Batshit Book Club: Shelley’s Heart by Charles McCarry (Final)

Last week I discussed the point at which I lost all hope for a redeeming resolution in Shelley’s Heart. The book had been so bad, in such a narrow way, for so long, that it exploded my explorer’s optimism; but in that explosion a piece of shrapnel must’ve gotten lodged in some extremity because, somehow, even as I neared the long-awaited End, I began to think I believed that the plot would, despite everything, at least close out in a memorably bad way.

Well.

At the End of the Tunnel, a Wall

After 500+ pages of political thriller watered down with low-effort spy fiction, of absurd digressions, irrelevant sci-fi bombshells, reactionary political fantasia, of Slim and Sturdi Eve, Franklin Mallory, Zarah Christopher, and the rest of the cavalcade, McCarry closes out his faecum opus with a downward arpeggio of anticlimaxes, off-stage resolutions, and sanctimonious narratorial hand-waves.

There are artistic, deliberate ways in which books can be left unfinished. But you have to earn it, and Shelley’s Heart doesn’t earn it. A book as needlessly prolix asthis, that seemingly cannot help itself from dashing off on absurd digressions, or from underlining for the dozenth time its author’s specific crochets & hangups, cannot now be terse when the time comes to pay what even the most basic, plainest stories owe. I’ve seen fucking cave paintings with better story structure than this.

Of two of the main architects of the stolen election that kicks off the entire book, McCarry says:

It was not yet known what would happen to Julian and Rose MacKenzie.

That’s it! These are characters who have had whole chapters, whole sequences devoted to them, by the way, and they get dropped like toys. Others important characters don’t even get mentioned at the end: how about Alfonso Olmedo C., J.L.S. McGraw, Emily Hubbard, Carlisle Blackstone?

The reason, of course, is that McCarry didn’t know how to bring his diarrheal avalanche to a stop – not without expending another 100 pages at least. This is the inevitable, gnarly, particolored pileup that happens when you send so many clown cars in the same direction. And far be it from me to wish that Shelley’s Heart were a page longer than it is, but the simple fact is that, even if the novel’s general verbal indulgence is one of its chiefest flaws, this final trailing-off seems like a dereliction of authorial duty. This is not artistically acceptable vagueness. This is “I threw so much shit at the wall and none of its sticking oh God how can I sneak out of the house before anybody sees the mess I’ve made?”

Showdown at the Not OK Corral; or, Lucy & the Boy-Girl Machine Pistol

The courtroom-constitutional drama ends abruptly. The seemingly central question of the presidential succession following a stolen election are resolved lamely, tamely. These tepid sequences are the last fossils of the political drama this book, at one time, seemed like it would be about, but at some point McCarry decided he was more interested in the espionage and spy stuff, which has been encroaching on the core of the book for at least 100 pages, and whose mascot is Zarah, who you know is McCarry’s favorite because she gets to waste the two evil lesbian terrorists in a super cool shootout at the end that, in comparison to the final bits of political wrangling, is positively lavish in its production value.

Zarah, along with Franklin Mallory’s favorite boy-girl security people, Lucy and Wiggins (Wiggins!), end up discovering that Slim and Sturdi Eve (if you forgot: lesbian ecolawyer terrorists) were behind the assassination, early in the book, of Mallory’s last romantic partner, Susan Grant. Up until now everyone assumed the assassination was the work of a terrorist organization called The Eye of Gaza, and that Susan was unfortunate collateral damage in an attempt on Mallory’s life. But no, as it turns out, Slim and Sturdi, being radical liberals, purposely killed Grant because they discovered she was pregnant with Mallory’s child, and the thought of his political line being carried forward into a new generation was unbearable.

