Machine by Barry N. Malzberg

"I had no business getting involved with you.  My feelings are right.  You're a little operator and on top of that, you're a two-timer.  You just go from one thing to the next and the only way you'll ever stop is when you get too old or die.  Then you'll stop moving around.  Until then you'll just ne a tinhorn."

Santa Claus, in the guise of my wife, gifted me a stack of four books put out by Stark House, each reprinting two novels by Barry N. Malzberg, one of the MPorcius Fiction Log's particular faves.  Let's start with Machine, which first appeared in 1969 under the title Do It To Me, credited to Mel Johnson, a pseudonym affixed to sex novels penned by Barry in the late Sixties and sold under such titles as Nympho Nurse, The Sadist, The Box, Chained and Campus Doll.  

The narrator of this relatively brief novel (its seven chapters total like 62 pages in this 2021 edition) is Mike Jennings, a sort of loser who can't ever seem to finish what he has started and who treats women shabbily.  The story Jennings relates to us takes place in 1956, when Jennings was 37 years old.  In his twenties, Jennings had a two-year marriage with a woman, Charlotte, who had fantastic breasts but who bored him otherwise; it seems their marriage collapsed when his fascination with her tremendous rack began to wane, in part because she was a poor performer in bed, merely laying there.  After failing at unspecified, perhaps illegal or immoral, business ventures in New York City, Jennings in '56 invested all his meagre resources, supplemented via loans, to open a pinball parlor in the college town of Syracuse.  (Syracuse comes in for a lot of abuse in this novel as a place where there is nothing to do and which people are eager to leave.)  Jennings is a poor businessman, not even keeping the parlor open on a regular schedule, disappointing paying customers so he can, for example, spend time with a college girl, Sandra, with whom he has a casual sexual relationship.  Even more threatening to the parlor's long term health is the fact that pinball machines are considered immoral by many in authority; in the 1940s the government of NYC famously shut down all the pinball establishments and smashed the machines, and Jennings fears such a crackdown may occur in Syracuse.  He has an underworld contact, a grossly obese man named Howells who has nebulously defined connections, and by paying protection money to this somewhat menacing character Jennings hopes to protect his business from government meddling.

The plot of Machine concerns three items: 1) Jennings' relationship with Sandra--are these two sick of each other after three sexual encounters (after all, they have nothing in common), or will they try to build a lasting relationship?  2) Jennings' relationship with Charlotte--all of a sudden his ex-wife comes back into Jennings' life and he and we readers wonder: is she nosing around because she thinks she can get her hands on some of that sweet pinball money, or does she want to take a second shot at building a lasting relationship with Jennings, and does Jennings?  3) The pinball parlor--can it survive?

Malzberg offers glimmers of hope in each of these plot threads before showing us Jennings' chances of a rewarding life going down in flames.  The Sandra narrative is the least interesting of the three.  More entertaining is the pinball business.  After emphatically telling Jennings that the local government has no objection to pinball, the very next day Howells of the three chins shows up at the parlor with the news that all the signs Jennings has been seeing suggesting that the days of pinball in Syracuse are numbered were indeed prophetic; the orotund organized crime figure warns Jennings to get all the money out of the machines ASAP because the fuzz could seize the machines any minute.  Howells also demonstrates that he has Jennings' number, having intuited that our narrator is a loser whose heart was never really in building a successful business.  (All through the novel Jennings demonstrates a wishywashiness, an inability to be decisive which has him bouncing to and fro, like a pinball, his course directed by external forces.)

The funniest scene in the novel follows that in which the cops arrive to cart the ten pinball machines away to the dump for destruction.  Jennings feels somehow responsible for these machines and wants to witness their final moments, and the laugh out loud scene is a pathetic car chase in which Jennings struggles to coax his unreliable automobile into action so he can catch up to the police van carrying the impounded machines and get to the dump in time to attend their execution.  Unfortunately, the actual scene of the destruction is a little too over-the-top, too surreal in an otherwise pretty realistic novel, with the cops shooting the machines with their service weapons before stomping them with their boots and finally hacking them with an axe.  Jennings' interpretation of the symbolism of the destruction--that each of us has an axe inside himself which works to destroy all he tries to accomplish--is clumsy.  

