University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The moral basement: investigations into ethics and irony in contemporary fiction

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The moral basement: investigations into ethics and irony in contemporary fiction

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Content The Moral Basement: Investigations Into Ethics and Irony in Contemporary Fiction

Ryan McIlvain

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the USC Graduate School,
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
(Literature and Creative Writing),
University of Southern California
May 12, 2017

1

……

I’m grateful to the editors of Post Road and The Rumpus, where portions of this long essay have
appeared in different form, and of course, and most of all, I’m grateful to the member-readers of
my dissertation committee for their patience and long encouragement.

—R.M.

…...

2

…...

Contents

The Moral Basement 3
Chapter One 4
Chapter Two 12
Chapter Three 24
Chapter Four 53
Bibliography 73
The Field Is White 79

3

……

Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and of all his followers lay in trying to make music
enter the domain of another art, and that poetry commits the same error when it depicts the
features of the face, which should be done by painting, and, as an example of this kind of error,
he mentioned the sculptor who tried to chisel the shadows of poetic images arising round the
pedestal of his statue of a poet. “The sculptor’s shadows so little resembled shadows that they
even clung to a ladder,” said Levin. He liked this phrase, but could not remember whether he had
not used it before, and to Pestsov himself, and after saying it he grew embarrassed.

—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

…...

4

Chapter One

……

In which the writer spends too many mornings in the library—Updike, or a happy accident—
the doppelgänger-reader—thoughts on “hybridity”

……

July–August, 2016—
It’s a little deranged, probably, how much pleasure I can take in a summer morning
whiled away under artificial lights—at the downtown branch of the L.A. Public Library, say (Art
Deco magnificence outside, wan fluorescence in-), or in the bright flat glare of the Mar Vista
branch with its windows onto sun-soaked Venice Boulevard, or in USC’s Doheny Memorial
Library, where a Borgesian labyrinth takes the searcher up to level 2 to get to stack level 5, and
so on, and where the plastic-encased overheads click on by motion sensor, dispelling the
darkness as you walk into it little by little. Researching by faith, not by sight, it occurs to me
now, a thought I’d forbid myself if it weren’t so obviously true. One recent not-at-all-atypical
morning found me searching on level -1/2 for a Michael Chabon book, believing that this might
at last be the scissor to cut the Gordian knot of a tangled, mostly notional dissertation-in-
progress, or at least the key to a halfway productive morning. The length of whitish light
overhead showed the way a little tentatively through a swath of American fiction and related
5
non-, and sure enough I’d hardly started down the aisle before snagging my eye on the thick blue
spine of Adam Begley’s recent biography of John Updike—Updike (1932–2009), a guilty-
pleasure author I’d read on and off since high school (and on the manifold guilts in certain
pleasures, more later).
I stood shelf-side, dipping into the book’s first chapter, learning (lightly billowing in the
wind of my curiosity) how Updike’s ambition to become a “universal artist” had begun at an
Updikeanly precocious age. Already at five years old, Updike’s mother recalled, “[John]
worked.”
1
He spent hours each day on the carpet of his Pennsylvania home reproducing cartoons,
doing sketches, working in the tradition of his idol Walt Disney, great uniter of different
audiences and brows. I couldn’t tell if my sudden receptivity to these lines owed to some
inherent relevance in them, or if I was just overeager (and not for the first time) to make a
connection to one of my own going interests. In any case, I’d soon been “dipping” into Updike
for a good half hour: my feet were sore, I’d had to wave my hand more than once to appease the
god of university library illumination, and my watch showed almost eleven. When I came across
this example of Updike’s early light verse—

O, is it true
A word with a Q
The usual U
Does lack?
I grunt and strain
But no, in vain

1
Adam Begley, Updike (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 36.
6
My weary brain
Iraq.
2

—I tittered out loud, sympathetic, unhinged. Then the lights went out again. Finally, I took the
book over to a reading desk on the far side of the floor and “gave up” on my morning.

I sit at the same desk now. The lighting is fixed, unsensored above me, but it appears all the
weaker for it, wan, exhausted, blinking. Outside, sunny, 73 degrees, Los Angeles in all its
summer pleasantness—and I’m content to be indoors. Never mind the monkish perversity that
must beat at the center of my being; what moves me now is a certain annoyed fascination,
directed at the mysterious Other: someone, in the day and a half since I first browsed it, has been
at “my” Updike biography. A little unbelievable, this, a little ghostly-seeming, since the campus
library in summer is largely abandoned (another source of my contentment), yet the stark pencil
underlinings scarring some of the same pages I read just yesterday, the circled star of emphasis
in one of the margins—it looks vaguely like a Satan sign—it all attests to another reader’s
colonizing presence. I think of the grease stains Billy Collins finds, in his poem “Marginalia,” on
a library copy of Catcher in the Rye. His poem’s speaker finds them, rather (Précisez, mon
cher!), and feels a surge of complicated emotion when he notices the jotting in the margin
beneath the grease,

written in soft pencil—
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,

2
Ibid., 37.
7
whom I would never meet—
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
3

Poetic empathy and connection on the heels of my annoyance—I’m duly chastised.
Besides, if pencil-marking a library book is defacing it (and look, it just is), I’ll have to accept
my complicity in the crime, since I was the one who left the book out on the desk yesterday, too
lazy or too afraid of the dark to seek out the reshelving area. I left the book out as a big,
important-looking temptation, and I imagine my marginaliast must have picked it up on the way
to some other task and gotten waylaid like I had.
I find that certain passages that initially took my mental underlinings now bear the carbon
imprint of my apparent doppelgänger’s attention. On other pages further on I notice all the things
she’s noticed for me, in a sense (and yes, I suppose I also think of her as a “she”), all the things I
would have mentally underlined if I’d read as far or as thoroughly as she did. (It’s obvious that
my doppelgänger is a faster reader than I am, more retentive too, probably, collecting more
insight and analytical nuance through the sieve of her quick, fine mind.) At one point she draws
my attention to a footnote about Updike’s first disappointing encounter with James Joyce’s
Ulysses, a forbidding book that confirmed the young Updike in his preference for escapist
reading and that he only actually finished some twenty years later.
4
This little fact sends me
racing off to conclusions about Updike and “the duty to entertain,” as I remember him once
quoting Henry James in an interview—sudden energy and expectation, the wind in my face

3
Billy Collins, “Marginalia,” in Picnic, Lightning (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 1998),
16.
4
Updike, 36.
8
again, until, chagrined, I hear my doppelgänger calling me back, reminding me that in the same
interview Updike mentions his great influenced admiration for Marcel Proust, hardly a potboiler,
and that Henry James himself is no simple stand-in for the contemporary notions of escapist and
entertaining that I helplessly bend to.
5

Yet the idea persists. In a later chapter of Updike—it’s still my hand turning the pages, I
believe—I see that Updike’s first big-book effort, Rabbit, Run, poured out of him in only nine
months. This page of the biography is heavily underlined, and for good reason: Begley, Updike’s
able chronicler, does some excellent novelistic writing to keep pace with the sense of thrill and
speed that his subject must have felt.

[Updike] wrote hurriedly, in soft pencil. Under the old-fashioned upright desk with its
fold-down writing surface, his kicking feet wore bare spots in the varnished pine
floorboards. The momentum of the accumulating sentences thrilled him. Writing in the
present tense, an unconventional choice at the time, had a liberating effect on him; it felt
“exhilaratingly speedy and free.” At first he thought he was working on a novella, and
imagined that the headlong pace of the prose was cinematic; he even considered giving
the book the subtitle “A Movie,” to capture the sense of continuous forward motion.
6

The passage goes on to describe how Updike was excited, too, about the sex in the book,
more full and frank than he’d dared before. This writing from the sheets is what thrilled and
scandalized a Mormon high schooler in Massachusetts, and an aspiring writer at that, but now

5
“John Updike: A Life in Letters,” The New York Times, January 28, 2009.
6
Updike, 200.
9
that I’m a practicing writer, and shed of God, I thrum to different frequencies in Updike’s story.
It’s not the battle against gatekeeping Puritans that resonates anymore; it’s the internal battle
with the notion of high, Proustian art on the one hand, and on the other the thrills and story-
driven speed of “A Movie.” Isn’t there more than a faint echo in this working subtitle of Graham
Greene’s “entertainment” descriptor—not a freighted “novel,” but a lark? Perhaps Updike
represents a fairly typical artistic progression, a seesawing between a younger reader’s jollies and
an older writer’s ambitions, and back again—a dialectic. Joyce or Woolf or Proust may offput
the novice, but a few years later he may credit the same writers with a “considerable expansion”
of his literary ambitions, as Updike did in his early twenties, with Proust and Henry Green
particularly.
7
Then a few more formative years go by and the writer grows tired, or at least a little
restless, at the altar of High, Serious Art. He’s explored, à la Updike with Proust, “what words
can do, in bringing reality up tight against the skin of the paper,”
8
but what about the bygone
page-turning pleasures? What about the mystery and sci-fi plots young Updike devoured? What
about the movies?
It’s a ceaseless tide, I suspect, a ceaseless back and forth. It’s also the subject I seem to
keep veering toward (just now I’ve decided to commit myself to it, once and for all), a subject
that already wakes me up in the morning and tucks me in at night. Hybridity, it might be called.
Or genre mixing, “register” mixing—the shaking up of categories, the alchemical stirring
together of “high” and “low.” Certainly this project animates the fiction and exhortatory
nonfiction of genre scofflaws like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon (and I will take that
Chabon volume off the shelf eventually). It’s also an obvious animating principle in David

7
Ibid., 116.
8
Ibid.
10
Mitchell’s opus, Cloud Atlas (not to mention Cloud Atlas’ spiritual source-text, Ulysses). The
principle is at play in variously subtle, covert, and accidental ways in the work of writers as
different as Kate Atkinson, Richard Price, P.D. James, China Miéville, Ursula K. Le Guin, Junot
Díaz, Cormac McCarthy, and more arguably (stretching the category perhaps to its breaking
point) in the work of hybrid essayistic fiction writers like Marilynne Robinson and Saul Bellow.
In Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel,” a sort of alt-universe contribution to Lethem and
Chabon’s exhortation literature, hybridity is less the subject of Smith’s thinking than the delayed
effect of it: she sees two forking paths for the novel, ably describing the limitations of the more
accessible, more-traveled road, the harder virtues of the lonelier one, and then taking what reads
to me like a clear “middle way” in her next novel, NW. (NW is also remarkable for being a sort of
compromise or hybrid offering to the gods of Smith’s own pantheon—E.M. Forster and George
Eliot on one side, and on the other the austerer influences of Woolf, Joyce, Barthes, Nabokov,
etc. Anyway, much more about all this later.)
For now, suffice it to say that Smith wears this two-paths idea on the sleeve of her own
work, and that in practice it looks less like an ultimatum than a conflicted, both-ways-is-the-
only-way-I-want-it desire (complete with the anxiety that usually accompanies desire). Suffice it
to say, too, Smith isn’t alone in this desire. Its marks are all over the novels and essays (and films
and songs and other works of art) that I’ve keyed into over the past several years: at times the
marks look like gouges in the imaginative landscape, deep holes, and at others like deep
beautiful reservoirs, best appreciated from a plane’s-eye view (I think of the Midwest’s winking
shining lake country, carved out by a retreating glacier). A blessing and a curse, in other words,
and mostly, it should be said, a self-sought blessing, a self-sought curse. This isn’t a desire that
exists globally—less agonized parts of the literary world may never have heard of it, or if they
11
have it’s something they regard with a kind of distant pity. You see two paths, two modes that
have traditionally split off, and you ache to walk them both, to merge them.
For my part, I betray my own double-mindedness in the way I can cringe and thrill at the
same time to the music of another writer’s “universal artist” ambitions. How bombastic this
music sounds to contemporary ears, out of touch with the realities of the digital age, and perhaps
a little “masculinist,” a little social Darwinist. Yet the desire to swing beautifully and for the
fences, to innovate the form in the presence of a large, pleased audience, to put on the
pyrotechnic prose mantle of a Joyce while channeling E.M. Forster or George Eliot, or a James
or a Faulkner while channeling Raymond Chandler—isn’t great art sometimes forged from this
muddle?

12

Chapter Two

……

What is this thing (take one) and do we take it seriously?—“scratch” definitions—Adaptation
as test case

……

And now I’m thinking about the day in class when an all-reading professor of mine, a wild
Socrates (“I don’t know how the fuck to write a short story . . .”), took up the traditionalist’s role
of separating “literary” fiction from “genre.” The first, he said, conduces to freedom, and
typically character-driven freedom at that, while the second is bound by its formula, caught and
deprived in plotty strictures. Our group bristled at this binary long enough to mention the work
of Michael Chabon, but the professor, a novelist himself, responded unruffled: “He may be using
some of the tropes of Chandleresque detective fiction, but he’s doing it ironically—both-ways-
ism.” The light high-jinks tone of a novel like The Yiddish Policemen’s Union or Gentlemen of
the Road helps to kosher the book for serious attention—or so goes the theory, and with it the
potential problem.
For three or four years after that day in class I sought cutting mental rebuttals to my
professor, thrusting forward and missing, thrusting again, missing, until recently I’ve started to
wonder if I haven’t been a little persuaded by his view all along, or at least worried enough by it
13
to take up some of its implied questions. Is it useful to keep old-fashioned terms like “literary”
and “genre” around, if only as rough rubrics to be messed up, familiar categories to be aerated?
More to the worrisome point: can a reader really invest in what I want to call a “high genre”
novel if she keeps getting sidelong, ironic winks between the lines? Or is the winking actually in
the eye of the beholder, a sort of tonal Rorschach test? What would such winking look or sound
like if it were objective, or relatively objective? We’re dealing in literature, after all, where the
sternest interpretive “objectivity” is really just the leftmost part of a spectrum of poker faces:
Harold Bloom’s, say, with those ashen seigniorial eyes giving little away as he intones his one’s,
his royal we’s, or James Wood’s or Cynthia Ozick’s, a little to the right on the spectrum,
cracking the occasional essay-reviewer’s smile, letting show from time to time a personalizing I.
Much farther to the right sit writer-critics like Smith and Lethem and Chabon, David Foster
Wallace, critical moonlighters, really, avid amateurs who openly grin beneath their sunglasses
and green plastic visors, tipping their hands with personal context, personal narrative, the
accidents of birth and preference, etc., quite content to undercut the majesty of their arguments
by claiming them in their own voice. I’m obviously a member of this latter contingent, perhaps
befitting my postmodern birthright (b. 1982), but I’ve read and cut my own amateur-critic’s teeth
on all the writers I’ve just mentioned, and many more.
Anyway, I’ve digressed. In addition to my provisional objectivity—call it “scratch”
objectivity—I lay at the mind of the obliging reader a few scratch definitions. First,

● a hybrid or high genre work of fiction is, at bottom, one that includes a locomotive,
usually causal plot (events following from each other, not merely after each other, in
Aristotle’s/E.M. Forster’s terms) and that features “round” characters (again borrowing,
14
more nervously now, from Forster’s Aspects of the Novel), or in other words characters
who manage to convey interior reality, who clothe themselves in the author’s fresh, vivid,
memorable language, and who live in a constructed authorial world (of course) but
nevertheless avoid the fate of being mere constructs, mere pawns in the plot’s larger
game. Taken together, all this adds up to a kind of salutary both-ways-ism, a best-of-
both-worlds-ism, or, as one reviewer said of Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay: “Some books you read for their plot, some for their style. When, like
Chabon’s, both are exceptional, you’re in a rare place.”
9
Amen.

Second,

● irony or ironic treatment or ironic winking in a high genre work might look something
like, or in any case might feel to a certain reader a little like, taking into account of course
the deep subjectivity that not only interprets the irony in a particular work but interprets
the contested idea of irony—because, really, has there ever been a more deflated, re-
inflated, confused, and solecized word than “ironic”? Here the sensible critic sidesteps
the definitional tangle altogether and chooses to neologize: winkism or winkist
treatment in a high genre work of fiction consists of consciously imitative and/or tonal
strategies that distance the writer from the material she handles a little uncomfortably, it
appears to the reader, a little like a dog walker who holds her pet’s bagged waste out
away from her body, but at least she’s deigned to pick up the plotty leavings in the first

9
From USA Today, quoted in the back matter of The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (New York: Random
House, 2000).
15
place, which is more than we can say of some, and so on.

An example is clearly in order, and where better to find one than the comparatively
frictionless theoretical vacuum that is Hollywood—“A Movie.” Here is the artistic arena where
the commercial stakes are highest, where the audience’s (paying) satisfaction is set at a premium
so far above the artist’s private ambitions, universal or otherwise, that his vestigial Proust-tail
can only be a liability, a perceived affront to the collective pleasure principle, a bit of plumage
clinging on to the pre-cooked bird. I’m exaggerating, but not outrageously. In his famous
screenwriting guide, Story, Robert McKee matches the monolithic bluntness of his title with a
similarly matter-of-fact tone, telling aspiring writers for screen and page alike that

most human beings believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible
change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are the
single and active protagonists of their own existence; that their existence operates through
continuous time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside this
reality events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons.
10

The upshot of all this? Writers who want to make their living writing need to validate
these beliefs with the kinds of stories they tell—causal ones, linear ones, with active protagonists
who confront primarily external obstacles to their desires, and with closed endings that result in
some kind of permanent change. This is what McKee calls “classical” story design, a set of
“timeless principles” that combine to make an “archplot” (pronounced like the ark in

10
Robert McKee, Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 62.
16
“archangel,” he tells us, or perhaps like the ark in ark of the covenant).
11
I’d argue that McKee’s
notion of timeless human nature (already with the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh, he implies,
archplot humanity and the story design it prefers were fully in place) is more than a little
teleological, a convenient evolving of the horse to fit the cart, or better yet a convenient cooking
of the books to match the company projections. What I wouldn’t or couldn’t really argue is the
bottom-line, actuarial realities of Hollywood that McKee knows so well: as story design moves
away from archplot and toward the more internal, experimental “minimalist” and “anti-structure”
plots, “the audience shrinks” (emphasis very much McKee’s).
In fact, I can’t claim to stand at much of a remove from McKee’s definition of “classical”
design, either; my working definition of a high genre plot shares many of its elements. Whence
all my skeptical scare quotes, then? Mostly it’s the lordly “objectivity” in McKee that rankles,
that oppresses. He isn’t presenting working definitions but revealed, celestial, ultimate
definitions, utterly failing, in his vatic mode, to admit of doubt or hesitation, much less anything
as messy and potentially undercutting as the chicken-egg question. (Who’s to say 4,000-year-old
masterpieces haven’t conditioned us?) McKee’s book is abrim with the kind of Sinai-like
pronouncements that beg for skepticism, resistance, parody, a kind of existential graffiti—and
sure enough, and right on cue, enter Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation with
spraypaint cans at the ready.
The movie begins as the movie project did, at least according to interviews with the
famously trickster Kaufman.
12
An awkward screenwriter, also named Charlie Kaufman (played

11
Ibid., 45.
12
See, for example, Roger Ebert’s write-up of a lively, cagey conversation with Kaufman, Jonze, and
Nicolas Cage (“Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze: Twin Pleasures”).
17
by Nicolas Cage), has been tasked with adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, a hybrid
memoir/monograph about orchids and the passionate pilgrimages they inspire, and about one
Florida orchid hunter in particular. In one of the film’s early scenes we’re in flashback to watch
Orlean (Meryl Streep, masterful as ever) in her high-rise New Yorker office writing about the
orchid hunter, a tall, skinny, toothless white man named John Laroche (Chris Cooper). Then
we’re back further in time to watch a van veer suddenly off a Florida state road and onto
protected swampland. We see Laroche leading a trio of Seminole Indians to a “ghost orchid,” a
delicately sexual-looking white flower that blooms out of the swamp’s muddy waters. Then
we’re forward in time again to the present moment where screenwriter Kaufman sits in a spartan
bedroom and frowns at the typewriter resting on a wicker chair, doubting what he’s just written,
what we’ve just seen. This narrative ping-ponging, the disorienting anti-linear crowdedness of
the setup, is part of the point, part of the fun at McKee’s expense. Where is the temporal locus of
this story anyway? And who is its inevitable protagonist—Laroche the doer, Orlean the teller, or
Kaufman the teller once removed? Old Plato and Aristotle would have given the story to the
character closest to the original events, pretty simple, but then Plato and Aristotle can’t be trusted
anymore. One is always too busy washing his hands of mimesis to speak to it lovingly (he would
argue that any story is at a dangerous remove from reality) and the other one’s Poetics, a 2,300-
year-old forerunner to McKee’s Story, feels as elemental and removed from Kaufman’s
contemporary existence as the single-celled organisms he imagines frothing up out of the
primordial soup, changing and adapting and finally arriving at the agonized species he belongs
to.
In McKee’s more pragmatic terms—Aristotle codified and hardened—Kaufman has been
tasked with turning Laroche into the single and active protagonist of his existence, a protagonist
18
who pursues his “object of desire” through a series of mounting crises that lead him to a
climactic “critical choice,” which in turn funnels him on through the final climax, denouement,
closed ending, etc. Of course, The Orchid Thief and the lives it chronicles refuse to fit into this
rigid formula (McKee would call it a “form”), and Kaufman himself refuses to mangle the book
into something “artificially plot-driven,” some “Hollywood thing.” What he wants is to let the
movie, like the book, simply “exist,” a formal goal so highbrow and noble that it’s instantly
impossible to carry out.
13

13
Continuing with the theme of art as a set of formal challenges, primarily, Joan Didion, in an early essay
on film, complains that few of the filmmakers she’s talking to in the early ‘60s get very exercised about
form, style, structure. “Issues” matter to them, “problems” matter—but forms? American directors,
Didion writes, “are at heart didactic” and the “‘issues’ they pick are generally no longer real issues, if
indeed they ever were.” Nor do European directors fare much better in Didion’s estimation. She writes
about Luchino Visconti (a little shockingly, I think) that he “has less sense of form than anyone now
directing. One might as well have viewed a series of stills, in no perceptible order, as his The Leopard”
(“I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem [New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 2008], 153). Form suggests shape, of course, and typically angular, architectural shape:
foundations, collections of rooms, buildings. Yet it may be that Visconti’s sprawling, overwhelming film
resembles more a slow seeping of water into tawny sand than a skyscraper, or it’s a livid spill of wine
annexing minutely ordered cells in the fabric of a white tablecloth, revealing mood, texture, the passage
of time—but I’m digressing within the digression. As if responding belatedly to Didion’s call, Jonze and
Kaufman have made a film in which style and form are the problems, are the issues; the film is in a sense
a record of the filmmakers breaking their heads against the walls of their medium, an “auto-
deconstruction,” as A.O. Scott calls it, recalling the work of Jacques Derrida, another Sixties pioneer of
interpretation and radical doubt . . . I can’t help wondering how Didion or Susan Sontag, say, another
19
Other problems: Kaufman is lonely, depressed, a little desperate. At night he masturbates
to imagined scenes with women he hardly knows. In the middle of one such session, a loud
abrupt knocking at Charlie’s bedroom door interrupts him. Enter Donald Kaufman (also played
by Cage), Charlie’s down-and-out but happy-go-lucky twin brother, currently crashing at the
house and hoping to run a new writing idea past Charlie, the acknowledged genius of the family.
Imagine a serial killer, Donald begins to Charlie’s sighs, who’s taunting a cop with clues about
his next victim, a beautiful woman he’s already holding hostage “in his creepy basement.”

CHARLIE (wearily, from the sheets): It’s a little obvious, don’t you think?

DONALD (excitedly): Okay, but here’s the twist. We find out that the killer really suffers
from multiple personality disorder, right? See? He’s actually really the cop and the girl.
All of them are him. Isn’t that fucked up?!
14

Kaufmann, the real Kaufman (call him Kaufman unremoved), is clearly enjoying himself
here. The scene not only pits highbrow art-house sensibilities against lowbrow genre ones; it pits
fresh enthusiasm against veteran jadedness, naïve story-love against a rather rote commitment to
writing as “a journey into the unknown,” as Charlie says. Again the Updike dialectic comes to
mind, the Graham-Greene-to-Henry-Green swinging pendulum. The film’s loudly metafictional
style invites viewers to speculate on whether or not Charlie and Donald are two aspects of

Sixties-era pioneer, would read a film like Adaptation—as a fulfilment of the promise and possibility of
form or a reductio ad absurdum?
14
Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze (2002).
20
unremoved Kaufman’s same person. Is he really like the dour, balloon-popping, self-hating
artiste on the one hand, the unselfconscious goof on the other? Who can say, and who can really
much care when the film is already so generously stuffed with questions of reality versus
realism, art versus life, real life versus fake life. The unremoved Author can by all means die.
The film has more than enough authorial stand-ins to go around.

Coming back to the question of irony—
A certain play, a certain leavening unseriousness coats almost every frame of this film. In
the beginning, it’s almost all in good fun, good faith. The only genre the first half of the movie
really activates is the “education” genre: Kaufman, first and final protagonist of the movie, is the
writer-pupil, slouching at times and at others truly yearning toward some new artistic maturity
(“I wanted to grow as a writer,” Charlie tells his agent). Somebody, containing multitudes, really
has thought and talked and joked and agonized about these questions, and the first half of the
film’s gabbling joking agonizing tone is so much testimony of the fact. It matters to somebody.
Whence all the comic verbiage if it didn’t?
It’s important to note, too, that the verbiage is self-deprecating, self-aware: a real writer is
making fun of a fictional version of himself and inventing another, arguably multiple personality
(in the character of Donald) to try to get at the underlying absurdity and muddle-headedness of
the writer’s struggle. When a desperate Charlie finally attends a screenwriting seminar taught by
(who else?) Robert McKee, Charlie stands during the Q&A to ask a question of the great man.

KAUFMAN (half-standing, really): Sir, what if a writer is attempting to create a story
where nothing much happens, where people don’t change? They don’t have any
21
epiphanies. They struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved—more a reflection
of the real world . . . .

MCKEE: The real world?

KAUFMAN: Yes, sir.

MCKEE: The real fucking world . . . . First of all, you write a screenplay without conflict
or crisis, you’ll bore your audience to tears. Secondly, ‘nothing happens in the world’?
Are you out of your fucking mind? (Standing from his stool, anger kindling.) People are
murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere
in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save somebody else. Every fucking day
someone somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find
love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches a mother beaten to death on the
steps of a church. Someone goes hungry, somebody else betrays his best friend for a
woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about
life, and why the fuck are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie?! I don’t
have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!

KAUFMAN (still half-standing): Okay, thanks.

Once again the printed word fails to capture the operatic range of two actors in full
gesture, full voice: Brian Cox, who plays McKee brilliantly, rising, gesticulating in strong
22
sweeping arcs, his indignation and self-assurance blowing in Falstaffian gusts that lay Cage bare,
mouse-like. Okay, thanks. Finally Charlie sits down. He has hunched through the whole of this
magnificent, earth-shaking speech, perhaps the funniest in the film, the one passage where
repeated viewings have not inured me to tears of laughter. After the seminar lets out for the
night, Kaufman stands McKee to a drink at a local bar, where he explains the overall essayistic
thrust of The Orchid Thief and the via dolorosa he’s walked in attempting to adapt it. Well,
McKee repeats, it’s a writer’s job to “put in the drama,” but the good news is that Kaufman still
has time. A screenplay can have all sorts of flaws, pretensions, dead spots, “but if you wow them
in the end, you’ve got a hit.”
Suddenly Kaufman has embarrassed his new mentor with an overbearing hug; McKee
gives a few tepid back pats in return. Perhaps the man senses not the disingenuousness of the
character in the scene—Kaufman, ridiculously, means his squeeze—but senses something
instead a little untoward in the scene itself. Unremoved Kaufman’s self-mocking satire has begun
to transform, subtly but crucially, into a winkist satire of “a Hollywood thing” that erodes the
ground underneath it, as if the film’s third act were already dropping by degrees into a hollowed-
out, eroded Florida sinkhole, or into the swamp that hosts some of the movie’s last scenes.
The erosion didn’t happen all at once, of course. Very little in this Rubix cube of a film is
without a parallel, a double, an ironic preparation. In one scene Charlie bats down the studio’s
suggestion of a romance plot between Orlean and her subject, Laroche, and a few scenes later
Orlean, reporter’s notebook in hand, is led by Laroche around a Florida orchid fair. He
soliloquizes (to rising synth-strings in the score) about the mating habits of insects, each one
drawn to a particular flower—“its double, its soulmate”—and suddenly Orlean looks a little
distant-eyed, a little sad and lovestruck. Here is a man overflowing with the passion and
23
conviction she lacks. It’s intoxicating, haunting. Once again we don’t doubt that the character in
the scene is genuine (Streep could inject pathos into a Saw movie), but is the scene itself
genuine? The honeyed pulsing light in the bee montage, the waxing epiphanic music—is it
winking at us? I think it is.
It might be different if we could sense that romantic stirrings between Laroche and
Orlean have developed in spite of Kaufman’s clever design, but really I think we’re meant to
read this subplot as a comical recidivism on the fictional writer’s part: for all his protestations
against Hollywood, Kaufman is giving in to Hollywood. He’s giving up. Fictional Kaufman is,
anyway, but—and this is important—not the real Kaufman who’s really pulling the strings. The
conscious tonal mimicking of an epiphany scene, a scene that “turns,” in McKee’s phrase, signals
to us that Kaufman unremoved has peeled himself away and now stands apart from Kaufman the
compromised and compromising writer. Winkist irony perhaps “saves” the real Kaufman, but not
the scene. And not Laroche or Orlean, either, lost in the ironic undertow. Whatever character
change we may have sensed in them is now nullified, since what we really sense is that these two
characters aren’t characters so much as developing punch lines in an elaborate joke. It’s as if the
real Kaufman, petulant teenage-style, is determined to show Father McKee what happens when
you graft too much formula onto living, breathing creatures. If that’s really what you want, fine!
He will stand by and let Orlean and Laroche suffocate to death, surviving only as pawns in the
plot’s larger game.

24

Chapter Three

…...

A belated proviso—Cloud Atlas and “volume,” “worldbuilding,” etc.—the parodist’s tell—
Chabon’s School of Genre Evangelism—Gentlemen of the Road—enter Joyce

……

Am I getting too gloomy too soon? Too grumpy?
I ought to make clear, if I haven’t already, that my marmish disappointment comes only
in films or books or with pieces of music I mostly love. I have to care first, I have to lift my
hopes high on the oceanic swells of a major accomplishment before I can crash down alongside
the film or song or book’s major failings—or sometimes minor failings. A mixed blessing, my
enthusiasm—I’ll be the first to admit it. At one point in the first half of Cloud Atlas (warming up
in the on-deck circle), I sent an excited text message to a friend and fellow high genre searcher:
“Could Mitchell be out-Chabonning Chabon?” You won’t be shocked to learn that I changed my
mind by the end of the book, but I changed it for somewhat complicated and, I hope, instructive
reasons. In any case, you’ve seen this movie before, haven’t you? The writer-critic struggles but
finally overcomes obstacles to succeed in the end? Only I really do mean it.

One more point to pick up from the sad but never-less-than-funny wreck of Adaptation’s last act:
the “volume” has been turned up. This music metaphor comes to me mostly from creative
25
writing workshops, other writer-friends, and my own agent and editor, neither of them “loud”
enough in their own right to satisfy our apparently limitless appetite for fictional editors and
agents turning green with money-lust, overflowing with boorishness and venality, and wielding
blunt-tool force. In Adaptation, Charlie’s agent looks all but vacant under his dense gelled hair.
A signed football sits behind him on his desk, a framed photo of him skiing, etc. “I’d fuck her up
the ass,” he interrupts his client to remark on a passing colleague.
No, my agent and editor, intelligent, reasonable, don’t offer themselves up to parody or
ridicule. They have a living to make, but then so do I, and their comments on my work that lands
“a little quiet,” or alternatively a plot shift that feels too abrupt, “too loud”—I consider these
instructive, open-ended comments, a kind of salutary McKeeism. At the end of Adaptation, of
course, McKee’s influence is literal and baleful. Here the heightened “drama” plays under an
intentionally loud, mangled soundtrack, a kind of jungle metal, as the characters splash into the
swamp with murder on their minds. Death is the traditional ne plus ultra of high, loud stakes—
what worse thing could happen? (I’m reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s doltish contention that
writers like James and Proust weren’t serious since their books didn’t deal primarily “with issues
of life and death.”
15
) Adaptation’s four main characters drive into the swamp preserve; only two
come out alive. Add to this all the sex and drugs, the spying, the guns, the car chases, and it’s
clear that capital-e Excitement is now in the driver’s seat. All the risks and dangers have been
externalized, all the forces of antagonism pushed outside the characters. Yet the action is finally
hollow and the excitement bloodless, and none of it grows out of forces of antagonism any more
real or high-stakes than the primarily internal pressures Charlie confronts at his typewriter.

15
“I don’t understand them,” he told the New York Times. “To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers
who are considered good I consider strange” (“Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction”).
26
These are the pressures that have wrung our protagonist for most of the film, and that the film
actually believes in. A writer struggling with a script is “quiet” indeed, but how much easier for
an artist of Kaufman’s inclination to breathe the breath of authentic life into a storyline he knows
and lives everyday?

