Lonely nights, lonely decades

The Evenings: A Winter’s Tale By Gerard Reve Pushkin Press 224 pp; $22

Two years after the Second World War, life remains dismal in Amsterdam. In the evenings leading up to New Year’s Eve, a 23-year-old Dutch office worker named Frits — “I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out I put them back in again” — roams its canals. For company he drops by his brother and his family and their various friends. It’s not as if he’s a man about town, but something has to fill the existential void, and conversation is Frits’s diversion of choice.

There is a desperate urgency to this pursuit, however, as Frits keeps a constant eye on the clock, measuring the ever-diminishing length of days. “The day’s half over,” he will complain, characteristically. “Valuable time, time irretrievable, have I squandered,” he will moan on another occasion. “We must keep talking. Conversation mustn’t lag,” he insists. “The whole trick is to start a conversation and keep it going.”

In a pinch, Frits will retreat to the flat he shares with his parents (he has no girlfriend) and engage them in this sad occupation of killing time.

Such a scenario of boredom would seem a wonderful recipe for boring the reader. But Reve, a noted Dutch novelist who died in 2006 at the age of 73, and whose 1947 debut novel has been recently translated under the title of The Evenings, keeps the narrative at a brisk pace. Reve also has some literary devices in store, mechanisms for added narrative depth. He employs dreams — normally a technique that alienates the reader — but in this case the dreams are like nightmares laying bare the evil of our world. In this world, the worst misfortunes command a perverse respect. “It is a quite marvellous disease,” Frits says about cancer, for example. “It is a parasitic cell, it appears out of nowhere and never stops growing. Right through everything. From one organ to the next. Straight through the intestines. Gruesome, incurable, grand.”

If this doesn’t repel you, Frits has lively, true-life tales of violent death with which to entertain. “A farmer had asked his hired man to toss him a pitchfork from the other side of the wagon,” Frits relates at one point. “When the farmhand did not do this quickly enough the farmer climbed onto the edge of the wagon and peered over the top of the load, at the very moment the fork came flying. The tines penetrated his eyes and he fell off the wagon, dead.”

Beneath the Holden Caulfield-like drollery, Frits bears a fierce contempt for his fellow humans, beginning with his own parents. “I’m only waiting for them to hang themselves or beat each other to death,” Frits comments at one point. “Or set the house on fire. For God’s sake let it be that. So why hasn’t it happened yet?”

He also delights in retailing the faults of his countrymen — linking these faults with his curious obsession about going bald, a misfortune which he seems to equate with a hideous moral and physical deformity. “I would be horrified to know I was going bald,” he tells a friend. “I would lose all desire to live.” He speculates endlessly about the causes and cures of baldness. (“You shouldn’t use anything on your hair except water. If you smear greasy filth on it, it won’t help. It plugs the pores, the scalp becomes inflamed.”

Frits’s comments aside, there is a deep, underlying sense in the novel that the inhabitants of earth are corrupt and stupid. The sense is not altered when the author intersperses the narrative with moments of broadcast from Dutch radio. It’s a potpourri of items ranging from Schumann and Bach to “Hawaiian Melodies” and Cowboy songs and jazz, plus the farm news. They are voices that embody “taste” in a country where traditional culture, as everywhere in the modern world, has been obliterated. What is left for the national broadcaster is anything that is not offensive or too obviously high culture or vulgar.

In this insipid cultural atmosphere, platitudes flourish. At one point, Frits utters such a platitude: “Modern science is a boon to mankind.” Is he putting us on? (These words are spoken after Frits hears about the misadventures of a quack.)

But what about the quotes from Scripture scattered through the narrative? Are we supposed to dismiss those? “I am a bad person,” Frits says after a drinking bout. “But God sees it.” God still cares, in other words.

A few things do happen that shed light on the soul of the protagonist. One is the same drinking bout, in which routines are temporally shattered and the possibilities of human compassion raised for a brief moment.

Another transcendent episode occurs near the end of the novel, when Frits, playing with a toy rabbit in his room, mumbles, “symbol of beneficence, beast of atonement,” holds the rabbit to his cheek and looks in the mirror. “Not an appealing face,” he realizes. “I have a sick soul.”

Then his unloved father comes home. “He sired me,” Frits thinks. “Let me view him charitably.”

Surprisingly, he does. Frits takes a close look at his father’s terrible ordinariness and his fleshly weakness and forgives him — because God sees everything, even something unforgivable in Frits’s eyes such as his father making a sucking sound while eating meat. “He wipes his fingers on his clothes,” Frits thinks, “And he spears things from off the platter. That is unclean. And he often goes without a tie. Yet great is his goodness.”

Only a writer such as Reve, who has viewed life in such an unflinching manner can include that final assertion without irony — and without falsity.