Barry N. Malzberg: "Getting In," "Getting Out," and, w/ B Pronzini, "Night Rider" and "A Matter of Survival"

Digging around scans of late 1970s detective magazines I came up with two Barry N. Malzberg stories I haven't read, and to round out a full blog post let's add to them two stories Malzberg collaborated on with his pal Bill Pronzini.  I read these all in scans of the issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in which they debuted, haphazardly reading the collabs out of chronological order.

"Getting In" by Barry N. Malzberg (1977)

This is an absurdist, somewhat dreamlike, story depicting the pressures inherent in the life of the middle-class male.  Our narrator, I guess an architect or something like that, is so stressed out by dealing with his office job, with his wife and kids, and with his mistress, that he tries to admit himself to an insane asylum called "the Residence."  The doctors run many tests on him and over his protestations declare him sane.  They explain to him that nobody is happy, that his psychological state is normal for one of his age and socioeconomic status.  

We get jokes about how the narrator always contacts his mistress by calling her from a payphone at the fast food restaurant Wonder Waffles, and scenes in which the narrator drives his assistant insane and jealously watches as the man is hauled off to the Residence.  Plus lots of dark humor that demonstrates how selfish the narrator is and how manipulative and emotional women are.  The story ends with the narrator taking up a Smith and Wesson .38, like the guy in one of the Malzberg stories we just read a few days ago, and using it to torture a doctor, who, even as he bleeds from his gunshot wounds, insists the narrator is sane.  As the story ends it becomes starkly dreamlike, and we are given the impression the narrator is going to commit suicide.

This story is so fantastical, feels so much like a cynical fairy tale set in a hyperbolic caricature of our own world, that it is odd to see it in a crime magazine instead of a science fiction magazine.  I don't know that "Getting In" has ever been reprinted, so all you Malzberg obsessive collectors out there will need a copy of the March 1977 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but if I know you sensitive and sophisticated guys as well as I think I do, you wanted one as soon as you saw the cool blue of the issue's cover.

"Getting Out" by Barry N. Malzberg (1978)

Nothing makes the cool blue photographic cover of the March '77 AHMM look better than the embarrassingly lame (the kids would call it "cringe") golf cartoon cover of the July 1978 ish.  Ugh.  But it seems "Getting Out" has never been printed anywhere besides behind this cover that is making me ruefully shake my head.  

As we were hoping, "Getting Out" is a sequel to "Getting In," even though the insane asylum, called "The Residence" in "Getting In" is called "The Institute" here in "Getting Out."  (Wonder Waffles is still "Wonder Waffles," thankfully.)  After shooting at least one person with his Smith and Wesson .38 (described here as "antique," giving us science fiction vibes), and not killing himself, the narrator is held in a cell which he considers more comfortable than the middle-class work and family milieu from which it (partially, as the wife and mistress do come to visit and the kids send correspondence requesting an increase in their allowance) separates him.  He expresses the hope he will be able to spend the next thirty years in this cell, but further tests indicate he is sane, and a doctor confides "You are a valuable social resource, a presumptive sane person. We cannot keep you, really, for thirty hours."  

Released, the narrator returns to work and to home and we get the same kinds of jokes about middle-class life as we got in "Getting In."  Then comes the punchline of the two stories--the narrator and his mistress truly fall in love, and the narrator decides to abandon his family.  This destruction of the family unit cannot be accepted by society, and so the insane asylum that rejected him when he was miserable and tried to admit himself now forcibly admits him, now that he has a chance of happiness by ditching wife and kids.     

Malzberg writes about the profession of psychology, big institutions, and disastrous sexual relationships all the time, and "Getting In" and "Getting Out" are pretty good examples of his work on these themes.  The extent to which Malzberg is sincere in his portrayal of the mental health establishment as a cog in the machine of bourgeois capitalism, as devoted to the project of corralling men in the prison that is the child-rearing family in order to bolster GDP, and to what extent he is spoofing such assessments, I don't know, but the text Malzberg produces is fun and provocative both in its general themes and in its many little jokes and details.  Thumbs up!    