Jennings' relationship with Charlotte is the most effective of the three plot threads, plausible and sad, a believable portrayal of people in early middle age desperate to get their lives straightened out and of course doomed to fail.  Jennings thinks of Charlotte as no more than a pair of breasts, and Malzberg suggests that all men have treated Charlotte that way, all her life, indicting all men or at least all American men of treating women as sex objects.  Charlotte, it seems, has not come to Syracuse looking to get her mitts on her ex-husband's money, but with the sincere hope of building a fulfilling relationship with Jennings after ten years of unhappiness spent with other men and at various jobs.  Jennings finds himself open to the idea, and for a moment it almost looks like Charlotte's hopes might be realized; Jennings, by ignoring her breasts and instead focusing on other parts of her body and striving to please her, provides Charlotte the first sexual encounter of her life that she can truly enjoy.  This event occurs at the end of the sixth chapter, serving as a kind of climax, and it almost looks like maybe these two are going to live happily ever after, but in the denouement that is the half-page of the seventh and final chapter we are brusquely informed that it all fell apart.  

Do It To Me was marketed as a sex novel, and many pages of Machine are devoted to the sex act, and the sex here is actually not as sad or disgusting as sex often is in Malzberg books--Sandra and Charlotte find Jennings a skilled lover, and our hero actually manages to achieve orgasm three times in one day.  The novel's sex scenes do have fetishistic elements to them: there is some rough behavior as Sandra and Charlotte put up resistance that Jennings overcomes and which may be largely or entirely token in nature, and Jennings admits to us his desires to inflict pain on the women.  And of course there is the obsessive focus on the women's breasts.  

In his writing, Malzberg often expresses the opinion that technology is becoming our master, and in his 2020 afterword to Machine here in the Stark House edition he deploys the couplet, "You don't play the machines.  The machines play you."  (Italics in original.)  Of course the presence of pinball machines in the novel offers him a chance to push this idea, and pinball machines do play a role here in Machine that betting on horse races does in some of Malzberg's other novels: in the same way we think we can control our lives by weighing odds, making predictions, and making decisions, but in fact the course of our lives is either totally random or controlled by larger forces exterior to us, such that we have no control over our own destinies, players of pinball succeed or fail due to randomness or because the machines are rigged or because of the selfish or arbitrary dictates of machine owners and government flunkies.

However, I think Barry's anti-technology theme here in Machine is working at cross purposes with some of the novel's other themes and so comes across as muted, something you might not see if you weren't already familiar with Malzberg's hobbyhorses.  Early on, Jennings thinks about pinball while having sex with Sandra, and Sandra complains that he thinks about the machines more than he thinks about her; these scenes suggest the novel's argument is that technology and capitalism serve to distract men from love and human relationships and thus prevent people from achieving happiness.  But this theme is undermined when we see that Jennings in fact is not very focused on his business at all, and is actually easily distracted from work by his sex partners, and his revelation at the dump that we all have an axe inside us which works against us.  Malzberg also doesn't devote much time and energy demonstrating how pinball negatively affects people; the idea that the government is corrupt and its anti-pinball campaign is driven by a brutish lust for destruction rather than a concern for the morals of minors comes across much more powerfully.  

Its failure to strongly advance its apparent theme suggests Machine was written and edited in a rush, and there are irksome problems with the text that bolster this suspicion.  When we first are introduced to Sandra we are told she is 19, but later we are told she is 21.  We are told Jennings' three-month career as a pinball parlor manager took place in 1956, but when he talks to an indifferent Sandra about the government destruction of pinball machines in New York in the Forties, he says they took place "twenty years ago."  Sandra claims she doesn't know who anti-pinball crusader LaGuardia is, but then she uses his first name before Jennings utters it.  Tsk, tsk.

So, a merely adequate Malzberg production, though the car chase is good, the relationships work and the sex scenes are actually sort of sexy.  I entertain hopes that one or more of the other Malzberg books contained in these Stark House double editions will reach the heights of Underlay, The Horizontal Woman, and Everything Happened to Susan.