Once they put all this together, Zarah decides that she will pretend she’s pregnant with Mallory’s child, so that the deadly duo come after her. Which they immediately do, because when it comes to criminal acumen Slim and Sturdi are basically on the level of, like, Team Rocket. In her genuine Terrorist Caftan, Slim approaches Zarah, but Lucy intercepts her; she had been waiting in a nearby lake, underwater, like a ninja in an old anime [ellipses mine]:

Half an hour earlier, Lucy had swum across the lake underwater, her snorkel tube creating the beautiful ripple Zarah had seen from the clearing…Now Lucy saw the brilliant flash through the lake’s surface and rose to her knees out of the shallows in which she had been lying…Training had eliminated the need for thought – even, as Zarah had foreseen, for intuition. Holding her 6mm all-vinyl♂↔♀-issue machine pistol in both hands at the end of rigidly outthrust arms, Lucy fired a burst of 12 mercury-weighted, vinyl-tipped, soft copper rounds into the heart and lungs of the person who had killed Susan Grant.

Contra my own directives with Batshit Book Club, I’ve summarized the plot here, but I needed to in order to highlight that this book’s most notable, longest climactic scene involves the Tom Clancian tactical takedown of an ecolawyer-couple-turned-liberal-domestic-terrorist-cell. It’s all taken out very seriously, with a po-faced, unearned nobility, but McCarry, does allow himself to point out, one last time, that Slim is the hot lesbian in the couple, even in death:

With her pistol pointed at the corpse’s head, Lucy folded back the hood of the caftan. A shining cascade of hair spilled onto the damp soil. The face was quite beautiful in its wide-eyed astonishment, and to Zarah she looked very much as she had when she was enticing Attenborough, like an actress summoning up a former self to make the character she was playing believable.

Awkward Envoi

The final scene between those two icons of tedium, Franklin Mallory and Zarah Christopher, is laughable, both for bathos and brevity. It may be the shortest chapter in the whole book, occupying less than a page. Here’s the meat of it [ellipsis here belongs to McCarry]:

Zarah said, “I want to say this to you, Franklin. I wish your child had been saved.”

“So do I,” Mallory said. “How I wish you’d stay. It’s very hard to accept that there’s no chance of having the child I’ve waited for all my life.”

“I thought you knew that already,” Zarah said.

“Not in quite the impossible way I do at this moment. I’ve never thanked you. What you did, seeing the truth, seeing the obvious, walking into the woods that way and…willing your death not to happen.” He paused. “I just wish you didn’t want so badly to be”- he searched for word – “apart.”

“It runs in the family,” said Zarah. “Goodbye.”

Just the word, not the smallest gesture. She simply left. Watching her walk down the hill, so singular and uncaptured, he fell into a reverie, wishing for a child in which they could both go on living.

There are many things McCarry does wrong in Shelley’s Heart, but you gotta admit, perhaps never before in literature (certainly not since Ayn Rand) has an author so indelibly captured the nuance, poetry, and nobility of Libertarian Romance…

“The best novel ever written about life in high-stakes Washington”

I’m sitting here reading Jonathan Yardley’s 1995 review of Shelley’s Heart and relearning a lesson I somehow often let myself forget, which is that corporate journalists should never be trusted, on any topic. Check out the opener to Yardley’s review:

Not to mince words: Shelley’s Heart is an amazing book. The eighth novel by a writer who to date has been filed away in the pigeonhole of political suspense and/or spy fiction, Shelley’s Heart at once stays within the conventions of genre and soars above them. It is a work of immense ambition that comes astonishingly close to achieving everything toward which it aspires. In so doing it rudely elbows its way into the precinct of “serious” fiction, rendering by comparison almost everything that now passes as such pallid, lifeless and jejune.

And later:

McCarry’s publisher does him no service when it claims that “the intricate, intelligent plot and writing invite comparison with Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent and Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey’s 7 Days in May.” Perhaps that comparison will lure readers whose tastes do not venture beyond the best-seller lists, but Shelley’s Heart is to those two novels as “King Lear” is to “The Sound of Music” and “Barefoot in the Park.” The Drury and the Knebel-Bailey are hack entertainments; McCarry, even though he dares not venture beyond genre, has written a work of literature. Its plot is, as advertised, complex and smart.