"Night Rider" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1977)

Compared to the "Getting" series, "Night Rider" was an international sensation, seeing reprint in the Pronzini and Malzberg collections Problems Solved and On Account of Darkness as well as translated for the Finnish edition of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine as well as the Japanese Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine.  

When I was living in the Hawkeye State, I checked On Account of Darkness out of the Des Moines Public Library, and so I read "Night Rider" in that dimly recalled period of time before I started this blog.  The New Jersey setting and the marital conflict plot stuck with me--I remembered the story immediately as I started reading it today.  Oh yeah, and the fact that I didn't really like the ending.

Our narrator is a failure in life who has always taken the path of least resistance and is married to a nagging boring woman who has the TV on all day.  His only relief is his nightly drive of over 60 miles along the highways and country roads of Northern New Jersey in his worn out Cadillac Fleetwood.  Pronzini and Malzberg take us with the narrator on one of these drives, mentioning real highways like Route 80 (what people in other states, I have learned, call "I-80") and towns like Lodi, though the geography feels fictionalized and there seems to be a typo, "Watching" for "Watchung."

Anyway, we hear how annoying the wife is and how unhappy the narrator is, and how he is stopped by the police so often for speeding he has developed a whole system of trying to bribe them with plausible deniability if the cop refuses the bribe.

Another car starts chasing the narrator, and we get a pretty good--realistic and tense--car chase.  The narrator drives too fast, is distracted by trying to figure out who might be chasing him, and crashes on a lonely country road by a swamp.  He gets out of the wreck, injured, sees the pursuer's car parked on the shoulder--it is his car!  The man emerging from the car must be himself!  The illusion, presumably a manifestation of his guilt, vanishes and the narrator remembers that he murdered his wife by hitting her with her TV and put her corpse (and that of the TV) in the trunk.

I had little tolerance for such silly psychological twist endings when I was younger, but now I take them in stride and don't find "Night Rider" as disappointing as I did when I read it over ten years ago.  So, thumbs up.

"A Matter of Survival" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1976)

Another Pronzini-Malzberg collab that was reprinted in Problems Solved.  This is today's weakest story, more an idea than an actual story, and lacking the little jokes and sharp images and biting phrases that add so much value to our earlier three tales.

Two business executive are on the balcony of an apartment building over twenty stories up in some Midwestern or Western city where a party is being held.  Each man owns an electronics firm that is losing money because of competition from out east and because corporate welfare from the feds has dried up.  Both companies will fold unless they merge and take advantage of the resulting economies of scale by slashing personnel and space costs.  But the two men don't get along, so a merger seems impossible.

The men don't like each other because one is married to a faithless, manipulative, promiscuous slut and her latest affair is with the other.  She has them under her thumb, enjoys torturing them, refuses to allow her husband to divorce her, refuses to allow the other to end their affair.  And she is against the merger the men think is the only means of saving their two companies.  She comes out on to the balcony to torment them, and they join forces to throw her off the balcony and convince the cops it was a freak accident.  The men's business careers and psychological well-being have been saved.  

Merely acceptable, a sort of skeletal outline of a story that lacks personality and emotional impact.   

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So, four stories about the tragedy of the bourgeoisie, how work life and women drive middle-class men insane, drive them to violence!  Maybe we can tie these themes to a specific time and place, perhaps they reflect conditions in the doom and gloom 1970s and the exigencies typical of American capitalism, and maybe Malzberg intends that interpretation.  But I think the themes of these stories are universal--no doubt medieval European merchants and Soviet apparatchiks were under the same sorts of stresses, were themselves pushed to the brink and sometimes beyond by the pressures of juggling the demands of women and bosses and their responsibilities to and for subordinates and children.

Of today's tales, "Night Rider" feels like the most palatable to a broad audience, a conventional suspense piece written in a realistic style that I think would appeal to mainstream thriller readers, though it has a Malzbergian psychological resolution.  Also conventional, but blandly and boringly so, is today's least piece, "A Matter of Survival," a story with a sort of boiler plate plot that is unadorned by stylistic flourishes or compelling characters or images.  The two solo Malzberg stories, "Getting In" and "Getting Out," are pure Malzberg, reminiscent of so much of his body of work in their themes, style and details, and full of fun; these two are definitely worth seeking out for the Malzberg fan.