Waiting for your dreams
Canadian debut tackles life’s lack of purpose with perfect prose
It sounds trite, but these days it seems as though the bravest thing a person of my generation can do is choose to leave a stable job, especially one they’re good at. With the many stories about how difficult the job market is and how poorly set up for retirement we all are, choosing to put those concerns aside is both crazy and enviable. In Waiting for the Man, Arjun Basu’s debut novel, that choice is fodder for international media scrutiny and 24- hour news coverage.
In his mid- 30s, Joe is living the kind of life many 20- year- olds think of as the adult dream: He’s successful in a cool job ( advertising, but at a small firm), owns a condo in a semi- gentrified New York neighbourhood ( grungy, but not without nice restaurants) and is single, but not without prospects. Basically, it’s what a decade of watching Friends taught you to expect for your life. Except that, around his 35th birthday, Joe starts to wonder if it’s actually what he wants.
As his success at work grows, his enjoyment wanes, a problem he deals with by working harder — trying to “outrun” the cliché. Over a birthday dinner, his dad suggests it’s a mid- life crisis, and it’s all Joe can do not to flee before dessert is served. Joe starts to feel like he’s floating. In meetings, his perspective will tilt and he’ll feel like he’s looking down at his situation from somewhere on the ceiling. “Stop sleepwalking” he writes on a piece of paper. Then he starts dreaming. In his dreams, Joe is visited by a man, The Man, whom he describes as dressed like a ’ 70s pimp and sometimes riding a well- groomed white horse — basically Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. Sometimes they talk in the dream, or they walk somewhere, or The Man watches as Joe has mundane conversations with people at work, but every night he’s there, “with a smile you couldn’t outrun.” And then Joe starts seeing The Man, or smelling the horse, while he’s awake. Just as Joe is starting to get used to it, The Man speaks: Wait, he says, and Joe does.
Instead of going to work, Joe sits down on the front steps of his building. When people ask what he’s doing, he just says, “Waiting.” It’s New York, so they don’t wonder too much. After a few days, though, he becomes a curiosity, and after a few more days he becomes a neighbourhood fixture. He sends kids to the pizzeria on the corner to get him dinner, local women bring him leftovers, and he just sits and waits, and then the media descends. They arrive slowly at first, but soon the police have to close off the street during the day because he’s become an attraction on par with Buckingham Palace’s imperturbable guards, or a Kardashian.
After months, The Man speaks again: “Go West,” he says, so Joe gets into a sponsored minivan and heads out with nothing but a compass heading in front of him and a big black media bus behind.
The concept may sound simple, but this is the literary equivalent of a movie shot in one long continuous take. Although the chapters alternate between time frames ( between Joe’s present, working at a secluded ranch in Montana and the events that led him there) there is no reprieve from his perspective, and apart from small snippets of dialogue, most of the novel is just Joe talking to the reader about waiting. That it’s hard to put down is a credit to Basu’s perfect sentences and clear sense of direction.
Though Basu has published short stories ( his collection Squishy came out in 2008) he is probably best known for his 140- character Twitter short stories ( micro stories? He calls them Twisters). The scenes and moments he creates in such a limited space are the highlight of my Twitter feed, and it’s astounding that he’s able to sustain that kind of wit and detail over an entire novel without it ever feeling over- written or selfsatisfied.
I want to say that it’s reminiscent of Hemingway, but in a way that sounds nothing like him. It is, however, the perfect style for this novel, a retelling of the American dream that Hemingway would never have understood.
Waiting for the Man is so soaked in contemporary culture that it could easily be mistaken for a memoir by an actual accidental celebrity/ reality TV personality. Throughout the novel, Joe analyzes and recounts his life so thoroughly ( even as it’s being documented on TV and with liveblogs) it’s hard to know whether you, his reader, are a confidante or just another spectator. Of course, thanks to the ubiquitous reality- TV confessional, everyone knows you can be both.
Similarly, it’s difficult to tell if Joe is actually happy at the end of the novel or if that’s the just what he thinks he ought to feel: His wait is over, he’s completed a bizarre version of the Jack Kerouac road trip and he’s arrived in the West, albeit a luxury resort version of it.
That kind of closure might be as close as we’re allowed to get these days. Whether that’s a bleak commentary on our society or a happy ending depends on your cultural upbringing. But being able to decide that for yourself is the “Dream” after all, right?