As a reminder, Yardley is talking here about a book whose main villains include a pair of fanatical liberal ecolawyers thatassassinate pregnant women so they can’t give birth to conservative children. A book in which the environmental movement somehow resulted in feral animals running wild all over the country. In which, somehow, there are not just one, but multiple “radicals” in Congress.

Personally, if I were Frederick Exley, I would want someone else to have written my biography.

Paul Christopher, Play Us Out

Shameful admission: when I closed Shelley’s Heart, I felt an acute desire to find and read The Tears of Autumn. Tears is McCarry’s much earlier, most famous book, the second book to feature his series character Paul Christopher, father of the illimitable Zarah Christopher.

As a reader, as a person, really, I’m highly susceptible to enthusiasm. A habit I wish I’d never developed, one so deeply ingrained at this point that it’s less habit and more an element of character, is this endless hunger for reading blurbs, write-ups, reviews, recommendations, due to some unkillable and childlike belief that they mean anything.

It was Otto Penzler’s and Jonathan Yardley’s praise for McCarry that led me here in the first place – specifically Penzler’s, mystery/thriller maven that he is. And despite slogging through this 500-page scourge, and despite what I literally just said about not trusting journalists, I don’t know if I can rest without giving McCarry’s supposed masterpiece a try. Maybe Shelley’s Heart is the freak in an otherwise solid oeuvre…

So I did find a copy, and I have dipped into it. Not enough to render a verdict, but the forecast, based on these early pages, is a grim one. First paragraph and McCarry’s, um, eccentric approach to gender relations is on full display:

Paul Christopher had been loved by two women who could not understand why he stopped writing poetry. Cathy, his wife, imagined that some earlier girl had poisoned his gift. She became hysterical in bed, believing that she could draw the secret out of his body and into her own, as poison is sucked from a snakebite. Christopher did not try to tell her the truth; she had no right to know it and could not have understood it. Cathy wanted nothing except a poem about herself. She wanted to watch their lovemaking in a sonnet. Christopher could not write it. She punished him with lovers and went back to America.

And, a bit later on, we get an actual couplet from the days when Christopher wrote poetry. I think he made the right choice giving it up:

Desire is not a thing that stops with death,

but joins the corpse and fetus breath to breath…

Batshit Book Club: Shelley’s Heart by Charles McCarry (Parts 6 & 7)

Today in Charlotte it’s hot out, but cloudy, in this way you see all the time in northeast Ohio, but later in the year, in high summer: the sky filled with clouds, lit from behind by the sun, diffusing that light into an even brightness that makes their edges vanish, so the seams between cloud & cloud can’t be seen, and from edge to edge it’s just a featureless silverwhite sheet, stretched like a canvas over its frame, taut, tremulous, lambent; a faceless, close sky that could threaten rain, or suffocating heat, could be a precursor to some greater storm or lead to nothing at all – the clouds could even break up, like bread in water, and drift, mellow & soft over soft breezes, unspooled into high drifts of cirrus among daubs of blue sky.

I’d rather write about the weather than Shelley’s Heart. I’d rather write about the things I see on my walks or 17^th century penal law or the Stalked by My Doctor filmic quintet. I’d rather go walking in a deep humid woods through a haze of alien pollens, & come back with a sore throat, watering eyes, and a regal mantilla’s worth of spider web clinging to my clothes, and sunburn. I really, really don’t want to write about Shelley’s Heart.

Oh Dear

Batshit Book Club has bit me in the ass. Our first sally into the world of bad books and immediately my soul is drained. I envisioned BSBC as an outlet for my fascination with interestingly bad commercial fiction, books that, while a failure by the standard metrics, manage through the unique texture of their badness to offer special things to the reader, singular things, worthwhile things that, while not the rarified artistic treasures of High Literature, still have much intrinsic aesthetic value. Hell, whole subcultures exist to explore this concept in other art forms: MST3K & bad movies, or Japanese kusoge culture, which has been a part of games appreciation since its very early days.

