A Life in Freefall: On Marc Kristal’s “Permission”

ONE MIGHT THINK another literary romp with booze, coke, and prostitutes is the last thing we need; in a world that has, by now, transgressed in just about every way possible, such stories feel superfluous. But in the Nabokovian noir of his new novel, Permission, Marc Kristal tells it all in a way we’ve never quite experienced before: with surgical precision, unpreachy humility, and continuous insight.

Only in Hollywood could a producer use a word like “smart” as a lukewarm death knell for your work. It’s a phrase that haunts Mike, an embattled screenwriter who can’t balance his professional and domestic lives until he finally surrenders his way — by dumbing himself down, devolving into his true nature, into depths that he, his wife, and the reader never saw coming.

“You’re very smart,” said the town, then took a pass; and whereas I had assumed, bitterly, that the town couldn’t handle smart, perhaps it saw, as I had not, that I was not really writing movies. “You’re very smart,” meaning — nudgingly, kindly — that I was trying to make myself look smart — in which case, how smart could I really be?

Permission begins in a more even-keeled New York, where Mike enjoys late-night bar hopping with other giddy screenwriters not yet beaten down by the studios. For Mike, the allure isn’t necessarily the nightlife — he’s also avoiding his wife Rose, an aspiring actress. The couple can’t seem to hold a conversation without exploding. Mike is ambitious yet overanalytical, while Rose is passionate but self-sabotaging. The screenwriter has drive; the actress, literally, refuses to drive.

“I’m not going,” says Rose when Mike is finally offered a screenwriting job in Los Angeles. She is dragged anyway, Mike’s eyes on the elusive prize. Their displacement exacerbates her self-defeat. Rose is now radiating pure negative energy, upping the ante on their toxic dynamic. “I’m going to start going to Al-Anon,” she tells him. It’s a power move, one that paints Mike into a corner while giving herself only the illusion of identity, of community — another excuse to sidetrack herself from booking auditions.

[A]lways, my wife worked to equate desire with dysfunction, my unwillingness to go to AA and admit that, yes, everything in my life of which she didn’t approve surely was bullshit and should be stamped out, a ceaseless, insidious linking of need or aspiration to personal failing, to weakness.

The bickering between Mike and Rose is monumentally repellent — it’s easy for the reader to feel like a child in a breaking home, trapped in the couple’s circular arguments, unsure whom we should even side with. But Kristal is a fierce stylist, and the way he immerses us in the crossfire is rhythmically hypnotic, incendiary as Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Mike and Rose are runaway trains of gaslighting, projection, and self-deception. We feel those pressures that drive them, captured by the author in tantalizing minefields of italics — the catty cruelty of a couple foolishly sustaining themselves on the ghost of love, a vaporous idea rather than a tactile reality.

When Mike’s painstaking work finally gets him invited to the producer’s meeting, it’s bluntly revealed that his script is merely being used as leverage to get another script (one far less “smart”) fast-tracked into production. And while he is going to be hired to rewrite that one, his self-described masterpiece will fall by the wayside. This suggests to Mike’s self-esteem that he isn’t a true artist, just a cog in the studio machine. And if Rose has painted him into a corner with her scheming, this shatters the last weak plank beneath him. Bereft of foundation, he freefalls, triggering a double life of chemical and sexual indulgence. But Kristal assures us that it’s not just destructive, balancing the excess with sincere exploration and occasional beauty.

Take the exquisite depictions of cocaine: after all, if it didn’t feel so sublime, why would we indulge? As Mike reacquaints himself with the seductive drug, he muses intimately to the reader:

Think of a December night: when the crisp, clear air rings each streetlight with an aureole, the vodka pours thick and frigid and arrives in a crystal glass, when a woman’s smile is bright, her laugh musical, and every scrape and snap has a satisfying bite: cocaine at its best is all that, a great winter’s eve in a small cylindrical bottle.

