News |

CASTING A COLD EYE ACROSS OUR ALIENATED CULTURE

Among the Dead

By Michael Tolkin

Morrow, 256 pages, $20

Like Camus’ “The Stranger,” this is a harrowing novel of alienation. Michael Tolkin’s “Among the Dead” brilliantly and chillingly explores the interior life of a man estranged from his work, family and society. But Frank Gale is also the ultimate product of this society, with its emphasis on personal gratification and fantasy fulfillment. He is the monster among us, but we’ve provided the current jolting him to life.

As the novel opens, Frank is composing a letter to his wife, Anna, confessing to an affair with another woman that he will have ended by the time she reads it. He plans to give Anna the letter while they are on a trip to Mexico with their 3-year-old daughter, Madeleine. He fantasizes that Anna will forgive him and they will rejuvenate their weathered marriage.

Although Frank’s plans involve elaborate arrangements for others, they are all about him. He may be the most purely self-absorbed character in modern literature. Tolkin is deft at showing this: “He was thirsty and went back down to the kitchen. He drank from a bottle of grape juice, leaving enough for Madeleine. He wanted more and drank it, with the excuse that in the morning she could have milk or water, and her mother could buy her juice at the airport.”

He packs his letter in his suitcase, leaving it at home while he goes off to break up with his mistress over a lunch that takes longer than he expected. When he sees he will be late for their flight, Frank calls Anna at the airport, tells her to take Madeleine and go on ahead, he’ll catch up with them on the next plane down.

As he waits for the 6 o’clock flight, the news begins to drift in; the plane has crashed in San Diego. All those on board, and many on the ground, are dead. It is Frank’s golden moment. After a lifetime of ineptitude, of being overlooked by the world, he is now the man who missed the flight that killed his wife and daughter, a survivor in two senses and of spectacular dimension.

Tolkin is extremely skillful at creating a convincing character in Frank Gale, while twisting us around in our sentiments toward him. Our disdain at his early reaction to the crash-he wants to have sex with the airline representative-turns to revulsion as Frank is thrilled “with what I can now do with my life. I can go to islands now, with women who are better looking than my wife” and wonders if his story would be good movie material.

Later, we come to pity him as he desperately uses his tragedy to search for authentic experience, to actually feel something instead of going through its motions.

In the end, experience breaks him. His letter is discovered and plastered across the media. He is arrested going through the wreckage of the plane. Frightened of the notoriety that looks to be coming his way in place of the fame he’d dreamed of, he loses control of his bowels in front of his parents, creates a scene at the memorial service, alienates everyone he was once haughtily alienated from.

Tolkin, who also wrote the novel “The Player,” from which the recent Robert Altman movie was made, has focused his cynical gaze on one man in this book, but this cold eye is really cast more widely across a culture in which people have become so detached from anything real that they need coaching to begin to find it. After the grief counselors have had a go at the survivors, one of them tells Frank, “I guess we’re still in the anger stage of all this. We weren’t in denial very long.”