The Striver Is Bereft: On Joshua Ferris’s “A Calling for Charlie Barnes”

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN a Chicago strip mall and the clang of the Wall Street bell, the American striver persists, eyes up, with a fresh business plan in his teeth. Clench tight, don’t let the plan drop. Forget e pluribus unum, he is going to be the man in these streets, right here among the painted letterboxes and picket fences. His tie is clean and dangling, his shoes shiny and overpriced. Yep. If I work hard and don’t die first, I will get what I want.

Or so thinks the eponymous hero of Joshua Ferris’s fourth novel, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, resident of 105 Rust Road, Danville, Illinois, a onetime paper boy who now sports a dusty Rolex. Barnes, a baby boomer, Updikean in his quirks and indulgences, is yet to accept the dying of the light. He’s a man with a proposition, in a long line of others. After an early stint on the sales floor at Jonart’s shoe store, his many hook-a-duck ventures include a clown franchise, a dog franchise, herbicide, toupees, an investment firm for retirees (launched after he left Bear Stearns in the early 1990s), and his latest, a detail-light business called Chippin’ In. It’s been a life’s work. “[H]e hungered after profit all his days, a wannabe Warren Buffett cluttering the margins of the American marketplace with his schemes and knockoffs.” For all his efforts, the striver is awarded a cruel nickname — Steady Boy. Charlie can’t get it together, besotted with striking it big, proving his worth. Who christened him with that moniker? He can’t remember. Likely a Danville neighbor, or perhaps one of his four impossible children: Jerry, Jake, Marcy, and Karen.

Now Steady Boy is facing the Great Recession. It is 2008. Obama is in office, but while talk of hope and change is in the air, the green light has gone dark. His fractious son, Jerry, spells out the doom. “It’s Armageddon, Pop. The great meltdown. We are at a historic juncture. Hegel is finished. Milton Friedman is finished. George fucking Bush and his cronies are finished. History itself may be at an end.” Worst of all, Charlie believes he is sick, and after a weeklong odyssey of competing interpretations, there is a definitive diagnosis: pancreatic cancer. Never mind Chippin’ In, the striver is out of time.

Cancer runs like a thread throughout Ferris’s work. In his debut novel, Then We Came to the End (2007), the forbidding ad boss Lynn Mason dies of breast cancer; in The Unnamed (2010), Jane Farnsworth battles cancer; and in To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (2014), the dentist Paul O’Rourke tells us that the mouth is where cancer starts. But this time, with Charlie Barnes, cancer has the lead role. From the novel’s opening pages, when the striver calls his children to tell them — prematurely — that he has the disease, cancer infuses every turn in the narrative, to comic effect. At one point, the narrator says of Charlie (who has been married five times): “[P]ancreatic cancer will always move faster than divorce proceedings.”

The challenge of this novel, a comic epic befitting the emperor of all maladies, seems, from the outset, an almost impossible task, especially against the backdrop of economic downturn. It put me in mind of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King (2011), also set in Illinois, a sprawling rhapsody about the minutiae of American taxation and its dehumanizing effects. Perhaps the reason Ferris pulls it off with such aplomb — the novel is exceptionally funny — is that there are no limp gags, no mere zingers. Instead, comedy permeates every line — it is the pulse of the tale. In a 2014 Paris Review interview, Ferris said: “We don’t exist in the world solely to grow goatees and stroke them. We’re here also to make one another laugh, and to use humor to mitigate some of the shit and misery that goes on. […] It’s part of my attempt to take the world seriously.”

There’s no more serious subject for the American novelist than the American Dream, especially when it remains out of reach. For Charlie, his aggressive cancer, amid the Great Recession, brings the devastating realization that it’s all been fake news, nothing but propaganda and petrified national myth. “I’ve spent my entire life pursuing the American dream, only to find out here at the eleventh hour that it was all a scam. The books were cooked. And now I’m dying. I’ve wasted my life.” The dice, he perceives, have always been loaded in favor of the elites who lie, cheat, and steal. What can the Danville man do now after his loss of faith in finance, in capitalism? What can he replace it with? The striver is bereft.