The autobiographical impulse (or is it a temptation?) must sometimes occur to David Mitchell,
too, though you wouldn’t know it from the evidence of his books. In reading Cloud Atlas,
particularly the early sections, what occurs to the reader is an insistent question, almost a mantra:
How is he doing this? How is he doing this? How the holy hell is he doing this? as the novelist-
critic Dave Eggers put the question. Mitchell’s far-flung settings and basically anti-
autobiographical characters lift off the page with real warmth, real color and shape, not at all like
the kind of researched fiction Henry James once described as “smell[ing] of libraries.”
16
In the
novel’s first movement, a journal writer sets down dense, elegant entries about a time (mid-19th
century?) and a place (somewhere in the Pacific) that we’re initially at a loss to triangulate. For a
tantalizing moment we wonder if we’ve stepped into a scene of traditional historical fiction or
some alternate universe of fantastic or “speculative” history, never more apt a tag than here: the
engaged reader can’t help but speculate, deduce, putting Holmes’ magnifying glass to the lines
that body forth this place so richly, to try to learn where or if it exists in the extra-literary world.
(Queequeg’s native “Kokovoko,” Melville tells us at the outset of another sea story, “is not down
in any map; true places never are.”
17
) Later we’re told outright that this is Chatham Island, just

16
This is quoted in Mary McCarthy’s Stones of Florence, about George Eliot’s then-successful but now
little-read novel, Romola (Stones of Florence [San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1987], 10).
17
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 79.
27
off the coast of New Zealand, and a slight sinking feeling lets us know that this particular game
is no longer afoot.
Yet it’s also at this point, with the facts of setting in hand, that we begin to appreciate
Mitchell’s oblique, perspectival, masterful approach to “worldbuilding.” Through the journal
format Mitchell chooses for his seaman, we see and hear only what this first-person narrator
(from the Latin for knower) chooses to set down: some truths and conditions Adam Ewing
knows so well that he takes them for granted, not mentioning them or commenting on them at
all; others he mentions too briefly or too obscurely to bring the reader along with him. And this
is just as well. Total comprehension on the part of the reader isn’t and shouldn’t be the goal of a
writer as talented as Mitchell—or Borges or Kafka, for that matter, or Ursula K. Le Guin with
her own inductive worlds, Junot Díaz with his a-lexical Spanglishisms, Joyce with his tossed-off
Dublinisms, or me (hesitating to join such company) with my novelistic forays into the worlds of
Mormon missionary work and neo-Marxist activism. In short, new cultures ought to open up to
the reader incrementally, inferentially, and partially—call it an exercise in real-world
empathizing, or an anthropological take on Keats’ principle of “negative capability.”
18

19

18
Shakespeare’s genius, Keats once observed, lay in his ability to “remain in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason” (The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of
John Keats, 277). In my slight broadening-out of this principle, the author and the reader work to suspend
final judgment, with the reader in particular crouching at the margins of the page, a salutary eavesdropper
or Peeping Tom trying to overhear and oversee enough to make good but always provisional inferences
and judgments, as befits novel-reading, and life.
19
One more thought, related enough. The critic and Russian specialist Gary Saul Morson has proposed
that the best fiction can and should entail a healthy didacticism. Whether we’re reading Dostoevsky or
28
In Cloud Atlas’ first section, virtually every passage presents the reader with the
challenge to co-create meaning along with the author. Here is our diarist, Adam Ewing, at the
start of an entry describing the jaunt he sets out on with his new friend, Dr. Henry Goose, an
English physician.

Sunrise bright as a silver dollar. Our schooner still looks a woeful picture out in the Bay.
An Indian war canoe was being careened on the shore. Henry & I struck out for
“Banqueter’s Beach” in holy-day mood, blithely saluting the maid who labors for Mr.
Walker. The sullen miss was hanging laundry on a shrub & ignored us.
20

David Mitchell, a certain level of realist detail will inevitably encourage us to inhabit the characters as
moral avatars—not as Virtue or Vice embodied, as in the old allegorical fiction, but as particular people
whose particular actions tend, sometimes quite messily, toward the virtuous or the vicious. In Morson’s
thinking, it’s this very messiness that makes a novel the perfect moral practice ground. The
“irrelevancies” of a good story make it difficult to apprehend the moral stakes with any stability or final
clarity, which is precisely the point. A reader’s ethical education now consists, Morson writes,
in the moment-to-moment decisions we make in the course of reading: where to extend sympathy
and where to desire a just punishment; when to be carried away and when to remain skeptical;
whether or not (to use a phrase that has gone out of fashion) to “identify” with a character.
Whatever conclusions we may explicitly draw, we have practiced reactions to particular kinds of
people and situations, and practice produces habits that may precede, preclude, or perform
conscious moral judgments in daily life (Gary Saul Morson, “Prosaics: An Approach to the
Humanities,” The American Scholar 57.4 [1998], 528).
20
Ibid., 5–6.
29
Fascination, delight, discomfort (from a political perspective), utter confidence in the capabilities
of the teller (from a purely readerly one). I’m only on page six, and there’s much to talk about in
Cloud Atlas, but allow me to linger just a moment over a paragraph of such effortless-seeming
effort, such artless-seeming art. I could begin with pedantry, didacticism, two concepts that
Mitchell ennobles in lines like these. Is it pedantic to leave for the reader a clue like “holy-day,”
the old English root of our “holiday,” or is it rather a radically abridged commentary on how
pervasive and entangled religion is with the most seemingly carefree language? I could go down
a Derrida wormhole about historical hegemonies like God and Holiness and how the most
hedonist and determined among us nevertheless “have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—
which is alien to this history,” no move unimplicated in it, no tool untainted by it.
21
But enough
Derrida (for now). To actually go down the wormhole is to betray the spirit of the brief
wormhole-view Mitchell opens to us. He has micro- or nano-essayed on God and Faith, letting
implied Derridean politics trail behind a well-chosen archaism like bright flapping streamers. An
essay in a single word!
The prose is “loud,” in other words, consequential, purposeful, and it flexes, as one
observer noted, in the service of a “muscular” developing story.
22
By the time Ewing’s ship, The
Prophetess, is seaworthy once again, Dr. Goose has agreed to accompany it on its journey,
serving as the captain’s personal physician and looking after our Ewing as well, who complains
of a mysterious “Ailment.” No sooner has the ship set sail than Ewing discovers a runaway slave

21
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” accessed
February 3, 2017 (http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html).
22
This language comes from Tom Bissell’s fine essay-review of Cloud Atlas in The New York Times
(“History Is a Nightmare,” The New York Times, Aug. 29, 2004).
30
hiding in his room. The American has to stick his neck out to keep the Islander from being
chucked overboard like so much needless ballast. Meanwhile, Ewing’s treatment begins under
Dr. Goose’s watchful eye, but we sense trouble, dark forebodings in the lower strings . . .

What are these dark forebodings? What is the trouble that really broods at the heart of Mitchell’s
novel? I don’t mean to sound conspiratorial (my “Mitchell” is a synecdochal stand-in for the
novel itself, by the way), but I will suggest that Cloud Atlas’ real problems reveal themselves
only superficially at the level of plot. Following Mitchell’s pleasurable trail, we nod along to the
story until we learn that the good doctor is an evil one, slowly poisoning his charge with arsenic
so he can rob him, and it’s only Mr. D’Arnoq, the stowaway Islander, who sees through Goose’s
ruse in time to stop him. Yet five other novellas, each in a different genre style, have come
between The Prophetess’ setting sail and the murderous doctor’s final escape. By any
conventional plot standard, four hundred pages is too long to make your reader wait for the
reveal. What gives here? Or what doesn’t give? What accounts for Mitchell’s ungenerosity at the
macro-level when at the micro-, at the chapter-, scene-, and sentence-level, he gives so often and
so much?
A little withholding of my own, if you’ll allow me—
At least part of the answer is found in Mitchell’s postmodern makeup. Cloud Atlas is a
symphonic novel, and it can sometimes recall this animating metaphor in vividly beautiful,
Mahlerian ways—first a dreamy romantic swoon in the high strings, then a wood-clapper’s
sudden crack. First a melodic storyteller’s magic, then a metafictionist’s bursting of that magic
bubble with a sudden shout at the reader. Here is a passage out of Ewing’s journal that comes
just after the American has discovered the presence of D’Arnoq, the stowaway:
31

The cacophony of timbers creaking, of masts swaying, of ropes flexing, of canvass
clapping, of feet on decks, of goats bleating, of rats scuttling, of the pumps beating, of the
bell dividing the watches, of melees & laughter from the fo’c’sle, of orders, of windless
shanties & of Tethys’ eternal realm; all lulled me as I calculated how best I could
convince Cpt. Molyneux of my innocence in Mr. D’Arnoq’s plot . . . when a falsetto yell,
beginning far off but speeding nearer at a cross-bow’s velocity, was silenced by the deck,
mere inches above where I lay.
Such terrible finality!
23

And such terrifying mastery!
Few writers at work today could bring off such a passage so seamlessly, with such
programmatic control. And there is a program at work: form in Mitchell is always following
function, or rather the received ideas Mitchell has about a particular genre’s function. A falsetto
note trails the unlucky sailor out of the sky as he falls from the rigging and, crack, hits the
deck—and before that, a rhythmic, repetitive, lulling sequence in the words prepares us to be
shocked out of our moral complacency. Hard mimetic gems like this glitter on almost every
page. Yet at the higher levels of its narrative, Cloud Atlas enacts this purposefulness too much
like Kaufman does in Adaptation. Form becomes a running commentary on the form in question.
It isn’t that a metafictionist’s notes interrupt the narrative midstream, confiding intentions or
doubts about the genre form the story is working in (although in certain sections of the novel this
does happen), but rather that a metafictional commentary is being enacted in the stories

23
Cloud Atlas, 27.
32
themselves, in the scrupulous fidelity of the stories to the forms (micro- and macro-) that are
stereotypically expected of them.
And when the form in question is legible genre form, Cloud Atlas enacts this fidelity in
decidedly winkist ways. Take the novella meant at once to participate in and parody the
detective-thriller genre, in which a corporation’s hired gun comes on the scene to take care of a
plucky investigative journalist, Luisa Rey, who is asking too many questions. The hit man’s
name is Bill Smoke. He speaks in gruff baddie platitudes. He lives, like Luisa and the whole of
this sub-story, in the terse present tense of so much bad thriller writing. He drives to a bridge that
spans a bay that separates the nuclear silos of the reckless energy company (of course) from the
unsuspecting California mainland. The bridge guard, a man named Richter, is to let Luisa Rey
pass the checkpoint in her orange VW, but no one else. “Understand, Richter?” Smoke says to
the man.

“Understood, Mr. Smoke.”
“You got married this spring, if memory serves?”
“You have an excellent memory, sir.”
“I do. Hoping to start a family?”
“My wife’s four months pregnant, Mr. Smoke.”
“A piece of advice, Richter, on how to succeed in the security business. Would you like
to hear this piece of advice, son?”
“I would, sir.”
“The dumbest dog can sit and watch. What takes brains is knowing when to look away.
Am I making sense to you, Richter?”
33
“You’re making absolute sense, Mr. Smoke.”
“Then your young family’s future is secure.”

Then the scene of action. Luisa arrives, Richter raises the barrier for her, and she passes under it.
Meanwhile,

Bill Smoke puts his car into first, second. The sonic texture of the road surface changes as
the Chevy reaches the bridge. Third gear, fourth, pedal down. The clapped-out Beetle’s taillights
zoom up, fifty yards, thirty yards, ten . . . Smoke hasn’t switched his lights on. He swerves into
the empty oncoming lane, shifts into fifth gear, and draws alongside. Smoke smiles . . . He yanks
the wheel sharply, and metal screams as the Beetle is sandwiched between his car and the bridge
railing until the railing unzips from its concrete and the Beetle lurches out into space.
Smoke slams the brakes. He gets out into the cool air and smells hot rubber. Back a ways,
sixty, seventy feet down, a VW’s front bumper vanishes into the hollow sea. If her back didn’t
snap, she’ll have drowned in three minutes. Bill Smoke inspects the damage to his car’s
bodywork and feels deflation. Anonymous, faceless homicides, he decides, lack the thrill of
human contact.
The American sun, cranked up to full volume, proclaims a new dawn.
24

These aren’t scenes so much as dutiful, parodic checklists, a winkist’s tonal mimicking of
scenes: the hard-bitten menacing dialogue between the chilly professional and the cowed
accomplice, the shorthand of wife and child as reason for the complicity, the utter absence of

24
Cloud Atlas, 141–142.
34
meaningful interiority in either character, the short sentences, the bland active verbs, the
italicized impersonation of interiority (à la Dan Brown and a host of others) that really acts as
information-letting, and finally the trumpeting of irony (the old-fashioned kind) in the
“American sun” that “proclaims a new dawn.” In the televised or filmed version of this moment
that we’ve all seen again and again, a rumble of bass and cello would come up to take the a-plot
out to the b-plot. In Mitchell’s novel, a new narrative begins.

How did the early critics respond to these exercises in narrative bet-hedging, a book that too
often asks its readers to admire performance of content rather than content? The book reviewer
for London’s Independent declined to write about Cloud Atlas, calling it “unreadable,” and Tom
Bissell’s essay-review in The New York Times struck a decidedly ambivalent note. But for the
most part these critical voices were drowned in the hallelujah chorus: “A remarkable new
novel…” “Grand and elaborate…” “Enthralling…” “Both action-packed and chillingly
ruminative.” The Times of London called Cloud Atlas a novel whose “scale, ambition and
execution make almost everything in contemporary fiction look like a squalid straggle of Nissen
huts . . .” Dave Eggers’ comment runs, in full, “One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it?
modern classics that no doubt is—and should be—read by any student of contemporary
literature.” And Michael Chabon said: “The novel as a series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a
puzzle-book, and yet—not just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate,
too. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and I’m grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its
many worlds, which are all one world, which is, in turn, enchanted by Mitchell’s spell-caster
prose, our own.”
25
For my part, I’ll stress again myadmiration for the pacing and pathos of the

25
These quotes come, respectively, from reviews in The Observer, The Los Angeles Times, People, and
35
first and second novellas, about Adam Ewing and a young composer named Robert Frobisher,
and particularly for the eloquence of the novel’s final pages, but what this means in practice is
that only about two-sixths of the book finally justified its legible project—only a third of it
managed to shake itself free of the Houdiniesque trap Mitchell set for it. Perhaps the surface
brilliance of the novel was enough to blind some to its deeper, winkist issues, a set of problems
like a powerful root system that ramifies out and down, down and out.
It’s in this sense that the praise of Chabon and Eggers is of particular note. Friends and
fellow travelers with Mitchell, they might have been de rigueur in their endorsements—but the
endorsements feel genuine. They also feel symptomatic of an embrace of the kind of form-as-
content thinking that Mitchell’s novel ultimately drowns in, and that does more harm than good
to the cause of what I’ll call, in my waxingly polemical mood, the Chabon School of Genre
Evangelism.
It’s a congenial school, a congenial mission, to be sure, and one that dovetails obviously
with the project I’ve been directing in these forays, these investigations into the “perfect” or
“best of all possible novels.”
26
The Chabon School’s mission is simple: it wants to expand the
definition of literary “entertainment” until it “encompass everything pleasurable that arises from
the encounter of an attentive mind with the page of literature.”
27
This is from an essay called

The Wall Street Journal.
26
In Voltaire’s Candide, the philosopher is at pains to ridicule Leibniz’s notion that this world is
somehow “the best of all possible worlds,” and these pains are long and laboring enough to suggest a very
personal and passionate stake in the debate, something like a competitor’s grudge. Je suis Candide,
donc—je suis Leibniz aussi.
27
Michael Chabon, “Trickster in a Suit of Light: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” Maps and
Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008), 14.
36
“Trickster in a Suit of Light: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” collected in a book called
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (and here at last is the Chabon
book I hoped would cut the Gordian knot of my project—well, we’ll see . . . ). Chabon is a
generous, deeply “contract” writer, in Jonathan Franzen’s phrase, which means that sometimes
Chabon’s titles alone can communicate his didactic purpose. (For several months the working
title of Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road was Jews with Swords.) What Chabon wants is an
expanded, playful, miscegenated literature, a canon that makes room for Nabokov as well as
Lovecraft, Woolf as well as P.D. James, a canon that blurs or outright ignores the market-driven
distinctions that exalt some books and “ghettoize” others. The “Trickster” of Chabon’s title
comes from Lewis Hyde’s study of the troublemaker in world mythologies—the mischievous
Hermes in Greek legend, the Native Americans’ Coyote or Rabbit, the Judeo-Christian Satan, all
agents of trouble and random change, upsetters of the status quo, reconcilers of opposites. These
tricksters have haunted the intersections and borderlands of the world, those areas of mixture and
ferment where, in a literary context, “many of the most interesting writers of the past seventy-
five years or so” have lived, Chabon writes.

From Borges to Calvino, drawing heavily on the tropes and conventions of science fiction
and mystery, to Anita Brookner and John Fowles with their sprung romance novels, from
Millhauser and Thomas Pynchon to Kurt Vonnegut, John Crowley, Robert Aickman,
A.S. Byatt, and Cormac McCarthy, writers have plied their trade in the spaces between
genres, in the no man’s land. These great writers have not written science fiction or
fantasy, horror or westerns—you can tell that by the book jackets. But they have drawn
immense power from and provided considerable pleasure for readers through play,
37
through the peculiar commingling of mockery and tribute, invocation and analysis,
considered rejection and passionate embrace, which are the hallmarks of our Trickster
literature in this time of unending crossroads.
28

I want to add an Amen (unqualified, mostly) into the proceedings, since I know and can
sympathize with the self-sought burdens of the proselytizer, and since I’m deeply in line with
Chabon’s suggestion that the “uses” of literature are first and last epicurean ones. Yet I do think
something suffers, something chippy gets added in translation, as Chabon moves from this
general preaching to specific practice, particularly in some of his shorter, more genre-y novels
and in the preemptive commentaries he appends to them (preempting the paperback critics,
anyway). In the afterword to Gentlemen of the Road, a “tale of adventure” starring two tenth-
century Jewish mercenaries, Chabon wonders rhetorically how he, a writer of his “literary
training, generation, and pretensions,” could end up writing a story “featuring anybody with
swords.” His first published works were sober, social realist pieces that appeared in “sedate,
respectable, and generally sword-free places like The New Yorker and Harper’s, and featured
unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short-story characters—
disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace.” Chabon’s
novels too, The Mysteries of Pittsburg and Wonder Boys, came from this dim-lit world:

Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and
self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and

28
Ibid., 24–25.
38
lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce—I guess that about covers it.
29

Chabon goes on to stress that he doesn’t disparage or repudiate his early work—he’s just
a little tired of it, and in a book like Gentlemen of the Road he has changed course, has “gone off
on a little adventure.” The condescension lurking in that phrase is either undetectable to Chabon
or part of the anxious, winking performance—I guess the former.
30
After all, we’ve just heard
him disavow the very disparagement and repudiation of his early work that we’ve just heard him
make. The great truth that Chabon seems to lose sight of here is that the way you say something
is just as important as what you say, sometimes much more so. His is a style of homiletics that is
strangely deaf to tone, and the consequences of tone, and that sometimes hedges its bets to the
point of canceling out meaning. At one point Chabon describes how his friends would all smile
or laugh if he mentioned the title of his work in progress, Jews with Swords. “And, okay, so
maybe I didn’t look very serious when I told people the title. Yet I meant it sincerely, or half-
sincerely . . .”
31

Which brings me, digressing only a little, to one of the soapboxes I’ve started carrying

29
Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road (New York: Ballantine, 2007), 199.
30
Arguably it’s hard not to condescend to your audience if your task is first to locate, then educate, its
common denominator: New Yorker fiction readers and New Yorker fiction editors, James Joyce fans and
Stephen King fans, literary critics and book group dabblers . . . The path of the populist is broad but
slippery. Here is Zadie Smith, for example, in an essay on the BBC talks of E.M. Forster: “There is an
element of the nervous party host in Forster; he fears people won’t speak to each other unless he’s there to
facilitate the introduction. Occasionally his image of the general reader is almost too general to
recognize” (Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind [New York: Penguin, 2009], 21).
31
Ibid., 198.
39
around: half sincerity is not sincerity,

2
≠ a. (I recall the opening lines of Toni Morrison’s
“Forward” to a reprinting of Beloved: “In 1983 I lost my job—or left it. One, the other, or both.
In any case . . .”
32
The pleasures of rhythmic language aside, isn’t it possible that some states or
interpretations really do exclude the others?) Chabon endorses the borderland writers and their
tonal mixing and remixing, the potent literary bouillabaisses they create—something I endorse
too (who wouldn’t, really?), but more guardedly, since in the “commingling of mockery and
tribute” it’s clear that mockery leaves a stronger taste in the mouth. This is the hamartia of
Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road: an injurious mockery that begins with the very subtitle,
reminiscent of Chabon’s words on why he wanted to write the book—“a tale of adventure.”
Another genre romp of Chabon’s, The Final Solution, takes for its generic descriptor not “a
novel” or “a novella” but “a story of detection.” But isn’t Kavalier & Clay a tale of adventure,
too? Isn’t The Yiddish Policemen’s Union a story of detection? Yet these books wear the
descriptors on their covers simply, almost invisibly: a novel. Why the difference with the romps?
It could be a nod to the brevity of these books (“novella” is apparently a synonym for
“anathema” these days), or it could be an attempt to marquee their genre play that much more
brightly. Whatever the case, the subtitles produce unfortunate echoes of the novel/entertainment
binary of Graham Greene, the very falseness of which it is the avowed purpose of the Chabon
School to prove.
Things don’t get much better once you get inside the covers of Gentlemen of the Road.
Chabon’s prose, so disciplined in his other books, here labors under the explanatory weight that
we typically associate with historical genre fiction, though really the association is with bad
historical genre fiction. The first of Chabon’s two protagonists, Amram, is a towering African.

32
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), xv.
40
“In his quilted gray bambakion with its frayed hood, worn over a ragged white tunic, there was a
hint of former service in the armies of Byzantium, while the brass eyelets on the straps of his
buskins suggested a sojourn in the West.”
33
Replace these too-telling details with almost any
others from Chabon’s books—say the minor Blake scholar in Wonder Boys, who “kept a framed
print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a stoop-
shouldered wooden suit rack”—and at once the machinery of crude exposition becomes plain.
34

Later in the story Amram and his partner Zelikman ride along “serpentine” tracks, through
“thundering” gorges, and so on.
35
Are these lapses into hackneyed, purplish description mere
lapses, or are they moments of the homage-ridicule Chabon advertised? It’s impossible to say,
really, and maybe irrelevant.
The story itself is slight, overwrought and at the same time predictable—a pair of
mercenaries pressed into an act of good grace must help a dispossessed prince (who turns out to
be a princess) reclaim her rightful kingdom. Raucous incident follows on raucous incident until
the agitations of plot are like so much white noise. Like the early characters Chabon now
dismisses, his Amram and Zelikman suffer “disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard
enlightenment, moments of bleak grace”—only in Wonder Boys and, later in The Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay, these heartaches felt textured, earned. In Kavalier & Clay the suffering of

33
Gentlemen of the Road, 4. The stilted-sounding, over-explanatory prose recalls the outright parody of
this kind of writing in the Coen brothers’ recent gem, Hail, Caesar! “Ancient Rome. Twelve years into
the rule of Tiberius, ruler maximus, Rome’s legions are masters of the world. The stomp of its sandal is
heard from the Iberian peninsula in the west through the halls of the great library of Alexandria in the east
. . .” (Hail, Caesar! directed by Joel and Ethan Coen [2016]).
34
Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (New York: Random House, 2008), 3.
35
Gentlemen of the Road, 30.
41
European Jewry is a chilling ticker crawl beneath the quotidian dramas on the American home
front. In Gentlemen of the Road and, to a lesser extent, The Final Solution, tragic backstory is
automatic, loaded on, like a kind of ballast to weight the story with. Here is Amram in the middle
of a strategic horse-rustling operation, riding his own mount at full speed when

the melancholy he had been carrying seemed to break him open, and the face of his lost
daughter was confounded in his heart with the face of the young prince of the Khazars . .
.
36

Rustling horses to disperse an enemy army, holding on for literal life, a stampeding mosh of
hooves all around you, and in pops a vision of your lost daughter. This is either camp that fails to
rise to that level, or a lazy shorthand for pathos—or genre “play.” Whatever it is it falls flat, and
it hints, like the book’s subtitle, at an attempt to qualify or ennoble the pulpy conventions that
Chabon claims to honor.
I’d suggest that the real and really significant showcases for Chabon’s broader, funner
literature are the ones that don’t require an explanatory afterword or a special descriptor on the
front cover. Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union already advertise an expanded
notion of literary entertainment, the live and lively encounter of an “attentive mind with the page
. . .” But in an exercise like Gentlemen of the Road, the attentive mind mostly encounters a self-
defeating insult to genre, a story that seems not to know or care that the game it plays brings
collateral damage. I could bring large parts of Cloud Atlas into this critique as well—and I have.
In their most conscious forays into genre, Mitchell and Chabon have put the customary artifacts

36
Ibid., 63.
42
of genre under display glass (Look but don’t touch . . . Don’t engage with the characters) and
you can’t help but feel, finally, that these writers are making fun of the genres they claim to
homage.

Well, so what? an ironist might counter, an unapologetic winkist. Why shouldn’t genre ridicule
be its own, perfectly valid sub-genre? Why this fetish for sincerity, anyway?
Perhaps I can’t escape the charge of preference (it’s all just preference!) that trails after
this study, this odd-shaped personal-critical thing, like a smell—but in fairness to myself and to
the thing it hasn’t much tried to escape the charge. Preference is my polestar here, inevitably.
And the fact is I do prefer a story (not to mention an accompanying theoretical manifesto) that
risks vulnerability, that doesn’t build in so many systematic rejoinders.
37
It’s not just that the
winkist apologia is always available—yes, yes, an ironic comment on the genre, a hybridity of
homage and ridicule—it’s also that this thinking, this approach represents a complacency about
genre, a missed opportunity. I won’t suggest that Kate Atkinson or P.D. James or Richard Price
are without flaw in their reimaginings of their chosen forms, but in their best books they pay
homage to these forms not by some flashy, virtuosic reproduction of the forms but by their very
reimaginings, their tweaks. Long stretches of Atkinson’s Case Histories or When Will There Be
Good News? lose sight of or interest in the exigencies of the detective plot, that ticking
metronome, and the sections are better for it. Fine character portraiture and beautiful writing

37
I think too of the wearying breathlessness with which some students of Foucault and other
constructivists (usually early-on grad students, in my experience) perform the familiar rhetorical move:
What you think you know is a construct, and if you doubt that you only prove your investment in the
construct, etc.
43
more than make up for the lack of incident—and we know that incident is coming back. In
James’ The Children of Men, a sci-fi departure of a departure for her, really (James’ typical mode
is a kind of “high detective”), Britain is in the middle of a twenty-five year worldwide fertility
drought, a plot-premise that makes up in essayistic opportunity what it lacks in subtlety (a
narrator-protagonist named Theo, or “God” in Greek, who must protect the Madonna-like Julien,
miraculously pregnant with a son, etc). The essayistic ore under the surface of this premise, I
should make clear, is on the older, Montaignean model of the essai as a try, an attempt, an
experiment with truth-seeking.
Here is a friend of Theo’s holding forth early on in the novel:

“You can’t mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was a hope for them. This
planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small
insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble. If man is doomed
to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any.”
38

This is a dark, unflinching, and very unfunny sentiment that recalls Nietzsche on the end of the
world: “There were eternities during which [humanity] did not exist; and when it has disappeared
again, nothing will have happened.”
39
I could say that it’s hard to imagine a more effective
antidote to winkist irony than Nietzschean pessimism, but really what’s happening here (what’s
providing the real antidote) is an earnest meditation on the starting conceit of James’ story, even

38
P. D. James, The Children of Men (New York: Vintage, 2006), 44.
39
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1999),
141.
44
if this meditation means keeping the louder plot points waiting in the wings.
40

In Price’s Lush Life, a scrupulous attention to the procedures of New York City homicide
police becomes so scrupulous as to weight down the middle of the book considerably, bloating a
taut detective story into a doorstop of a social indictment, but who would really want to change
that? “That sea of words is a sea,” as Saul Bellow said of a different big book, complete with
flaws and longeurs and strict plotted passages of its own—Dickens’ Little Dorrit. “When its
amplitude tires us we readily forgive it. We wouldn’t want it any other way.”
41

40
Another pessimistic gem, another essay-in-a-single line: Sex in this dystopian future, “totally divorced
from procreation,” had become “almost meaninglessly acrobatic” (The Children of Men, 116)—a line that
the queer theorist Lee Edelman takes James to task for, incidentally, deploring the “narcissism” and
“pronatalism” that it betrays, that James supposedly betrays through this sentiment. I’ll take this
opportunity to point out that I’ve tried to avoid readings like this, not that I’m a particular fan of
heteronormative “futurity” but rather because I’m interested in reading a novel like James’ more or less
on its own terms, taking its “novelness” seriously, as I don’t think Edelman does. (James’ narrator’s view
about “meaninglessly acrobatic” sex, to take up just one point, is not necessarily the same as James’
view—and it’s worth remembering that this sentiment, clever turn of phrase and all, is consistent with the
novel’s sci-fi premise.) What I’ve been at pains here to do is read and think about novels not just as
“tracts into which you dip for illustrations of your own polemic,” as the critic Patricia Beer writes, not
just as “means to an end,” but as documents with their own intentions and craft-based goals—a rather old-
fashioned and author-centric approach (Patricia Beer, Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women
Characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot [New York:
Macmillan, 1974], ix). The comments from Edelman come from No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 13.
41
Saul Bellow, “Afterword,” Collected Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 444.
45
Of course, it could also be—and here is the place to acknowledge this, a hinge point—
that a kind of big-book Stockholm Syndrome obtains in novels like Lush Life and Little Dorrit.
42

Or take a novelistic genre experiment of the order and magnitude of Joyce’s Ulysses (warming
up mountainously for its brief at-bat), a book that holds us captive for hours and days and weeks
on end, for hundreds of dense, difficult pages, and by the end of them we feel grateful to them,
we almost have to feel grateful, so invested are we in the novel’s long project that to call it into
question would be to call ourselves into question, to mark a double failure. If whole stretches of
the book were a mistake, why did we put up with them? Why didn’t we try to escape?
43
Add to
this the natural aura that a widely syllabused book assumes, framed in its seemingly infinite
scholarship, and what you get is a kind of glowing museum cordon around a given book, with
the velvet festoons sometimes looking more like the flaming swords that guard the Tree of Life.
Anyway, I’m arguing here, and always, really, against religious awe, which in the King
James Bible is just called “fear.”
44

45

46
It should be clear that by comparing Chabon’s and

42
This clever conceit comes from Mark O’Connell’s essay in The Millions (“The Stockholm Syndrome
Theory of Long Novels,” May 16, 2011).
43
In this connection I can’t help noticing that Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay is ambitiously long, at 639
pages, while a novella like The Final Solution has to luxuriate in its kerning just to reach a hundred pages.
44
I’m also mindful of Edward Said and his notion of good “amateurism,” the kind inherent in any true
intellectual’s makeup and task—no badge or certification is necessary, or necessarily good, since these
can starve a great subject or book of the popular attention it deserves.
45
It might be argued as well, with Said, that the true intellectual “appeals to . . . as wide as possible a
public, who is his or her natural constituency,” and for this reason can be excused for not entering into the
hyper-specific and hyper-specialized debates of “insiders, experts, coteries, professionals”
(Representations of the Intellectual [New York: Vintage, 1996], xiii). It could also be argued that this
46
Mitchell’s polylingual experiments to Joyce’s I don’t mean to shame the apprentices by
comparing them to the master—far from it. Mitchell and Chabon possess tremendous gifts, as
Joyce did, a glut of talent that can sometimes get them in trouble, as it did Joyce. Often the long,
crushing, self-indulging experiments of Ulysses have recalled to me Beckett’s great title, I Can’t
Go On, I’ll Go On. Joyce’s Chabon School–style impersonations (if I can anachronize a little) of
the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, or the gothic novel, the windy journalism-speak of the
broadsheets—all this builds up a stack of debt in the ledger column of a certain type of reader
(read: me). Yet I do go on, and I’m usually glad I did. I dip back and back into Joyce’s
misshapen masterpiece, not least to try to puzzle out the reasons why I keep dipping back in.
What is it, finally, about this exhausting book that haunts me, moves me, that stays with me,
while a book like Cloud Atlas, so Joycean in its program, drifts off finally like a mechanical fog?
Ulysses begins in remarkable form, with a subtle heightening of the style that ended
Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen, the complicated hero
of that book, has returned to Dublin from Paris after the death of his mother, pulled back into the
orbit of family and country (the “nets,” as he’d called them in Portrait) by the gravity of death.
Death puts its pall over these early, bantering pages, as it does over the entire bantering novel.

position coincides quite conveniently with my own congenital, wandering laziness (see back to the first
chapter in which I accidentally launched on this project full of wandering and accident). Then again,
Said’s message is more than big enough to precede its puny messenger in this case, isn’t it?
46
I’ll argue, finally, defensively, that consecutive footnotes in conversation with one another are not quite
as twee and precious as the Wallacian footnote within the footnote (though it must be admitted that I’m
now closer than I’ve ever been to acknowledging the full, uncomfortable brunt of my essayistic debt to
David Foster Wallace (and all the more so now, of course, having failed to resist a parenthetical comment
within the footnote tacked onto the footnote, etc. (etc. (etc. . . .)))).
47
From the roof of Stephen’s guard-tower-cum-rented-apartment, Stephen and Buck Mulligan, an
equivocal friend, regard the Dublin morning and the bay stretching out beneath them like “a grey
sweet mother,” as Buck says. “The snotgreen sea. The scrotum-tightening sea. Epi oinopa
ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta!
Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.”
47

When Stephen rises to join Buck at the parapet, he does it in a sentence like this:
“Stephen went up and went over to the parapet.”
48
Simple, clear, crisp, restrained and earnest
prose—Joyce’s natural mode, musical, rhythmic (“went up and went over”), a little tweaked at
times (“snotgreen” instead of “snot-green”), playful and accessible. “Lucid and logical Joyce,”
Nabokov calls the stylist of these early chapters.
49
The first accesses of interiority begin with
relative ease, too, an easing-into-things. Stephen leans against the parapet as “pain, that was not
yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.”

Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose
brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent
upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare
cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him . .
.
50

47
James Joyce, Ulysses (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2010), 5.
48
Ibid.
49
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Mariner Books, 2002), 295.
50
Ulysses, 5–6.
48
Later, when Stephen’s mother returns in another daylight vision, his mind calls out to her, and to
Death:

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
No, mother. Let me be and let me live.

This representation of consciousness, a mind in the world, a body in the world, is exhilarating at
first, much more taxing later on, but even late in the novel we have recourse to this baseline
style, the rulebook of these earliest scenes. The same is true of our first exposures to Leopold
Bloom, our Ulysses, captured in clear, unparodic prose as he remembers his young son—

If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside
Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be . . . . I could
have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn German too.
51

The halting, fragmented sentences home in on grieving memory about as closely as written
language can. Sentences stop mid-thought (“I could.”), tenses seem to shift (“Make him
independent. Learn German too.”), and betray the very live pain, the very present reality of past
bereavement. (“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner, a great stylistic confederate of
Joyce’s. “It’s not even past.”
52
) If a kind of Nietzschean pessimism is what redeems The
Children of Men from too much symbolism, say, too much tidy parallelism, here the tokens and

51
Ibid., 79.
52
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage, 2011), 73.
49
inescapable memories of personal, close death are what mark this story, with its endlessly
shifting genre landscapes, like measure markers, key repetitions, like the foreground telephone
poles that resolve out of the blur of the landscape as seen from a passing train.
Here is Stephen in the chaos and absurdity of the long (overlong) Nighttown Episode:

STEPHEN
Ho!
(Stephen’s mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor in leper grey with a wreath of
faded orange blossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with
grave mould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on
Stephen . . .

THE MOTHER
(With the subtle smile of death’s madness.) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am
dead.

STEPHEN
(Horrorstruck.) Lemur, who are you? What bogeyman’s trick is this?
53

And here is Bloom at the end of the same crazed episode:

(Silent, thoughtful, alert, he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of

53
Ibid., 499–500.
50
secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a
changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze
helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing
the page.)

BLOOM
(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!
54

What bogeyman’s tricks are these? No tricks at all.
55
The novel has prepared us for these
moments early on, letting slip the seeds that will shoot up in seemingly random, non sequitur

54
Ibid., 522.
55
In answer to this question I hear the sound, again anachronistic, of Raymond Carver’s famous dictum:
“No tricks!” The famous line comes from his 1981 essay in The New York Times, “A Storyteller’s
Shoptalk”:

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say ‘‘No cheap tricks’’ to a group of writing students. That
should go on a three-by-five card. I’d amend it a little to ‘‘No tricks.’’ Period. I hate tricks. At the
first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I
tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along
with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain
tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily
need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes
needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute
and simple amazement.
51
place, uniting the novel by its emotional thruline as if by accident. But only seemingly, only as if.
In fact, we’re in the middle of a deep and deeply earnest program, a system of motifs and
recurrences that exist to keep us on track, to anchor us in the wild genre experiments of this
story, proving that the Joyce of this novel, at bottom, and despite popular opinion, is a contract
writer.
Ulysses also puts the lie to the idea that the novel of character and the novel of action are
finally at loggerheads. Here they’re the same novel, and most often they need to be if the novel is
to be any good. The Chabon School has inadvertently propped up the false character–action
binary in an effort to tear it down—think of Chabon’s “sedate” disinherited character novels
versus his more recent “novel of adventure.” But how else could a novelist plot if not with
people? What plot point could finally hold our interest if it didn’t involve characters we know
and genuinely care about?
In Joyce’s magnum opus, a lot does happen—again, contrary to popular opinion. Street
fights happen, hockey games, chores, adultery, verbal assaults, funerals, fracases in houses of ill
repute . . . But always and throughout the characters and their interior emotional lives helm the
story, steering it around or through the worst of the trickery, and freeing themselves, for the most
part, from Joyce’s Houdiniesque traps. Where there is mockery here, it’s a kind of pure mockery,
unmingled with condescending tribute. The characters exist outside these systems of ironic
commentary, anyway—they preexist them, like Stephen’s God who exists outside history, who
preexists our doubt of him. Joyce’s experiments in form and style descend like weather, annoy us
for a while (or annoy me, anyway), then lift—the clouds part, the “lucid, logical” sky appears,
and instantly we know what to look for and where: the characters, Stephen and Bloom and
Molly, in the reality of their own experiences, the reality of their own minds, which Joyce never
52
parodies, never mocks away.

53

Chapter Four

……

Corrections, theoretical speculations, or what is this thing (take two) and how to think about
it?—“high”/“low” hybridity—Smith by way of Tolstoy and Barth—NW and the thinness of
art

…….

January, 2017—
After several months away from this project I return to it to find the mental furniture I
thought I’d left behind looking not so much rearranged as changed—I didn’t remember the room
this way at all. All these men! All these white men! I swear I read more than that, but you
wouldn’t know it from the evidence of the books I’ve traveled with and made a very qualified,
niggling common cause with so far. And am I really this niggling, this haughty-sounding?
(Apparently, yes—at least sometimes.) And look how I’m always ghettoizing my theorists and
critics in the footnotes, penning them off in parentheses, introducing them to the larger party in
quick, embarrassed snatches, as if larger, farther-reaching thought had never violated the inner
sanctum of my artist-brain . . . .
All this injustice weighs on me, impresses me to make amends/amendments in the body
of the first three-fourths of this thing (and I have now, a little) and in the order of these last
batter-writers, particularly. Particularly on the theory front, then, defining “theory” broadly as an
54
attempt to speak to the concerns and anxieties underlying the hybrid project in a way that lifts
above any single example of it—

● First theory: pseudo-Marxist speculations on “class,” or really the popular perceptions
of class. It’s hard not to read high class for “highbrow,” even with all the pseudoscience
and poisonous nationalist propaganda that that particular term trails after it.
56
In this
troublesome schema, low class or “lowbrow” novels would be the ones that calmly and
dutifully inhabit their genre forms, while the genre “bending” or self-consciously genre
works I’ve considered so far are “middlebrow”/middle class, or perhaps upper middle
class—or maybe high class but “slumming it,” as some critics are wont to say? Here the
distinction seems to flow from the point of literary “origin” or “debut,” a pair of society
words I place in skeptical scare quotes because they’re society words, but also because
they perpetuate a specious idea of literature as graphable, a set of fixed points plotted
along a vertical axis: Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, say, since they debuted
“high” with their High Art, difficult, experimental novels, now graft genre elements into
their work in a way that smacks of “slumming it,” having “fun,” having “a blast,” or any
amount of other verbiage suggesting a project of condescension, an extension of the
experimental impulse into the nether realms of genre literature. In which case the

56
Perry Meisel shows how the nineteenth-century science of phrenology, purporting that “high”
foreheads meant intelligence and “low” ones stupidity, “led eventually to the racial theories of the Nazis,
for whom the Jewish cranium and pale, sunken face were clear indications of Jewish racial inferiority”
(The Myth of Popular Culture: From Dante to Dylan [Chester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009], 3).

55
experiment would be genre mixing itself, defined in high, self-congratulatory terms—
boundary breaking, trailblazing, egalitarianism!
57
Meanwhile, a writer like Ursula K. Le
Guin, working in the “low” form of the sci-fi/fantasy novel, is congratulated for her
impressive (read: surprising) handling of language and character, as if these elements in a
quietly stunning book like The Left Hand of Darkness were so much petty bourgeois
aspiration. (In an introduction to my copy of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin notes
wryly that “many people who do not read science fiction describe it as ‘escapist’. . . .”
58
)
● In rereading the foregoing, by the way, I’m acutely aware of how my own language of
praise and correction sometimes slips into the condescending patterns I’m holding up for
censure, almost as if, to reprise Derrida on the problem of metaphysics as a “center”—
“We have no language . . . which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single
destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the
implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.”
59
In Derrida’s terms, and
according to my second theory (Derridean centering/de-centering, or the rigged
dialectic), a “center” is a place of authority, reference, power, domination. God, Man,
Heterosexuality, Stable Language—these are all centers, which is to say false or
arbitrarily fixed centers, since we know that no greater or purer “truth” inheres in Man as

57
The Village Voice called The Counselor, a thriller film written by McCarthy, “a cumbersome end
product of a high-minded writer slumming it . . .” Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks if Thomas
Pynchon’s detective novel, Inherence Vice, could be a “symbol-filled allegory about the nature of the
modern novel, a Nabokovian joke about fiction and its ultimate meaning? Naw, I think Pynchon’s just
having a blast, and we are lucky to join in.”
58
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace Books, 1987), i.
59
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play.”
56
opposed to Woman, Straight as opposed to Queer, etc., and we know that God and stable
meaning in language are outright fictions. (Well, Derrida and I believe this, anyway—
how imperious that “we know” begins to sound.) Add to this list of dominant hegemonies
the idea of Literary as opposed to Genre fiction, and the parallels fall loosely into place. I
use the word “loosely” intentionally, by the way, taking a lesson in postmodern virtue
from the large “Perhaps” that opens Derrida’s famous “Structure, Sign, and Play”:
“Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be
called an ‘event,’ if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the
function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use
the term ‘event’ anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this
sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.”
60
A rupture
and a redoubling: my problem in a phrase. I may recognize the falseness and arbitrariness
of the literary-fiction-as-center center, yet my attempts to de-center it, to advocate what
Derrida calls “the joyful affirmation of the freeplay of the world . . . without truth,
without origin, offered to an active interpretation”—all this attempted deconstruction in a
sense only recognizes and reaffirms the order I’m trying to escape. In a sense there is no
bad press for the hierarchy that Literary Fiction tops—only traces, only searches and
“hits” in which the intent of the search matters infinitely less than the fact of it.
61

● For my third theory (unnamed), a kind of variation on the second, I want to
acknowledge that more optimistic accounts of this center–margin dialectic do exist, one

60
Ibid.
61
We might think of the media coverage that doubled as free advertising for a certain circus clown
demagogue now residing in the White House.
57
of which comes by way of Edward Said’s productive obsession with music. His variation
on the theme of center–margin movement takes the form of a meditation on the
“contrapuntal,” the interplay between two or more “lines” or melodies in a piece of
music. The essence of this counterpoint, Said writes, is “simultaneity of voices,” or in
other words a sharing and “control” of imaginative resources that can yield “apparently
endless inventiveness.” Counterpoint produces “horizontal, rather than vertical, music.”
62

In a piece by Said’s beloved Bach, for example, no hierarchy or essential priority mars
the interaction between the “first” and “second” melodies; on the contrary, a
promiscuous, Dionysian power flows from this mixture—an obvious model for sharing
and mixing in other spheres. For the critic bell hooks, a different approach: her constant
awareness of the fiction of the center recommends the margin to her not as a place of
banishment but refuge, possibility, a place of “radical openness.” Of course, hooks’ initial
“choosing” of this margin didn’t feel much like of a choice: she thinks about “mama and
daddy aggressively silencing me . . . the censorship of black communities. I had no
choice. I had to struggle and resist to emerge from that context and then from other
locations with mind intact . . . .”
63
Yet the fact remains, in a register of Derridean
contradiction, that this non-choice choice, this complicated embrace of the margin is
what deprives the center of some of its god-like, deterministic power. Coming back
explicitly to Derrida—hooks’ project could be said to partake of the “Nietzschean
affirmation,” the “joyful” affirmation of possibility that “determines the non-center

62
Edward Said, Music at the Limits (New York: A&C Black, 2013), 5.
63
bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and
Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999), 148.
58
otherwise than as loss of the center.”
64

● And now, and finally, coming back down to earth, which is to say coming back to Robert
McKee—fourth theory: McKeeist pluses and minuses. At one point in Story, McKee’s
(in)famous screenwriting guide, the guru of plot recommends a simple trick for creating
movement within and across scenes: you simply flip the “emotional charges.”
65
If a scene
begins with a negative emotional charge (–), a jilted lover, say, broke and angry, turning
up and banging at his ex-girlfriend’s door, something must happen within the scene so
that it ends on a positive (+) or upticking charge. Continuing with this dopey example,
courtesy of McKee, our jilted lover smashes through the door and demands money from
his ex-girlfriend, who, terrified, “takes a gun out of a drawer to scare him off. He laughs,
saying he remembers giving her the gun a year ago and the firing pin was broken. She
laughs, saying she had it fixed and blows up the lamp next to him to prove it. He grabs
her wrist and they fall to the floor wrestling for the gun, rolling over each other, until
suddenly an emotion they haven’t felt for over a year ignites and they start to make love
on the floor . . .” And so on. “The scene ends on the positive,” McKee tells us: “He has
her help to survive, their love is restored.” To which the only sane response is probably,
If you say so, McKee . . . I personally can’t imagine the scene coming off in any but the
most zany, dark comedy, but McKee seems to think this material is also ripe for “Thriller
mood”—McKee, with his apparent mania for capitalization, literal and thematic. For my
part, I’m less interested in the thematics or content of these changes of “charge” than in
the structural or categorical movement the changes represent. Often McKee diagrams

64
Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play.”
65
See McKee’s Story, 123 and 246–7.
59
these changes using EKG-like graphs (McKee has a mania for graphics, too), with the
spikes and dips representing positive and negative emotional swings within the scene, or
across scenes, in the film as a whole. What these graphs eventually begin to recall for me
is the popular visual representation of Hegel’s dialectic, the rising lines representing the
Geist or World Spirit’s rising lurches toward perfection, self-realization, the end of
history, and the falling lines representing epochs of reversal or stall, decadence,
confusion, forgetting—or perhaps (my heretical gloss) just a generation’s zeal for
something different, something else. “Make it new!” Ezra Pound famously enjoined the
Moderns, laying less emphasis on the content of the newness than the mere fact of it . . . .
In short, it could be that our early-twenty-first century “scene” enjoins and ennobles
mixture for mixture’s sake, preferring to climb a positively charged, upticking line
labeled “hybridity,” since the line labeled “purity” has come into disrepute on and off the
page (and off the page, very justly). “Hybridity” attracts the positive connotations of
novelty, democracy, equality, openness—“purity,” on the other hand, looks and sounds
more and more like the slippery slope, homogenous and boring and somehow dangerous
at the same time, backsliding, precipitous, dark.

Political implications aside (and breaking from my own apparent mania for bulleted
lists), I’m intrigued and slightly haunted by the possibility that this movement of the charges,
these swings and tacks toward differently charged artistic poles, might represent nothing so much
as the natural contrariness of the race, a grass-is-greener-thither instinctual yearning. “Genre
mixing is in vogue, yes,” said a recent acquaintance, something of an authority on the subject—
an authority in the context, at least. I was actually describing this investigation into hybridity
60
during an academic job interview, complete with the inevitable, stomach-lining-shredding
hesitation and self-doubt, the clogged ears from the recently landed flight. In a crowded
restaurant—dim lighting, dark shine lifting off the mahogany tables—I sounded to myself like a
puffed-chest bullhorn user shouting platitudes at the walls of my skull. “Yes, everybody loves
genre mixing nowadays,” my interviewer said beneficently, distantly, over a glass of red wine,
“but then again if everything is hybrid, nothing is, right?” It gave me pause.
And then, just the other day, random pleasure reading dropped this epigraph-worthy
passage on my mental doorstep—or maybe it was my doppelgänger returning, with her mania for
qualification, knocking at my mental door and stealing away? From Anna Karenina, once again,
the scene in which Levin and a casual acquaintance, Pestsov, discuss a piece of music that’s left
Levin deeply confused:

During the interval Levin and Pestsov began a discussion on the merits and defects of the
Wagnerian tendency in music. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and of all his
followers lay in trying to make music enter the domain of another art, and that poetry
commits the same error when it depicts the features of the face, which should be done by
painting, and, as an example of this kind of error, he mentioned the sculptor who tried to
chisel the shadows of poetic images arising round the pedestal of his statue of a poet.
“The sculptor’s shadows so little resembled shadows that they even clung to a ladder,”
said Levin. He liked this phrase, but could not remember whether he had not used it
before, and to Pestsov himself, and after saying it he grew embarrassed.
Pestsov argued that art was all one, and that it can only reach its highest
manifestations by uniting all the different kinds of art.
61
Levin could not listen to the second part of the concert, for Pestsov, who stood
beside him, talked all the while and found fault with the piece because of its unnecessary
and sickly affectation of simplicity . . . .
66

“Simplicity,” “purity,” “integrity,” “round” as opposed to “flat,” “character” as opposed
to “action”—it’s an old, old debate, regardless of the terms that receive the positive charge. I
can’t help noticing, too, that here the hybridist position is taken up by Pestsov, a holder forth,
like Levin, but a holder forth of the showboating, make-it-new variety, whom Tolstoy banishes
from the rest of his great, solid, simple, miraculously un-showboating novel.

A final experiment, then—
I want to side with Tolstoy for a while, taking a tack that may tack back against whole
swaths of my own argument, approaching the waning stages of this essay in high, Nietzschean
style (the Nietzsche of On the Genealogy of Morals, anyway, for whom self-doubt and the
construction of a kind of Ouroboros argument, the essay eating itself gruesomely, represented an
act of radical modesty).
67
Tolstoy, or really “Tolstoy” the synecdoche, may be right to side with
Levin against Pestsov’s zeal for the new, the totalizing, the cutting-edge, the elite. It’s hard not

66
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1992), 806–807
67
From Douglas Smith’s introduction to the Genealogy: “Nietzsche also provided an important point of
reference for . . . Jacques Derrida, who saw in his work an anticipation of the theory and practice of
deconstruction. The argument of the Genealogy, for example, might be said to deconstruct itself as it
unfolds, in so far as it gradually undoes the assumptions and distinctions from which it proceeds”
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xxviii.
62
to see the class or classist connotations, once again, rising up out of most discussions of
“experimental” art. When Pestsov wants to disparage the kind of simplicity he’s hearing in the
concert’s second half, he compares the music to the enduringly popular simplicity of the Pre-
Raphaelite school of painting. What could be worse than the familiar, the accessible, the
conceptual monochrome that the masses seem to like, and need?
A hundred years later, in another statement in this ongoing debate, the somewhat
Pestsov-like John Barth gets around to acknowledging the elitism implicit in his call for a new
new, another new. “Narrative literature,” Barth begins, his premise point, “has just about shot its
bolt.”
68
This is the cocktail-party version of “The Literature of Exhaustion,” passed down for
more than a generation now with a persistence that apparently makes the current Barth, an
octogenarian, blush. Who knew a young man’s rhetorical brashness would stick around so
long?
69
For much of the essay, of course, Barth’s tone is much quieter than the one-line summary
would suggest, and funnier, wilier, building escape hatches in the floor of the sinuous, self-
conscious prose.

Distressing as the fact is to us liberal democrats, the commonalty, alas, will always lose
their way and their soul; it is the chosen remnant . . . who, confronted with Baroque
reality, Baroque history, the Baroque state of his art, need not rehearse its possibilities to
exhaustion . . .
70

68
John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” The Friday Book (London: John Hopkins University Press,
1984), 71.
69
See Barth’s endearing comments to this effect in his introduction to The Friday Book.
70
Ibid., 75–76.
63

Barth goes on to lament that so many of his novel-writing contemporaries in the late
Sixties seem to be following Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Balzac “when the question seems to me to
be how to succeed not even Joyce and Kafka [two of Barth’s literary heroes], but those who
succeeded Joyce and Kafka and are now in the evenings of their own careers.”
71

The evenings of their own careers . . . the commonalty . . . the chosen remnant . . . These
are elegant, witty cues, and probably gentler ones, gentler usherings-out than Pound would have
used, but it’s still the door that’s being shown to the old and superseded. They must be
superseded, right? They’re old! It’s a curiously tyrannical reading of linear time from such a
champion of the nonlinear, the nontraditional as Barth. Not only is Time in the usual temporal
sense our taskmaster (its winged chariot drawing near, etc.), but now Time is also tyrannical in
the sense that it’s always time for something else, time to chuck the old gods, time to tack back,
or back again, time to make our move, make it new, and again, and again. I sometimes doubt if
innovation is really the motive force behind these shouted manifestoes, or if newness isn’t
simply the vehicle that frightened ego uses to try to escape time and its symbols, the old and the
dying, the outmoded, those not smart enough, apparently, to run.

It bears repeating that a theoretical, categorical hybridity is the subject I’m thinking about now—
and not the small-c category mixing of the literary detective novel, say, mixing “literary” and
“detective,” but instead the big-c Category Mixing that Levin and Pestsov disagree over—Music
mixed with Drama, Poetry with Art, and with reference all throughout to the specious but
apparently inescapable large categories of High and Low. None of the bomb throwers and

71
Ibid., 67.
64
innovators I’ve quoted have finally been able to do totally without these referents—and for my
part I haven’t much tried to do without them. “High” and “low” are implicit, animating
categories in Zadie Smith’s covert essay in hybridity as well, “Two Directions for the Novel,” an
essay-manifesto quickly making a name for itself beside Barth’s famous entry.
In the essay, Smith turns her critical gaze ostensibly outward, picking up and putting
down Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s lyric realist (read: popular, established) novel, then picking
up Tom McCarthy’s experimental novel, Remainder, and lavishing contrasting praise on it—
“one of the great English novels of the past ten years.”
72
Remainder, Smith tells us, is a book that
resists easy synopsis, easy analysis, pretty quotation. It consists of a nameless first-person voice
trying to understand a nameless trauma (“About the accident itself I can say very little.”), and
mostly failing to do so. Smith has strong words of praise for the novel’s resistances, and for its
conscious provocations, but above all she praises Remainder’s categorical position: the novel is
well off the well-trodden, middlebrow, lyric realist path that Flaubert arguably cut and that a
century and a half of middlebrow literature has beaten to tractionless powder.
In an important moment in “Two Paths for the Novel,” Smith acknowledges that
narrative literature has indeed survived the assaults of the twentieth-century experimenters, but
not, she says, without an “anxiety trace.”
73
Smith points out the ways O’Neill’s novel
“foregrounds its narrative nostalgia,” tries to excuse its familiar moves by nodding to them
within the story—metafictions as permissions. Here Smith is pointing an earnest finger at
O’Neil, but pointing three fingers back at herself—and I think she’d acknowledge this, by the
way, this murder of the projected self that accounts for her essay’s remarkable power. No more

72
Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind (New York: Penguin, 2009), 94.
73
Ibid., 81.
65
White Teeth or Autograph Man, she implicitly declares, no more On Beauty, those Flaubertian
prison houses with their escape attempts chipping the walls. It’s not incidental that “Two
Directions for the Novel” now appears in an essay collection called Changing My Mind, the book
that collected itself without Smith’s knowing it, she writes in the “Foreword”: “I had thought I
was writing a novel.”
74
It’s also worth noting that the book’s front matter begins with a line by
David Foster Wallace, another artist of anxiety, particularly anxiety of and for the new. Here is
what the Wallace epigraph says: “You get to decide what to worship.” And here is what I think it
means for Smith: Shouldn’t we be striking out for something else already? How boring, after all,
how static and disappointing to return to the old gods of fiction with Wallace’s permission slip in
hand.
Changing My Mind is a remarkable book, not least because it represents and reflects on a
very public artist’s identity crisis: What kind of writer should I be? What kind of reader? What
kind of person? Four years after Changing My Mind, Smith released NW as if to answer some of
these questions—NW, Smith’s most ambitious and arguably best novel to date, in which she sets
out to escape the middlebrow Flaubertian mold and essentially fails. It’s a remarkable failure,
though, a lucky failure, a fine, searching character novel about friendship and chance in
northwest London. Where John Barth made good on his literary manifesto in a book of short
fictions (Lost in the Funhouse) that reads less like a funhouse to me than a joyless, knowing
maze, Smith’s failure to make good on her manifesto results in a kind of accidental hybridity, a
“better failure,” if I can adapt Beckett, and a testament to the moderate, incrementalist heart at
the heart of Smith’s approach.
75

74
Ibid., viii.
75
Fail Better is also the title of another book (“a solemn, theoretical book about writing”) that Smith tried
66
On the face of things, NW begins in high, High Art, Joycean mode—

The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates
and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a
mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole
author of the dictionary that defines me. A good line—write it out on the back of a
magazine. In a hammock, in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides.
Four gardens along, in the estate, a grim girl on the third floor screams Anglo-
Saxon at nobody. Juliet balcony, projecting for miles. It ain’t like that. Nah it ain’t like
that. Don’t you start. Fag in hand. Fleshy, lobster-red.
I am the sole
I am the sole author
76

—but soon enough Smith grounds the reader in this play of voices, this stream of thought and
action. High Art “difficulty,” as much to do with choices of layout and paragraphing as concept,
gives way in the next chapter to Smith’s version of a “lucid, logical” baseline style: we learn
quite clearly that the “she” of the first chapter is Leah, a redheaded Irish-English social worker
who lives on the edge of the projects she grew up in. Her best friend is Natalie, a first-generation
Caribbean born and raised in the same projects, now a barrister, married with children and living
in a posher part of town. The real substance of the novel is the complicated relationship these
characters chart as they navigate their thirties, defining themselves by and against their past

her hand at while Changing My Mind took shape (ibid.).
76
Zadie Smith, NW (New York: Penguin, 2012), 3.
67
selves, their bricolage ethnicities, their changing class paths, their hopes, their dreams, their
politics. It’s a bildungsroman for the new millennium—the modern city’s babel of voices, the
long adolescence of its youth, the risk of violence, and then the sudden fact of it . . . In the
middle of the novel an easygoing mechanic drops in on an ex-girlfriend, holds back her weary
taunts about his new life and plans, then goes out into the world to be randomly stabbed after an
incident on a bus. The news of the murder drifts in and out of Leah and Natalie’s day, like distant
traffic sounds.
This second part of the novel, like the fated young mechanic it stars, is much more
relaxed than the first, settling into a beguiling, almost “populist” naturalism. It’s as if Smith
means to present a hybridity of alternation, starting high with her High Art experimentalism,
descending into middlebrow realism (giving her readers a bit of a breather), then leaping high
again for the long finale—reminiscent of the McKeeist EKG. I think the negative charge attaches
here to the familiar, smooth, accessible material, the positive charge to the more difficult, the
more “resistant.” Or anyway I think it’s supposed to do this. In the last third of the book the
telling fractures again, breaks apart into short, staccato, nonsequentially numbered sections that
hint at the nonsequential progress of a life. We never really lose the scent of the narrative,
though—Smith the helpless Forster disciple makes sure of it. The numbered sections come
complete with punning, rather wearying titles that help focus the reader’s attention and that
contain something of the “anxiety trace” Smith finds in O’Neill’s novel, in his “foregrounding”
of “narrative nostalgia.” A section title like “Speak, radio" claims a resonance with Nabokov’s
famous memoir (laying claim to the memoir’s cultural caché, too, inviting the reader to share in
the author’s clubby knowingness) but more than that it foreground Smith’s nostalgia—a nostalgia
less for narrative in this case than the possibilities of nostalgia proper, that backward-looking
68
gaze that makes sense of and arguably constructs lost time. Other clever, allusive section titles—
“Detour into the perfect past tense,” “Vivre sa vie,” “And the scales fell from her eyes”—
cleverly suggest that nostalgia (again), carpe diem sentiment, traditional epiphany, etc., matter
enough that they should still be allowed to happen in fiction, but perhaps not without a certain
salutary winkism, the permission slip that a winking, slightly embarrassed, self-referential tone
provides.
There are worse sins to commit than these, of course, if they’re sins at all. At its core, NW
is an accessible, lyric realist novel in the dressup of Joycean experimentalism and
inaccessibility—fine. It may flirt with and outwardly pay a certain homage to Barth’s model of a
“chosen” art, lofted above the “commonalty,” but really the novel and its creator are instances of
the interesting, sometimes frustrating mulch that a hybrid instinct can produce. Smith is still and
all a “contract” writer, coming back to the phrase of Jonathan Franzen’s that I used earlier in
reference to Chabon and Joyce—a phrase that sparked a minor skirmish in the ongoing
“high”/“middle”/“low” literary class wars, not incidentally. Smith may tax her audience’s
patience with experimental gestures, but in the end she still carries an image of the reader in her
composing mind, an image that weighs equally against her idea of a chosen art, a sacred ark
containing the perfect, personal novel. Could we say the same counterbalancing act went into
late late Joyce’s work, which is Barth’s touchstone? The answer seems obvious enough to dangle
the question rhetorically, but to be extra clear: No, I don’t think we could say that. The author of
Finnegans Wake seems to be writing almost entirely for himself, a lone prophet cut off from the
bustling, reading masses, pure, isolated, quiet in the desert of his experiment.
Here is Franzen in “Mr. Difficult,” by the way, an essay on William Gaddis that
69
eventually drew a bitter rejoinder from the experimental writer Ben Marcus:
77

Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of
reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential
loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader’s attention only as long as the author sustains
the reader’s trust. This is the Contract model . . .
78

And here is Smith in an essay from Changing My Mind called “Rereading Barthes and
Nabokov”:

I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college anymore, and I’ll tell you why: it made me
feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the
idea of a privileged reader—the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone,
belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but
also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible
genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know
the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness
other than my own.
79

77
For what it’s worth, I realize with more than a little ambivalence that I’m reprising the Franzen role
here.
78
Jonathan Franzen, “Mr. Difficult,” The New Yorker (September 30, 2002), 102.
79
Changing My Mind, 57.
70
Writing as communication, communion, a cure for existential ills, and you get to decide
what to worship—it’s literature as secular religion . . . . For all my protesting (too much?) against
religious awe, I suspect it’s obvious that I belong to this same hobbled club, gilded in post-
grandeur, a club that seeks Big, sometimes Totalizing, Hybridizing Things from literature—a
religious impulse.
80
I suspect it’s also obvious that my true and complicated feelings about this
impulse are reflected and refracted in my critiques of Barth, Smith, nearly every writer I care
about. I may not have finally chosen for my subtitle “self-portraits in the mirror of other people’s
books”—too Joycean-coy, too hipster—but I do own up to the truth embedded in the fact that I
considered that subtitle.
Near the end of NW, Smith tells us that Natalie, once a devout Christian, “lost God so
smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word. She found
politics and literature, music, cinema. ‘Found’ is not the right word. She put her faith in these
things, and couldn’t understand why—at exactly the moment she discovered them—her
classmates seemed to be giving them up for dead.”
81
I think something in the thinness of the
literary enterprise finally haunts its practitioners, its parishioners, its congregants and hopers, its
totem worshippers. We know, as Marx tells us, that the totems come invested only with the
magic we put in them ourselves,
82
but somehow we still want it—that guiding totality, a system,
a novel that can do everything, encompass everything, the “high” and the “low,” the near, the far,
encompassing or really transcending the ordinary, earthbound, time-bound limits . . . . No,

80
Derrida, in a mischievous mood, pins a memorable phrase on this secular yearning—“a nondogmatic
doublet of dogma,” he calls it (The Gift of Death, 50).
81
NW, 247.
82
Compare Marx’s discussion of the “fetishism” of commodities, in Capital, chapter 1.
71
“found” isn’t quite the right word. The word Smith is looking for—the word we are looking for, I
think—is the one that combines hope for infinite reinvention with the knowledge, a kind of fallen
knowledge, that no found or revealed reinvention is possible anymore, if it ever was. We have to
inspire the totems ourselves, worshipfully, suspiciously—and the try is everything, the attempt,
the essai, each failure containing the hope of a better one.

72

73
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......

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79

The Field Is White

…...