There’s a bewitching vibrancy to bad art, and that vibrancy comes from a place very much connected to the sources from which great art draws its power. Bad Art is still art because, like great Great Art, it reaches for the extremes; deliberately or no, it’s exploring hinterlands, fringes, those regions on the edge where the particular falls off (or rises up) into the universal. Any honest creative endeavor is a wild shot, and the arc & ambition of any shots is bracing even if it ultimately lands in the swamp.

But Bad Art and being bad are two separate things, and it’s the gap between those two concepts in which I find myself stuck with Shelley’s Heart. Shelley’s Heart is not bad art, it’s just bad. On a strictly technical, Strunk & White level, it is actually better-written than much Bad Art, but these mostly-adequate, acceptable sentences articulate only the stupidest shit, with the straightest of faces and an infuriating belief in its own importance. If McCarry was a flamboyantly bad writer this would be a better book.

My advice to anyone curious about starting Shelley’s Heart would be: don’t start it. If you absolutely must, just read the first 100 pages and you’ll have experienced the meager best the book can offer, and had a laugh at its obsessions and tastlessnesses before those things recur to the point that they threaten to drive you insane.

Gourmet Club Stupid Books Course

Last week when Batshit Book Club convened, ostensibly to discuss parts 6 & 7 (the same sections that are nominally the topic of this post), the discussion turned quickly into an all-purpose wild hunt therapy session. Basically, we hung the book on a hook and beat the shit out of it, slinging vitriol at any questionable element that came to mind – and Shelley’s Heart is basically all questionable elements.

“I’m ready to call it now,” I said then. “Y’know I was hoping against hope that there’d be something to justify the bullshit in this thing. But like there’s no way this is going to get better. We’ve got, what? less than 150 pages to go? There’s NO way in hell that ANYTHING in those 150 pages could justify the trouble it took to get to them.”

I said too that I dreaded having to write about the many things in Sections 6 & 7 that are tasteless, stupid, or both – the crown jewel of such things being Zarah Christopher’s insane condemnation of Slim Eve’s, the ecolawyer’s, molestation at the hands of alcoholic Speaker of the House R. Tucker Attenborough, in a scene discussed last time around, the worst dinner scene in all of literature. Early on in Part 6, Sturdi, Slim’s partner, brings it up to Zarah in preparation for a law suit against Attenborough and Zarah, in her role as McCarry mouthpiece no. 2, says some reprehensible shit:

“As a woman, you must have seen how distressed she was,” Sturdi said, moving closer.

Zarah stepped back. “No, that’s not what I saw,” she said. “Your client provoked and flirted with Attenborough from the first moment of the evening. She was wearing a very short dress for a lawyer escorted by the Chief Justice of the United States. She was in a state of almost feverish excitement; at first I thought she might be on drugs. And when suddenly, very suddenly, she leaped to her feet and lifted her skirt to display the damage to her clothing – damage that could not possibly have been done in one single grope by the sharpest fingernail in the world – she was obviously in a state of sexual arousal.”

“ ‘A state of sexual arousal’?” Sturdi could scarcely bring herself to repeat the words. “How could such a thing be obvious?”

Zarah was calm, watchful. She replied, “Sense of smell, Ms. Eve.”

There isn’t any real need to underline how revolting this is, but let’s talk about how fucking weird it is. Deep in the thickets of an overlong book I believed, at some point, would be some kind of thriller about high-level politics, I have to listen to characters say shit like to this each other – and they’re all always saying shit like this to each other, and the narrator says shit like this to you all the time. It’s not always this gross, but it is always this stupid. The characters are all morbid dorks and the author seems to take every absurd thing they say or do with utmost literary seriousness.

As an explorer of worthy trash, it behooves you to expect weird/bad elements; but you do so with the understanding that they will not impede, will actually in some ways enhance, the pleasures of the text as a whole. But the opposite is the case here. A fundamentally good political thriller with tasteless characters could be fun in a schlocky way, but Shelley’s Heart is not a fundamentally good political thriller. I’d argue that, at heart, it’s not even about politics, really; at heart, it’s an espionage drama, a story about spies and conspiracies. Obviously McCarry believes the two can work in tandem, and that makes sense on paper, but in this paper, the paper on which Shelley’s Heart is printed, it does not. Each half operates independent of the other – and while I say ‘half,’ it’s really like a 75-25 split, favoring the spy stuff.

