying to stay alive.” And he does this by deepening the mystery of himself, becoming an untouchable bead of mercury, darting away at the slightest touch.
It’s worth noting that, at age 80, having authored some 24 books, Russell Banks seems to be asking, in the form of a novel, what’s it all about? Taken this way, “Foregone” becomes most powerful as a meditation on storytelling itself. As the narrator observes, “[Fife] was nineteen years old and was already thinking of himself as a Writer, as a man committed to understanding himself and the world by means of language.” But, again, is this even possible? Do our means of understanding only further the deception? And what is the truth? What is a lie? Is there any boundary between the two?
Iwas wrong — or maybe I lied — “Foregone” is not a strange and beguiling experience, the novel is harrowing and lonely and familiar and sober beyond words. As Fife wishes to explain: “For him now there’s only more pain and less pain, more and less nausea and diarrhea, more and less dread, more and less fear. Along with more and less shame, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, depression. And more and less confusion. Forget happy and happier, he says.”
Spoiler Alert: This is not a Gene Kelly movie they’re making here. “Foregone” is a powerful act of both love and vengeance, a series of gut-punch confessions meant to affect Emma and Malcolm and what we accept as reality and truth. Russell Banks has built a dark hall of mirrors out of Leonard Fife and the story of his life being made by those left behind.