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McLeod really did hate the hymn. He’d said what he meant and he’d meant what he said, like
they’d vowed to do over the flames of the contraband fire. They would communicate their
challenges better, their temptations, so each could succor the other, hold the other accountable,
but that meant they needed to cut out the sarcasm, all the evasive cleverness, as Passos put it.
Tools of the Adversary, he said. McLeod had nodded uneasily at that part, but the rest he agreed
with. He said what he meant now, and he meant it. He couldn’t stand the hymn. So chipper and
upbeat in tone, so militant in content—enlist, fight, battle the world, our foe, our mortal enemy—
and here was his companion still whistling it despite the challenge it posed for him, the
temptation even. It made him feel fragile and temporary in his faith, the delicate equipoise he
held now, made him almost regret the work of maintaining it. The way the song pushed grays to
blacks, made a foe of the world, trucked in the idea of foes in the first place, the tired and
dangerous tropes of war. If the world is the enemy, then the church can justify its utter contempt
of the world, can dismiss the world’s criticisms, however constructive, and reject the world’s
beauties and innovations. To accept them would be treasonous, after all. The embattled church
defines itself by opposition. Take those crentes they’d just seen walking to church, in single file,
the father first, of course, and then the wife and daughters in his shadow, with nearly every inch
of their bodies covered in thick fabric. If the women of the world wear comfortable unstifling
dresses, then the women of the church wear long swaths of burlap. If the women of the world
demand equality with their husbands, then the women of the church walk several steps behind
them.
The hymn conjured all this for McLeod, and more. It reopened what he thought of as a
wound, a vulnerable spot, an occasion to worry that his own church might not be as far from its
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militarist isolationist beginnings as he liked to believe, as he needed to believe.
A voice came from behind them. Oh Elders! Oh Elders!
It looked like Leandro, but looser, and shufflier, as if he’d somehow been de-boned in the
legs and arms, moving his gelatin limbs in ways that seemed to surprise even him. McLeod
wondered if he might not be mistaken about the man, but then he heard his companion make a
deflated sound.
Oh Elders! Leandro shouted again. Wait for me, wait!
He crossed the street holding a sad-looking bottle shorn of its label. You could hear what
was left of the bottle sloshing as he approached. He wore a faded Brazil jersey, mesh shorts,
Havaianas. He looked tanner, rangier, his goatee gone to seed. That he worked construction
seemed suddenly fitting: it looked as if a loose jumble of two-by-fours was sidling up to them,
was smiling at them, laughing a loud, stupid laugh.
Oh Elders, he said. You see the game?
Leandro’s breath was a foul cachaça breeze. His eyes were blood-red and swimming.
Passos stepped forward now and reached back a hand to keep McLeod where he was.
Something paternalistic in the gesture, and tender. Passos knew more of this than he ought to
have needed to. Hadn’t he called his father—long gone and good riddance, he’d say of him—a
drunk? Passos ducked and craned his head now, tracking Leandro’s, trying to make eye contact.
How much have you had to drink? Passos asked him.
I’m talking about the game, Leandro said. The game! Did you see it?
We can’t watch TV, McLeod said. Remember?
Passos turned to him, shook his head—I’ll handle this, his eyes said—and as he turned
back around Leandro swung his left arm over Passos’ shoulder. He lifted his other arm,
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disjointed and exultant, into the air, waving the cachaça bottle like a flag. We won! Leandro
shouted. Again! What joy to be Brazilian!
Passos slipped Leandro’s beery embrace like a prize fighter, with more speed than either
anticipated, it seemed, Passos ducking under and out with such agility that Leandro lost his
balance. He listed left, then right, overcorrecting. The bottle sloshed as he threw out his arms for
support. Passos took him by the shoulder, steadied him.
Why don’t you come home with us? Passos said. To your home, I mean. We’re on our
way there to visit with your wife, actually. Leandro? When’s the last time you were home?
My wife! Of course! Hey guys, he shouted, wheeling around to address his huddle of
friends across the street, which had dispersed. Guys, where are you? These are the boys I was
telling you about! Guys?
He visored his forehead with his left hand and bent a little, straining his gaze toward the
dark mouth of the bar. Ah, fuck ‘em, he muttered. Then he turned to the elders, gave a loud
belch, said, Of course you’re going to visit my wife! You love my wife, don’t you? Especially
gringo here. He jerked a thumb past Passos at McLeod. Don’t you, gringo?
McLeod felt sure he hadn’t heard him right, or understood him. His face started to burn in
any case.
Leandro flung his arm around Passos again and bellowed out the side of his mouth: He
comes to our country, eh Passos, and tries to steal our women, eh?
Passos slipped the embrace again. You’re drunk, he said. Go sleep it off.
Go on, McLeod said, after a pause, his voice horse all of a sudden, gravelly.
And all of a sudden Leandro straightened, homed his eyes in on McLeod. What are you
doing with my wife? he said. Then he shouted, Are you fucking my wife?
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He lunged around Passos for McLeod, threw a loose, waving punch at him. He missed
badly. He pitched forward with his arm’s momentum and landed face down in the street. He tried
to lift himself, collapsed. He tried again, collapsed again.
McLeod felt the flood of adrenaline moving all the way to his toes by now. His heart beat
in his throat. Passos turned to him, laid a hand under his chin, said, He didn’t get you, did he?
Then they looked at Leandro the way two fishermen might look at a giant catch in its
throes, trying for something it no longer had the means of. Escape. Or dignity. Or
help.
Leandro wailed for it, shouted it into the dusty pavement. Help me! Help me up, for
Christ’s sakes!
Passos moved McLeod back another step and then bent down and rolled Leandro over
onto his back. The man squinted and blinked several times, his right cheek outlined in dust.
Passos held out his hand. Come on, he said.
Leandro took the hand and mocked, Come on, come one. Let’s all go fuck Leandro’s
wife. That’s what you do when I’m not there, right? The wife fuckers?
Passos jerked his hand away and let the jumble of a man fall back to the street. Leandro
tried to prop himself up, from his back now, but he couldn’t and he couldn’t, once, then again,
and so McLeod stepped forward and Passos shouted, No, leave him there, and he took McLeod
by the wrist and upper arm and rushed him away down the street with Leandro screaming after
them and Passos saying in a low rapid voice, Leave him there, leave him, don’t even look behind
you, just leave him in the dirt, in the filth . . .
…
An hour later and McLeod still half-thought it could have been a dream—how Leandro’s voice
84
had caught on the f of Are you fffff-fucking my wife? and how they’d flinched at the word, the
both of them, and the smell of cachaça burning in their nostrils, and the sight of him flopping
there in the street—or if not quite a dream, then something surreal, something beyond
explanation, something exempt from it, but just then they arrived at Josefina’s street, and
McLeod knew that some kind of reckoning must come.
The river ran brownish pink and white in the near distance, and the sound of it calmed
McLeod, and he walked toward it. Passos followed without question or protest. They sat for
several minutes in silence on the corrugated guardrail that separated the road from the steep
crumbling bank beneath them, the occasional prods and nubs of drainage pipes sticking out of
the dirt like uncovered limbs. The low sun on the river. The crooks and eddies of light.
McLeod spoke first. Now what?
We baptize Josefina, Passos said.
You mean we—
We baptize Josefina without Leandro. We don’t even tell her that we’d changed our
minds. She doesn’t need to know that. We pick up where we left off Friday night.
Then a long pause. The runs and riffles down below, a continuous sound but dislocated
somehow, fragmented, like the light.
What time is it? McLeod asked.
We were supposed to be there ten minutes ago, Passos said.
They knocked at Josefina’s door and waited for what seemed like a long time. She came
to the door, smiling, and McLeod gave an audible sigh. They took their seats inside as Josefina
started to the kitchen for the snacks, but Passos called her back, asked her to sit. They wanted to
begin right away. She looked back toward the kitchen. She just wanted to get them some water
85
and biscoitos.
We appreciate that, Passos said, but please, and he motioned with his hand at the
cattycorner loveseat. She sat on the side farthest from them and smoothed her jean skirt as she
settled down, her legs uncrossed but tight together. Why did she seem self-conscious of them? It
could be that they were alone with her, as they hadn’t often been, or could it be something
McLeod had done, was doing at that very moment, a set of subverbal signals? He noticed her
body in a new way now, and he hated himself for it. He thought of Leandro and the horrible
things he’d said and he hated himself for thinking of them now. He kept his eyes on the pocked
cement floor between his shoes, and if he had to look at her he looked straight in her eyes, not
her face even, her eyes, her pupils, those expressionless black dots which were his best hope
now. He moved his eyes between those two poles—the floor between his feet, and her pupils—
and he moved them along a frantic track designed to take in as little of the distance between them
as possible. He wished he had run away from Leandro, sprinted in the opposite direction at the
sight of him, for now he could think of little else but what he had said and how he had said it—
the initial f, then the explosion past it—and how the mere suggestion had changed the way he
looked at Josefina, thought of Josefina, just as the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil had made Adam and Eve ashamed of their nakedness, had sexualized them, corrupted them,
and somehow it was all Leandro’s fault. Leandro. Leandro. McLeod kept his eyes on the floor
and considered the name with such vehemence, like a sort of crazed mantra, Leandro Leandro
Leandro Leandro, that he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined the name when it came out of
Josefina’s mouth and hung there, hung in the air in front of him, big and terrifying as poached
bloody game.
Well? Josefina said.
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Look, Passos said, look—
I asked Elder McLeod, Josefina said.
McLeod looked up at the sound of her voice and his untrained eyes caught the sheen off
her knees. He jerked his gaze up to her pupils and held to them like the unraveling ends of a rope
dangling down into an abyss.
What? McLeod said. What did you say?
When did he call? Passos said.
Half an hour ago, Josefina said. He said Elder McLeod pushed him to the ground and the
two of you just left him like that. Is that true? Is it, Elder McLeod?
He opened his mouth to say No, but nothing came out. He held the O of his lips like a
suffocating fish. He was the catch now, they were the catch, and Leandro was streaming in the
reel.
Passos said, Wait. Wait, Josefina. Please.
She turned and looked at Passos and McLeod breathed again.
What did he sound like on the phone? Passos said. Did he sound like he’d been drinking?
He was drunk, Josefina. He was angry. We tried to tell him to come home. I said When was the
last time you were home, Leandro? And he got angry with us, he tried to hit Elder McLeod. He
fell down and we tried to help him but he wouldn’t accept our help. He kept yelling at us.
Josefina turned back to McLeod, her pupils shimmering like hard dark gems. Is that true,
Elder? Because he said you tried to hit him.
McLeod shook his head. No, I never tried to hit him. I promise.
What was he yelling at you?
I don’t want to repeat it. It was bad.
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Her eyes held steady for a long minute, then they wavered, and then finally they broke,
like a fever, and belief and sympathy poured out of them again. She said she was sorry, so sorry,
and so embarrassed, and they told her not to be. She said she couldn’t believe it, and she started
crying—her eyes filling until finally the meniscus broke—and they told her it was okay, and not
to cry. She said please, please let her get them some snacks, and Passos nodded and she stood up
and rushed to the kitchen and McLeod jerked his head away as she stood. He couldn’t afford to
be subtle about it. She came back bearing two glasses and a plate of the white cookies, which
McLeod at one point had mentioned that he liked. He saw the glasses and the plate touching
down on the table, Josefina’s hand placing them there, like a still life. He thanked her without
looking up and he ate and drank. They both did. She said she shouldn’t have believed him over
them, he wasn’t dependable, and she didn’t know how to apologize enough. They told her not to
apologize, please. They’d come to talk to her about her baptism. This was Passos now. Did she
still feel the desire to be baptized in the Lord’s church? She said of course she did, of course.
Passos took out his planner and set a date for that Sunday, right after church, he said, when all
her friends in the ward could be there to support her. He said they would set up a baptismal
interview for her late-week—did Thursday work? Friday?—and would help her fill out the
necessary paperwork then. She said of course, and she was so excited, and also sorry, again, so
sorry. Passos held up his hand, an imperial gesture. Enough. He asked McLeod to say a closing
prayer.
On the way home they passed by rejuvenated bars, but McLeod heard and saw them now as if
through gauze. Josefina would be baptized that coming Sunday, in one week exactly, and yet
what did he feel? He felt numb, and fallen. They passed the town square where a few people in
jerseys still clung to darkened corners, and the yellow shirts looked brown in the darkness, and
88
the streamers papering the sidewalk looked like garbage, and the confetti and the ribbon from
balloons too, like so much garbage.
.....
On Monday morning Passos called the mission office to speak with President Mason, but the
president had gone out of town, out of country, actually, to attend a three-day conference in
Santiago with all the other mission presidents from the South American Area. This, according to
Elder Tierney, one of the president’s two assistants. He said President Mason would be available
for appointments as of Thursday. Passos scheduled the baptismal interview for Friday morning.
Later that day he asked McLeod, What do the Americans think of Elder Tierney?
What do you mean?
Well, I mean, is he liked? Is he very popular?
He is with the mission president, obviously, less so with us. Or I don’t know. Why?
Hmmm, Passos said. Hmmm.
On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons they visited Josefina. Leandro wasn’t there either
time, or at least didn’t come out into the entryway/living room. At one point on Thursday
McLeod thought he heard the TV murmuring in the backroom, but he couldn’t be sure. They
read aloud from the Book of Mormon with Josefina, or the Bible, or they answered whatever
questions she had. She asked who exactly would baptize her. Passos said anyone with the proper
priesthood authority. She could pick either of them, or the bishop of the ward, or Maurilho, or
even Romulo, who was old enough by now. She said she wanted one of them to do it, of course,
but she didn’t think she could choose between them. Passos slapped McLeod’s knee and turned
to him and said, Companheiro here will perform the ordinance. You’ve never gotten to do one,
have you?
89
He hadn’t. Oliveira had performed the baptism for Ze, his only other convert in the
mission. And Zezinho hardly counted now. He’d lasted all of two months. A revolving door
convert. The kind that opened up another vulnerable spot in McLeod, for what kind of church
could allow the baptism of a smitten little boy and, on the other hand, what kind could fail to
keep him? But Josefina—golden Josefina—she was different. McLeod felt Josefina would be his
first real convert. He looked into Josefina’s pupils and told her he’d be honored to perform the
baptism, and he meant what he said.
On Friday morning, early, the elders picked up Josefina at her house. She wore her
Sunday best. That much McLeod could tell. Something white on top, black on bottom. He didn’t
allow himself more than a brief peripheral awareness. They all traveled by city bus—the buses
were running again—to the main rodoviaria in Carinha and from there rode to the rodoviaria in
Belo Horiztone, an hour ride by regional bus, and from there took a taxi to the big chapel
downtown, and all at mission expense. The Work did feel best at a dedicated pitch—Sweeney
and Kimball had been right—and especially on days when the work paid off: McLeod’s second
convert, or really his first, and her excited nervous talk in the taxi, and he and Passos telling her
she had nothing at all to be worried about. That she’d knock the president’s socks off.
They went inside and knocked at the stake president’s office, which President Mason
often borrowed for interviewing. After a beat he opened the door and his big round face loomed
up like a rising moon. The face smiled at Josefina, then turned to the empty foyer, and then
turned to McLeod and Passos.
Can I speak with you two for a minute? President Mason said.
They all trailed reassuring smiles into the office, but as soon as McLeod pulled the door
closed behind him, President Mason’s faded, then Passos’, then his, in quick succession, like
90
dominoes. They sat on two padded chairs in front of a large mahogany desk. The president sat
behind it in a black leather desk chair, a framed picture of the risen Lord glorying at his back.
I should have confirmed with you two, but I didn’t, and that’s my error, the president
began. Elder Tierney had the interviewee’s name down as José.
I told him Josefina, Passos said.
An honest mistake, President said.
McLeod and Passos waited—the sound of creaking leather—for the president to
continue, to make sense of the ashen look on his face.
Is Josefina married? President Mason asked.
Yes.
Well, that’s good news then. That’s good news.
The president leaned forward in his chair—more creaking—and rested his forearms on
the desk and crossed his fingers in a loose weave, somewhere between relaxation and prayer. He
sighed.
I think you heard I just returned from a three day conference in Chile, President Mason
said. The theme of the conference was retention, and the South American Area is now committed
to improving its performance in that regard. To this end we’ve been instructed to only baptize
families, celestial units. That’s our ultimate goal, as you know. To exalt families, to unite them in
the eternities, and not separate them. Tell me about Josefina’s husband. Does she have any kids?
No kids, McLeod came in, and the husband’s not interested in the gospel at all. I’m
confused, though. A few minutes ago you thought Josefina was José and then you were all ready
for a baptismal interview, weren’t you?
President Mason’s eyebrows furrowed, and Passos’ did too, another domino effect.
91
McLeod noticed it out of the corner of his eye, as if a marionette’s string ran from the
puppeteer’s thick bushy eyebrows to the puppet’s dark sleek v.
Well, McLeod said. Were you or weren’t you?
Elder McLeod, President said, a note of warning in his voice.
Passos looked sidelong at him, a pleading look. It was the look of a socialite mother for
her child who acts out in front of the company. It was Gertrude’s look for Hamlet in front of
Claudius. The spinelessness, the sniveling ambition of his companion. Even now. When
President was cutting Josefina down at the knees. And Passos just sitting there, short nods, sober
looks. All of a sudden McLeod felt a physical revulsion for his companion, something rising in
him, like bile. His companion the climber. His companion the missionary careerist. McLeod
lifted free of the respectable world. He felt he could say anything now, if only to hurt Passos.
Why are you avoiding the question? he said to President. When it’s a man, you’re all for
it. It’s green lights all the way.
Mind your tone, Elder, President Mason said.
Are you going to answer the question or not?
Elder! Passos said, grabbing McLeod hard, strangling his wrist as if to cut off circulation
to his mouth.
It’s a double standard! McLeod said.
Elder McLeod, Passos said, though he’d already turned back to face the president, the
kingdom can’t grow without priesthood holders. Isn’t that right?
That’s the hard truth, the president said. You ought to listen to your senior companion,
Elder McLeod.
We’ll work with her husband more, Passos said. We’ll bring him around. She’ll help us. I
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know she will. She really is golden, President. You’ll see.
I’m sure she is. Which is why we want her baptism to be meaningful. We want it to be a
step toward exaltation, which can only happen if a woman is sealed to a man. You both know
this, Elders, as well as I do.
Where was this talk eight months ago when we called you about a ten-year-old? McLeod
said. Do you remember that? Do you remember you okayed it? The kid went in the front door
and out the back.
That’s precisely what we’re trying to avoid, Elder McLeod.
Yeah, he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and he went to the door and slammed it shut
behind him.
Out in the foyer Josefina said, What’s wrong, Elder? She sat straight-backed at the edge
of a florid floral-patterned couch, her knees together and sheening, like waxed fruit, her
prominent parts pushing out against her blouse. And McLeod just shook his head, slowly, and
looked away.

The next evening they brought Rose on their visit to Josefina. The main point was to cheer her
up, bringing a friend from the ward to help put things in perspective, but also, as it happened, to
meet the new requirement President Mason had put in place: missionaries must bring a third
party in order to visit a woman alone in her home. Passos didn’t need the rule any more than
McLeod did, but he wasn’t about to employ McLeod’s strategy of shouting into the wind, then
spitting into it, then hanging his head when he turned up hoarse and wet.
He hung his head still, on the couch in Josefina’s living room—he’d hardly looked at
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Josefina since they’d arrived—but what angered Passos most was the way Josefina seemed to
absorb McLeod’s body language, mirroring it. She sat on the love seat with her hands crossed in
front of her knees, her back hunched, her gaze angled down at the bowl of pebbles on the coffee
table and the untouched plate of cookies. He explained again the President’s reasoning, and she
nodded, explained how it really would be for the best—she nodded again—a small moment of
sacrifice until her husband came around and then think how great would be her joy. She nodded.
She was all but absent, like his companion. Look at him. Sunk down in the sofa, eyes vacant, like
a patient in a mental hospital. He’d given up. His negativity had filled the room, infected it, like
an air-borne disease. Passos had a mind to slap him.
Then Rose leaned forward from her spot beside McLeod, looked across to Passos, said,
Can I say something?
Of course, Passos said. Please.
She turned to Josefina, said her name, held her thin face perfectly still and calm, like a
bell jar, until Josefina looked up to face her.
I just wanted to say something, she began. I meant to say it at the beginning, actually,
when we first sat down. I’m sorry Maurilho couldn’t be here tonight. He wanted to be, but he
actually has a job interview at the town hall. I think I’ve told how long he’s been without work,
so he couldn’t miss it. It’s for a janitorial position, and I know he’s embarrassed about that. He’s
not a prideful man, but he’s smart enough to run that town hall, and if he’s lucky he’ll be pushing
a broom there. My point is that the Lord sometimes humbles us to make us teachable. He wants
us to be like little children.
Josefina’s eyes had changed, and her posture, and she seemed to be listening for the first
time all visit, unthawing, uncopying McLeod.
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We’ve been praying together, Rose continued. In addition to family prayer. Every night
Maurilho and I kneel down beside our bed and ask the Lord to help us. One night I’ll pray, the
next night he’ll pray. It brings us closer together to pray like that. The Church has brought us
closer together. It used to be so much worse. Before the Church came something like this jobless
stretch would have shaken us to the core. We didn’t know how to face adversity back then. The
Lord hadn’t taught us yet. He hadn’t broken our hearts. He hadn’t begun to rebuild them.
Rose dropped her head just a bit, a subtle nod, then looked at Passos as if to yield the
floor.
Thank you, Rose, Passos said.
Rose leaned back and disappeared behind McLeod, whose head still titled floorward. Had
McLeod’s eyes changed? Passos couldn’t tell. Had he felt anything at all? Why wouldn’t he look
up?
It’s like you wrote in your talk, Josefina said.
Passos took a minute to register the comment.
The talk you gave on Sunday, she said.
Oh yes, yes. You read the rest of it?
Josefina nodded, repeating the operative phrase. A broken heart and a contrite spirit, she
said.
Exactly, Passos said. The Lord gives us trials to shape us. He chisels away at us to
remake us in His image. It hurts—it hurts for everyone—but it’s essential. This trial with
Leandro, with the waiting, Passos said, and suddenly he had an idea, he was reaching for his
scriptures, the confidence building in him. He saw the rest of the discussion laid out in his mind
like a map, the colored lines and junctions, saw it clear for the first time that evening, he felt it, a
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feeling of opening up, of clicking into place. He would read to Josefina from the Doctrine and
Covenants, the words of the Lord to the Prophet Joseph Smith as he languished in a rank freezing
jail cell—how his adversity and his afflictions would be but a small moment, and if he endured
them well, how God would provide—and then he would promise Josefina, in the strength and
confidence of the Spirit, that if she endured her trial, her waiting for Leandro, then the Lord
would provide a way. Her husband would be baptized in the true church. Passos would make her
that promise. He flipped through the pages of his quad in search of the verse. Was it section 130?
131? He didn’t want to paraphrase it, he wanted the words themselves, those pointed words of
counsel, so perfect for the moment. He held up his finger—one second—and then went back to
flipping pages, scanning them, flipping some more. He should know the reference exactly. The
scripture had spoken to him too, had burned in him, and now he couldn’t find it, or not fast
enough anyway. He felt as if whole minutes passed with him flipping, he was losing the
momentum of Rose’s testimony. He could feel the Spirit seeping out of the moment like air from
a tire, he could almost hear it, a low horrible hissing. Just one more second, Passos said. I’m
sorry about this. There’s a scripture I wanted to read to you about your, your situation, you
know, with Leandro, I just needed to . . ., and he was back to flipping. Was it section 120, then?
121? He scanned the pages as fast as he could, turning the tissue-thin leaves with thumb and
forefinger, making small sharp tearing sounds as he turned, little rips. He looked for key words
and phrases. Adversity. Afflictions. Rip, rip, rip. Exalt on high. Rip, rip. What felt like minutes
passed. Rip. He began to doubt if he even remembered the words right. Then his eyes alit on a
patch of text that seemed familiar, and he slowed his scanning. He felt he was close.
Speaking of your situation with Leandro, McLeod said.
McLeod’s voice surprised Passos—it felt like the first time he’d heard it all day—and he
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looked up to see his companion all of a sudden staring intensely into Josefina’s eyes.
Speaking of that situation, McLeod continued. When was the last time you talked to
Leandro?
Last night, Josefina said, but she said it like a question, as if she too had been taken aback
by McLeod.
What about this morning?
He left for work early.
Did he know we were coming tonight? Did he know we wanted him to be here?
Yes, Elder. I told him.
Last night?
Yes.
Was he sober?
Excuse me?
Was he sober when you told him?
Josefina sat up straighter and her face flushed redder, and Passos felt his own face
contorting at McLeod, and the Spirit, which had already been leaving the room by degrees, flew
out of it now as if shot from a cannon.
.....
Passos made no gesture at reconciliation the next day, or the day after that. He and McLeod
knocked doors in the mornings and afternoons, speaking in short clipped sentences when they
did speak, which was rarely, and almost always about logistics. Where should they knock next?
When should they leave for lunch or dinner? What bus should they take? Little more than this.
President Mason had been right about McLeod. He’d been right to warn Passos a month
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and a half ago before transfers. A difficult companion, he’d said. He’d been right to commiserate
with Passos in the interview the other day after McLeod had stomped out of the office trailing his
Yeahs—Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he’d said—like a little boy’s baby blanket, dirty and worn after
too many years of dragging it around. McLeod was worse than juvenile. He was worse than
infantile. He threw loud tantrums at the realities he disliked, and then walked around with his
nose in the air as if he were the pure one, untainted by compromise, by facts or considerations.
Maybe this was the American style. The thought had occurred to Passos more than once in the
last weeks, as McLeod started resembling more and more Elder Jones, his boorish yet arrogant
former companion, naive yet somehow cynical, and also as the news of America’s build-up to
war starting soaking the air, like humidity before a thunderstorm.
On Thursday afternoon they knocked a door and an oldish woman answered it. Tracting
had improved now that the Championships were over, but the harvests were still meager, and
opened doors still the exception. Passos and McLeod straightened up as the woman tucked
strands of gray behind her ear, smiled, and straddled the threshold of her door. Yes? Could she
help them? Passos gave the extended introduction in which he anticipated common questions—
they weren’t brothers, no, Elder was a title, and they came from Recife and Boston,
respectively—and then he asked the woman if they could come inside and share their message.
The woman hesitated.
It won’t take long, Passos added.
Then she opened the door wider and stepped aside to let them into the courtyard.
Oh, actually, Passos said. I forgot to ask. Are you alone, ma’am? Is your husband or
anyone else home with you?
McLeod scoffed, muttered under his breath, in English, She’s like sixty, dude.
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Shut up, Passos said, also in English, then he turned back to the woman at the door and
said, I sometimes have to translate for him. Excuse us.
Inside the dark living room—no light besides sunlight slanting sharply through the
narrow blinds—they sat opposite the oldish woman on a pair of wooden chairs brought in from
the kitchen. She called out to her son more than once as the three of them made small talk and
waited for him to come. After a time the woman shrugged and told the elders they might as well
begin. Passos hesitated—Did the rule require that the third party be in the room?—but then
McLeod started into the regular first discussion, asking the woman about her thoughts on God.
Passos took up the next two sections, proceeding to discuss God’s Son and His sacrifice, and the
original church He established on the earth. They were into the section on that church’s eventual
apostasy—the saving truths had been lost or corrupted, McLeod was saying—when a big
shirtless man stepped into the room, immense brown belly first. The man was generously
proportioned throughout, but especially at his middle, so bowed out and smooth as to look
ceramic. He sat down beside his mother and leveled a stare at McLeod, said, You’re an
American?
He nodded.
How about that fucking president of yours?
Passos could feel his companion bristle, could imagine his hackles leaping up, but before
McLeod could say anything, Passos said, Sir? Sir, please. He explained how they were sharing a
gospel message with the good sister here. They had been talking, among other things, about the
attributes of God. Would he like to tell them how he imagined God?
God is good, the man said. His head snapped back to McLeod. And God ain’t greedy
either. He don’t want to bomb poor little countries just to get their fucking oil. He don’t want—
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Passos cleared his throat, loudly. He stood up and shook the woman’s hand, then the
man’s. He thanked them for their time and at the doorway exchanged a few last pleasantries, a
few God-bless-you’s. McLeod kept notably silent. He waited until they had rounded a corner
away from the house before he said, sounding confident of Passos’ accord: Talk about an
ignoramus, huh? Anyway, thanks for sticking up for me back there.
Passos answered in careful English: I did not say I disagree with him.
.....
A week more passed, two weeks. They visited Josefina several times, with Rose or Romulo in
tow, but seldom Maurilho, since Maurilho now worked mostly night shifts at his new job. The
visits with Josefina tended to devolve into planning sessions, strategic brainstorms: how to get
Leandro interested? how to get him to show up at all? What about a casual meeting one night,
nothing heavy, nothing doctrinal, just a chance to relax and talk? What about a dinner at Rose’s
and Maurilho’s? They needed to re-establish their friendship with Leandro, after all, needed to
properly apologize for their run-in after the Championships. Or what about a surprise visit? What
if they dropped by unannounced? Most of the suggestions were Passos’, some Rose’s, some
Josefina’s herself. McLeod seemed merely to naysay. He took up each suggestion like a pawn
shop jewelry appraiser, holding it to the light and finding something to disparage: too
transparent, too murky, too sneaky, and weren’t they supposed to be missionaries first, friends
second? Wasn’t that what they had decided?
Things between Passos and McLeod hadn’t healed so much as scabbed over—they’d cut
back the joking to a minimum, and the movie quoting, they seemed to have resigned themselves
to one another—though on some nights Passos’ frustrations still boiled up and he composed long
lists of McLeod’s shortcomings in his head: pride, negativity, cynicism, stubbornness, near-
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sightedness, ignorance, disobedience, narrow-mindedness, hyper-criticism, petulance, arrogance
. . . He began to take private pleasure in the carfuls of men shouting out at them bin Laden, bin
Laden! or Imperialists! or War Mongers! He knew many of these drive-by critics probably
lumped him in with the brancinho at his side, but he considered this a bearable price to pay for
the sight of McLeod’s jaw tightening, the sudden flaring in his eyes, the stiffening and
quickening of his stride that betrayed how angry he really was. He didn’t hate his companion,
nor did he feel apathetic toward him. He lived in a shielded shifting middle space, a place that
could accommodate hope—for example, that the offer of a stay in McLeod’s parents’ basement
still stood—but that could also make room for spite, and bitterness, and hopes for comeuppance,
and flights of vengeful fantasy.
One day toward the end of February they tracted out a rich neighborhood, just to give
them a chance, the hard-hearted and puffed up and worldly. Electric fences topped the property
walls instead of broken bottles, and on some of the walls, the white, glaring stucco, local vandals
had spray-painted looping insignia. Others had left message of protest: FILHOS DA PUTA!
IMPERIALISTAS! VIVA A REVOLUÇÃO! The rich hardly ever answered their doors,
Championships or no Championships, now or ever, and this neighborhood looked to be no
exception until a house near the end of one street let them inside. Behind the property wall
elaborate plants lined the walkway, a red convertible shone in an open garage. The man who
presumably owned the house wore a crisp blue button-down and tan pleated pants. He had dark
hair and olive skin but spoke Portuguese with an accent, not unlike McLeod’s, actually, an
American accent. Had he moved here from there? Or had he returned home after years abroad?
The man led them into the house and sat them down at a lacquered table. He went out of
the room and came back with two glasses of filtered water. Under his arm he carried a thin,
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spiral-bound book, which he placed on the table in plain sight: How to Evangelize the Mormons.
McLeod did his indoor scoff, a rush of air through the nose, and for once Passos matched
it. They did it in synch. They each took a drink of water and rose to their feet, saying something
about an appointment they’d just remembered, they were sorry.
Out in the street McLeod said, You think he was a pastor?
I’m almost sure of it, Passos said.
I hate that crap.
Yeah.
And how about that book of his? I mean, talk about brazen.
Brazen was that convertible in the garage. Courtesy of tithe money, I’m sure.
Yup, McLeod said. Lay not up treasures . . .
Tell that to your countrymen, Passos said.
Excuse me?
Passos kept quiet, kept walking. He slowed down to stop at the next door and McLeod
kept on toward the corner. Passos didn’t call after him this time. He just stood and watched him,
straight-backed and proud, marching to the edge of the street and disappearing, heading for who
knew exactly where. Passos had a guess, of course. The image had recalled their first
disagreement two months ago, on one of the first days of their companionship, and on the very
first day of the Championships. McLeod had waited in vain for a bus while Passos went in search
of a market or padaria that sold Guarana, one of the few things McLeod kept in his side of the
fridge. The incident had taken place not half a mile from where he was now, in fact. The poorer
neighborhoods by the river were just a few blocks away. Passos guessed that McLeod would end
up at the same bus stop, or otherwise at the riverbank. What if he could push the reset button on
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the day—a couple cans of Guarana, an apology—just as he had two months before? Maybe he
could reset the last several weeks. It might take nothing more than that. But did he even want to
reset? Maybe the friendship, the society, of Americans was the problem. If you weren’t careful
you ended up like the pastor they’d just met: imperial in bearing, grudging, frank to a fault,
inhospitable. If you weren’t careful you ended up stripped of everything that made you Brazilian.
It was best to take what America had to offer and leave, stay for a few years, not too many, and
then return to the place that made you. Like dos Santos was doing. Yes, exactly as dos Santos
would do things. Passos hurried to the corner.
He got out to the main street just in time to see McLeod in the near distance boarding a
bus. The buses were running on schedule today. That was one difference. But let it be the only
one. He caught the next outbound bus and then stopped for a case of Guarana at the market en
route to home. He found McLeod reading at his desk in the entryway/living room.
Hey, Passos said, holding the case in the doorway.
McLeod looked him up and down, then looked at the Guarana for a long minute. Is this
your standard peace offering? he finally said, and turned back around to his reading. We’ve got a
case of the stuff in the fridge already.
Passos crossed the room and placed the case on his own desk, removed two cans, held
one out for McLeod. You can never have too much, he said.
McLeod took the can after a pause, hefted it. It’s piss warm, he said.
He went to the kitchen and came out with two cans from his own stash. They sat at their
desks drinking them, or chugging in McLeod’s case, McLeod hurrying, finishing in half the time
as Passos, and then tipping back his head and emptying the dregs in a quick practiced shaking
motion, the can like an instrument he was playing for vibrato. Then he smacked it down on the
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desk with a loud percussive report that made Passos jump, and made McLeod smile, it seemed,
despite himself.
Well? McLeod said. Are you going to apologize, or at least explain yourself?
Passos continued to nurse his Guarana. Explain what? he said.
Why you’ve been after me so much lately. And all this anti-American crap. I thought you
were on our side.
It’s not about sides, Elder McLeod.
What’s it about, then? What was that line back there about the pastor?
I shouldn’t have said that. I am sorry about that. It’s just I’ve been a little frustrated
lately, and I mean this sincerely. It’s a challenge I’m sharing with you, like we said we would,
right? I’ve been frustrated with the way you’ve handled the situation with Josefina and Leandro
lately. It seems like all you do is play the pessimist, all you do is criticize.
What’s there to be optimistic about, Elder? You threw Josefina under the bus with
President and now we’re waiting for Leandro, which means we’re waiting for a miracle.
Passos had to take a long draught of his Guarana to hold his tongue, or keep it otherwise
engaged. The naiveté of his companion, the outright stupidity of a comment like You threw
Josefina under the bus, as if the president’s new rules, handed down to him from his superiors,
who had probably received them in turn from their superiors and so on all the way up to the
General Authorities in Salt Lake City, as if a directive with that much institutional momentum
could be deflected by a pair of lowly foot soldiers. His companion knew nothing about
leadership. He knew nothing about successful organizations. He knew next to nothing about the
very Church he put on the airs of an expert about. He was as arrogant as he was ignorant, just
like Jones, even worse than Jones, and Passos wanted to tell him that, his tongue burned to tell
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him, but the Guarana was there to cool it, and also the thought of dos Santos. Convivial dos
Santos. Conciliatory, cunning dos Santos. Beloved on the mission, then off to America. Took
things for what they were worth, nothing more.
Passos finished his soda, smacked it down on the desk in imitation of McLeod, a
lighthearted gesture, a belying gesture.
You’re pretty much right, you know, Passos said. Only we’re not waiting for a miracle.
We’re planning for one.
Passos took his weekly planner from his breast pocket and flattened it out on McLeod’s
desk.

