Bowl of Cherries (review)

Millard Kauffman is the real thing: a brawler, an ex-marine, and a screen-writer who stood up for fellow writers who got blacklisted. He's the type of guy who calls movies "pictures" and waves both hands and makes a face when someone says "films." When he tells Liz Taylor stories, it isn't camp or movie magazine gossip. He has Liz Taylor stories. When he talks about Spence, he means Tracy. He discovered Lee Marvin. He tangled with Steve McQueen. When he says, "When I first knew Francis Ford Coppola, he was this fat kid who everybody called Frankie," you believe him.

In his career, Kaufman earned both the swagger and the brio. He enlisted in the Marines shortly after graduating college in 1939. While in the South Pacific he saw action at Guam and Okinawa and was twice wounded. When he came back to the States, he was so wasted by malaria that his wife didn't recognize him. They settled in California—the weather being presumably more salubrious for his long recovery. A journalist in the few years between college and the Marines, he decided to try his hand at writing a short story. He sent it to The New Yorker and they offered him $500. Kaufman turned them down. He thought that they were lowballing him. He didn't much care for The New Yorker anyway. He turned the story into a radio play and his career began. Ultimately, Kaufman became a contract player in what would be the final flowering of the studio age. He invented the cartoon character Mr. Magoo, based on a nearsighted uncle back in Baltimore. He wrote for Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock, another iconic turn of phrase. It came to him while pumping gas in the Arizona desert. He wrote and got a producer credit in the Elizabeth Taylor antebellum costume drama Raintree County.

In short, Kaufman was dialed in.

The first question when one begins writing a first novel at the age of eighty-six is what sort of novel will it be? In the case of Bowl of Cherries, the answer reveals itself fairly quickly. Besides being a brawler and a movie mogul himself, Kaufman is a lifelong, serious reader. And Bowl of Cherries is a deeply literary book, redolent of Western literature. Genesis, the siglo de oro (Bowl of Cherries is first and last a picaresque novel), and the extended nineteenth century all get their loving due. He deploys his characters with the psychological acuity of George Eliot, even when they are simply knaves. He borrows a chapter title from Edith Wharton. The ghost of Thomas Wolfe casts its penumbra early on. There's at least one epic list, of nuclear reactor parts no less, worthy of Joyce. Even pets in the book—certainly he's borrowing Tolstoy here—have intellectual nobility to them.

The intertextuality isn't exclusively high, either. The giddiness of Kerouac comes through in a digressive visit to Colorado. His narrator's comic disaffection echoes Bellow. The Amises, both Kingsley and Martin, show up in the wacky academia and offbeat adjectives respectively. There are even a few touches of the genuinely low: a former porn actress has been reduced to wearing dental floss and working the "warm-up pit." In Colorado, a farm girl asks, in a hayloft no less, "Interested in a little beef jerky?" A central conceit of the book is sufficiently scatological to engage even the most hardened Germanic sensibility. This book has a lot going on.

Structurally one senses another borrowing, from Georges Simenon's hard novels. As the story begins, our condemned narrator finds himself in a fetid jail cell in a remote Babylonian nation-state that has managed to avoid any involvement in the war that rages beyond its horizons. The exact day and time of Judd Breslau's execution are not published—this is an element of his punishment. But the decision is final, any appeal is impossible, and the date of execution is likely to arrive sooner rather than later. Judd...