Like all great American lives, Charlie needs a second act. But the trail at his back — of failed businesses, and wives — means that he’s already had a dozen extra lives. Yet he is to be granted one more — the final — in the guise of his son, Jake Barnes, a midlist novelist who shares a name with Hemingway’s hard-boiled protagonist in The Sun Also Rises. Here things get tricky, in terms of form. Charlie’s life is told in the third person, while Jake speaks for himself. At first the reader might wonder why there isn’t a strict division of these voices — say, between chapters, or with section breaks — until it is revealed that Jake, the novelist, has been writing his father’s story the whole time. The generosity and range of Jake’s voice rights the story of his father’s misshapen life in a way the old man couldn’t do himself.

At one point Charlie says to his son: “Writing novels. All that make-believe. That’s a very silly occupation for a grown man.” Jake’s response, and I’m paraphrasing, is, “Dad! I’m taking over!” It’s an expansion of the MFA dictum that the novelist must kill his darlings. Here, the novelist must also kill his father. Write up his father’s life, as Jake does, and then detail his imminent death in subclauses and quiet adjectives. The effect reads like Don DeLillo channeling a set by George Carlin. I also heard a voice, between paragraphs, muttering, “Autofiction? Hahahaha.”

Much in the same way the first-person plural in Then We Came to the End felt audacious and new, this novel’s drip-feed metafictional arc, with the first person subsuming the third, is similarly inventive. It’s a powerful reminder that contemporary fiction is more than its middling hands — like, say, those in the mold of Jake Barnes, who complains that he can’t finish his manuscript and bemoans internet graffiti: “You can’t read a book wrong anymore[.] […] Not in the age of Amazon reviews.”

The novel also seems preoccupied with the relationship between fakery and success. One of Charlie’s early wives calls him a con man, and the notion infects his children, whose task is to distinguish their father’s truth from fiction. But to be a con man is not Charlie’s fate alone. Rather, it is the fate of all Americans. “[I]t was that way throughout Chicagoland, the Land of Lincoln, the heartland, and all the rest of America, too. It was stocked full of, crowded up with, overrun by … fakes, frauds, imposters.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted repeatedly, as in Then We Came to the End, where he is the favorite scribe of prankster Tom Mota. The Emersonian directive, as set out in his 1837 speech “The American Scholar,” is to be a nonconformist, to reject old ideas and think for oneself. The directive has often been interpreted as — fake it! It’s the only way to settle the tension between the need for unity and the desire for individualism. What is a doughty Midwesterner to do in order to stand out among his fellow boobs? Pretend, make it up, invent yourself. And when that doesn’t work, when your wife can plainly see that your clown franchise is a dodo, you must reinvent yourself again, and again. Take Charlie’s fake teeth. He had the real ones pulled in his early 20s, and his smile has twinkled ever since. Even some of those closest to him can’t tell if they are real or not. And in that space between the fake and the real, between original and imitation, lies opportunity.

“Autobiography is the spirit and the letter of my work,” Ferris told The Iowa Review in 2010. “I’m informed by broad things: being a man, being someone’s son and someone’s father.” Born in Danville, the author also lived with lots of different stepparents. His own father, too, was suspicious of novels and died of cancer several years ago. But despite the personal territory, sentimentality never intrudes, only the ambition to capture a fictional life in all its contradictions, competing accounts, and messy grandeur. A Calling for Charlie Barnes is operating at the highest levels of American fiction. Make it new? Consider the whale harpooned. Or, in the words of the persnickety novelist and son, Jake Barnes: “[A] fucking colossus.”

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Nathan Dunne is the author of Lichtenstein and the editor of the essay collection Tarkovsky. He has written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Slate, Literary Hub and Artforum. His website is: www.nathandunne.com.