They had opted for the sneaky approach, the least of several evils. They’d planned for Saturday,
in the morning, a likely time for Leandro to be at home, and now it was Saturday morning.
McLeod and Passos left the apartment after companionship study and prayer, stepped outside
into another bright hot morning. It wasn’t as bright or hot as it had been, granted—it was March
1 today, the worst of summer behind them—and McLeod took heart at the sound of birds still
singing in the standing-up sun. The birds no longer needed to hibernate, as it were, conserving
their energy in the swelter and leaving the bulk of the soundtrack to skirling insects in the
underbrush, in the cracks in the sidewalks. The insects now were a baseline hum under the birds
and the breeze and the traffic from the main road. The world seemed a little more balanced this
morning, a little softer and calmer, and younger.
They turned onto the main street, passed the supermarket, the bank. They were en route
to pick up Romulo, who had agreed to accompany them in the event that their drop-in turned into
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a drop-in visit, but mostly he would be there in the likelier event, to McLeod’s mind anyway,
that Josefina came to the front door as her snake of a husband slipped out the back. McLeod
wasn’t sure he even wanted Leandro to be there. Leandro was part of the problem. Passos was
another part. In the planning for this morning, for example, McLeod had been handed his token
role as the confirmer. His companion would make the proposal and then, with an almost
parliamentary vacuity, ask, And what do you think of that, Elder McLeod? The Socratic motions
of discussion, then. The false facade of joint decision making. Passos was going do what he
wanted, of course, with or without McLeod, and McLeod was going to have to follow him. He
sometimes wished Passos would just skip the pretense and bark orders at him, it would be more
honest that way, though more galling as well. Probably better that he go through the motions,
McLeod supposed. At least he was back to doing that much.
Up until a few days ago Passos had been in his own autocratic little world. He’d only left
it long enough to scowl at McLeod, dismiss his critiques, discard his suggestions. The v shape
had all but installed itself as a permanent feature of the landscape of Passos’ face. McLeod had
gotten used to it. His companion had begun to conform in every detail to the image projected of
him around the mission. Smart, sure, but also cold. Coldly ambitious. Unfeeling. Biding his time
for the assistantship. A climber.
And an anti-American, too, it turned out. In the wake of the Championships the entire
country had taken up anti-Americanism as its sport. The drunken idiots shouting from moving
cars multiplied five fold, it seemed, as did the foreign relations experts on buses and street
corners, in the lines at the post office and the bank. And where was his companion to defend
him? What was his supposed friend doing, the friend of America? Doing nothing, an accomplice
in his silence, or worse. More than once McLeod had noticed the hint of a smile from Passos as
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the drive-by shouts faded into silence. Or take the afternoon on which McLeod tried to make
small talk, something light. Passos had mentioned the Lenten season that was almost upon them,
or upon the Catholics anyway, his former brothers and sisters in Christ. Then McLeod asked
about Easter. Or Christmas, for that matter. Did Passos’ family back home, or nordestinos in
general, have any special traditions? Passos snapped at him: You mean like the stupid Easter
Bunny? Or Santa Clause? You mean like Saks Fifth Avenue? That’s American stuff, Elder.
That’s for los ricos.
Los ricos! Listen to his companion now. Where had this come from? Los ricos! It wasn’t
even Portuguese. It was the language of Che Guevara. Textbook anti-Americanism.
Remind me why you want to go to the States again? McLeod said.
Maybe it’s because I’m a kiss-ass.
What? McLeod said. Who are you lately? I never thought I’d have to tell you to keep it
Bible.
I am keeping it Bible. You said ass words were okay. Variations, you said.
You understood all that?
I understand everything, Elder. I speak English. I speak your American language.
And after that came the incident with the beer-bellied ignoramus, and then the incident
with the rich pastor with an accent. All of it fodder for Passos. That creeping smile. What was he,
then, if not a silent cheerleader for America’s enemies, McLeod’s enemies?
In the face of these attacks McLeod had felt his hold slipping, felt himself regressing
back into old habits. First the ogling, if a little more furtive, more guilty, and then the glances at
billboards, newsstands. Mulheres. The images from Passos’ magazine bubbling up like molten to
the troubled surface of his mind. He’d even started masturbating again. More guiltily, again, and
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less frequently than before—two times in the shower, twice into little nests of toilet paper, and
always turned away from the pictures of Jesus on the mirror—but still. Four times in two weeks.
It made McLeod nervous, made him feel dirty, atavistic, and something worse, something close
to evil, a concept he associated with medieval preachers, scare tacticians, a concept he doubted,
and yet there it was. Evil. For how else to understand the image that haunted his mind on the
fourth time he masturbated, the image that fluttered up and cut through the ménage and for a
terrifying second looked like Josefina? Only it couldn’t have been. He refused to believe it. She
was the last person he would have admitted into his thoughts. He wanted no persons at all, only
bodies. And who but an Adversary could have planted her there?
On the next day, a P-Day, he confessed to President. He had to lean on Passos to go with
him to Sweeney’s and then he had to lean on Sweeney—Where’ve you been anyway? he wanted
to know—to go with him to Belo Horizonte. On the busride up, which McLeod paid for, and
then over lunch, which McLeod also paid for, he outlined the basic problems. A controlling
companion. A stranded investigator. All the anti-Americanism. And a feeling of waste, still, and
doubt, still. Hence the Problem. Capital p.
Sweeney glanced up from his buffet plate, cracked a smile. The capital-p Problem? he
said. You mean the—
He started into the hand gesture but McLeod cut him short. Yeah, McLeod said. The very
one.
Yeah? Well are you really going to town or what? What’s the deal?
It’s complicated.
Sweeney shrugged, returned to his meal.
The Problem afflicted more than a few missionaries, of course. McLeod had heard stories
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of greenies confessing to President with their bags already packed, expecting a dishonorable
release for their indiscretions. But President Mason could do the math. He gave practical tips
instead: Take short, cold showers. Pray. Wear blue jeans at night. Keep the bathroom door open
at all times . . . McLeod hadn’t heard of Passos’ technique, the pictures of Jesus in the bathroom,
but he’d heard some of the others bandied about in the mission, teased for their goofiness, their
whiff of quackery. Still. He sat down that afternoon with the mission president, sat in the very
same office he’d walked out of less than two weeks earlier, trailing his Yeahs. The president
looked surprised to see McLeod. McLeod felt surprised himself, especially as he opened his
mouth to confess his masturbation and ended up confessing everything. He talked about the
mulheres crowding in on him—he couldn’t bring himself to mention Josefina by name—but he
also talked about the stagnation he felt, the sense of waste. It was something close to anger, the
feeling. It was hard to pin down better than that.
Anger? President Mason said. Why anger? I don’t hear that in these cases very often.
I don’t know, McLeod said. I guess I feel like I should be changing by now, but I’m not.
It was more than two years since McLeod had decided to come on a mission, since he’d
made his pact with God: he would serve Him, he would testify of Him, he would do His will, if
He, in turn, would make Himself known to him, make Himself truly and plainly known. He’d
come to Brazil and learned the language and worked hard every day. He was scared, yes, but he
was also hopeful. The field was white already to harvest, as the scripture says, and he thrust in
his sickle with his might, but to what avail? He’d made a temporary convert of Zezinho, and an
informal convert of Josefina—informal because, it now seemed certain, Josefina would never be
able to be baptized—but the conversion he’d really set out for was his own, and that seemed
suddenly more distant than ever. It seemed impossibly distant, he told the president.
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President Mason leaned forward in his chair, said, Elder McLeod, nothing is impossible
to the Lord. Then he leaned back again and nodded, his mouth set in a way that suggested
finality.
And let me say a word about your other problem, he said, and then he started into a
speech that seemed much more practiced, rote even. He said a missionary, in order to solve this
problem, needed to realize its true nature. It was, at bottom, self-love. Of Satan’s ilk. The polar
opposite of the selfless love of Christ. And what was the solution to the problem? The president
said McLeod already knew the solution. The Lord’s gospel was fixed, eternal. The answers never
changed. He needed to pray for strength, and for a testimony, he needed to read the scriptures
daily, and he needed to serve the Lord with all his might, mind, and strength. The gospel wasn’t
complicated. He needed to remember that. It wasn’t a puzzle to solve.
The president reached into his briefcase at the side of the desk and after a beat retrieved a
small, yellow, laminated card. Then he stood up and moved to the door with it. McLeod
followed.
Remember the selfless love of Christ, President said. That’s the operative doctrine, you
understand. These are just tips.
He put the card in McLeod’s hand, gave him a perfunctory hug, and ushered him out into
the foyer.
Sweeney unslouched himself on the couch at the sight of the president. President Mason
showed a tight smile to him, then again to McLeod. I trust your respective companions are
together today? he said.
McLeod and Sweeney both nodded.
Well, okay, he said. It’s okay every now and then, but companionship assignments don’t
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end on P-Day, you know.
Sweeney nodded again. He sat up even straighter now, in the very same spot—the very
same position, McLeod noted—that Josefina had sat in. This must have triggered the president’s
memory as well, for he turned to McLeod alone and said, How’s that investigator of yours? I
meant to ask. How’s her husband? Is he progressing?
Not really, McLeod said. But we’re still trying. We’ve got a few ideas.
Good. Keep trying. The both of you. Fiquem firme, he said, the first Portuguese he’d
uttered since McLeod and Sweeney had arrived. Stay strong.
After the president went back into his office Sweeney sprang off the cough and snatched
the card from McLeod’s hand. I knew it, he hissed. The Guide to Self-Control! Oooh, and
laminated now.
Let’s go, McLeod mouthed.
Out on the street he asked for the card back. He hadn’t even seen what it was.
You don’t know the Guide to Self-Control? Sweeney said, holding the card away from
McLeod. Dude, this is a classic of Mormon literature! Anybody who’s really going to town gets
this card.
And how are you such an expert?
I’ve going to town my whole mission, Sweeney said. A little different for me, though,
isn’t it? I’m thinking of Tiff, and that’s practically kosher.
Is that right?
T-minus four months to homecoming, he said, handing over the card. T-minus five
months to the wedding.

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THE GUIDE TO SELF-CONTROL
1. Never touch the intimate parts of your body except during normal toilet processes. Avoid
being alone as much as possible.
2. When you bathe, do not admire yourself in a mirror. Never stay in the bath more than five
or six minutes—just long enough to bathe and dry and dress.
3. When in bed, if that is where you have your problem for the most part, dress yourself for
the night so securely that you cannot easily touch your vital parts, and so that it would be
difficult and time consuming for you to remove these clothes.
4. If the temptation seems overpowering while you are in bed, get out of bed and go into the
kitchen and fix yourself a snack, even if it is in the middle of the night, and even if you are
not hungry, and despite your fears of gaining weight.
5. Put wholesome thoughts into your mind at all times. Read good books—Church books,
Scriptures, Sermons of the Brethren. Make a daily habit of reading at least one chapter of
Scripture, preferably from one of the four Gospels in the New Testament, or the Book of
Mormon. The four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—can be helpful because of
their uplifting qualities.
6. Pray. But when you pray, don’t pray about this problem, for that will tend to keep it in
your mind more than ever. Pray for faith, pray for understanding of the Scriptures, pray for
the General Authorities, your friends, your family, but keep the problem out of your mind
by not mentioning it ever—not in conversation with others, not in your prayers. Keep it
out of your mind!
.....
They kept on in the direction of Romulo’s, he and Passos, opting to walk since it was easy
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enough to walk, and walking at a steady sprightly pace, though not quite a hurried or anxious
one. They passed the bus stop, they passed the Pentecostal church on the corner, they passed the
lumber yard and the empty lots beyond it. And Passos now made the attempts at levity—
McCulkin, he’d say, I made my family disappear!—which attempts McLeod recognized and on
some level appreciated as gestures of good will, overtures to reconciliation, to a return to their
earlier, friendlier status quo.
The line referred to the Macaulay Culkin movie which everyone in Brazil seemed to have
seen, and which McLeod and Passos would sometimes quote to each other, a running joke about
the frequent association that door contacts drew between McLeod’s name and the child star’s.
Just you watch, McLeod had told Passos after the first time it happened. Just you watch, because
it’ll happen again. And sure enough on that same day a teenage boy did a double take at
McLeod’s nametag, saying, You mean like the kid from that movie? Macaulay Culkin?
Something like that, McLeod said.
The contact proceeded to stick to the usual lines—no thanks, he and his family were
Catholic, but go with God, and God bless—but he had proved McLeod’s point.
That’s funny, Passos said afterwards. Must be the M-A-C sound. We don’t get that
around here very often. Your M-A-C kind.
They shared an unhedged uncomplicated smile then, a smile of the kind that neither
seemed quite capable of anymore.
But Passos was at least trying again, and McLeod appreciated the effort. Elder McCulkin,
Passos said again.
Yeah, McLeod said. That’s right.
They passed another bus stop, and the paint store, and a slew of sidestreets that branched
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off into the residential areas. Passos started down one of the streets, a route they’d taken before,
but McLeod called him back. Weren’t they going to Maurilho’s, to get Romulo?
Yeah, Passos said, but let’s go this way, and he pointed toward the street he’d started
down, a strip of bleached asphalt that curved away behind orange-brick property walls.
Maurilho’s right off the main road, though, McLeod said. This way’s faster. He looked at
his watch, half past ten, and then turned out his wrist to show the time to Passos. We don’t have
that much time, Elder. We want to catch Leandro before lunch, don’t we?
Passos glanced behind him, then up ahead at the drive-thru’s sign rising high above the
property wall.
Is it the drive-thru? McLeod said. Nothing’s happening there now.
Passos hesitated.
You won’t even walk past it during the day? McLeod said.
I’d prefer not to.
It’s almost ten thirty-five, McLoud said, holding his watch out again.
Fine, let’s go, Passos said, and he caught up to McLeod and overtook him at a hurried,
anxious pace.
They knocked at Maurilho’s a few minutes later. Romulo came to the front gate in his
Sunday best, a short-sleeved white dress-shirt, a dark blue tie, brown pants and brown loafers
that looked to have been polished, the leather dully shining in the sun. He also had a shoulder
bag with the black strap running diagonal down his shirt-front and behind his tie, just as the
missionaries wore their bags.
Look at this guy, McLeod said. All he needs now is a nametag.
You ready to go? Passos said.
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Romulo nodded, blushing, and pulled the door shut behind him. Passos said they were a
little short on time. Did Romulo have money for busfare? He did. At the end of the street
Romulo turned right back onto the main road as Passos and McLeod moved left. It’s actually
faster to backtrack to the bus stop back there, Romulo called after them.
McLeod looked at Passos, and Passos nodded, and then the three of them retraced their
steps along the sidewalk that passed the drive-thru on their right.
What’s in the bag? McLeod asked Romulo.
My scriptures, he said.
Wow, McLeod said. Will you look at this guy? And on a Saturday morning too. I figured
you’d have just rolled out of bed after another night of partying. All that wild partying you do,
right?
Yeah, well, Romulo said, and he gestured up at the drive-thru sign just as the three of
them passed under it. I did get woken up last, though it wasn’t any party I’d ever go to. The
noises from this place, man. You wouldn’t think they could carry that far. I actually had to get
out of bed and shut the window.
What do you mean? McLeod said. Do they have loud speakers or something?
Loud speakers? No, I was talking about the, you know, and he raised his eyebrows,
grimaced a bit. Then he cocked his head at McLeod and said, You do know what a drive-thru is,
don’t you?
I’m pretty sure, McLeod said, just as he wasn’t anymore. He’d assumed that the lot
contained a drive-in movie theater, and a deserted one at that, or maybe an adult movie house—
an adult drive-in movie theater? could even Brazil devise such a thing?—that opened for
business only after hours. Drive-thru wasn’t a translation, by the way. That’s what the sign
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actually said.
Passos scoffed a bit. I thought you knew what it was, he said. It’s not a drive-thru like
your McDonald’s, Elder McLeod. You don’t buy burgers there.
You buy sex, Romulo said. It’s a place to buy prostitutes. Either that or you bring your
mistress there in your car. I think there’s stalls where you can park. Or rooms. I’m not sure. I
haven’t been, obviously. I can tell you all about those noises, though. Oh man, they’re terrible.
Passos and Romulo kept walking, but McLeod stood moored a few yards beyond the
sign. He couldn’t even pretend nonchalance. He’d never actually seen a physical house of
prostitution—he could hardly believe they really existed—and now here one stood in the broad
bright daylight. It had been there the whole time he had been there, less than two miles from the
apartment, hiding out in the open. If it hadn’t been for the sign McClould would have assumed
that the brown stucco perimeter wall enclosed an empty lot. It made sense now why Passos
preferred to detour around this stretch of road. It was impossible to behold even the walls now
without thinking of the sinfulness and impossible bravery of some men. McLeod ticked his gaze
up the length of the sign like a mariner looking for directions, only what was this new sky
wheeling into view? Passos was saying something. He said it again. On the third time McLeod
recognized it as his name.
McLeod! Passos said again. Earth to McLeod!
What?
I thought we were hurrying for Leandro. What are you doing?

Passos checked his watch as they turned onto Josefina’s street. Quarter past eleven. If they were
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lucky enough to find Leandro at home, they’d have just enough time for a discussion before
lunch. Though discussion was too formal a word for what Passos had planned. He wanted a low-
key conversation, a chat, really, that still managed to wind upward toward the spiritual, slowly,
almost imperceptibly, like a graceful circular staircase. He would end with a scripture, not read
aloud—again, too formal—but rather recited from memory, from a place of heartfelt conviction.
Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise
man, which built his house upon a rock . . . Then Passos would bear his testimony and then, if
the moment was right, if the Spirit indicated, he would invite Leandro himself to say the closing
prayer, and maybe they would even kneel around the coffee table, all of them, in a gesture of
added humility. And if Josefina should invite them to stay on for lunch, and if she should insist,
he already knew what he would say. They had another lunch appointment, they were sorry . . . It
mattered little that this wasn’t in fact the case. What mattered was that they leave the house while
the Spirit was still a palpable presence in the room, thick enough to wade through, the air like a
warm oceanic buoyancy to surrender to, to float away on. This was important enough to justify a
white lie, if it could even be called that. It was something, after all, the Lord would look well
upon. For what did the Bible say of the midwives who lied to Pharaoh about sparing Moses?
Therefore God dealt well with them, it said. And what did President Mason often say at Zone
Leaders Conferences? Our God is a results-oriented God.
They arrived at Josefina’s door and Passos went to knock but McLeod arrested his arm.
Let the honorary missionary try, McLeod said. He brought Romulo in between them,
within knocking distance of the door.
We don’t have time, Passos said, and he rapped on the metal.
The raps reverberated, fell away, and the silence came up in the wake of them and felt
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accusing. It felt like that to Passos, anyway.
We’ve got forty minutes if we’re lucky, he told McLeod, showing his own wristwatch
now. Passos startled himself by the tone in his voice, defensive where he’d gone for explanatory,
and for a brief moment it seemed like Romulo stood between them more to head off a
confrontation than to accompany a discussion.
They heard the front door scrape open, then footsteps in their direction, the tread
somewhat heavier than usual. The steps left off just short of the door.
Who is it? a male voice called. Leandro’s voice.
Passos had expected Josefina to come to the door, if anyone did, and now in his surprise
he let the question hang too long.
Who is it? Leandro asked again.
McLeod opened his mouth to answer but Passos warned him off with a wave of his hand.
Then he lowered his voice beyond recognition and said, Electric company here. He ignored the
curious smile from Romulo, the glare from McLeod. He didn’t care about that, he couldn’t. He
cared about results. The door latch clattered and the door opened.
Leandro stood in the rectangular frame, confused at first, then darkening with
recognition. He wore green soccer shorts, a white tank top, and the same goatee he’d had the last
time they’d seen him, which was several weeks ago by now. The muscles in his arms, his entire
body, seemed to tense as he looked from McLeod to Romulo to Passos, and then back to
McLeod.
Passos said, Leandro, and raised his hand, like a footballer acknowledging a foul to the
referee. He said, Leandro, listen, we just wanted to talk to you. We haven’t seen you in forever,
you know? Do you have a few minutes before lunch? Just to talk?
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Go away, Leandro said, his voice like gravel, rough and hard and loose, too. Passos
couldn’t tell if he’d been drinking already, if the smell of cachaca carried on his words or if it
came off his body, deep-down pervaded, seeped in over the course of days and weeks and
months and even years. The sweet-sour stench of too much alcohol. The body never forgot.
Leandro, Passos said, please—
Go away, he said. We don’t want you here. She doesn’t want you here either. She just
can’t say it, but I can. Go! he said, shouted now. He flung his hand out, pointing, and Romulo
flinched, turning his head aside at the sudden movement.
Who are you anyway? Leandro said to him. Are you supposed to be the electric man?
I’m Romulo. Maurilho’s son? I visited here once—
So there’s three of you now? Three of you here for my wife?
McLeod took a sudden step forward, said, Hey! Hey! Don’t you start that!
Leandro jerked back out of instinct, it seemed, then he more than made up for the loss,
stepping up a matter of inches from McLeod, straightening, stiffening, his nostrils flared out, and
McLeod didn’t back down either. An electrified field coursed between them. Passos could feel it.
He tried to reign in the scene. He put both hands up, like a traffic copy now, saying, Listen,
listen, listen. He said it again, louder, calling Leandro by name. He just wanted him to listen,
listen for a second, and look at him. Leandro? Leandro!
Leandro slid his eyes, slowly, in Passos’ direction, keeping his head straight, his
peripheral vision trained on McLeod, McLeod returning the stare. It was as if they’d drawn
invisible pistols on each other.
We didn’t come here to upset you, Passos said. We’re your friends. We just wanted to
say hello again. We’ve missed you. Okay?
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Leandro turned his body now, stabbed a finger in Passos’ direction. I’m not going to say
it again, he said, low, almost growling. We don’t want you here anymore. I don’t want you here.
Josefina doesn’t want you here either.
As if on cue Josefina stepped into the front doorway behind them, half in shadow, but
still visible across the courtyard. Honey? she said. Then she paused, said, Elders?
Leandro turned around as Elder McLeod shouted past him, Josefina, it’s us, it’s the
Elders, with a sudden desperation in his voice and, again, an intimacy, but then all Passos could
process was the fact that Leandro was now even more in McLeod’s face, a stiff finger at his
sternum, pushing him back with jabs and short jabbing steps. You don’t fucking talk to my wife,
brancinho! You don’t even fucking talk to her! he shouted, all spittle and rage now, his chest
puffed out, until he suddenly doubled forward and exploded into a moan, a long keeling thing,
like the lowing of sick cows, and there was McLeod’s arm buried hilt-deep in Leandro’s
stomach. His companion reared back and drove his fist home again and the lowing renewed, ran
down to a wheeze, and Leandro tipped forward and collapsed onto the sidewalk in front of his
own house. Josefina rushed to him. She screamed at the elders as she dropped to the pavement—
What did you do? What’s wrong with you? Get out of here! Go!—put her hands on her
husband’s back as he rocked and pitched for breath—Are you all right, Leandro? Honey?—and
then fired another hateful look at the elders, her face unrecognizable—I said get out of here,
Elders! And don’t come back! Get out of here! Never come back!—as McLeod and then Romulo
backed away, and then Passos, taking stunned backward steps, and then turning and running, one
after the other after the other.
…..
Two minutes, maybe three minutes later. Passos and Romulo at the bus stop, and Romulo bent
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over now, hands on his knees, breathing hard. Passos too. He took great drags of air, his lungs
burning. For all the walking he and McLeod did every day he lacked the stamina, and usually the
occasion, for full-tilt running.
An outbound city bus rumbled onto the main road from a few streets down, the big
rasping bear of a thing picking up speed as it approached, then slowing down just as soon. It
pushed up a wave of heat and sound at Passos’ feet. He didn’t even try to speak over it. He
offered Romulo the bus fare but Romulo refused, pointing instead down the street and managing,
He’s that way. Then a weak, worried smile from the bus’s stairwell as he disappeared behind the
hiss of the hydraulic doors.
…..
Passos found McLeod at the riverbank, the same spot. He sat on the cement wall overlooking the
drop-off, his eyes on the water, eyes vacant as a doll’s, and the water pulled taut and rope-like by
the current. Passos sat down beside him and kept silent for a long time, the dull grinding of
traffic fallen under the runs and riffles below. And still the anger built in him. It accumulated
slowly, drop by drop, each moment recalled in succession, and then it calcified, his insides
coated with stalagmites, all those dead hard sharp things just waiting to wound. The moment
before he began to speak had a feeling of inevitability about it, a feeling of prophetic fulfillment.
He opened his mouth and spoke the words with a mortician’s tired voice.
Well, he said, they’re gone now, aren’t they? You made very sure of that, didn’t you?
Silence.
It’s the American way, isn’t it? The diplomacy of the balled-up fist.
More silence.
Here we are, trying to publish peace, but I should have known better, shouldn’t I have?
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Elder? Don’t you think? Huh?
McLeod kept his eyes straight ahead. The sounds from the road faded completely for a
long moment, and it was just the burble of the water beneath them.
Peace, Passos said. Peace. Just listen to the word in your language, he said, and he said it
in his most aggressive, nasal, sawed-off Yankee accent. Peeeace, he said. Peeeeeeeeze. It doesn’t
even sound like English, does it? Listen to it. It’s an impostor in the very language. Peeeeeeze.
Peeeeeeze. Peeeeeeze, and now he was grating it just inches from McLeod’s ear, Passos’ face at
a right angle to his companion’s. Peeeeeeze, he said again, louder now, Peeeeeeeze, like a crazed
insect, almost shouting it, Peeeeeeeze.
McLeod swung around and took fistful’s of his shirtfront. Stop it! he said.
Or what? Passos said. Or what? You’ll hit me too? Huh?
McLeod relinquished his grip, even smoothed the shirt, turning back to the river, but
Passos kept after him. He was yelling now, full up with righteous anger. Do you have any
idea what you did back there? You just beat up an investigator in front of his wife! Do you know
what that makes us? The both of us? Elder McLeod? Elder? Hey, I’m talking to you! I’m asking
you a question!
He was filth, McLeod whispered after a pause. You said it yourself.
So you clobber him? That’s the only option? You don’t talk about it, or walk away, you
have to clobber him and ruin everything we worked for? Did you hear what Josefina said? She
said Don’t come back! Never come back! Josefina said that, Elder, not Leandro. Josefina! I’ve
never seen someone so excited about the gospel, ever, and now we’ve lost her. Because of you.
You are the one who threw her under the bus. Do you hear me?
But he was done hearing anything. He just stared at the water, stared through it, it
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seemed, and after a while Passos stopped talking too. His anger gave out on him from one
moment to the next, like a candle flame extinguished in its own melt. They sat there, the two of
them, in silence. Twelve o’clock came and went. Twelve-thirty. At one o’clock Passos rose from
the embankment guard and McLeod got up and followed him. They walked to the nearest
padaria and bought cheese sandwiches and ate them at a table near the open-air storefront. An
afternoon rain came on, turning the sidewalks brown and the streets slate gray. The speckled line
between dry and wet came right up to the threshold of the storefront. It greased the metal track
for the rollup gate, inching past it as the drops got thicker and as a shimmering beaded curtain
dropped down from the awning, started splashing the table’s legs, McLeod’s legs. He sat closest
the door. The drops kicked up a small floor-level mist—it suggested to Passos a diffusion of
spirits—and after a time Passos noticed it had wet McLeod’s shoes. McLeod hadn’t adjusted his
position at all. He hardly seemed to notice the rain. At one point a wind gust blew a thick scrim
of it all over them. Passos scraped back his chair, shucked his pants. McLeod sat motionless,
holding his hard roll in front of him for a long, contemplative moment. Then he took a soggy
bite.
The sky cleared a half hour later. They left the padaria and walked the downtown with no
particular purpose or direction, the streets still wet from the rain, dull mirrors, and the sun in
them now, a strange effect. Cars passed by and dragged shallow wakes after them, each one like
the sound of a piece of paper tearing. The sidewalk dust-turned-to-mud made a thin brown paste
on the pavement, a collage of footprints. Passos tried to fit his steps into the steps that had gone
before him.
McLeod stopped, said, What are we doing right now?
Wandering.
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Ten minutes later he said, I want that book back that I gave you. It was a gift from my
mother. I’m taking it back when we get home.
Passos laughed and said, Fine by me, like it hadn’t affected him, like he didn’t care at all.
He laughed again for good measure.
That’s good, McLeod said, and we’ll cut out the English practice too, all right?
Fine by me.
Good, good. And maybe I’ll write my parents and tell them you changed your mind about
wanting to visit? You wouldn’t like being around all those Americans anyway.
You can do whatever you want, Elder. I don’t need your charity.
Oh it’s not my charity. It’s not even charity. I’m just looking out for you. It sounds like
you’d hate it there.
Well, Passos said. Well, maybe you’re right. I mean, with you around the house, yeah,
you’re probably right.
Oh I won’t be around, Elder. Is that what you thought? I’ll be long gone by then. Away at
college, and a good one, and with my own room, I’ll make sure of that. And reading great books,
and not burning a single one, books that don’t begin every sentence with And it came to pass, or
Verily, verily, I say unto you, and all of the rest of this? Brazil? The mission? You? You’ll all be
a memory, a receding little spec.

