“Oh Luther, I don’t want to talk about it. I mean I know that this is what you’re waiting for, that I should confess my soul now or tell you secrets. That’s what you do with everybody and I just can’t stand being part of a pattern. I’m different.”
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| Cover of the Stark House electronic edition I read |
For a year and a half I commuted into Grand Central Terminal via MetroNorth. As a NYC resident I had had to stay alert on the actual New York City subway lest a fellow New Yorker abuse me in some abominable fashion, but MetroNorth was stuffed with harmless members of the bourgeoisie and I could comfortably lean my head against the window and fall asleep listening to Peter Hammill on my Ipod and watching the Bronx whip by. I worked for the government so there was no rush getting to my office, and I used to stroll down from Grand Central to the environs of the Empire State Building, to an office where the taxpayers paid me to sit around in a cubicle from ninish to fivish, with a break for lunch, of course--you've got a right to 90 to 120 minutes for pizza, shish kebab, or souvlaki, you know.
Anyway, Westchester County is often seen as an archetype of the wealthy suburb, where desperate housewives live empty lives and all that. In 1971, Barry N. Malzberg, a longtime resident of New York City and New Jersey, set a novel in Westchester, Confessions of Westchester County. Initially published by the famous Olympia Press, Confessions of Westchester County was marketed as porn or "erotica," but this is our pal Barry, who generally depicts sex in a way that is far from titillating. I love Malzberg's non-SF work (check out my blog posts on Underlay, The Horizontal Woman, Everything Happened to Susan, Screen, and an excerpt from Oracle of the Thousand Hands) and so when I found I could get an electronic version of Confessions of Westchester County for $4.00 from Stark House Press, I jumped at the chance.
The protagonist of Confessions of Westchester County is Luther, a forty-five year old orphan. As a baby he was abandoned at a carnival by his parents. The man running one of the rigged games, a guy named Hilarion, adopts the baby, and soon after becomes a Catholic priest in Brooklyn; this is an odd career choice, as Hilarion is no believer, though Malzberg implies that, as religion is a total scam, it is wholly appropriate. Presumably his name for his adoptive son is a clever little act of rebellion.
On the topic of career choices, Luther chooses to avoid a career, and in his mid-forties still lives in the home provided Hilarion by the diocese in the church rectory. In one chapter Luther, our first person narrator, tells us about the time he took five lessons of a correspondence in computer science. He dropped out after those five classes because he realized (and here we have a common Malzbergian theme) that he would become a slave to a machine should he get involved professionally with computers.
The school forecast that it could make me a skilled technician at a salary of a hundred and fifty dollars a week within three months, but I came to understand that in terms of what they were offering there would be no discrimination between the data and the programmer, and that Luther, a shy binary unit, would be coding himself into one and zero forever after.Luther suggests that reducing the world to a series of ones and zeroes will destroy all individuality; he also sees the ones and zeroes as uncannily like male and female genitalia, elements more closely aligned with his interests.
Luther has no remunerative career, but he does have a major project, what you might call a literary project, which takes up much of his time. During the day he drives in Hilarion's car from Brooklyn up to Westchester County and, on the pretext of being some kind of government functionary taking a survey or some manner of salesman, he gets into the homes of housewives and has sex with them. Luther professes to us that he doesn't really care so much about the actual sex, that his real interest lies in what comes after, when the women, laying in bed with him, tell him their secrets, their "confessions" as he calls them. (Yes, Malzberg is equating clergy who take confession from the faithful with a creep who fucks women under false pretenses.) Luther claims that he has succeeded in these operations many thousands of times, and that his "dossier" consisting of the confessions he writes up every night runs to ten thousand pages.
The plot of Confessions of Westchester County concerns one Mrs. Lee. Lee has sex with Luther, but afterwards instead of unburdening herself to the persuasive Luther, telling him all about her unhappy life and her broken dreams, as so many of these women do, she treats Luther in a brusque, almost condescending manner--Luther is always the one in charge, the manipulator, but he finds himself, for the first time, holding the wrong end of the stick! After leaving the Lee household Luther broods over this defeat, and develops a determination to set things to rights.
A few days later he returns to the Lee house, only to find Mrs. Lee gone; a black woman whom Mrs. Lee calls "Melinda" (it is implied that this is not her real name) who cleans the house twice a week is there. Luther is a racist who tells us that "I have a mild prejudice against Negroes...while sympathetic to their social problems I simply cannot bear their enactment in the flesh" and even makes a joke about how Melinda's recent ancestors must have been cannibals. He also has little interest in the confessions of "the servant class" ("there is little sociology to be obtained from servitors,") but he decides to have sex with "the Negress" anyway and wheedle a confession out of her. These scenes are genuinely disturbing as Luther seduces Melinda, tricks her into thinking he cares about her so she spills her guts, telling him all her problems, and then he just callously leaves her, not even concealing his lack of interest now that she has fulfilled his desire for a confession.