The alcohol Rose has fixated on is merely a gateway to this drug, almost as if Mike is saying: if she’s convinced I’m a monster, I’ll show her what a monster really is. It’s a contrarian attitude, but also sincere — he wants, at once, to avoid his wife yet also find a way to relate to her prosecution of him, even if only as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Since their house has become a suffocating stalemate, Mike finds one of ill repute instead — an environment that might actually support his urge for depraved self-realization. Kristal introduces us to the brothel as Raymond Chandler might: “[T]he big room […] had faux walnut paneling, a moss green carpet so hard and worn that it shone, and a water-stained acoustical tile ceiling that quivered like a frightened Yorkshire Terrier every time a truck rattled past.” During his allotted hours with each girl in these blurry nocturnal escapades, Mike allows self-destruction to morph into sexual obstruction: so overzealous is his cocaine use that he can no longer perform. While any other man would be ashamed, Mike readily adjusts to this handicap, since he realizes that getting himself off isn’t really what he’s doing there. By surrendering to his inadequacies, he’s able to give these girls what no other john can: unexpected pleasure via his own determined submission.

With each woman reflecting a different angle of his introspection, Mike finally lands on Jessica, who, like his wife, is an aspiring actress and married. But the similarity stops there — Jessica isn’t afraid to surrender to vulnerability, which teaches Mike his most profound lesson in abdication: that one must step down from the pedestal to get a closer look at common ground.

I was attracted to prostitutes because their emotional lives were identical to mine, we had all been traumatized by the destruction of our belief systems by those to whom they’ve been entrusted. The girl’s traumas (I knew by now) had been experienced in childhood, mine was the product of marriage, but the result was the same: we had lost the hegemony over our dignity that is every creature’s right, and our bitterness arose from the fact that, no matter how much control we might regain over our externals, it could never restore what had been taken from us.

Since they’re both cheating on a significant other, Mike and Jessica use cocaine to temper their tryst, the illicit substance supplying an alternate reality where they are allowed to sin, where they have permission. Kristal shows us that revelations come even in the tooth-grind of drug-fueled cognitive dissonance: “‘Men,’ I began, and gasped violently — the signal I was approaching cocaine overload. ‘Men,’ gasping again, beginning again, ‘Women cheat because they’re not getting something. Men, because they’re not taking something.’”

But these eureka moments are fleeting when balanced against Mike’s more sobering meditations. For example, he contrasts the present depths to which he has sunk with his former self’s use of drugs to inspire hope and a youthful sense of immortality:

What I did not realize, sitting down to cocaine again, was that depression had altered my brain chemistry. The drug, entering my head, encountered a changed environment: its job now was not to underscore the fun, but to reverse devastation. […] [T]he antidote I’d chosen was as pointless as the anger it was meant to cure. […] One thing I’ve learned from my addictions[:] […] You only need one perfect experience. After that, it’s all repetition.

Rediscovering the rhythm of their bodies, the red-light lovers build bridges between their disparate professions — and Kristal’s impeccable knack for dialogue makes these exchanges even more profound than flesh on flesh.

“As a screenwriter,” I said to Jessica, “I was a bad whore.”

“What’s the screenwriter’s version of bad whoring?” she said.

“Same as a whore’s version. Trying to win what can’t be won. […] My scripts were just imperfect enough to not get made, because perfecting them — AKA, giving my employers what they were paying for — would have meant accepting the power that lay within them. […] So the subtext of everything I wrote was, ‘I’m smarter than you.’”

“So, you quote unquote won?”

“But not ultimately, because customers weren’t paying me to humiliate them.”

When he finds the courage to cold-turkey coke, he recovers, at one of his last appointments with Jessica, a full synergy where everything works. The two realize that they need each other outside the labyrinth of smeared mirrors and stained bedsheets, and Kristal cites Iris Murdoch’s observation (not once, but twice) that “[l]ove is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

Marc Kristal is a writer known principally for authoring books on architecture. But here he is writing a steamy novel of sex and drugs and hard-won redemption. Yet this contrast actually gets to the heart of Permission: when comparing the design and integrity of Mike’s two “houses,” we find that the one where anything goes fosters a true expansion of the mind and a renovation of the heart.

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Gabriel Hart lives in Morongo Valley in California’s high desert. His literary-pulp collection Fallout from Our Asphalt Hell is out now from Close to the Bone in the UK. He’s the author of the dispo-pocalyptic twin-novel Virgins In Reverse / The Intrusion (Traveling Shoes Press, 2019) and a poetry collection, Unsongs Vol. 1. He’s a regular contributor at Lit Reactor and The Last Estate.