Difficult Grandeur

David Matlin's novel A HalfMan Dreaming begins under the shadow of death. This is the shadow that covers Matlin's protagonist, Lupe, a Mexican American growing up in California, and his friend Wesley, whom Lupe meets at the same moment that a military airplane flies overhead:

It was a "Flying Wing" hovering, a Cold War Secret Darkness that few, away from the Air Force off-limits high-priority shadow zones, ever got to see. It was that shadow that brought us together, and it would loom in everything we shared from our boyhoods to the fury that separated and swallowed us, but kept us connected as we became men.

When he first introduces himself, gives his name, Lupe defines himself in terms of a relationship: "My name is Lupe. I'm Wesley's friend." Though Wesley mostly drops out of the novel after the first section, it's fitting that Lupe defines himself in terms of a relationship to another. Often, the narrator of A HalfMan Dreaming loses himself almost entirely in something or someone outside himself—history, the Vietnam war, his lover Nadia's previous relationship with an older, dying woman. There is a deep fatalism to this book that I find compelling—in tone, it often reminds one of the poet Robinson Jeffers, his focus on stark, uncaring nature, and the meaninglessness of the human in the vast abyss of time.

In what is to my mind by far the strongest section of the novel, Lupe leaves his own story to tell that of Jeffrey Langer, a schizophrenic Jewish man whose path crosses briefly with Lupe and Nadia's, and who later murders a rabbi in a synagogue. Lupe traces the deterioration of Langer's mind through the papers that Langer left behind, as well as through interviews with Langer's friends: Langer's violent obsession with Robert McNamara; his attempt (unknown to Lupe at the time) on Lupe and Nadia's lives; his growing self-identification with the Jewish prophet Nathan of Gaza. Jeffrey comes to believe that "the Law in its most ancient form [was] cannibalism"—and by this point in the novel, we have seen enough to understand that the "Law," here, must be understood not simply as the Jewish Law, but the all-encompassing Law of the Universe, holding equally for Jew and non-Jew, Mexican and gringo.

The prose throughout A HalfMan Dreaming can be overbearing. The novel is told almost entirely in exposition, and one gets the sense that Matlin is striving for a certain prophetic quality himself. Often, one could argue that this quality is called for, given the novel's themes: A HalfMan Dreaming focuses on that which is larger than human, history, solitude, death, and the way each of these indifferently swallow up us all. Here is Matlin's narrator Lupe ruminating on American pre-history at the site of an archeological dig:

Around 9000 BC another people appear. Some of the most skilled inventors to have ever lived. They carried spear-thrower weights or banner-stones.... Many are some of the finest examples of an abstract sculpture to be found anywhere. Their mystery and beauty of material are experiments in form that move their function, which was death, clear to the edge of where function dissipates in the purposelessness of nothing encased in a pure object.

Here, in a wide-ranging bit of exposition, we have ancient history—which, by its very definition, carries with it the mark of death—violence, and art (with a Kantian theory of beauty thrown in). The prophetic voice is entirely grounded by the weight of so many centuries.

It's difficult to maintain this sort of grandeur for page after page, however. Faulkner tends to build towards it. Robinson Jeffers, as a poet, is generally only required to maintain this level of language for a page or two at a time. Even when Matlin's prose is working well, it gets a little exhausting; one starts to wonder if so much grandness is so constantly necessary...