So in short you’ve got this failed chimera, this unliving hybrid, and then on top of all that you’ve got the constant bullshit, stuff like this:

Sturdi smiled. The great nose, the furry unplucked eyebrows that suggested equally furry armpits, the faint shadow on the depilated upper lip, contrasted strangely with the bright Teutonic hair of her wig.

Or how about this:

“How am I doing?” Macalaster asked.

“We’ll begin to see more progress soon.” The trainer, nearly all muscle himself, smiled encouragingly. “Anybody can do it,” he said.

“Except the women,” Macalaster said. “They don’t seem to get muscles. Any reason for that? Do they lift in a different way, or what?”

“Women don’t get muscles unless they take steroids,” the trainer said.

“And if they do take steroids?”

“Then they get biceps, just like us.” He lowered his voice, imparting secrets. “They also get bitchy. Even men get aggressive when they take steroids, so women usually stay from them. Besides their hair can fall out.”

The above excerpt is even more insanity-inducing when you realize, later on in the book, that it is Extremely Plot Relevant. Or this:

She had the air of a woman who had known exactly what to expect before she met him and had not been disappointed in the least by the reality. It was a look he recognized. He recognized the touch of her hand, too: back in the fifties Vassar girls, his wife among them, had cultivated the hand-on-your-hand-holding-the-cigarette-lighter trick, linked with the lifting of meaning-filled eyes, especially during senior spring, and nearly every member of his class had succumbed to this particular old one-two before finding out, to their lifelong cost, exactly what the consequences were.

There’s that classic cool McCarry tone! He really sees through the surface of things, and – uh oh, look out, ladies! – this time he has turned his gimlet eye to Vassar!!

I’ve been on an internet blackout for Shelley’s Heart since beginning it, but I’m dying to know what other people who’ve read this thing think.Like are there any academics out there doing their PhDs on McCarry’s fiction? Anyone composing a monograph about the neglected master McCarry? Is there some possibility that his other books are better?

Next time it’ll be the last time, we’re going through the end of this thing. Can redemption be found in a pile of shit?

Hm. Well, later, having embarked on the last bit of Shelley’s Heart, one Batshit Book Club member messaged me:

“Ben. I will hopefully never turn down the pleasure of reading, but you owe me a pint at this point.”

Batshit Book Club: Shelley’s Heart by Charles McCarry (Parts 3 – 5)

In an interview with Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt, William H. Gass, in response to a question about the particular density of the first section of The Tunnel, explains that it is a sort of gauge, a test of fortitude where readers prove their worthiness for what comes after: “What it is is to make sure that the person who gets into the book is ready and deserves to be there.”

The real test in Shelley’s Heart, not fair, not sane, comes not in the first part of the book, but in the confusing barrens of Parts 3, 4, & 5 – and no reader will be ready, and no reader deserves to be here, wading through McCarry’s interminable bullshit. If you’ve read it yourself, you know, and if you haven’t, well, take a gander at a field report from someone who has gone into these fields of pain.

We Return Briefly to the Vanishing Stand-in

One nice thing about Shelley’s Hearts Middle Sections is that Franklin Mallory is backgrounded – mostly. Y’see, even though his previous partner, Susan Grant, was murdered in front of him within the last month or so, Mallory has taken a shine to Zarah Christopher, daughter of famous CIA spy Paul Christopher. Paul Christopher is McCarry’s George Smiley, a poet-spy who starred in many of his thrillers before Shelley’s Heart. Having not read those books I don’t know how much Zarah figures into them, but here in Shelley’s Heart she immediately beguiles Mallory:

With Zarah, however, [Mallory] was now experiencing, on the verge of old age, something he had always been sure did not exist: love at first sight…this woman’s physical being acted in some inexplicable way upon the involuntary functions of his own body. Mallory being Mallory, he had attempted to analyze this phenomenon.

