Memory's splinter movements

THERE is a venerable and deep-seated fear in the United States that American culture is a mere sham, a phoney faade, a cruddy film set of triumphant buildings and cheap illusion. The rider to this spooky apprehension is that to survive in the unreal city, you need to out-scam the shysters.

Melville's The Confidence Man and Twain's Huckleberry Finn are classics of the genre, where the typical American is no longer the pioneer or the penniless immigrant, but the huckster, the shady operator, the confidence trickster. There is something gritty and wry about this vision of US democracy that brings out the jaunty criminality implicit in sleazy versions of the American Dream. Utopian confidence becomes the confidence trick.

Self-improvement is reduced to the stealing of other people's money. Self-transformation and rebirth (the myth of the immigrant) become a story of disguise and forged identities. Pioneer advance becomes the road movie of the criminal on the run. Jim Lewis is beautifully well informed about the complexity of this jokey transformation of American values into their criminal analogues. Why the Tree Loves the Axe is only his second novel and he remains practically unknown in Britain, but he deserves a wider audience. This novel is wise, lyrical and refreshingly astonishing. Lewis is capable of registering real shock at the plight of the very old and poor, at the fate of the American city, of the pitiless loneliness of single, difficult women. Yet his writing is not pious, but raunchy, with perfect pitch for the weird folksy-Dylanesque-ballady-apocalyptic imagination of the Midwest: "Every night I stared out my window, waiting for the bandit to come down from the mountain, the light in the clock tower, listening for the sound of the trumpet; every day I went out with the word Sure waiting on my lips." What saves this from becoming tiresome is Lewis's tricksy confidence in his own storytelling. The heroine and first-person narrator, Caroline, is a compulsive liar. She ends up in Sugartown, Texas, after fleeing a broken marriage and suffering a car crash, and makes up an identity for herself to get a job. She lives a shadowy fictionalised life as an orderly in a geriatric ward, getting involved with a rather sinister old man, who confers on her a strange box to deliver, and a soul- mate girlfriend whom she strangely resembles. Sugartown descends into hellish street riots during which Caroline kills a policeman, and learns that her girlfriend has died. She decides to take on her friend's identity to escape the law and goes back to New York. Her arrival there is a return to her past, and her marriage, as we unravel her previous identity. The final section of the novel concerns the delivery of the old man's box to a sinister group of hoodlums in a house in upstate New York. The narrative here is modern American Gothic, with a Pinteresque menace, and a nice twist in the tale (they are actually forging money). So the American ideal of forging your own identity through making money is given a criminal twist. These three narratives of self-forgery cover a wonderful range of American experiences. Midwest pieties and dreams of a new city on the plain are transformed into a nightmare of social unrest, sinister geriatric decay and necessary lawlessness - this is Lewis as Carson McCullers. The New York section is an efficient parody of all those novels of recall, broken marriage and urban isolation Lewis doing Updike. The forger's-den tale is a superb wrestling with Gothic conventions, all mixed up with a host of rape and paedophile fantasies, which are beautifully deflated - Lewis Pinter-ising Poe. Lewis's style is forced at times. He needs to learn how to do good passage work, rather than feeling he has to craft and inflate every single sentence. But this is really a very good book. The tree loves the axe because, Lewis teaches us, with dexterous and lithe prose, we have to learn to love splicing ourselves into separate identities and life-stories to outwit the degrading sham of modern urban culture. This is a "fakebook" which is as good a guide as any to finding out how that is done.

Copyright 1998
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