McLeod meant it too. Every word of it. He was back in the home stretch. He was counting down
the days. Mid-March now, and he’d hit his two years in mid-June, which meant he had
approximately three months left, and probably several weeks less than that with the transfer
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schedule. Transfer days came every six weeks and as such tended to fall to one side or the other
of a missionary’s theoretical release date. The transfer day on the near side of McLeod’s release
date, and Sweeney’s and Kimball’s as well, had recently been announced for mid-April, a full
four weeks prior to their two year marks. President Mason officially reserved the right to decide
if a class of elders would leave early, or if it would be held past its date until the next round of
transfers. But the longstanding precedent had been early release, with an option for missionaries
to stay on longer if they so chose. Very few did, of course. Only the zealots. The crentes. The
people like Passos, the ass-kissers, as he himself had said, the climbers of a dead-end ladder.
These were the people who couldn’t understand that the mission president’s favor meant almost
nothing outside the mission, in the Church at large, and nothing at all outside the Church. Unless
you copped to the theologically specious notion that favor before the mission president, or any
priesthood leader, somehow translated into favor before God.
McLeod certainly hoped the notion was specious, though maybe it didn’t even need to be.
Maybe his very hope grew out of a well-worn and misplaced reflex toward belief, a sort of
muscle memory grabbing at rationalization—Surely the theology doesn’t mean that—or at
softening metaphor—Surely this is meant to be read as a symbol—or at best-case-ism in general,
benefit-of-the-doubt-ism, or worse, at a solipsistic, even nihilistic creed that eschewed the
possibility of real knowledge of any kind—Who’s to say if anything is real? God? The room
we’re sitting in?—and that therefore held up assertions of faith as equally valid with, or invalid
with, every other assertion. But what would happen if he took things at face value? A specious
notion would be just that—specious—and not some occasion for intellectual backbends. Why
did he even want to believe anymore? To be like Passos? President Mason? The straight-faced
crentes marching to church? Reality on its own terms was uglier, granted, flatter and darker and
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lonelier, granted, but it was also simpler. A specious notion was specious. An incredible
Message, like theirs, was incredible. An asshole like Leandro was an asshole. And the asshole’s
wife, falling at his side, screaming at the missionaries to be gone, to never come back, was doing
just that. She was ordering them away. Screaming it at them. From one moment to the next, a
total change. This was what it meant if she meant what she said.
That night at the apartment Passos dropped the Dr. Seuss book on McLeod’s desk, a loud
sharp smack against the wood.
I’ve got it memorized anyway, Passos said. Thanks for the loan.
He went back into the bedroom, leaving McLeod to leaf through what was, technically,
another piece of contraband. Should they burn this one too? He halfway wanted to. To prove a
point. But the thought of his mother finding out dissuaded him. What could he say, after all? I
burned your personalized gift to me to spite my companion? Forget everything I said about him,
by the way? Forget how smart and kind and hard working I said he is, how his mother is gone,
and his father too, how he sends off money every month to his brothers and grandmother, how he
deserves to catch a break? Forget how I said he dreamed of BYU, where he would be a shoe-in if
he just got a little help, a little getting-over money which he would surely pay back, and maybe a
place to stay while he honed his English, a newly finished basement apartment, say?
McLeod knew he couldn’t renege on his offer to let Passos stay with his parents. It
wasn’t his offer anymore. It was theirs. His mother now asked about Passos in every letter, even
sent pictures of the finished basement for him to show Passos, and also pictures of the house
from the outside and of the neighborhood, the rows of green lawns and the thick numbered
curbsides. What could McLeod say to check her enthusiasm that wouldn’t sound petty, or
contradictory, or both? Not that his grievances with Passos felt petty to him, just that he didn’t
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feel confident in his ability to communicate their subtlety, the little by little of them, their
cumulative weight. And neither was he in the habit of disclosing in his letters the day-to-day
sorrows and frustrations of the mission. His mother always began her letters by commenting on
his letters, how uplifting they were, how fortifying. His father said the same thing, when he
wrote, his sister too. He didn’t want to disappoint them, add to their worries, so only the most
obvious, unsubtle setbacks, which was the word he always used, made it into the letters.
Besides, what he’d told Passos was true. He wouldn’t be around by then anyway. He’d be
off to bigger and better, off to Great Places!, as the book in front of him put it, all capital letters
and exclamation marks. McLeod had all but memorized the text himself. In the tough early
sloughs of his mission he had taken solace in the strange and colorful drawings, the simple lilting
encouraging words, and the thought that something better awaited him after the mission. These
two years were a prelude to his real life.
McLeod flipped back to the first page of the book, the four short opening lines on a large
white page, and underneath the lines a detail of a smiling little boy trailing footsteps, the boy all
in yellow, yellow pants, shirt, cap, and his sharp impish nose tipped up and forward, the forward-
most part of his body, in fact, as if some enticing aroma wafting over from the next pages were
leading and leading him on. McLeod began to read the lines aloud, as he always had—he liked
the sound of them, the tilt, the rhythm—but now he read in such a hushed, self-conscious
whisper, for fear that Passos might hear him in the other room, that the words took on a
conspiratorial quality.

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
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You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

The next page opened onto a full spread of a cityscape with smooth orange buildings and white
roads laid down around islands of green in which pink sinewy trees sprang up and listed to left
and right, and the words on the lefthand page, near the bottom—

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

—drew McLeod’s attention to the little boy again, in the bottom left corner of the righthand
page, nearly hidden behind a pink treetop. He wore the same outfit, the same determined look.
He trailed the same patch of footsteps behind him, his legs and arms in mid-stride, his face
pointed east, off the page again, as if he couldn’t wait to leave it, this place that suddenly
reminded McLeod of Brazil, of Carinha, the high orange buildings like orange-brick property
walls, and the tall skinny trees like mangos or cherries, and the white angling streets like the
streets McLeod walked along day after day after day, all the color leeched from them by the
sun.
…..
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The next day the elders waited through sacrament meeting, through Sunday School, through a
joint Priesthood-Relief Society meeting, the full three hours of Church. They were waiting for
Josefina to come, hoping against hope that she might just be late, and turning around every time
someone opened the chapel door, or the door to the Sunday School classroom, or to the cultural
hall where everyone met for the third hour. Nothing.
After church they met Rose and Maurilho in the hallway. Romulo stood behind his
parents, smiled once at McLeod, a little sheepish, then studied the floor.
Josefina wasn’t here today? Rose said. She brought the corners of her mouth up in a
wincing half smile, a comforting, sympathetic look for the both of them.
But Passos turned to McLeod and cocked his head at him, as if he were determined that
the sympathy, and the blame, should belong to the junior companion alone.
She didn’t come today, McLeod said to Rose. No. We had a problem yesterday with,
well, I had a problem with—
Romulo told us, Maurilho said. But, listen, we had an idea. What do you say to this? You
let things cool for another few days, then you come over to our place on Thursday for a big
dinner? We switch our regular lunch to the dinner that day, and we invite Leandro and Josefina
to join us. What do you think?
Passos turned back to McLeod again, the same head-cock as before, the same faux-
solicitous stare. A long time passed like that. McLeod felt his face start to flush with heat. He
suddenly had a mind to punch his companion in the stomach. Why stop at Leandro? Why stop at
all? Why not double over every asshole in Brazil?
Rose cleared her throat, filled the silence. Also, I was thinking I could go over there and
personally invite them. At least Josefina. Since it’s at our house, you know? If you thought that
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would be helpful, of course.
McLeod said, Well, companheiro? Senior companion?
No, no, Passos said, you decide. I’m delegating to you.
McLeod gave the go ahead. He said it couldn’t hurt to try.
I could even pick them up, Maurilho said. And you guys too, if you wanted. I’ll be
downtown already, working. And I finally got the car fixed, did I tell you? He rubbed his thumb
back and forth against his index and middle fingers. I’m flush now, right?
McLeod obliged with a smile. How is the new job?
Ah, you know. It’s a job.
It’s a blessing from God, Rose said.
So we’re on for Thursday? Maurilho said. I get off at seven. I could pick people up a little
after that. Sound good?
McLeod looked over at his companion again. He had an expression on his face of false
cheeriness.
That sounds good, McLeod said.
Great, Maurilho said, clapping a hand on McLeod’s shoulder. Let’s just hope that the
world doesn’t end before Thursday, what with that loon you’ve got in the White House, and so
on and so forth down the hallway and into the street, and for once McLeod welcomed the
distraction, felt grateful for it.
…..
On Wednesday afternoon the elders went to talk to Rose. They detoured around the drive-thru en
route to the house and then talked with her outside on the front porch, a rough uneven piece of
concrete—it looked to McLeod like a whitewashed lava rock—since Maurilho had already left
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for work and Romulo had not yet returned from school. They asked Rose how the personal
invitation had gone. No one had answered the door, Rose said. She said she planned to try again,
though, later that evening. But the next day the elders went to Rose’s again and same story. No
answer at the door.
Did you say who it was? Passos asked her.
Yes, Rose said. Both times.
What exactly did you say?
I knocked on the door and then I called out Hello, Josefina? It’s Rose. I tried that two or
three times, and I waited a long time between each try.
Passos sighed and shook his head, his hands on his hips, arms akimbo, a familiar posture.
McLeod knew it to be the posture his companion assumed in moments of unusual stymie or
disappointment, and for an evaporating moment he felt close to him. They had both been hoping
against hope. Again.
I’m sorry, Rose said.
It’s not your fault, McLeod said.
I know, but I still feel sorry. The two of you will still come tonight, though, right? I’m
making fejoada. We won’t be able to eat it all by ourselves.
Of course we’ll come, Passos said. We’re grateful to you.
They shook hands with Rose and started back across the courtyard. Rose called after
them. Oh, and Elders?
They turned around.
Maurilho said he still wants to pick you up downtown tonight, if that’s where you’ll be
working? At around seven? I’m supposed to find out exactly where.
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Tell him we’ll be knocking Rua Branca, Passos said. And tell him thanks.
They left Rose’s and boarded an inbound bus. The late afternoon sun slanting in through
the windows, strobing the passengers in light and dark as they passed by buildings, open lots,
more buildings, overpasses, then more open spaces, rows of trees. The Assembly of God
cathedral, the public park, the trailing gleam in the storefronts along Main. McLeod took it all in
at a series of glances, but the thrust of his attention was elsewhere. He felt a familiar wash of
annoyance at his companion’s decision about Rua Branca. It was the first McLeod had heard
about it. Of late their daily planning sessions, which formed part of companionship study, had
been reduced to the bare bones, to the nonverbal even. Passos unfolding his planner onto the
desk, penning DOORS in all caps, a downward arrow through the hours of the day. Then an
interrogative grunt, and McLeod answering with an affirmative one. This morning had been no
different, granted, and McLeod knew DOORS constituted a carte blanche, but still. He and his
last companion had knocked Rua Branca several months ago over the course of several days. The
street was long, very long, and pitched on one of the steepest hills in the entire vicinity of
downtown. All of which Passos knew. McLeod had told him. He sensed a motive of punishment,
therefore, in his companion’s unilateral decision, but he also sensed a return to the modus
operandi, which, pinched and meager though it had become, was certainly preferable to the faux-
solicitousness of Sunday.
McLeod could see the street now through the bus’s wide flat windshield, the bus slowing,
breaks squealing, for the last stop on the near side of the river. Rua Branca meant White Street,
though most of it lay in shadow now, dark gray against the gilded orange houses and property
walls. It climbed up the sudden steep rise of the far bank, looking to McLeod like the seam of a
giant basketball.
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The bus came full stop and Passos stood and moved to the middle door.
The next stop is closer, McLeod said.
We’re getting off here.
He followed his companion down the stairwell and down the street, walking in the
direction opposite the river. McLeod asked why they weren’t going to Rua Branca, though by
then he had a pretty good idea.
We’ve got time, Passos said. It’s not even six yet.
They turned onto Josefina’s street a few minutes later, and both of them slowed their pace
as they did. They took the last hundred yards to her door in silence, walking at half speed,
lightening their footfalls, as if the house might spook and run away. At the door McLeod lowered
his voice to ask Passos what he planned to say if someone did answer.
Passos hovered his fist a few inches from the metal. I’ll say what the Spirit tells me to,
Elder.
Then he knocked. Waited. He knocked again. Waited. Nothing at all moved on the street,
or on the main street behind them. The sound of the river came up. A few birds. Nothing at all
from the house. After another minute McLeod turned to his companion and stared at him until he
returned the stare. McLeod felt he could locate accusation in Passos’ face, but not quite as much
as before.
Are you satisfied? McLeod said.
Almost.
Passos knocked the door one more time, hard, a loud series of raps that stung the air like
gun reports. Then he waited again, and waited, and then something clacked from behind the gate.
A door handle. The catch and uncatch of the knob, and then the sound of the door scraping back
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through door jam and onto the poured cement floor. McLeod and Passos perked up, held their
breath. A few short staccato scrapes on the dirt of the courtyard. Light steps, tentative. Then a
few more. Then Josefina’s voice in the air: Who is it?
Passos hesitated a beat.
McLeod said, It’s us, Josefina. The elders. We’ve come to apologize. We want to
apologize to both of you. Josefina?
The silence stretched out like something living, a dense, coiling, spring-loading thing. His
companion stared straight at the door, steeled, but McLeod couldn’t handle it. He called out
again. Josefina? Please. Please let us apologize.
The steps in the dirt started up again, steadier now. They seemed to change pitch, hitting
cement, it sounded like, slapping once, twice, three times, the sound of her sandals on the
entryway/living room floor. Then the front door clattered shut.

Nearly two hours later Passos stopped to check his watch again. Eight eighteen. He blew air from
his mouth, turned around. Not halfway up the steep Rua Branca and the town below looked
miniature already, the web of streets and alleyways radiating out from the downtown like tiny
tidy spokes, the kinks in the roads ironed out by distance. The rows of orange boxy houses, too,
improved from this height, looking more like concerted complexes of houses, like freight cars
running parallel the roads. The whites on the teeming clothelines shaded blue, and the river, dark
brown since the sun had set, kept traces of the afterglow, warm seepages, like gold dust in a
prospector’s tray. The scene was tranquil, quiet, and at odds with Passos’ mood. Most of the
people on the street weren’t home, or at least didn’t answer their doors. The few who did begged
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off in short order. An ordinary stretch of tracting, in other words, but tonight it seemed
unbearable. The only solid presence in their teaching pool had sunk, and who would take her
place on this street? The man who’d closed his door as fast as he’d opened it, saying, Not
interested, or the woman who’d frowned at McLeod’s Portuguese, and then at Passos’
Portuguese too? I’m Brazilian, he said. The woman held out her palms, shook her head,
apologized, shut the door. Or the little girl who’d peered at them through a gap in the gate,
conferred with a parent back in the house, then returned to the gate to report that no one was
home. Passos took a page out of McLeod’s book, surprised himself. But you’re there, he said,
and then the hesitant silence, the footsteps beating a hasty retreat.
None of this should have rankled Passos, but all of it did, every last no-show, every
evasion, everything that reminded him of the drawing board they were back to, blank and black
as a void. And on top of it he was hungry. Maurilho was late. More than an hour late. Passos
checked his watch again. Eight twenty. He lowered himself down onto his haunches, rested his
arms on his knees, rocked at intervals, checked his watch.
I’ve never understood how you people can sit like that, McLeod said. Isn’t that bad for
your knees?
McLeod too, and even the sound of his voice now, bothered Passos more than he should
have let him. But his companion seemed resilient to the point of callous, uncaring, especially in
light of the problems that he himself had caused. Passos wanted to shake him, grab him upside
down by the legs and shake all the smugness out of him, the false cool, empty him like a child’s
piggy bank full of stubborn rusty pennies. You! he wanted to shout. You did this! At the very
least he wanted McLeod to quit the small talk.
We’re sure he said seven o’clock? Passos said.
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I’m sure, McLeod said.
Has he stood you up before?
McLeod shook his head.
Well where is he then? I’m hungry.
McLeod stood behind him, and a little further out in the road, shrugging at first, then
squinting at something in the distance. Is that his car? McLeod said.
A small blue two-door was turning onto the avenue from a side street just above the
bridge. The car hitched, then starting accelerating up the hill, the whine of the engine mounting,
the car getting closer and closer, and not slowing, until Passos could make out Maurilho’s face in
the windshield. It was furrowed, he assumed, in concentration. But then the car skidded to a stop
a little too close to them, and Passos was up on his feet, jumping back, and McLeod fell back a
step too.
Maurilho cranked down the window, gave nothing in the way of apology or explanation,
just glared at McLeod. He said, You see the news tonight, Elder? Huh?
McLeod pulled his head back on his neck, turtle-like. He studied Maurilho’s face, as if
for clues, then he turned to Passos with a look of confusion and appeal. Maurilho knew the
missionary rules as well as anyone. What was he missing? What was happening?
They’re dropping bombs on Bagdhad, Maurilho said, his eyes dead-bolted on McLeod.
Your country. They’re invading as we speak. People are dying as we speak. Then he said, Come
on, get in the car already. Come on, come on, come on!
Passos climbed into the back seat. McLeod filed in beside him, leaving the front seat
open. Maurilho whipped the car around and raced down the hill, through the downtown and
beyond, the sights of the city shooting past. He kept up a steady torrent of facts, indictments,
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laments, shooting poisonous looks at McLeod in the rear view mirror, the whites of his eyes
flashing in the glass. Massive air strikes. The city on fire. Three hundred thousand troops on the
ground. Thousands of refugees already, thousands dead. The oil fields closely guarded, of
course. Did McLeod know what the Americans were calling it? Operation Iraqi Liberation. In
English, and here Maurilho slurred his way through the abbreviating letters: O, I, L. Did he
recognize that word?
It kept on through dinner, to everyone’s surprise. Maurilho held his fork like a weapon,
wielding it, stabbing it in the air at McLeod to accentuate his points about that warmonger
president of his. Bloodthirsty. Lying. Thieving. Maniacal. He held forth about wars and rumors
of wars, about great prideful nations ripening for destruction. McLeod no longer looked to
Passos for appeal, though at times he wished he would. He too felt angry, shocked, that the war
was actually here, but he also felt taken aback by the sheer force and duration of Maurilho’s
anger, his eyes boring into McLeod, as if it were all his fault, his fork streaking through the air, a
silver blur, like a missile in its own right. At moments Passos felt Amens welling in him, little
surges of satisfaction at the look on McLeod’s face, feelings of vicariousness, of voyeurism
even. Here was Maurilho laying into America, into one of America’s haughty sons, in a way that
Passos simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, for fear of burning his bridges with McLeod for good, or, if
they’d already been burned, and they might have been, for fear that a deteriorating
companionship would spoil his chances at the assistantship. President Mason had faith in Passos’
ability to help McLeod, or at the very least contain him. Those were his very words to him in the
stake president’s office after McLeod had stormed out it. I have faith in your ability, he’d
said. Passos couldn’t afford to let his other avenue to BYU—the scholarships on the table for
APs—slip away in an exchange for a few harsh words, a mess of pottage. Did he feel venal? Did
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he feel weak? Again, he couldn’t think in those terms. He knew now that those very questions
distracted from the goal, from the strategy that superseded all concerns of venality or weakness,
valor or strength, manly concerns, these, American concerns. Let Rambo have his brute bloody
valor. What Passos wanted, what he needed, were results.
So his vicariousness stayed vicarious, his voyeurism hidden, until even these safe feelings
started to recede under the piling and piling on from Maurilho, red-faced now, sharp-tongued,
sharp-eyed, his brow T-boning the top of his nose. The United Blood-Spattered States of
America! Belligerent from its very inception, one hand on a silver spoon, the other on a gun! A
country of the violent, by the violent, for the violent. And the CIA killings in countries far and
wide, including in Latin American countries. And the coups they incited, the dictators they
installed, the blood money they traded in. And on and on.
The other faces around the table, like Passos’, now tipped forward in helpless chastened
expressions, an echo of the first quick turtle-like retraction of McLeod’s head after Maurilho’s
opening salvos. Each of them had hazarded appeals into the maelstrom, an occasional Okay, let’s
change the subject, or a Dad, come on, or a Honey, please, or even Passos’ comment about the
worldly kingdom, how yes it was evil, but they had the gospel as their guide, an authority above
any earthly tribunal, and how blessed they were to have it, even that softening comment with its
falling inflection had failed to knock Maurilho off the war path. Indeed, he and Rose and Romulo
seemed to have melted away from the table until only McLeod and Maurilho remained, Maurilho
leaning forward into his points and McLeod leaning back, an amused little smile on his face,
resting his cheek in the delicate crux of his fingers, a parody of the fascinated student, the
dreamy listener, which only seemed to anger Maurilho more.
You think this a joke? Maurilho was saying. You think this is all a joke?
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Then Rose scraped back her chair and went to the kitchen, returning with a molded flan
de leche dessert, even though none of them had made much progress in their meals: the black
beans and rice and beef and pork parts heaped on their plates along with potatoes and carrots, a
fancy meal, this, an expensive meal, a sign of changed fortunes, and most of it going untouched.
Rose placed the dessert in the center of the table like a peace offering.
Please, she said. I made it special.
Maurilho abated for a moment, for a breath, really, but before Rose could cut it into the
dense brown mold McLeod addressed Maurilho in grand oratorical style. Oh Professor, he said,
please don’t stop. What other searing insights have you been hiding from me? And to think! All
this time a genius in our midst! What other pearls of wisdom has your eighth grade education
endowed you with, Maurilho? Was it eighth grade? Or did you get as far as ninth? All the more
reason for you to continue! Tell me your secrets that I may too have a chance to one day become
a janitor. Please, Professor, please. I beg you. Please go on.
Maurilho stiffened in his chair, drawing the silence into an orbit around him. Very slowly
he relaxed. Then a smile spread across his face, every bit as disingenuous as McLeod’s.
Elder McLeod, Maurilho said calmly, your country is evil. That much I can tell you. Are
there any questions?
No, Professor, McLeod said. No questions.
He stood up and walked out of the kitchen and out of the house. Passos stood too, out of
reflex. Then he paused, said, I’m so sorry about this.
Go, Maurilho said. Go after him. That child.
.....
Passos found his companion at the bus stop a few streets beyond the drive-thru. The sight of him
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sitting alone under a cement awning was familiar now, almost comical. It was like a punch line
that earned its groaning laughs through sheer and purposeful repetition. He kept quiet beside
McLeod, as he knew McLeod would want him to. On the bus ride home McLeod chose a bench
seat across the aisle from where Passos sat. At one point a woman sitting to McLeod’s left
craned her head to read his nametag.
Are you a salesman? Passos heard her ask.
Not tonight, McLeod answered.
He stood up and moved to the pole nearest the middle door, staring out the darkened
glass at the night. Passos could study McLeod’s face in the reflection, and also the woman’s
across the aisle from him, by pretending to gaze out the window himself. The faces looked
ghostly, unreal in the glass, especially the woman’s, tilting at McLeod’s back and frowning,
transposed over the moving street lights and walls beyond the bus like a spirit observing its body.
The entire day seemed unreal as Passos thought about it: the last-ditch effort at Josefina’s, the
tiny blue car growing larger as it sped up the hill, the worst words spoken in the calmest tones,
and the thought of a major city being bombed, the huge tearing sounds of afterburners, the
deafening explosions, the screaming choruses, but none of it more than that, none of it more than
the thought, conjured images from movies, documentaries, newscasts. Passos knew it had
happened, was still happening, he knew it was real, but he couldn’t feel it. The only thing he
could feel was now. The silence on the bus. The silence walking home. The silence in the
apartment as they separated to their corners, McLeod to the bedroom, Passos to his desk.
He read for an hour, or tried to. No sounds came from the bedroom. He noticed that the
Seuss book had joined the other volumes bunched upright in the corner of McLeod’s desk, the
Seuss spine much thinner and taller than the others, like a lone skyscraper amid one-story flats. It
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looked awkward, calling attention to itself, and Passos wondered if it hadn’t been arranged for
that very purpose, with the goal of catching Passos’ attention, making him jealous somehow.
Had the book been on his desk before McLeod gave it to him? Or loaned it to him. Or whatever
he’d done. Hadn’t he kept the book in his desk drawer? Passos couldn’t remember.
His eye drifted next to the black-and-white picture of McLeod’s family: the mother and
sister showing white wide smiles, a rosy blush on their cheeks that showed up as darker gray,
and then the father with an exaggerated mock-serious look, like a fake newscaster’s. McLeod
said his father liked to kid. All in all, then, a handsome, friendly looking family. Passos imagined
he would get along with each of them. He already liked the mother. McLeod had showed him the
pictures she had taken of the spacious carpeted room, a bed, a bedside table, a desk, a window
high up on the far wall that showed a cross-section of dirt and grass in the bottom half, and pale
blue sky in the top half, and then on the wall closest to the picture taker, a white door opening
onto a white tiled floor. The bathroom, McLeod explained to him. He turned the photograph over
and showed him his mother’s graceful cursive: 1 bed, 1 bath, 0 occupants, for now . . . Another
photograph of the room bore the inscription on back: Le Chez Passos?
She was clever, then, and generous, and Passos read these qualities into her face in the
black-and-white picture. Nothing bloodthirsty about it. Maurilho had been wrong to focus his
anger at an individual American, an innocent, really. He should have acted better, but then he
wasn’t a missionary. He wasn’t an ordained representative of the Lord like McLeod.
An hour was enough. And it was nearly bedtime anyway. Passos got up from his desk
and walked into the room to see McLeod laid out on his bed like a body in state, fully dressed,
arms tight at his side, feet together, his eyes on the ceiling. He didn’t acknowledge Passos when
he entered the room or sat down on his own bed, or even when he said McLeod’s name, the word
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almost startling in its clarity, like struck crystal, a sound made huge in the wake of so much
silence.
He said the name again. McLeod didn’t move. He said it a third time, an edge in his voice
now, and McLeod got up off the bed and went to the dresser. He gave his back to Passos,
loosening his tie with deliberate slowness, undoing his shirt button by button.
Elder McLeod! Passos shouted.
The voice drifted back to him like a wisp of incense, lazy and thin. Yeah? You got
something to add? Something that Maurilho might have missed in his lecture? You’re a bit of a
lecturer yourself, aren’t you?
No, Elder. No lecture. But I do think you owe Maurilho an apology for what you said to
him. You’re a missionary. You represent the Church, Elder.
McLeod turned around, leaning against the open dresser door. All you lecturers, he said.
All you foreign relations experts. One on every corner, right? Right next to the glue sniffers.
Right next to the drive-thru prostitutes. Or no, no. They’re experts too, aren’t they? I just wish I
knew as much about your country as you all seem to know about mine. The janitors even! The
filthy shirtless little kids. And of course the drunks. We can’t forget the drunks, can we? And
what about all the favela dwellers? The people who live in places that even the cops won’t go
near? They must know too. The falling-down shack builders, the thieves, the trafficantes, even
the dead dogs rotting in the streets must know. So many lecturers. I should feel grateful, I guess.
Of course I feel grateful. And for you too, Elder? How can I begin to thank you?
Passos said, Did you know Elder Jones? He felt a smile on his own face now, to his
surprise, an irresistible impulse, it seemed. He had meant to rebuke, then show an increase in
love, as the scripture counseled. He had meant to commiserate. But now he had heard the truth
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from McLeod, at long last, and all he could think of was Jones.
I knew of him, McLeod said.
He was my first American companion. Very observant. Very curious. Like you. One day
he asked me if Brazil had a Fourth of July. I asked him what he meant. He said You know, a
Fourth of July! I told him yes, we did have a fourth day in our month of July. Was that what he
meant? He said You know what I mean! But he couldn’t explain it. He just kept saying Fourth of
July, Fourth of July. He was the dumbest person I’ve ever met. And you remind me of him,
Elder.
McLeod said, Oh, a breathy sound, like he’d just remembered something obvious. Then
he switched to English. Well then, he said, and he hesitated, mouth ajar, as if he were
considering the words on his tongue, tasting them. Well, he said, fuck you. Fuck you, Elder. I
mean, right?
McLeod turned around and continued unbuttoning his shirt. Then Passos moved to his
own dresser. He undid his tie, his shirt. He removed his socks. He changed out of his dress pants
into a pair of shorts.
That’s right, Passos said.

That night he repaired to the bathroom and masturbated out of anger, now, as much as lust.
Succor me, Lord, for I am compassed about by assholes, but the Lord didn’t answer. Of course
He didn’t. After twenty-one months He had gone away for good, dissolving through McLeod’s
grasping fingers like sand, and leaving him Passos instead. And Maurilho. And Leandro. The
big-bellied men in the dark houses. The idiots shouting from their cars. And now Josefina, too,
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and the hardness in her voice, the finality. It was more than enough for McLeod.
He conjured the images from newstands, call cards, racy billboards, the spectral train of
mulheres. He accessed the silo of stored stolen glances—mulheres in the streets, on the buses,
mulheres who bared their breasts for infants, and secretly, he imagined, for him—and now, on
the topmost layer, mulheres in the nearby drive-thru. Those noises, Romulo had said. It was
more than enough.
Afterwards McLeod tore down the Jesus pictures on the mirror, crumbled them into balls
and flushed them.
The next morning he canceled his alarm and slept in. He missed breakfast, personal
study, companionship study. At a little past nine o’clock he finally got up. He showered. He
dressed in the bedroom. Then he went into the entryway/living room and sat in the blue chair,
taking his shoes out from under it and lacing them in silence. Passos sat at his desk in full dress.
From the slope of his shoulders he looked to be reading. A minute later he stood up from the
desk, let the soft leather cover of his quad slap shut. He came over and knelt with his arms on the
chair beside McLeod’s, waiting, his head bowed. McLeod went to the door and opened it. Passos
looked up at him, a long blankness on his face, and then he stood up too and led them out into
the street. For the rest of the day they looked everywhere but at each other. They spoke to
investigators, street contacts, bus drivers, but never to each other. That was Friday. On Saturday
McLeod started dropping from his door introductions even the mention of his companion’s
name. No longer Hi, I’m Elder McLeod, and this is my companion Elder Passos, and we’re
representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but rather Hi, I’m Elder
McLeod, and we’re representatives of the Church, and so on, the presence of his companion
implied in the pronoun, but never acknowledged outright. Passos took to using the same
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technique on his turns. They became invisible to each other, closed off by degrees, each on either
side of a chasm that widened, deepened by the day. Saturday. Sunday. Monday. Tuesday.
On Wednesday McLeod boarded a bus en route to Sweeney’s where he and Kimball and
Sweeney had agreed to meet up. A P-Day pow wow, something they hadn’t done for months,
and also a reprieve from the week-long silence. Passos accompanied McLeod on the bus, which
fact surprised him, at least at first, in its apparent generosity. Passos could have refused to leave
the apartment, after all, effectively stranding McLeod at home, since for a missionary to cross a
city alone meant insubordination, and bravery, of a very high order, much higher than sleeping
in, for instance, or skipping companionship study or prayer. The fact remained, despite all
McLeod’s resentment of his companion, that twenty-one months of conjoined living and moving
had instilled in him, as it did in most missionaries, a distinct separation anxiety from his
companion. And Passos must have known this. But he hadn’t exploited it, hadn’t dared him to
overcome it and thereby commit an actionable offense. He’d followed him out to the bus stop
instead. He’d taken a seat across the aisle from him, taken out his scriptures to read in silence.
Then it made sense. McLeod smiled at the realization. Passos too must have been eager
for a reprieve, desperate even, for a break from the silence. He too must have pined to talk to
someone, even if that someone happened to Sweeney’s junior companion, or Kimball’s junior
for that matter. Jokesters, Passos had called them once. Unserious, unimpressive, immature. But
at least they were Brazilian. He could commiserate with them about the boorish Americans and
their imperialist, blood-spattered, maniacal ways, could reprise all the slanders from Maurilho’s
diatribe that Passos had endorsed with his purposeful silence. More than once since then McLeod
had started letters to his mother—I was wrong about Passos, he wrote in one draft, and I don’t
think you should help him—but each time he gave up. I don’t think you should help him. It
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sounded so blunt, so sudden, so unlike the voice of charity and calm he had cultivated for his
family in his previous letters. How could he act out of spite to Passos without betraying the fact
of his spite? He decided to let things be. He could see the finish line, anyway. The home stretch
and then some. Just yesterday he’d received a letter from the mission office asking him to
indicate which release date he preferred: either May 14th, or six weeks later on June 25th. He
could choose, then, which meant he already had. Less than two months to go. A transfer and a
half. Which meant less than two weeks left with Passos. He would demand a new companion in
the upcoming transfers. He’d make the appeal direct to President at next week’s Zone
Conference. Then it would be just one more week of Passos, one more week of the silence.
Things could always change, of course, though McLeod felt certain they wouldn’t. He
snuck a furtive glance at his companion across the aisle—the ogling glance, well practiced by
now—and in the instant his bilious revulsion surged up again. Look at him. The sad sallow
frescoed face, more yellow than olive, really. The thick eyebrows diving in concentration, an
open book of scripture on his lap, and the rigid posture. Everything about him suggested self-
satisfaction, self-sacrifice, self-seriousness, as if enough frowning and sober works could insure
a spot in heaven. McLeod hoped heaven didn’t exist, or part of him did. Part of him hoped,
where he had once only feared, that life eternal amounted to the keystone lie in a magnificent
span of lies, some of them perpetrated, some devoutly wished for. He hoped for the Resurrection
to be a lie, Jesus and the prophets and eternal families, all lies. He hoped for God Himself to be a
lie. If only to spite his devout companion.
.....
The bus let them off into a newsprung rain, the sky above them closing off, and darkening,
staining the undersides of clouds in the color of eggplant. McLeod and Passos walked at pace.
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Sweeney’s building, a narrow three-story walk-up that put McLeod in mind of a vertical desk
organizer, one apartment on top of the other on top of the other, loomed up ahead of them as the
rain thickened. They took the last several hundred yards at a run, took the stairs that wrapped
around the building two at a time. Sweeney’s companion Elder Nunes answered the door. He had
his poncho on already, a large umbrella at his side. He glanced up and down the dripping pair of
them and laughed. He handed an umbrella to Passos, stepped out in the awninged hallway to join
him. Passos titled his head at Nunes, then up at the emptying sky, as if trying to petition with the
obvious fact. Trust me, Nunes said. Then to McLeod: Well? He motioned to the open doorway.
McLeod entered the apartment and gave a nod to Elder Santos, Kimball’s junior companion, who
was crouching in the dim gray light of the entryway, fitting on a pair of rubber overshoes.
Where is everybody? McLeod asked Santos.
Hiding, man.
Huh?
Santos worked a corner of the overshoe around his back heel, but the rubber
snapped back. Come on, he said. McLeod looked around the apartment. All the doors shut, all
the windows closed except one, in the kitchen, a small frame onto a big hardening sky. The
window light gave onto the long countertop that separated the kitchen from the entryway/living
room. It imparted a shine to that surface that cast all the others in the apartment in relief, the
small wooden dining table with drop-down flaps, and the desks, the taped-up pictures on the
walls, and the stacks of teachings pamphlets and Books of Mormon teetering in the shadowed
corners.
McLeod heard whispered voices conferring out in the hallway behind him. He turned just as
Nunes leaned his head back in the door. Santos, you coming or what? he said. Oh, and McLeod,
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tonight we want you guys to come pick us up at Passos’ apartment, okay? Well, your apartment
too.
Who’s we? McLeod said. Then he laughed a little, said, Yeah, okay.
Then Santos was on his feet and shutting the door behind him, the apartment that much
darker. He searched for the light switch on the wall. The naked bulb—why were the bulbs
always naked?—filled up the room with a harsh thin light that reminded McLeod of old black-
and-white police dramas, the bad guys lurking in boiler rooms, or languishing in hold cells while
detectives leaned into their questions. The bulb should be hanging, though, swinging, making the
room feel like the underdeck of a ship. McLeod noticed a map of the area, west Carinha, taped
up on one of the walls. It hadn’t been there the last time he’d visited the apartment, or maybe he
just hadn’t noticed it. He would have noticed, though. It was new. Had it been Nune’s idea? Or
Sweeney’s? Some symbolic stand against the usual slacking off that marked the waning days of
a missionary’s service? McLeod felt a pinch of comparative shame at the thought. Then he called
out in English, Sweeney? Hello? Kimball? Guys?
The only answer was the rain sound through the kitchen window. McLeod walked toward
it, saw a checkerboard of orange tile roofs and sooted white satellite dishes, brown alleyways,
gray sidestreets, all of it tipping up at him, pushing out some of the sky from the frame: half city
now, half cloud. The water buzzed in puddles in the street below, and for a second McLeod
couldn’t be sure if he’d heard the toilet flushing from the bathroom, or some sudden rush from
outside. Then Kimball emerged from one of the closed doors off the entryway/living room,
looking pale and pained—sea-sick, it could have been—barely altering his ashen face at the sight
of McLeod behind the counter.
What’s with you? McLeod said.
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Green bananas.
Yeah?
It’s all I can figure. Ate them yesterday at lunch. Those things hold a grudge, man, let me
tell you.
Then Kimball put a hand in his dense helmet of P-Day hair, frowning, looking as if he’d
forgotten something. Remind where you’ve been for the last two months?
Yeah, I know. It’s a crappy situtation. I’m just glad to be away from it for a day.
You mean Passos?
There are words for him, but none of them Bible.
I thought you said he wasn’t as bad as the hype.
He’s worse.
A tiny lull on the heels of this forcefulness, but then McLeod said, remembering, You get
the letter from the mission office? About our group?
May 14th, Kimball said, a sly spreading smile. Less than two months till I get to play
with my Blondie.
You and Sweeney both, right?
Kimball’s smile went lopsided. He shook his head in stiff quick motions.
What’s up? McLeod said, suddenly hushed.
Kimball lowered his voice even more as he said, Sweeney got a Dear John from the
girlfriend. Not even a Dear John letter, actually. She sent a wedding announcement—her and
some dude name Corey—who marries a Corey?—and there was this little Dear John note,
basically, inside the envelope.
I thought they were practically engaged.
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Who knows, man. The note said she’d tried to tell him sooner. That old story. It looks a
BYU romance to me. Three weeks and they’re soul makes, you know? Agreed to marry in the
pre-existence, all that. My brother said you see it all the time there.
Wait. He showed you the note?
Well, Kimball said, he just sort of dropped it on the floor. Well, he tore it up, then he
dropped the pieces on the floor. I was with him when he opened it this morning. Here, he said,
and he motioned for McLeod to follow him, on tiptoe, to the little trashbin at the far edge of the
kitchen. It stood mere feet from Sweeney’s bedroom door. Kimball picked the several pieces of
the announcement and the note out of the transbin and assembled them on the kitchen counter.
McLeod inspected the announcement first: a black-and-white photograph of a square-jawed
letter man type holding the pale pretty girl in his arms, her ringed hand on display against his
chest. And on a separate piece of cardstock, the following:

Dr. and Mrs. Jeremy Ledgewood
are pleased to announce
the marriage of their daughter
Tiffany Anne Ledgewood
to
Corey Bruce Nielsen
on Saturday the second day of August
two thousand and three
in the Salt Lake City LDS Temple.
You are cordially invited to attend a
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reception held in their honor.

