March 28, 2005

Things Fall Apart (Especially in California in the 70's)

arling, this is the story of an absolutely divine refrigerator. It belonged to Maritta Wolff, and she had the marvelous idea of stashing an unpublished novel inside. That way, she could keep her book as fresh and stinging as a chilled martini. And she could create such a clever hideaway that, in the enchanted fashion of a fairy tale, the novel would stay out of the pesty hands of editors for 30 years.

Hiding her last book, "Sudden Rain," was, as one of her male characters might say, a damn good idea. A woman in her novel would be likelier to remark that life really can be so extraordinary. In any case, the deep-freeze finale amounts to a last, attention-getting flourish in a most unusual career. Pre-fridge, Wolff was best known as the 22-year-old prodigy who published "Whistle Stop" in 1941. "If she can write this way at 22," one reviewer said, "she should be good for a banning in Boston before she's 25."

"Whistle Stop," which became a film starring the hot young Ava Gardner, was a deft, articulate potboiler about a no-account family in a seamy little town. Featuring berry-picking as employment and a wooden outhouse as local color, it could not share less socioeconomic territory with "Sudden Rain." Here, two and a half years after Wolff's death at 83, is a story set among affluent, unhappily married California couples, mostly of an age to worry why their children are joining communes and throwing the I Ching.

The book can be carbon-dated (autumn, 1972) by the fact that one matron goes to see a "really dirty" and "absolutely nothing" film called "Last Tango in Paris." She goes home and comments: "I can't imagine why everybody's been talking about it." Whatever disputes with editors might have caused Wolff to keep "Sudden Rain" out of their clutches - and it's not hard to see where potential disagreements lay, in a novel sometimes fatuous and overlong - it has been left spookily intact in all its time-capsule period references. "I am taking the Moody Blues records," one of the younger women writes in a farewell note to her lover, "but you may borrow them back any time you like."

"Sudden Rain," which uses its title metaphor as gently as a baseball bat, is about a sex-, love-, meaning- and water-deprived culture on the brink of drastic change. Hindsight gives it a wisdom that is not altogether apparent in the actual prose. Something is happening here, but they don't know what it is, in words redolent of "that damn endless racket the kids called music these days," though Bob Dylan is not the type of famous figure on this book's radar screen. These are the kinds of people who talk about "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" and think of "a great, mad fling with Burt Reynolds" as a good time. To be fair, Wolff does amplify this with the suggestion that Marcello Mastroianni might make a better object of fantasy.

"Sudden Rain," her seventh novel, raises one overriding question, and the answer is no: it is not as striking as its peculiar provenance. Nor is it as vivid or verbose as Wolff's debut work, since it is a much more narrow, embittered kind of fiction. But her early strength lay largely in the immediacy of her dialogue. And "Sudden Rain" finds that she is still, quite evisceratingly, in fighting trim.

This author's domestic arguments are fueled by extraordinary rage, made all the more compelling by what the reader knows better than the writer did: that these husbands and wives inhabit a cultural Pompeii. Their world is about to erupt in every way (drugs and the Vietnam War figure briefly but laceratingly in this vision) and "Sudden Rain" is most significant for preserving it so flawlessly in literary lava.

The book's most exemplary and loathing-filled spouses are Tom and Nedith Fallon, a prosperous couple whose interests have completely diverged. Beginning on the occasion of the divorce of their son, Pete, from his unfaithful wife, Killian, the book watches the Fallons shred and flay.

Tom, a Pleistocene aerospace executive whose manful use of "damn" as a modifier is so relentless as to be laughable, has a loyal secretary called Batesey. ("Don't worry, Mr. Fallon, we'll get you out of here in a flash." "Good girl.") He has an even more loyal mistress, Hallie, who honestly says things like "Darling, what a clever man you really are!" Warmed by such sentiments, Tom is so comfortable with Hallie that he works on needlepoint when he visits her happy home. This is the kind of book in which Tom emits a rebel yell when he finally decides to put an end to the hypocrisy of these arrangements.

Meanwhile, Nedith shops, decorates and radiates contempt with supreme gusto. ("Ah, how it serves you right!") However fatuous the story can be in some details (Hallie sells hose; Tom meets her when buying Nedith a loveless, uninspired birthday present), "Sudden Rain" is shockingly, timelessly immediate in its sexual anger. Wolff's greatest insight is into the irreparable scorn between bread-winning men who expect their wives' undying gratitude and women who have tried every trendy measure - making ceramics and batiks, tying Indian headbands around their foreheads - to make life less empty. If her work is achingly outmoded in some such details, its enduring power lies in diagnosing the roots of their desperation.

"We just sit alone in our houses and look at pictures and none of it is ever quite real," says the woman most eager to take on Marshall McLuhan's idea of television's global village. "We watch men shoot each other in a cops-and-robbers movie and turn the channel and watch news tapes of people being killed in the Middle East or somewhere, and it's really all the same to us, isn't it?"

Her friend, listening reassuringly, replies: "Darling, we all have moments of this." Even without 30 years' worth of cold storage, that thought would be Wolff's most chilling: Darling, we all do.