She is shocked anew by the power of Arthur’s writing, its ability to take her in. Is this just the power all authors have? The mere mention of a red shawl—like a command you are powerless to resist — and there it is, the chenille soft in your hands. Even though the title prepares her somewhat, it’s also a shock to be taken into the fictionalized realm of her own life — a version of déjà vu, not unlike hearing her own voice on an answering machine. She reads, and winces, reading, and reads on, and then falls asleep.
In her dream, she is twelve and in braces, self-conscious of her breath and of being naked. She is in a stable, shivering. There are horses stamping and farting around her. Something terrible has just happened, or is about to happen, but she can’t figure out what. She wakes herself so that she can remember and finds that her coat is on the ground and her shirt is hiked up and she is freezing.
She finds the book, which has fallen under the bench. She returns to the last page she remembers reading and continues, but she can’t shake the feeling that something is terribly wrong. Her dream has entered the atmosphere of the book, or maybe she is picking up a subtle atmosphere from the book itself? It’s hard to tell now. She puts her coat back on and zips it up and continues reading.
In the manner of other contemporary fiction, there’s little story to speak of — the dilemmas of everyday life — and yet it’s also compelling. It’s the sentences, the train of thought — it’s persuasive. So she turns the pages to see where it all might lead, because it does seem to be leading somewhere, each scene a preparation for some defining moment. How could he call this a novel? She checks the cover again. The Morels: A Novel.
The main character is named Arthur Morel, who is married to a character named Penelope, and their child’s name is Will. The voice is conversational, less formal than the I-voice of his previous book, closer to Arthur’s own. Main-character-Arthur works as an administrative head at a university library, a job real-Arthur had for a short while, before being let go. It had not been a good time for them. Arthur was miserable. This was three years ago, before his first book was published. Will was eight.
We find ourselves at the beginning of The Morels with Arthur struggling to make meaning from what has become a mundane domestic existence — he works; he comes home; he washes dishes and bundles garbage. The burden of fatherhood puts a strain on him, on the marriage. Manhood does not come naturally; he is not a natural father. What to say, how to behave. His father-in-law tells him not to worry, that it’s eighteen years of on-the-job training, to follow his heart and he would be okay.
The only problem for Arthur is that his heart is a mystery to him. Most of the time, Arthur doesn’t know what to feel and suspects that deep down he feels nothing — for anyone. In the meantime, he fakes it. He watches Penelope for clues, imitating her expressions of affection, her declarations of love — and as such, Arthur feels as though he’s making up his feelings, inventing them as he goes along — careful to feel whatever is appropriate for the situation. His job brings him little satisfaction — it requires a kind of leadership he does not possess — he must motivate his staff as well as those he answers to. He dreads work, feels in over his head daily — the suits he’s required to wear have been given to him by Penelope’s father, his father’s suits, as it were. He looks in the mirror to see that he is no longer himself, but with every passing week, living the life he is living, he is no longer sure who that is anymore.
DEVOTED HUSBAND, LOVING FATHER. It feels like an epitaph.
His thoughts turn morbid. He feels like the walking dead. A man of no consequence. He has given up the immortality of Visionary Artist for the mortal and inconsequential role of Family Man, indistinguishable from eighty-three million others just like him. It is a long slow march toward the grave, no doubt on which will be written DEVOTED HUSBAND, LOVING FATHER. Within two years, less, his family will have moved on, forgotten him. It would be as if he’d never existed. His struggles at his job and at home take on the proportions of life and death — it’s a struggle he is waging — and losing — for his own survival.
In lieu of lunch, Arthur goes into the library stacks, and here he can finally breathe again, a fish returned to water. He drifts among the sea of words, stopping randomly at an unfamiliar or interesting title. Opening the book, he allows himself to dream for a while inside, and when it’s time for him to make his way back to work, he feels as though he is leaving a part of himself there — that part of himself has become trapped within the covers of the book he’d been browsing — and so he must go back the next day, and the next.
He tests his limits. He skips meetings in which he is not expected to speak. He spends entire days lost in the stacks or behind his desk, holding all calls, in front of his computer. When someone enters, he does not look up.
He begins writing e-mails to himself.
At night, unable to sleep, he fires up his laptop to find his inbox full. The messages are addressed to himself, from one part of his brain to another. Cries for help from a man in the trenches. He details his troubles at work. His restlessness, his suffocation. He used to be able to shut the stall door in the men’s room and with a visual cue of Dean Bartholomew’s secretary — her parted legs under her desk, the small patch of hair — masturbate to climax in less time than it took most men to wash their hands. These days it is a different story entirely. He works at his flaccid penis there in the stall, trying to fully picture the space underneath the secretary’s desk — unsuccessfully — until the bathroom door bangs open, the sound of unzipping at a urinal, and Arthur’s concentration would be fully broken. What has he become, that he can’t even give his secret work crushes their proper due? That this last refuge of freedom, his sexual imagination, is closed to him?
Arthur reads these e-mails from himself in the monitor glow of the darkened bedroom, Penelope asleep not five feet away — addressed as though he were someone else, an estranged friend. So he does what any friend would do: he writes back.
He commiserates. He relates his various miseries on the home front. His life with Penelope and Will is just a series of small lies — from the moment he walks through the door. I missed you, she says, and he says, I missed you, too. But he has not in fact thought about Penelope throughout the day — should he have? He feels guilty, and so when he tells her that he has missed her, too, he is lying. Or maybe willing himself to have missed her, not so much a lie as it is a kind of apology. When he says, I missed you, too, what he really means is I want to have missed you, too. He means I will try my hardest tomorrow to miss you too.
She asks him how his day has been, and when he says that it was fine, when he doesn’t tell her that it was decidedly not fine, this is another lie.
These overtures about their day are no more prelude to a real discussion of their true feelings as the peck on the lips as he’s taking off his coat is a prelude to sex.