–And McCarry being McCarry, we have to read this analysis, but, again, there’s not as much as I feared there’d be. It’s not all good news, though, because McCarry giveth and he taketh away, and what he giveth here is another tedious self-serious bore of a character, in Zarah Christopher.

Everything I said about Mallory last time can be applied to Zarah, too. She has the same absurd self-righteousness, the same smug debate club personality, the same authorial grace marking her out as Chosen, above the rest of the cast. How annoying is she? Jumping back to part 2 for a minute, here’s an early scene with Zarah, to give you an idea of How She Is:

“I had British teachers as a child.” Zarah addressed herself to Polly [Lockwood, the First Lady]. “It’s a boy’s name, really. It means ‘sunrise’ in Hebrew.”

“Hebrew,” Hammett said, startled. Zarah was blond and gray-eyed, with a face out of a Dürer drawing. “Are you Jewish?”

“No, are you?”

Hammett, defender of Jewry’s most implacable foes, uttered a strangled guffaw. “Good God, no, but it’s a novelty to be asked. In fact, it’s a novelty to meet someone who doesn’t read the papers. Does that come from growing up in the Sahara desert?” Staring at her with intense concentration, he waited for her answer, which did not come. Zarah simply absorbed his question into some pool of silence at the center of her personality.

Lockwood’s eyes flicked in open amusement from Hammett to Zarah. He said, “No offense to old Ross here, but if you can get away from the newspapers in the Sahara Desert, that’s where I want to be. Can you actually do that, Zarah?”

With all the easy charm she had been withholding from Hammett she said, “You sure can if you go to the right place, Mr. President. I never saw one, even in Arabic, until I was grown up.”

Hammett said, “What did you do for news?”

“There wasn’t any.”

“Then what was there?”

She paused for a beat. “Life,” she said without expression.

The sensation, the vibe Zarah exudes is like if all the homeschool kids you ever knew fused together in some horrible singularity. It makes perfect sense in a world presided over by the mad god McCarry that Mallory would find a partner so perfectly attuned to his fucked wavelength. I’m happy for him. It would be wonderful if these two got married and lived happily ever after in some other book I didn’t have to read.

Not going to talk about her much more today but I needed to get a foothold in the Zarah issue because it really comes home to roost in part 6.

A Lament for Structure

There’s an arrhythmia in Shelley’s Heart. In parts 1 & 2, you get the feeling the book is going exactly where it says it’s going: that it will deliver a political thriller about a contested election, rife with the snakepit politicking that is the main draw of the sub-genre. Sure, it’s impossible not to notice that McCarry is an author with more complicated ambitions than ‘merely’ writing a good thriller, & that he’s aiming his book at a higher target than pure entertainment; but you still feel comfortable believing, early on at least, that this ambition will not get in the way of what promises to be a fast-moving plot, & that once things reach a certain velocity the ambition, the Points the book tries to make, will get lost inside all that speed, the way that, when you’re driving fast, everything in your peripheral, whether tree or sign or roadside oddity, distills down to the same lightly stippled visual noise that can be discarded with the aetheric intrasecond flicker of a sub-thought.

But in Parts 3 – 5, the “Middle Section,” a slew of new characters enter from previously unseen trapdoors in what you assumed was a sturdy, sound plot, built on solid foundations; characters each with own dubious claims on authorial attention in the form of subplots, sidestories, vignettes – most of which do seem to be on trajectories aimed at the central plot, it’s true, but in their waywardness they hinder that central plot’s momentum, adding developments that could have been introduced in a much straightforwarder way with existing characters & closer-to-the-core situations.

In Go/Baduk, you are always looking to play efficiently; accomplishing multiple things with fewer stones is always better. In Shelley’s Heart, McCarry spends so many pages and so much time looping these side-episodes back into the main story so that they can effect some single, specific change within it; and because the book has to manage multiple simultaneous threads, there can be a major lapse of time and pages before the way in which any side thing connects to the main thing becomes clear;the horrid dinner scene (discussed below) is the prime example of this.