Then the note. It filled half a page with tiny looping words about how sorry she was that she
hadn’t told him sooner, how she’d tried but she hadn’t known how, and it had happened so fast,
though the Spirit had confirmed, of course, and how she hoped he’d be able to understand
someday and continue to serve a faithful mission, and of course how proud she was of him, how
she was his friend forever.
McLeod looked up from the counter in the direction of the closed bedroom door. What’s
he doing in there?
Kimball shrugged his shoulders.
And he’s been in there since this morning?
Kimball nodded.
McLeod took eggshell steps across the kitchen, opening cupboards in search of food. He
found a box of imitation Cocoa Puffs in one cupboard and took it to the threshold of Sweeney’s
bedroom door. He held up crossed fingers for Kimball to see, then he knocked once and entered.
The room was sepulchral. The blinds shut. The fan turned off. The air was still and heavy with
heat, the rain drumming distantly on the roof. McLeod waited for his eyes to adjust, then he
crossed the room, stepping on stiff piece of paper from the sound of it. Sweeney didn’t move. He
lay face down on his bed, his arms stretched up above him, his legs in strict unnatural parallel.
He looked like he was being drawn on the rack.
A narrow shaft of gray light broke through the gap where the metal blinds met. The
window hung between the two beds, and the shaft made a half-hearted partition of the room.
McLeod sat down on the bed opposite Sweeney’s. He picked up one of the stiff pieces of paper
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and examined it in the grainy light: a torn Polaroid of the lower half of Tiffany’s cross-country
stride, the long white legs amputated just above the knees, one of them straight, the other bent.
Other shreds showed faces with no bodies, a group of headless girls on horseback, a willow tree
split right down the middle. Sweeney stood just off center in the latter picture, extending three
quarters of his arm to a rude white tear.
What are you doing? Sweeney said.
McLeod shook the box of cereal. I brought you some lunch.
McLeod?
Yeah.
Oh, McLeod.
Sweeney settled his head in the crux of his elbow, let out a quavering sigh. McLeod
shook the box again and opened it. He pulled out a handful of dark, vaguely sticky spheres. He
extended the handful toward Sweeney’s face, holding it out the way you hold out feed to horses.
At length Sweeney rolled over to face him. He propped his head up on his fist. He looked at
McLeod’s outstretched hand for a long minute, then reached out and overturned it. The little
spheres made hollow reports on the linoleum, rattling as they came to rest. McLeod reached into
the box and produced another handful, which Sweeney overturned again. McLeod laughed a
little.
Do it again, Sweeney said.
McLeod did it again. Sweeney flung McLeod’s hand up, or slapped it up—a loud echoey
uppercut of a slap—which sent the imitation Cocoa Puffs flying. McLeod and Sweeney laughed
together.
Then Sweeney said, Just give me the fucking box. And don’t you dare tell me to keep it
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Bible. Not today.
McLeod handed over the box. Today is an exception.
You’re fucking right today is a fucking exception.
Sweeney plunged half of his arm into the box, then shoved the puffs into his mouth,
making loud rapid crunching sounds. He repeated this process half a dozen times, coming up for
air every two or three handfuls.
I figured you were hungry, McLeod said.
Did you bring anything to drink?
I can go get something for you.
No, he said. I’ll get it.
Sweeney let the box fall to the floor and swung up out of the bed, crunching his way
across the room. He opened the door and staggered out into the gray light, his arm shielding his
eyes. McLeod followed at a distance. Kimball stood before the tatters on the kitchen counter,
studying them, nursing a glass of chocolate milk. He looked up as Sweeney and McLeod came
into the room, tried to cover up what he’d uncovered. Sweeney pushed him aside and stared at
the announcement, his mouth open, then open wider, wider, like he’d just had the wind knocked
out of him. His eyes started to fill. Kimball pursed his lips for McLeod, mouthed Sorry, then
hung his head like a penitent.
McLeod went to the fridge and filled a glass of water and brought it over to Sweeney. He
pulled him away from the counter, turned him. He pressed the glass into Sweeney’s hand the
way he had once pressed pamphlets on strangers. Dear sir, dear madam, this can help, I promise.
Kimball swept the pieces of the annoucement and the note into his hand and then back
into the trash, though not without Sweeney noticing.
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In the trash is where it belongs, McLeod said. The best thing you can do is forget about it.
And drink your water.
McLeod stepped back against the wall beside the window, leaning there, and then
Kimball joined him. The two of them watching Sweeney as if from behind mirrored glass. The
front third of his corkscrew hair matted down. The eyes red and unfocused. The absent sips from
the glass.
McLeod disappeared again, Sweeney said. Where’d you go, McLeod?
It’s Passos, he said. But it’s almost over. Next week at Zone Conference I’m demanding a
transfer from President. Then no more of the vanishing acts. The last transfer of our missions
will be the best one yet.
Oh sure, sure, sure, sure, Passos said, trailing off. Then he laughed. And I’m sure
President Mason will give you exactly what you want, McLeod. Since he loves you so much,
right?
He laughed again, louder, an unhinged laugh, then it cut off, as if it had been caught in a
sudden reversal of wind. Sweeney drank down the rest of his water in one long breathless gulp.
Then he held out the glass and let it slip from his hand. It bounced once and shattered loudly on
the hard linoleum. McLeod and Kimball looked at the shimmering mess, then at Sweeney, who
seemed to be looking past it. Sweeney took two quick strides to the drying rack and got out
another glass which he also dropped, a neat, almost dainty gesture. Then he dropped another
glass, then another. McLeod and Kimball watched in amazement. A porcelain cereal bowl hit the
floor and radiated shards. A dinner plate cracked in half on impact. Neither of them said
anything, and neither of them moved, but then Sweeney finished the drying rack and went to the
cupboard, started raking the dishes from the shelves, a guttural roar building in his throat. A
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heavy mixing bowl smashed into pieces at Kimball’s feet. He jumped back, said, Hey! Another
smashed too close to McLeod and he and Kimball ran for the living room. Sweeney followed
them there, flipping the wooden dining table, kicking out the drop flaps with as many screams.
He hurled the desk chairs, swept the desks, toppled the stacks in the corners, kicking books and
pamphlets around the room as he tore down the pictures from the walls, and the map of the area,
and the monthly calendar, moving McLeod and Kimball around the room, too, as if by opposing
magnetic force. He finally slowed near the front door, paused there, his breathing loud and
ragged, a wild stare, and then he sprinted headlong for the bedroom door, just short of which
McLeod checked him into the wall. He held onto him, lowering him down to the floor, saying,
I’m sorry, okay? But come on. Are you okay? And Sweeney just gasped and gasped for breath
until it caught on a choking sob.

The rain kept up. It thickened and bowed. It swept the streets in gusting scrims on their way back
to the bus stop, made a mockery of their umbrellas. Nunes and Santos tittered behind Passos like
children, kicking up puddles at each other and splashing the backs of Passos’ pant legs, which he
might have objected to if they weren’t already soaked. Still, Passos almost regretted his decision
to be rid of McLeod for the day in favor of these childish greenies. Childish, not childlike. There
was a difference. They made it under the bus stop’s awning and drew their feet up clear of the
coursing sidewalk, all except Santos, who pretended not to notice. He planted his feet in the
downhill rush, pushing little wavelets and tributaries up and over the rubber overshoes he
wore.
Oh, are my feet in the water? Santos said. Didn’t even notice, brethren. Didn’t even
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notice.
He laughed, and Nunes joined him, but said how ridiculous he looked in those things, like
a clown. They spent several minutes back and forthing pros and cons and then Passos put an end
to the conversation. I’ve only ever seen Americans wearing them, he said.
On the bus ride back Passos watched out the window as the bus sprouted thick crescents
of water from the tirewells. The din of the downpour on the metal roof made it sound as if the
bus were being lashed by the giant brushes in an automatic carwash. Nunes raised his voice
almost to a shout and Passos still couldn’t quite make out what he’d said.
What was that? Passos shouted.
I said I sure hope you didn’t leave your laundry out in this.
Passos slumped his head into his palm, remembering.
Did you really? Nunes said. I was just kidding around.
I can’t believe this, Passos said.
You didn’t know it was gonna rain?
How would I have known that, Elder?
You just feel it, man. You’re Brazilian. You just look at the sky.
He’s from the northeast, Santos said. They’re all Bedouins up there.
More tittering from Nunes and Santos. More rain. Minutes later they got off the bus and
made a run for it, running alongside rivers that gushed down either side of the street, depositing
trash and mango leaves into eddies that formed around the flooded drain gates. Passos jumped
the river onto the sidewalk in front of their gate, thrust his hand into the mail slot and came away
with a clutch of envelopes. He stuffed them in his pocket, rushed into the courtyard. The rain
boiled in several centimeters of standing water. He and Nunes, and even Santos now, stepped
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and stepped like flamingos, trying to keep their feet dry as they tore down the morning’s laundry
from the clothesline. Passos had a mind to leave McLeod’s out, but Nunes and Santos had
already grabbed indiscriminate handfuls of garments, socks, shirts, pants, mixing the just with
the unjust. The laundry took over the apartment, laid out to dry, or re-dry, on chairbacks,
countertops, tablesides, desksides, doorknobs, door edges, anything and everything.
An hour later a fungal stench had suffused the air, and they still had to push through still-
dripping clothes as if through jungle brush to move about the apartment. Passos spent the first
part of the afternoon reading the letter Nana had sent, and responding to it, and then encouraging
Nunes and Santos to do the same. Had they already written their letters home? Didn’t they have
people worrying about them, wondering? He spent the second half of the afternoon cutting out
pictures of Jesus from approved church magazines and re-wreathing the mirror, twice as thick
now. Jesus in the manger, Jesus in the Temple, Jesus with the woman at the well, with His
disciples, Jesus with the little children, heirs of the kingdom of heaven, He said, and also Suffer
them to come unto me, He said, Suffer them to be childlike, not childish, not inane, not laughing
at who knew what from the bedroom, swapping wisecracks, probably, just like McLeod and his
jokesters, when they should be writing their parents to let them know they’re alive, to bear
testimony, to be missionaries. Why was he so surrounded by idiots? Why did they all think they
were here? To tell stupid jokes? To win popularity contests? Jesus at the Last Supper, the
washing of the feet, Jesus atoning in Gethsemane, being betrayed. He arranged each picture so
that it just overlapped the one beneath it, so that he could fit as many pictures in as possible. He
looked at the pictures, the mounting sweep of them, one image bleeding into another into
another, a sort of kaleidoscope montage of His Life and Passion, and then he looked past the
pictures, through them. His grandmother still wasn’t better. She’d thought enough time had
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passed, but after a day behind the counter her ankle blew up again, round and dark as an
avocado. The pain laid her low. She couldn’t even think anymore. Felipe and Tiago had to all but
carry her onto the bus to the doctors. Those white-coated scoundrels. The endless waiting rooms,
the flat-faced receptionists. Then they kept her there, said she had more than a sprain. An ill-
healed fracture, they said. They’d had to break it again so it could set right. Could he believe it?
She was writing him from the convalescence ward now. They said she’d be there for a week.
Tiago visited often, even Felipe. They were both good boys. She ought to sue the city. They’d
promised pavement a year ago, and now the white-coated scoundrels said she’d need to be on a
walker for six weeks, but she might too weak. Then the government would give her a motorized
cart, probably some old golfmobile from the States. Ha! She bucked up for him, he knew. She
tried to make a joke of things—Ha!—but it wasn’t funny. Passos could see the writing on the
wall. On the mirror, too. Jesus before Pilate, amid the Pharisees and Sadducees, red-faced
fattened snarling men, Jesus amid the jeering Roman soldiers. To this end was I born, He said. It
was not a funny message. Passos could see into the mirror and then beyond it, could see through
the glass, for a moment, clearly. Felipe and Tiago visited Nana often, which meant no school and
no church for either of them. It had been like this for two months now, more. They took turns
behind the counter during the day, one bringing in what little business the street offered while the
other played pickup footballs games. At night they helped Nana, or now visited her in the
hospital. In two more months, maybe more, Nana would start walking again, tending the store
again, a trickle of customers, a river of bills. The street would stay dusty and unpaved. The life
meager. There was nothing there for them. Nothing. He saw everything. Jesus at Golgotha, on
the cross, and Jesus risen up on the morning of the third day. Touch me not, He said, for I am not
yet ascended. Then Jesus with the Apostles before his final Ascension, and the commandment to
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take the gospel to all the world, and then Jesus in the clouds of glory, even on the right hand of
the Father, and He will come again. The whole story there, taped up on his mirror, from birth to
death to rebirth, an eternal chain, a revelation. He knew McLeod couldn’t be trusted, couldn’t be
counted on. The silence meant a no-go on the basement apartment in Virginia, he was almost
sure of it. He couldn’t untell the lies McLeod had no doubt told his parents about him. He
couldn’t undo that damage. He needed a back-up. He needed the assistantship. Next Tuesday
was the quarterly Zone Conference and as Zone Leader he would be responsible for the opening
presentation, a rather perfunctory assignment, this, and in the hands of some ZLs little more than
a précis of the President’s longer presentation, but not in Passos’ hands, not now. The President
had asked him to address the new rules about family-oriented teaching from a practical,
missionary standpoint. He would do much more than that. He would get President Mason’s
attention. He would convert the missionaries of his Zone to the procedural by way of the
doctrinal, by way of the spiritual. He had already started preparing notecards, putting down
certain verbatim phrases to capture the essence of an idea, one about the measured grace and
power of missionaries dedicated to quiet dignity, another about the blessings of obedience, which
is all the Lord asks of us, let us remember, obedience, saith the Lord, not sacrifice. Nothing more
or less than that. Passos repeated the phrase, slower now, and with emphasis, in the sanctified
bathroom mirror. Obedience, saith the Lord, not sacrifice. Nothing more or less than that.
.....
At a little after nine o’clock that night McLeod arrived with the jokesters in tow, the three of
them ashen and funereal, it seemed, at the prospect of reuniting with their assigned companions.
Passos would address companionship unity in his talk next Tuesday. He would add that to the
list. First Santos and Kimball, and then Nunes and Sweeney, filed away into the night, leaving
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the apartment to descend back into its pall of willful silence. Passos could handle it. If things
went according to plan, in fact, Passos felt confident that he’d only have to deal with McLeod for
two more weeks. They hadn’t been together very long, it was true, but in order for Passos to
serve for any significant amount of time as assistant he would have go to Belo Horiztonte soon,
and why not this transfer? He might even hint at that in the personal interview with President
after the close of Zone Conference. That and the BYU scholarship. He could mention how he’d
dreamed of BYU, but of course the money and the distance and the bureaucracy . . . Then let
President Mason reassure him. Then let Passos respond with a well turned bit of English,
something very American in character, something to demonstrate his growing mastery of the
language and also the feel of the language.
The next day’s silence had a gloomy quality, irresolute somehow, unsure, and at several
points Passos thought McLeod might just say something. He would have welcomed the change,
the move toward reconciling, if only for the purposes of the interview with President. He hadn’t
figured out how to describe the situation in terms that would absolve him of blame.
By Friday the silence had hardened again. On Saturday it seemed even harder, though it
also seemed to float free of them, independent, like a poisonous gas that emanated from the
mutual disdain that pulsed between them. At times Passos felt he could almost see it, sense it
separating out from the air around them, the way a squid’s ink separates out from water. Sunday
passed like that. Monday too. He had begun to hate even the sound of McLeod’s breathing, and
he imagined McLeod hated the sound of his.
Early on Tuesday morning Passos went into the bathroom to practice one more time the
presentation he would give that afternoon at Zone Conference. He went through the first
notecard, the second, and only on the third, looking up into the mirror for brief but potent eye
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contact, did he realize that McLeod had torn down all the pictures again. He must have done it
some time during the night. To anger him. Try to throw him off kilter only hours before
delivering the talk that McLeod had watched him prepare, night after night, hour after hour. It
wouldn’t work. It didn’t. That afternoon at the Conference Passos mastered his concentration as
he moved through the cards with a calm, unhurried, confident air. He outlined the numbers for
the twenty or so missionaries in the Zone, and of course for President too, all of them gathered in
Belo Horizonte to receive instruction and edification. He transitioned into the doctrine. The
numbers had dropped since the new rules had taken effect, but this was to be expected at first.
Bringing whole families to the waters of baptism mattered, mattered everlastingly, and the
Everlasting Enemy knew this. Resistance would grow in direct proportion with the stakes. And
nothing less than celestial units, Passos stressed, self-perpetuating godly family units were at
stake. The makers of kingdoms, worlds without end. Passos described how the missionaries
could achieve such vast and marvelous results by small and simple means, the means by which
great things come to pass. The Lord required of them not inhuman sacrifices, but normal, human
obedience. Discipleship. Passos promised the elders of his Zone that if they would follow the
new proselytizing guidelines with faithfulness, with quiet dignity and grace, and if they would
follow them together, in the strength and unity of their companionships, then the Lord of Hosts
would pour out blessings so numerous that there shall not be room enough to receive them. The
Lord asked not for sacrifice, remember, but simple saving obedience, nothing more nor less than
that.
Two hours later Passos sat before President and the big dark mahogany desk that took up
the bulk of the room. It looked like it could be set afloat on the open seas, like it could captain a
shipwrecked gaggle ten strong, maybe twenty.
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That was some talk you gave, President said.
Thank you, Passos said in English. I worked hard on it.
You sure did, President said, also in English. He chuckled a bit to himself. You went
above and beyond, stole some of my thunder even. Do you know that phrase? To steal
someone’s thunder?
Passos shook his head.
Well, it means I ended up repeating some of the things you already said. But that’s not
important now.
You don’t have to talk so slow, Passos said. I can understand English very well now.
Elder McLeod and I have been practicing.
I can tell. Your grammar is very good. How is Elder McLeod?
He’s okay. He is difficult, but okay.
He goes home after one more transfer, President said. You probably knew that? Anyway,
I wanted to tell you that I do appreciate the challenges you face with him, and I do notice the
way you handle those challenges. You’re a good missionary, Elder Passos, a good Zone Leader,
and I don’t mind telling you that I can always use good missionaries in the office with me.
Do you mean assistants? Passos said.
President chuckled again, and Passos cringed at what he assumed had been
overdirectness. In English he lacked the nuance, still, perhaps he always would, of Portuguese.
He formed an apology on his lips.
Obviously I can’t make promises, President said. The Lord is the head of this mission,
not me. But I don’t mind saying that I could use a good missionary like you, a resourceful
missionary, as my assistant. If you can keep up the good work you’re doing with Elder McLeod
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for one more transfer . . . Do you think you can do that?
Passos nodded. Then the president returned the nod. He dropped his eyes for a brief
second—it might have been to his wristwatch—then returned them Passos. A curt smile, a tiny
pause. Passos knew the afternoon had been long for him. The President wanted to be done with
his interviews. Passos couldn’t afford the lead-in, therefore. He couldn’t afford the English.
He said in Portuguese, President, may I ask one more question?
Shoot, President said, still in English.
Is it true that assistants to the president are offered scholarships—I’ve sometimes heard
this around the mission—scholarships to BYU? Some of the missionaries in my Zone have asked
me, which is why I ask. Some of the Brazilians have asked. Many of them would like to go to
BYU, of course, but it’s very expensive to travel there and very difficult to get a visa. They say
the scholarship helps.
And are you one of those Brazilians, Elder Passos?
I’m sorry?
More chuckling from the president, and the same kind too, the same light avuncular nasal
laugh. It put Passos on edge. It came close to angering him. It suggested a private joke, a private
club, perhaps, that Passos could only be admitted to at a member’s pleasure.
President Mason said, I’ve never heard the rumor quite like that, though it is true I have
many contacts in Utah. My younger brother is on the admissions board at BYU. Maybe that’s
how the rumor started, I don’t know. I know BYU likes foreign students, though, they like
diversity, and I’ll bet a smart resourceful missionary like you would make a smart resourceful
student. I might be able to write a recommendation to that effect, Elder. But don’t start worrying
about that yet. How much time do you have left again?
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Five months, Passos said.
Well, you see my point, that’s a long time. For now you just concentrate on that difficult
companion of yours. Then we’ll see what we can do for you, okay? Is there anything else?
No, President. Thank you.
Thank you, President Mason said, and he half rose to shake Passos’ hand as Passos stood
up from his chair. And please tell your companion to come in next.

Passos came out of the stake president’s office, caught eyes with McLeod, nodded at the door.
McLeod stood up and crossed the foyer which glowed from late afternoon sunlight streaming
through the window shades, beige translucent pulled-down sheets that looked like backlit fly
paper, like the lining of a womb. McLeod carried some of the light into the office as he opened
the door onto President Mason sitting behind the massive desk, the picture of the risen Lord
shining on the wall behind him, and the President’s face shining too, for a brief moment, brief
from the light let into the windowless office, brief like a harvest moon. They shook hands, and
then McLeod sat down on a padded folding chair half as big, a third as big, as the President’s big
swiveling leather recliner.
I liked your presentation, McLeod said, lying. He wanted to start on a positive note, even
if entailed a servile untruth, a Passos-esque gambit, as he thought of it. In fact President’s talk
had been worse than usual, soaked straight through with his business speak. At one point he’d
interrupted himself to ask the group, and not rhetorically, Como se diz deliverables? But McLeod
now felt he had an end, for once, that could justify any means.
President Mason smiled, acknowledging the compliment, then started into the language
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of the personal interview. He asked McLeod about his progress as a missionary, as a disciple and
representative of Christ. He asked how the Work was going. Then he asked about the Problem.
McLeod, out of instinct, lied on all counts. Fine, okay, fine, and so on. And President Mason
didn’t challenge him either. He shifted in his deep leather chair, shook his watch of his shirt cuff
and glanced at it. Okay, he said, is there anything else?
McLeod realized his mistake. He said, Well, stalling for time. Then he said it again,
through a sigh now. Well, letting the tone of his voice begin the disclosure, letting it commit the
both of them to that course. It worked. The President leaned back in his chair again, showing a
knowing half smile, half grimace. He laced his hands together in the manner of casual prayer,
rested them on the desk, said, What’s in that Well, Elder? I know that Well very well.
Well, I don’t think the Work’s going fine, McLeod said.
Work harder then, Elder. Apply the principles you learned today, that your companion
talked about also. The Lord will reward your obedience.
Well, I haven’t stopped masturbating either.
When was the last time it happened?
Last night.
Read the Guide to Self-Control, Elder. Pray. Take short, cold showers. And read the
Guide.
I haven’t spoken to my companion in a week and a half. I want a new companion in the
next transfer. I need one.
President Mason lifted his eyebrows. A week and a half, he said. Wow. Then he let out a
chuckle. The best I ever managed was half a day of the silent treatment. I never had the patience
for it. What about your companionship scripture study? Companionship prayer?
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You don’t understand. We haven’t talked at all. Anything that involves talking to each
other we avoid.
Literal silence? President said.
Literal silence, McLeod said.
The president’s eyebrows furrowed. His face darkened over. He gestured for McLeod to
continue.
McLeod took a deep breath, told the president all. He catalogued every offense, every
trespass, every passive aggression. It wasn’t just the anti-American jabs, the anti-American
sentiment in general. It was everything, everywhere. It was as pervasive as God. The belligerent
big-bellied man in a first discussion. I did not say I disagreed with him, Passos had said. Or the
pastor with the red convertible bought with tithe money, they’d both assumed, and then
McLeod’s harmless comment to lay not up treasures. Tell that to your countrymen, Passos had
said. Or the time he’d asked Passos about Easter and Christmas. That stuff’s for los ricos, he’d
said. Los ricos! It could come out of nowhere. Anytime, anyplace, and without provocation. He
felt like he lived on a minefield. He walked down an ordinary street and the Brazilians did
double takes—blond hair, blue eyes, must be American, right?—and then Hey, bin Laden!
Hooray, bin Laden! Tell your president this, tell your president that, as if he could just get him
on the phone, just dial in to the White House and say President! Urgent memo from the Third
World! McLeod could count on something like that happening every day—you could set your
watch to it—and could tell that Passos enjoyed it. He smiled sometimes. He laughed! Only it
wasn’t even laughter, it was this amused little smirk he always wore. The son of a bitch was one
big smirk!
President Mason put a hand up. I’m sure your companion would have a different version
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of things.
I’m sure he would, McLeod said. I’m sure he’d lie. The son of a bitch is one big lie!
Watch your language, Elder. And listen. Listen. I understand what you’re saying. I’ve
experience some of it myself. But you have to stop letting it get to you. And you can’t feed into it
either. This isn’t the Third World. This is the vineyard the Lord has called you to work in. Elder
McLeod, he said, pausing, leaning forward. He dropped his voice and began again. Elder
McLeod, are you praying for the success of your companionship? Are you praying for a
testimony? Are you doing the simple things the Lord asks of you?
McLeod sighed a long, deep sigh. I need a new companion, he said. Please.
President Mason said, Look at me, Elder. He said, Elder McLeod? Look at me. I’m up
here.
McLeod looked into his face, round and soft and large, larger than usual, at this distance.
The President half bowed his head. He dropped his voice even more.
I can’t make any promises, Elder, but I can promise to ask the Lord. He is the head of this
mission, not me. I testify to that. And I can tell you a story, too, he said, that you might just find
useful. When I was a missionary I served an Elder Donson. We didn’t get along for a number of
reasons, none of which were political, but of course it was still a problem. One morning I woke
up and he’d shined my shoes. It was a dusty area and we did a lot of walking. He’d shined my
shoes and I knew it and yet I didn’t say a word about it, and neither did he. The next morning I
got up early and shined his shoes. Then the next day he did mine, and the next I did his, and so
on. It went on like that for more than a week. Something had changed. We both felt it. We both
felt grateful for it. We were never bosom buddies—don’t misunderstand me—but now we could
work together. We could concentrate on the Work. Do you understand what I’m saying?
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. . .
McLeod understood it but he didn’t believe in it. He and Passos rode the bus back to Carinha in
the same silence, stark and heavy and imperious. At a few moments that night, granted, and in
the next several days, McLeod thought he might have sensed the silence softening, lifting,
though he couldn’t be sure. At a few moments he felt his companion’s eyes on him, though he
couldn’t be sure if they implored him, or bored into him. Perhaps Passos wanted to make his
peace before transfers, play conciliator on the eve of his ascension to the assistantship, which he
had clinched in all likelihood with his ass-kissing performance at Zone Conference last Tuesday.
Or maybe he only wanted McLeod to look at him as he broke into another smirk. In any case,
McLeod didn’t return the gazes.
After more than two weeks of the silence he and Passos had a system of communicating
at each other, if not quite to each other, on matters of logistical import. One or the other of them
made calls from a public payphone and talked loud enough for the other to hear. McLeod had
used the system on the first Thursday, for example, to inform Rose, and by extension Passos, that
they wouldn’t be able to make it to her house for lunch. Something’s come up, he’d said, not
hiding his transparency, and Rose had merely asked if he was sure. The next week she’d merely
sighed, and so on. Passos used the system less frequently, and in less oblique ways, since as the
senior companion he already exercised the prerogative, or what he felt was the prerogative, to
call the shots as he pleased. On Sunday nights he did walk the few the blocks to the payphone
nearest the apartment, trailing McLeod after him, of course, like a slinking reluctant shadow, and
he did report the zone’s weekly numbers to the assistants who reported them to the mission
president who reported them to the Area Authority who reported them to the General Authorities
in Salt Lake City who reported them to the Church President, the living prophet, who presumed
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to report them to God Himself. From Passos to God, then, in an unbroken chain, passing his
precious results up the ladder.
On occasion the flow reversed itself. A week after Zone Conference, for instance, on
Tuesday night, Passos led them from the apartment to the nearby phone and waited for the
assistants to call with the transfer assignments. McLeod had never witnessed the process before
Passos, had always been on the blind receiving end of the Zone Leader’s call. You’re going here,
or there, get packing, you’re getting a new companion, make sure the place is ready for
company, and sometimes, nothing. The sense of anticlimax. The next day a P-Day like any other.
But was that worse than the feeling of helplessness at being jerked around like a pawn on God’s
chessboard? You had barely enough time to pack your things, get a few hours of rest, and then
make it to the rodoviaria the next morning. No goodbyes to the people you’d befriended or
taught, the fireworks fading in the afterdark already, no sense of a proper caesura at the end of
three months of your life, or six months, more, no period to end on, only a dash. The irreducible
strangeness of the mission. In McLeod’s case, of course, he had had time to prepare, and he had
no one left to say goodbye to, anyway. No more Josefina. No more Maurilho. Rose and Romulo,
collateral losses. And no more Passos, of course. What shoots of friendship had grown up
between them had long since withered and gone underground. Just the thought of McCauly
Culkin now—or any of the movie lines they’d quoted to each other, laughed about, practiced
English on—made him cringe. The very sight of Passos, or even the peripheral blur of him,
raised McLeod’s hackles in a way that overwhelmed him, towered over him, that approached the
category of reflex.
McLeod stood a ways off behind the payphone’s covering. All he could see of his
companion were his legs. Up above the last holdouts of evening trembled, gave way before the
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first stars of the night. The top of the sky looked cobalt, the sides blue, the bottom gray. None of
the holdouts could power the wall of refracted light from beer bottle shards on top of property
walls. The street stood largely in darkness, with only a few wan streetlights casting halos on the
sidewalks.
Passos picked the phone up on the first ring. Hello? he said. Fine, you? I know you’re
busy tonight.
Then he said, Yes, I’ve got one. Go ahead.
Yes, he said.
Okay.
Yes.
Got it, got it. To Pampulha, got it.
Then he said, Kimball gets a new companion? Okay. So he stays, then. Got it. Keep
going.
McLeod noted what he took to be the gesture on his behalf, repeating the news about a
friend, but then he learned better, not thirty seconds later, as Passos said in a loud buoyant voice,
So Sweeney’s going to Setes Lagoas, you say? He’s getting transferred way down there? Okay,
got it, got it.
And what about de Freira? He stays.
Alvarez? He stays too. Got it.
And you didn’t mention McLeod. Does that mean he stays? McLeod stays in Carinha, got
it. And so do I. One more transfer, that’s right. All right, thanks.
McLeod rushed around to the front of the payphone just as Passos ended the call. He
pushed him aside, grabbed the receiver. Hello? Hello? Hello? He pulled a contact card from his
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breast pocket and dialed the mission office’s number on the back. The Brazilian assistant, whose
name he’d forgotten, answered the office phone. Was there something else Passos needed?
This is Elder McLeod. Did you say I’m not being transferred? I’m staying with Passos?
Elder McLeod, you know the system we’ve set up for relaying—
I want to talk to President Mason. Put me through to him.
Do you have any idea how busy we are tonight?
Put me through to President Mason.
It’s out of the question, Elder. We have a system in place for a reason.
The line clicked dead. McLeod held onto the receiver, strangling it, bowing his head in
utter rage, feeling dizzy with it, light-headed even. He finally lowered the phone back in its
cradle, a forced-gentle gesture. He stepped away from the payphone, noticed Passos at his left
opening his palms to him, opening his mouth, but McLeod willed both shut with one hateful
look.
He lay awake that night for hours, still dressed, summoning all his courage. At a little
after two a.m. he slid out of bed and onto his knees to pray, something he hadn’t done in weeks.
The floor felt harder than usual, less forgiving. His knees throbbed after only a minute or two,
and he wondered how he had ever managed the kind of prayers he gave nightly at the beginning
of his mission, the wide open earnest pleading of his MTC prayers, and of his first months in the
field, his first year, in fact. Please, God, make yourself known to me. I’m keeping my side of the
bargain. Keep yours. McLeod still remembered the time he spent a full hour in prayer, mostly
listening, mostly waiting, and he remembered the answer, like a water drop gathering in his
mind, dropping down, It is enough, it is enough, it is enough. But of course it wasn’t, not even
then.
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And now McLeod kneeled at his bedside and offered not a plea but a sort of growl, an
ultimatum: If you are real, God, if you really exist, then you will stop me, do you understand?
You will protect my virtue.
He stood up, checked the alarm clock. Two eleven. Passos snored in his narrow bed, his
breath wheezy, the breath of an old man. On the floor between the bed lay a pane of bluish,
cloud-mottled moonlight. McLeod stepped into it, then turned to see his face in the dresser
mirror across from him. He too looked old, gaunt, deliberate, suffused in blue, like a man in a
Picasso painting. Quietly, then, quietly, he climbed out the window and into the night.