On his third trip to the Lee household, after he and Mrs. Lee have sex (I guess appealing to some demographic of the erotica-reading public Lee says "Let’s do it fast today, let’s do it just like dogs. Did you ever see dogs fuck, Luther?” and I guess as a satire of materialism Luther, while penetrating her from behind, says things like “Think of furs, rich furs swaddling you as you move down the ramps of descended jets, the flicker of photography haloing your face. Think of the Hamptons. Think of two summer homes” and the thought of two summer homes brings her to orgasm) Lee gives Luther what he wants, a confession of how she hates her husband and hates her little daughter. (Dislike of one's own children was a theme of Herovit's World, you will recall.) Luther briefly thinks he has achieved mastery, but in fact it is Lee who is still in the driver's seat--she begins demanding that Luther murder her husband!
Malzberg does a good job with the chapters about the murder--they feel like they are from a legit crime novel. The dirty deed goes off well--the cops think it was suicide!--but Mrs. Lee goes off to Portugal with her daughter and without Luther (during which time Luther is squatting in the abandoned church and eating onions), and when she gets back she introduces Luther to a friend of hers who wants Luther to murder her hubby!
Briefly resistant, soon Luther has embraced his new identity as a killer ("the important thing about a satisfying murder (I am already something of a connoisseur) is to get it over with and enjoy the afterglow.") Finally he has a career, finally he knows what he is good at, what he is good for! He dresses up in Hilarion's priestly garb and Malzberg gives us some good scenes that revolve around how the public, mistaking Luther the killer for a man of the cloth, responds to him as he makes his way via mass transit and on foot to murder #2 in beautiful downtown Manhattan. Another success--the cops again chalk this one up to suicide!
Following this second assassination, Luther learns that Hilarion never got to the retreat, perhaps because Luther never returned to his adoptive father his automobile--Hilarion died while walking on the highway, his body discovered "in a small ravine off exit fifteen of the New York State Thruway, about five miles east of Suffern." The cops ascribe his death to suicide, but Luther isn't so sure.
Murder #2 is not the last, as the number of Westchester wives who would like to see their husbands exterminated is not in the single digits. Mrs. Lee gives Luther a long list of names and addresses, and there follows a campaign of murder against married male Manhattan office workers of horrendous proportions, a campaign which ends with Luther in a prison cell from which, perhaps appropriately, perhaps ironically, he can see a feminist demonstration far below, the marching women waving signs demanding "FREE ABORTIONS" and "EQUAL EMPLOYABILITY."
Confessions of Westchester County is a good mainstream comic novel about how horribly men treat women, how horribly women treat men, how working hard and/or having lots of money won't make you happy, how religion is a scam and the government is incompetent--all those truths that we hold to be self-evident. It also has Malzbergian asides reflecting Barry's beliefs that machinery is destroying us and the space program is doomed. The whole thing is clever and many of the jokes are funny. I enjoyed it and recommend it, with the usual boring caveats about how Christians and Democrats and feminists and "the woke" may find it offensive. Students of 20th-century American literature might be curious about it, as Malzberg's intro to this edition suggests Confessions of Westchester County is a sort of erotica/noir take on John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle, an "important" book I'd never even heard of until today.
Yet again, kudos to Malzberg, the sage of Teaneck. And thanks to Stark House--hopefully they will make more of Malzberg's non-SF material available.
There is no more Malzbergian concept line than the following --- "Luther suggests that reducing the world to a series of ones and zeroes will destroy all individuality; he also sees the ones and zeroes as uncannily like male and female genitalia [...]"
ReplyDeleteI can't say I'll track this one down. I do enjoy his near future speculations more than his erotic fiction. But, can you imagine being his editor? Yeah, "write a sleazy erotic story" please. Oh, "absolutely, here it is [a few months later]" -- and the entire novel, is, as you say, far from actually erotic, despite its content. People miss the black comedy elements of his writing, which should be seen as front and central.
I'll have a review of The Last Transaction (1977) up soon. Talk about a work that's lost it's shock value in the era of Trump (it's about a senile president recording his last thoughts).
As I have said before, I think I like Malzberg's mainstream stories as much or more than his SF. But my next Malzberg will probably be The Remaking of Sigmund Freud published by Del Rey in 1985 and apparently a fix-up and expansion of four early '80s stories which I have not read.
DeleteI have The Remaking of Sigmund Freud on the shelf. Not sure which Malzberg I'll read next. The Last Transaction was an impulse read -- after putting down at least three novels as I "wasn't in the mood."
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