“More is more” says Stanley Elkin, but Elkin is an artist, and McCarry, despite ambition, is a potboiler, a pop novelist. There’s often much to admire, much art, in popular fiction, but here in Shelley’s Heart little if any of the artistic thrusts stick.McCarry’s not enough of a stylist to make the individual sentences satisfying in and of themselves; if you’re here, you’re here for what they lead to, not their own music; but because there are so many sentences, and so many of them to greater & lesser degrees not necessary, it’s hard, on the long, long road of Shelley’s Heart, to keep up interest in that destination.

Epic-length thrillers aren’t uncommon, but they demand orchestration on the writer’s part, and Shelley’s Heart overlarded interior comes across less like an orchestra and more like a bunch of weird guys jamming within earshot of each other. It’s impossible to stop thinking that the book would’ve worked better, been clearer, with less cruft – especially when the cruft sucks so much shit that it saps actual life essence from you.

Some of These Scenes are So Fucked, Man

The pacing problems, the unnecessary scenes, & McCarry’s general reactionary bullshit all reach an apotheosis in a dinner party scene near the end of part 4. It is, without doubt, one of the worst scenes I’ve read in a book, ever, and if I weren’t reading this with the specific intent of exploring complexly bad books, I would have stopped here (if I managed to make it this far).

At this dinner party, Archimedes Hammett, the scheming, freshly-minted Chief Justice of the United States, has brought along one of his lackies, Slim Eve, with the explicit intention of using her to seduce R. Tucker Attenborough, Speaker of the House, for reasons that are too complicated to get into here – “you’ll just have to read the damn thing!” Anyway, Slim is gay, and an ecolawyer who also runs an organic farm with her partner Sturdi – all of this, quite obviously, is very funny to McCarry: his sense of humor can be dry and witty, but whenever it involves elements of the modern world he clearly doesn’t like (y’know, stuff like Feminism and homosexuality, vegetarians and revolutionaries) the humor becomes sniggering and pencil-necky; I’ve never wanted to kick sand in an author’s face before but McCarry’s authorial voice is really the printed word equivalent of a backpfeifengesicht…

When it comes to Slim and Sturdi, they are not permitted one sentence’s worth of dignity, or, really, even humanity: they are cartoons. Look (to revisit a scene from last time), McCarry even sets them up in the classic frat bro trope of the ‘One Hot One, One Ugly One’ lesbian couple (ellipses mine, here and throughout):

Hammett made a gesture to someone inside a Volvo station wagon that was parked at the curb with its motor idling. Two women dressed in ankle-length calico dresses and hiking boots got out of the car…One was blond, thin and willowy, with enormous blue eyes, like a Vogue model…her thin skirt blew around her long and unusually beautiful legs. Despite the weather, they were bare.

Macalaster said, “The skinny one is going to catch pneumonia.”

“Not her,” Hammett said. “She’s absolutely impervious to cold.” The other one…was rawboned and as tall and broad-shouldered as a good-sized man…she caught Macalaster staring at her friend’s legs and sneered in feminist disgust.

Slim is the Hot One, so she’s the honey pot for Attenborough. Attenborough, who could be glimpsed here and there earlier in the book, rockets into the limelight in this middle section and, by the end of part 5, it’s clear that he’ll be a major character going forward – that odd plot rhythm again. Slim sits next to Attenborough at the dinner table and he begins to grope her:

Attenborough gave her a pat on the arm, as if she had been the one whupped with a one-inch trace. Then, deftly, he laid a child-size hand on her thigh under the table. She reached down and captured it in her own larger hand, which was surprisingly rough as a result of her work on the farm…

“Were you gentle with your own children, Mr. Speaker?”

“Tucker, call me Tucker,” Attenborough said, stroking the backs of her ringless fingers with his thumb. “Never had any, never was married.” He gave Slim’s hand a meaningful squeeze.

This is all about to get a lot worse, but even in the midst of this McCarry can’t resist a little snickering dig at the funny organic farmer lady:

In his other hand the servant held a silver bowl filled with some kind of vegetable casserole. Attenborough sniffed this dish, then waved it away.

“No veggies?” Slim said. “I made that ratatouille myself, out of organically grown ingredients. It’s the Chief Justice’s favorite. No salt or chemicals of any kind.”

“Ratatootie?” Attenborough had slipped deeper into a parody of good-old-boy speech and behavior as the level of the vodka in his water tumbler dropped inch by inch. “Is that some kind of Arab dish?” he asked, pronouncing the word AY-rab.

Attenborough’s alcoholism becomes a major character and plot element at this time, although it (and he) were given no particular narrative weight before. Well, Attenborough continues to grope Slim:

His fingers walked upward, as in a child’s game of mousie-mousie. She was unable to defend herself and lift food from the platter at the same time. With amazing swiftness and dexterity Attenborough’s hand lifted up her short skirt, folded it back over her napkin, and scurried up the inside of her thigh. Startled, yet not surprised, she twitched slightly, relaxing her legs; through a rip in the crotch of her panty hose, two scurrying fingers found her labia. A third searched for her clitoris; she was back in high school, the pre-enlightened Slim.

I don’t want to say McCarry has never had sex, but he writes like someone who was probably not the greatest lover – I dunno, something about the clinical-anatomical terms, maybe – and also the way he usually calls women ‘females’ throughout the book…..anyway, this scene gets worse, and because I read it, anybody stuck here with me has to read it, too:

To her surprise, Slim realized that she was approaching orgasm. It wasn’t Attenborough who was producing this pleasure, it was the situation, it was the memory of other men. But she could not let it go on. Feigning interest in what was being said across the table and continuing to eat with her left hand, she reached down and grasped Attenborough’s hand with her free right hand and dug her thumbnail into the tender wrist joint.

You also need to know that, in the middle of this struggle, McCarry takes a break to move us around the table so we can overhear a conversation about Shelley between Hammett and Zarah Christopher. If I didn’t mention last time, the election fraud at the heart of Shelley’s Heart’s plot was instigated by members of a secret society called the Shelley Society, who idolize the poet and try to enact their “radical agenda” in his name. It’s complicated, and arguably the stupidest element of a plot not lacking in stupid elements, but the point here is that, in the fucksy-turvy moral universe of Shelley’s Heart, anyone who likes Shelly the poet is obviously an idiot, viz:

“What do you know about Shelley?” Hammett was asking.

“Very little,” Zarah said. “Except that he was a totalitarian.”

“Hammett’s sulky face darkened. “Explain that,” he said.

“Alright,” Zarah said. “Prometheus Unbound reads like a dream Stalin had in an opium den. Shelley describes heaven on earth as a place where people fall asleep and when they wake up they’re not human any longer. They’ve taken off their human nature and condition like a disguise; therefore they’re happy because now they’re all alike, thinking beautiful thoughts. Utopia always turns out to be an eternal prison camp with people like Shelley in the commandant’s office.”

Keep in mind, this bullshit happens in the middle of the Attenborough/Slim business. Attenborough then quotes lines from “To a Sky-Lark” as he continues to molest Slim, until she can’t take it anymore:

Slim shrieked, “Help!”

Underneath the table, Attenborough’s middle finger had broken through. His victim leapt to her feet, overturning her chair. Beneath her skirt, she was still holding his wrist in both hands. It was an extremely short skirt. Slim had truly wonderful legs, and there was no mistaking what had been happening.

This isn’t even the end of the scene, but it’s I’m ending things here. Y’know, one sad thing is that, at the end of Part 5, things seem to start focusing again: there’s a scene between Lockwood and Mallory, a sort of showdown in the Oval Office where this massive political struggle is distilled down, in a tense moment, into a battle of wills, something very personal and petty and heated. After the glut & gauntlet of most of the rest of the Middle Section, this scene feels like it comes from a different book altogether – the book that, early on, you probably thought you were getting, before the hidden doors opened and you started getting invited to the dinner parties.

What a mess.

Next time: Parts 6 & 7. Will things get better? Probably not!