He hadn’t expected McLeod to take the news well. He hadn’t expected an instant change, not
hardly. But Passos had expected at least something, some recognition, some acknowledgment of
his vulnerability, or of the fact, at the very least, that it hadn’t been his fault any more than it had
been McLeod’s, that he hadn’t wanted this any more than McLeod had. And yet, and yet, and
yet. Here it was, another six weeks, and nothing they could do about it, so they might as well get
used to it, might as well adapt to the new circumstance with a measure of grace, a measure of
quiet dignity. Passos had stood beside the payphone with his arms open, halfway to an embrace,
and all ready to say, Elder, look, let’s be done with this, when McLeod had fixed him with such a
furious petulant stare that he let go of any hope for reconciliation. At least for tonight. Give him
a little more time. The little child. Give him time to get his tantrums out.
Passos had called all the senior companions in his zone, passing along the transfer news
as his own companion paced back and forth behind the phone like a mental patient, kicking at the
dirt, hurling rocks against property walls, his low steady angry mumble erupting into guttural
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shouts from time to time.
What was that? Elder Sweeney had asked over the phone.
My companion is upset, Passos said.
Is he still your companion?
Yes.
Sweeney half sighed, half laughed, said in English, Poor bastard.
I can understand you, Passos said.
Yeah, well, go easy on him, Passos. He’s having a rough time.
And what about me? I’m not? Huh? He should go easy on me! Elder Sweeney? Elder
Sweeney!
But the line had already gone dead.
And the rest of the night had followed suit. Passos hadn’t even waited for McLeod after
he’d finished his calls, starting back to the apartment alone and becoming aware only a few
meters shy of the front gate that his companion loped behind him, light on his feet now,
ghostlike, in something of a trance, it seemed, as he followed Passos into the front room and took
his seat beside him on the blue plastic chair, unlacing his shoes and removing them, just as
Passos did, but then laying them out in front of his stockinged feet and considering them, for a
long still moment, as if he had been dislocated backward from his shoes by a superhuman blow
and was now trying to make some sense of the fact. Passos had also let go of his plan to try for
companionship prayer that night, the first such prayer in more than two weeks, it would have
been. All his modest ambitions, his planned ententes, had been postponed. Let the little child,
now sullen, sulk. At least for tonight let him alone.
Passos had retired to bed minutes later with the English Bible he’d been reading lately,
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and reading often, on buses even, both for practice and inspiration. It lay in front of him now,
open to 1 Corinthians 14, but it went largely unread as the events of the night, the events of the
last several weeks, kept drawing his mind away into roiled memory. He readjusted the pillow
propped up under his chest, reread several verses continuing on the theme of love, or charity, as
the King James Version had it. He turned a page with great care, wary of tearing it. Most of the
page edges were already brittle, some of them serrated like paper knives, though less from use,
Passos gathered, than from simple serrating brittling Time. He had found the Bible a year or so
earlier in the closet of his second missionary apartment, the book abandoned, apparently, by an
outgoing elder. The missionary must have received it, or inherited it, years earlier—a faded ink
inscription on the front cover read To our son: Herein you shall find the words of Life—and he
must have read it only once in a great while. Passos could find very few fingerprints on the
pages, finger oils, smudges, grease stains, could find no marginalia of any kind anywhere, and
only a few colored pencil underlinings of a few verses, and only the most obvious ones at that.
Genesis 1:27, Amos 3:7, John 3:16 . . . . In chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians the missionary had
underlined Paul’s famous words about the need to put away childish things. Passos tried to recall
the exact language in English, though his effort lacked conviction. He turned back a page and
read the verse in question: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I
thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
He thought of McLeod. How could he not? Passos, after all, had started reading the King
James Bible in earnest after McLeod had taken back, in a childish move, his childish cartoon
book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Passos didn’t miss the book at all. It hadn’t ever really
challenged him, and what little affection he’d had for the story he had since put away, and felt
much better for it.
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He thought of McLeod, too, because of the chapter the verse came in. He happened to
know that 1 Corinthians 13 was McLeod’s favorite section in the Bible. McLeod had volunteered
this information early on in their companionship, in the casual, almost forgetful way that Passos
hadn’t yet come to recognize as false modesty: Oh, 1 Corinthians 13? Love it. Probably my
favorite in all scripture. Just beautiful, beautiful language. Memorized most of it I like it so
much. That’s one place where nobody does it better than the King James.
In retrospect it seemed so appropriate to Passos that McLeod should say that, just that,
and just that way too. Of course he loved 1 Corinthians 13! All the tentative believers did, all the
worldly wise! To their minds Paul said nothing about obedience or dedication or hard work or
actual literal belief except to say Don’t worry about all that, just love. Just love, man. Passos
knew to be wary of such feel-gooders, an apostate group defining love as lawlessness, but why
hadn’t he been warier of McLeod? Why hadn’t he seen through him from the very start? To
think that all the symptoms of all McLeod’s problems, his shallow-roots faith, his arrogance, his
superiority, all of them hid out in the open in that statement. He loved 1 Corinthians 13, he and
every other so-called Christian. And why did he love it? The beautiful language. The
undemanding surface of things! And why was the language beautiful? Why was it the best?
Because a group of aristocratic proto-Americans wrote it! Because some English king hundreds
of years ago rammed it down the throat of half the world, made an imperialist weapon out of it!
Because it trucked in obscurity, in abstruseness, in so-called tradition, in hath instead of have,
doeth instead of does, giveth instead of give, and even charity instead of love. Even the most
unmistakable word got substituted out lest the uninitiated gain admittance to the club, lest they
prove themselves equal to the club members and complicate their designs to continue raping
pillaging plundering exploiting enslaving exploding the uninitiated. But Passos for one
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understood the implicit challenge, and understood also the stakes. He refused to be turned away
by all the thees and thous, the monied diction, the unspoken rules. Turned off, yes, but not turned
away. He had determined to finish the English New Testament at least, and then he could go
back to the New Life Portuguese translation he had read since his early youth, a translation of the
Bible in which Jesus sounded less like an overcareful Englishman, adjusting his powdered wig as
he cast out the devil—Get thee hence, Satan—and more like the Son of God Himself, a
carpenter, a working man, a man of strong words. Get out of here, Satan! Get out of here!
…..
A few minutes later Elder McLeod came into the bedroom. He carried his shoes in his right
hand, placed them at the foot of his standing armoire, a change of pace, this, a change of
precedent, as if he feared that Passos might vandalize the shoes in the night and wanted them
closer to him to protect them. McLeod stood at the dresser, his back to Passos, undoing his tie,
from the movement of his arms, but leaving his shirt and pants on. He half turned from the
dresser as Passos snapped back to the Bible, but sensed out of the corner of his eye a long chilly
stare from his companion, who finally lay down on his bed, on top of the covers. He didn’t move
from that position for the next twenty minutes.
At 10:30 Passos got up out of bed and turned out the bedroom light. He kneeled at his
bedside for personal prayer, tried to ignore his sarcophagal companion behind him, praying in
earnest for a change of heart for both of them, and meaning it, or coming closer to meaning it,
anyway. Then he opened his eyes and the swimming feeling returned, blue light on the blue-
green tile, and the feel of being underwater, a kind of baptism by moonlight, the full moon hung
in the window like a silver Christmas bauble. He had had them growing up, of course, no matter
what he’d told McLeod. At some point he had decided what the pearls were, what moments he
176
wouldn’t share with anyone, and especially not with the McLeods of the world. Most of them
involved his mother. The feeling of her hands around him as he came out of the baptismal water,
the feeling of rebirth, yes, but of reunion more than anything. The feeling of reassurance and
warmth that had never fully left him, that sustained him even now.
And other memories mattered to him, mattered terribly, memories of long-ago times, of
times out of Time, it seemed. One of his earliest Christmases, for instance, all of them there,
even his father, he and Felipe little boys, Tiago still in diapers. The image of a conical green tree
hung with bright shining balls of red glass, green glass, and silver. The green of the tree against
the red of the throw rug underneath it, and the porcelain crèche on a nearby table. Under the tree,
three matching soccer balls, white with black pentagonal tiles. The ball nearly rivaled Tiago in
size, a useless toy for an infant, but many years later Passos felt he understood it: an effort at
relative largesse, this, along with the modest Christmas tree, the new rugged floor, the porcelain
crèche on the table. The husband had work for a change, the wife had her sons, three of them, a
respectable number. She sat beaming on the floor in front of the tree, cross-legged, her hair
swept back, smile wide, her arms extended like a mother hen’s to her anxious impatient chirping
boys. Who could have denied her her right to happiness? Who could have argued that life for her
would ever be anything other than full and new?
Something about this and other memories, granted, seemed too perfect to Passos, too
composed, as if he had consciously idealized the scene, or plucked it from a photograph and
somehow reanimated it. Sometimes they moved in his memory, his mother and his brothers, and
even his father sometimes, as if in stop-time motion, as if in the wash of a strobe light.
Sometimes they even appeared to be moving backward, backward in time, back toward that
Eden, but they never seemed to make it. They never would, of course. The only hope lay
177
forward, lay in the distance in front of him. Passos felt this familiar piece of knowledge, of
testimony, alight on him like a sudden revelation. He felt it move down his body like a warm
draught of drink. It felt like a chance. He looked over at his companion. McLeod lay motionless,
still, atop the covers, like a dead man, and still mostly dressed, from what Passos could tell. He
wore his dark socks, or maybe his feet were in shadow, and his dark pants, and his white shirt,
palely blue in the moonlight. Give him time, then. Give him a little more time. Maybe as early as
tomorrow, Passos thought, as he turned over and started the slow drift toward sleep.

Then the drive-thru. He turned a corner and there it was. McLeod felt it had loomed up too soon.
He felt it should have taken longer to get there. He should have had more time. Did they really
live so close to it? They didn’t. McLeod knew they didn’t. What could explain it, then, except
God? Somehow the Lord had cast a net over the world and hauled it in, drive-thru first, and
dropped it squirming at McLeod’s feet.
He stood a ways off from what he assumed was the walk-in entrance, a small metal door
halfway down the concrete perimeter wall. An automatic gate beside the door opened up to let
cars enter, as two did in the time McLeod stood waiting, a young Jonah, now, counting his
doubts under low luminescent clouds, feeling the cool night air prick his skin, insinuate itself
between the gaps of his white button-down shirt. This was really the only style of presentable
shirt in McLeod’s wardrobe. He had needed to feel presentable. He’d left his tie behind, that
said, and his missionary nametag, as well as his undergarments and any form of identification. In
his pocket he carried a hundred reais, and twenty American dollars for good measure.
McLeod looked around and saw no one on the street, but he couldn’t be sure no one was
178
watching him, and soon felt embarrassed enough at the mere thought of being watched that he
started moving. It acted like a cattle prod, this threat of embarrassment, it acted like an eternal
goad to action. He realized, too, that he was mumbling under his breath now, Walk, walk, keep
walking, walk, and so on all the way to the metal door in the perimeter wall. He paused there,
took a series of deep breaths, arranged his face in an expression of nonchalance, and stepped in
off the street.
The first thing he saw was a dark-haired woman in a tollbooth of sorts, the windows
yellow against the darkness. Beyond the booth stretched a low-lying series of curtained stalls. He
thought of a row of outsized voting booths. Or a stable. He took another step and startled at the
sudden crunch of gravel underfoot. The entire bottom half of this world lay in an inch or so of
loose rock, somewhat blue in the moonlight, like hailstones, or the floor of a fish tank. The sound
caught the attention of the dark-haired woman in the tollbooth. She looked up to see McLeod
hesitating, cocked her head. Then McLeod strode forward with sudden feigned purpose.
Good evening, he said, smiling.
And to you, she said, cracking a smile of her own. She looked thirtyish, maybe fortyish.
Or a very young fifty. The skin of her face, stretched smooth across her cheekbones, bore no
signs of makeup, and only a few lines. They gathered at the corners of her large eyes and mouth.
She wore a simple blue tank top. Her arms were firm. Her cleavage ample.
You know I could charge you for this, she said.
What? McLeod said, looking up.
I’m kidding.
Oh.
You here with someone or you looking for someone?
179
I guess I’m looking.
Okay. How much time do you want?
How much time?
How much time. You pay upfront.
McLeod gripped the narrow counter protruding from the tollbooth. He looked at his feet
as if he’d dropped something. Then he bent down a minute later as if to pick something up.
Sorry, he said. Sorry. He felt his head go empty of all moral concerns. The very notion of
morality seemed foreign to him now, useless. Only practical considerations, cordiality, proper
procedure, the overriding desire to avoid embarrassment, only these things clamored in his mind.
What was the language for such an occasion anyway? What was the Portuguese word for escort?
For prostitute? Which was better? Escort sounded high end, a whiff of snobbery even, but it also
sounded euphemistic, too careful. Maybe prostitute drew less attention to itself. In any case, he
didn’t know either word in Portuguese. Or he didn’t think he did. He couldn’t be sure. The only
word he could bring to mind, for all his striving, came from his reading of the Book of Mormon
in Portuguese. He had needed more time. He didn’t even have a condom. He wouldn’t know how
to use one if he had one. What was he doing here? Was it too late to back out? Of course it
wasn’t. He could just turn around and leave, flee like Joseph from Potiphar’s wife.
How much time? the woman said again. She seemed to be losing her patience.
Look, McLeod said. I’m not from around here.
I noticed, she said. You want fifteen minutes? Thirty minutes? How much time?
You mean with a harlot, right?
She paused. For the first time she really took McLeod in, up and down. His close cropped
hair, freckles, nervous smile, his overformal attire. Where are you from? she said.
180
The United States.
I’ll give you fifteen minutes for fifty American dollars.
I only have twenty, McLeod said. I have a hundred reais, though.
He produced the roll of bills from his pocket and passed it across the little counter. The
woman took it and stuffed it in the back pocket of her short jean skirt.
Okay, she said. Follow me.
You? he said.
I’m your harlot, she said.
McLeod followed the woman into a dim-lit room and watched her peel of her tank top
with both hands. She did it in one fluid motion, more efficient than seductive. Still, he thought in
that very moment how he couldn’t now unwatch it, even if he wanted to, he couldn’t undo this,
worlds without end.
The woman stood at the foot of the bed and unclasped her bra. She let it fall away and
caught it and placed it with the tank top on the small lamp table behind her. The room, the stall,
could fit little else: the table, the lamp, the bed. The lamp shed a harsh yellow light that cast half-
moon shadows beneath the woman’s pendulous breasts. They contoured down just so at the
nipple. McLeod thought of tiny hooked noses.
Aren’t you going to undress? the woman said. She moved to the side of the bed and stood
above McLeod, wearing the jean skirt and nothing else, looking down upon him, it must have
been, with the look of a puzzled god. McLeod for his turn sat there, shaking, trying to will
himself hard. Nothing. These were the first pair of breast ever presented for his touch. They were
large and full. The undersides hung in shadow. A network of faint purple veins branched out
from the nipples.
181
Why are you laughing? the woman said.
I’m not, McLeod said. I’m not laughing.
Why are you crying? the woman said.
…..
He wandered the streets of Carinha for the rest of the night. The big moon hovered and sank in a
haze of thin, unconsummated clouds. He had expected to see many people in the streets, but
there were only a few. He felt hopeless and young and alone, and his thoughts returned, in spite
of himself, to Joseph of Egypt, and the Sunday School lessons he’d received as an early teen, and
the day his father followed him at a distance to the woods where McLeod kept a Ziploc-ed
Playboy. Then the moment he came crashing through the woods like a warrior god. And McLeod
holding the magazine in one hand, himself in the other, but just holding it, not knowing what to
do besides. What great wickedness is this? his father said, an allusion to Joseph with Potipahar’s
wife, and McLeod recognized it, even in that moment of duress, the words shouted at the
unnamed woman before Joseph feld her advances. How can I do this great wickedness? he said,
and now his father had ripped the magazine from his hand, holding it with thumb and forefinger
like a reeking thing. Young man, Dad said, but his voice faltered as McLeod struggled to cover
himself, to get back into his jeans. He couldn’t get his pants up fast enough, and he was crying
now. Get out of here, he shouted, get the goddamn fuck out of here! He finally managed to fold
the erection into his pants and stood up, crying in earnest now. Oh Dad, he said, oh Dad, just
leave. But something had changed in his father’s bearing. Dad was leaning down to hug him, the
offending Playboy still in his hand, but instead of receiving the embrace he punched hit away. He
punched his father, the first and last time in his life, a glancing ineffectual blow to the chest, and
then he tore out of the woods with his father calling after, the pine boughs whipping his face and
182
neck, and he kept running, running and running, his breath ragged, until he reached Memorial
Park at the center of town, the park with the pond where he and Dad used to feed the ducks in
springtime, but now it was fall. He spent the night on a park bench in the dark and the cold and
in the morning, more tired than he’d ever been, he returned home. His father had stayed up, too,
all night, worrying about him, angry, he would tell McLeod later, but angry at himself more than
anything. Dad must have stood at the bay window as McLeod appeared at the edge of the yard,
must have seen him while he was yet a great ways off, like the father in the story of the prodigal
son, for he ran out into the front yard and fell on McLeod’s neck and kissed him, and said he was
sorry, and he loved him, but McLeod knew better. He was the prodigal now and things had
changed forever.
…..
Soon enough the rows of teeth on top of the walls started casting their sharp silhouettes against
the fading night. McLeod watched the dark drain from the sky in the reverse order that it had
filled in the night before, first the edges, then the middle, then the top. At the first pink
underblush of the clouds he turned toward home, which loomed up even faster than the drive-
thru had.
He walked right through the front door, not caring if Passos heard him. It was 5:30 a.m., a
full hour before the mission rules got them up. It was still mostly dark. The air through open
windows was warm. The first sporadic chirps of birds outside. McLeod took off his shoes and
placed them back under the blue chair, then he padded across the tiny entryway that doubled as a
living room. He reached for the bedroom door handle, stopped. He turned around and considered
the room for a long, still minute. He switched on the overhead light in the entryway, but slow,
slow. He didn’t want the click to sound.
183

For the moment he existed in that liminal space between subconscious and conscious, dreaming
and waking. Something had drawn Passos upward toward the surface such that he felt he could
almost control the dream, as if he were an actor in a scene he had written himself, and yet he
worked to stay asleep so he could learn what would happen next. He and his mother walked hand
in hand in a green wood, a winding trail of the kind he had seen in pictures, or in the south of the
mission, but not in the northeast, not in Recife, the trail gone soft from accumulated pine needles,
and somewhere a stream running down among rocks. The water burbled in a playful vein that
seemed to belie the soberness in his mother’s voice.
If you go there, of course you’d need to take your brothers too.
Of course, Mom.
They look up to you.
It’s not forever anyway.
You have to promise me you won’t forget about them.
Mom, come on.
Promise me. You’re a good boy, but promise me.
I promise you.
You are a good boy, you know. A good man.
The trail widened out and the water slid away and the dappled light through the trees
undappled, got steady and bright, bright enough to fill up the vast green field that opened up in
front of them, the trail feeding into it like a tributary into an ocean. In the far corner of the field, a
lone tree. They closed most of the distance to it in a matter of steps. His mother stopped short,
184
though, picked up a windfallen mango, and sent it flying the rest of the way. The green oblong
fruit described a rainbow arc until it knocked against a low bough with a hollow sound, dropping
what sounded like pinecones and loosing a shiver of white iridescent fuzz. The fuzz, snowy
scrim, unpdrafted and eddied on the breeze. It finally settled on the ground around the tree,
coating its exposed, prodigious roots.
Passos cocked his head. What kind of tree is that?
You never played Brazilian Snowstorm, meu filho?
I don’t think so.
Why, it’s a Snowstorm Tree. Here.
She led them to the squat twisted tree base. Against the trunk, its bark gray and papery,
his mother put out her hand to steady herself. She reached down and retrieved from between two
roots a small green pod, cleanly burst down the middle, with its white fibrous insides showing.
These sides peel back, his mother explained, until it’s just the fluffy seeds, you see? Then she
lofted the pod straight up into the canopy of dark impenetrable green. Some leaves wafted down
before another cloud of white, like an annunciation. Passos’ mother bent down for more pods
and he followed her lead, collecting a handful and unloading it, one by one, into the tree. The
snow shook down now in successive waves. It fell on his hair, his neck. He could almost feel it.
It tickled. And in the dream it made him chuckle. He was chuckling with the sensation, and then
suddenly he was laughing. And then suddenly, boyishly, he was spinning around, putting his
arms out, gathering speed, spinning, making the white stuff coat him, making it swirl around
him, making it whirlwind in the darkening air. Over the whoosh of his movement he heard his
mother laughing too, a bright clear girlish laugh. They laughed in chorus, mother and son, and
hardly knew why they laughed, but still they did it, as if in defiance of the dream, dimming now,
185
darkening, the surface of it approaching in spite of his best efforts to stay under forever, to live
there and breathe there and escape the waking world of waking sights and waking sounds.
…..
The bedside clock said 5:28. He became aware of footsteps crossing the courtyard outside, then
the key in the front door, the door opening, shutting. Passos jerked into an adrenal breathless
trance that breached the chrysalis of sleep once and for good. He heard steps in the front room,
but unhurried, ambling. He listened again, leaned his ear against the wall. He heard the soft clap
of shoe sole rubber on linoleum. What kind of thief burglarized a house in bare feet? What kind
unlocked the door, for that matter? He looked past the clock across the room for the first time.
McLeod’s bed lay flat and empty, still made up. He had either got up early to study, something
he hadn’t done in weeks, and never this early, anyway, or he had left the house in the night and
had just now returned. Passos thought of the shoes at the foot of McLeod’s armoire last night, the
full attire he wore to bed. And hadn’t Passos heard the heavy clatter of the front gate just now?
Wasn’t that what had finally brought him out of the dream? Just then a strip of yellow light came
on under the door. Passos listened again for footsteps.
For a moment the glowing band seemed surreal, and so too the thought of McLeod
leaving the apartment. Passos rubbed hard at his eyes, sitting up now, trying to make sure he had
left the dreaming state. But even to wonder was to have left it already, and as the scales fell away
Passos felt sure that his companion had indeed left the house, alone, and in the night, a violation
of the rules. Exactly when? To where? To what purpose, nefarious or innocuous? It didn’t really
matter, did it? Passos held a trump card now.
That he had come to this realization so soon made him, once again, feel somewhat venal,
calculating, especially on the heels of his dream. You’re a good boy, but promise me, his mother
186
had said. It had the force of reality as he recalled it. That but. But what were his other options?
Should he pretend he hadn’t heard his companion come in the door at five in the morning?
Should he turn a blind, uncaring eye? In the event of serious misconduct, serious sin, potentially,
a missionary did best to turn the matter over to the presiding priesthood authority. President
Mason, in this case. Perhaps Passos had been handed a gift, perhaps they both had. It might not
even be too late for a change of transfer plans, Passos to the office and McLeod to another
companionship, or home early, or however the president saw fit to handle him. It could be as
simple as a simple phone call, an apology to president for calling so early in the morning, an
expression of concern for his junior companion, whose misbehaviors had finally gone beyond his
ability to control or, really, to help. McLeod needed more.
He heard footsteps again in the front room. The short scrape of a chair readjusting under
McLeod’s weight. What was he doing out there? Why had he left the apartment? What had he
done? But of course Passos couldn’t exactly go strike up a conversation. To even go out into the
front room now would be to acknowledge that he knew, would be to tip his hand. Better to make
a private phone call to the president, keep McLeod at a respectful distance from the payphone,
explain the situation and give them both the out they wanted. He didn’t need McLeod’s parents,
anyway. He needed a recommendation from president, a student visa, and the rest, he felt sure,
could take care of itself. And of course he would remember his brothers. He would bring Nana
over too, if she could ever be persuaded, or if not he would return after four years, maybe less, an
American degree in tow, and the world that much wider for him. Passos knew enough to build
his house on two foundations, the spiritual and the secular. He knew his mother would be proud
of him. He was a good boy, she’d said. What did she mean by that? A good boy, a good man,
but. But.
187
Passos got out of bed and prayed and at the end of it had changed his mind. It was as if
the Lord had heard his questions to his mother just now, had had access to his thoughts, which of
course He had. Give McLeod a little time. Wasn’t that what he had decided for him just last
night, just a few short hours earlier? It implied a chance, a chance at explanation, at least. If
Passos expected the same from President, if he expected the same from BYU and, ultimately,
from life, then he owed a chance to McLeod too. This way, besides, he could still call the
president if he needed to—it might entail more complication, but he could do it—and he could
also satisfy his curiosity, growing by the second. Where had he gone? How and why? What was
he doing out now? And what was that noise, that tiny insistent tapping, scratching, tapping,
scratching, like mice in the walls. It drove Passos to his feet.

The bare ceiling bulb cast overlapping shadows back on itself in a geometric pattern, a sort of
flowering out from the center. The light, as always, gave little light. Darkness clung to the
corners of the room. To the left of the front door against the wall sat the two blue plastic chairs.
Beneath the far chair Elder Passos’ worn black shoes sagged in silence. McLeod remembered
now a quip of his companion’s—in the first week or so, it must have been—about how very well
traveled his shoes were. His soles had been truck tires at one point. I’ll bet I’ve logged a
thousand miles in these, he’d said, holding up the shoes, clapping soles together, sending up a
histrionic cloud of dust.
McLeod recalled the scene in his mind now, and it felt like a scene. It lacked the texture
of lived experience. It felt somehow scripted, contrived, like the moment he stood in the middle
188
of now. He stood at the threshold of the entryway/living room, framing it for memory’s sake, for
posterity’s. He was about to enact a course of action he had decided on an abrupt few minutes
ago, a course that he already imagined, grandly, would restore his companionship to good faith,
set the tone for a better, no, a triumphal end to his mission, and trigger God’s permanent grace in
his heart and cure his unbelief. He had had this sense of performance before, of personal history
making in situ. The time he zeroed in on a little girl with big hungry eyes. Gaping eyes, McLeod
had thought. Gaping is how he would describe them. He bought an ice cream cone and motioned
for the girl to come over and help herself. She moved to the cone and took it from his hand and
looked at him flatly and walked away. This he would revised, he had decided, into a callow little
smile and a half limp. Let her limp away. Or the time he stayed up half the night writing his
homecoming talk in his head. He hadn’t been six months into the mission at the time. The talk
would begin: I wasn’t six months into my mission when I started writing this homecoming talk
in my head . . .
And now he stood in the entryway/living room, doing it again. The room languished in a
dim yellow light. Shadows grew like fungi in the corners. The air felt warm, the floor cool
underfoot. He was a twenty-one-year-old Mormon missionary in Brazil, an elder. He was at deep
and intractable odds, it seemed, with God, and now with his Brazilian companion, asleep in the
very next room. In a gesture of charity—what did Paul say? It never faileth?—he would shine his
companion’s worn and dusty shoes. He would cross the room and sit in the blue plastic chair and
take up the first of the shoes, as he presently did. He stuck his left hand into the mouth, made a
shoe horn of his fist, and brushed the dirt clods off the sole sides with his hand, removing the big
stuff preparatory to the thorough treatment: the old toothbrush and the tin of shoe black and the
small felt buffing rag. He took out his pen, tip retracted, and worked at stubborn tracks of dirt
189
crusted into the grooves along the side of the shoes, scratching at the dirt in the groove, then
tapping at it, then scratching it again, and so on around the shoe. He had nearly finished this
process when he looked up at the sound of Passos’ bare feet slapping the linoleum floor. He
looked at McLeod, squinting. He rubbed the dark from his eyes, still squinting.
What the hell are you doing? he said. His first words to McLeod in more than two weeks.
They caught him off guard. He felt waylaid, tricked.
Is that a pen? Passos said. Hey! What are you doing to my shoe?
McLeod opened his mouth to say something but only a wordless moan came out. It
flapped up like a threatened bird in the space between them, the space that Passos started closing
as he advanced across the room, as McLeod instinctively adjusted his grip on Passos’ shoe,
cocking it back at his ear, as Passos hesitated a beat, then rushed into the airborne shoe, nose-
first. The collision made a sharp, wet thwock. The shoe fell to the ground and Passos followed it
and McLeod saw dark blood forming up in his companion’s nostrils. He looked dazed, blinking
rapidly, touching his fingers to his nose, coming to a number of realizations. McLeod stood
behind the chair, meanwhile, crouched in a wrestler’s stance. He felt the other shoe gripped tight
in his right hand, and he came to realizations of his own. This was not the way it was supposed to
go. This was the little girl taking him in flatly, walking away instead of limping. This was God
resurrecting Himself just long enough to throw Jonah to the whale, then dying again, and dying
for good, consigning Jonah to the dark reeking bowels forever.
This was his bloodied companion suddenly lunging for the fallen shoe. This was McLeod
rushing forward and kicking it out of his hand. This was McLeod falling astride Passos’ chest
and feeling his knee instead, feeling it drive up hard as beam into his groin. This was the airless
howl I made, the feeling of drowning and drowning, of pain like the end of the world. This was
190
Passos falling astride McLeod’s chest, trapping his arms under his bony knees, and landing hard
stiff repetitive punches on McLeod’s nose, jaw, temples, eyes. This was the anticipated moment
of charity—of differences set aside, of pardons proffered and received—failing miserably,
failing finally, failing harder with every blow.

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator McIlvain, Ryan (author)

Core Title The moral basement: investigations into ethics and irony in contemporary fiction

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 04/21/2019

Defense Date 03/01/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Fiction,irony and sincerity in ""high genre"" works,Novels,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Handley, William (committee chair), Bender, Aimee (committee member), Finlay, Stephen (committee member)

Creator Email rmcilvai@usc.edu,ryan.mcilvain@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-364583

Unique identifier UC11258063

Identifier etd-McIlvainRy-5262.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-364583 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-McIlvainRy-5262.pdf

Dmrecord 364583

Document Type Dissertation

Rights McIlvain, Ryan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA