Caudell, Caleb. The Neighbor. Bonfire Books, Melbourne, 2021
Writing about Caleb Caudell’s first novel from my own, Australian point of view is an interesting exercise. A work of social criticism and satire as much as a tragicomedy and mock epic, social comparisons come naturally. Like Caudell's American heartlanders, we are increasingly deformed physically and spiritually by junk food, legal and illegal drugs and a consumerist culture that exists not only alongside but right on top of increasing immiseration as we lose our livelihoods, our identities and our communities. Add to this the fact that The Neighbor is published by new Melbourne-based publisher Bonfire Books, and, in a nice visual witticism, features a photo of a truck driving on the left side of a road lined with what appear to be eucalypts—and a claim to international significance is insinuated before the book is even opened (a claim that—spoiler alert!—does not disappoint).
The novel tells the story of Jessie Clemons, a lost and listless young man somewhere in America’s heartland. His lostness invites ironic comparisons with Odysseus throughout in a way certainly less tenuous than any links drawn in Joyce’s Ulysses. One readily apparent parallel is the repeated descriptions of food and hospitality. In Clemons’s world, the food is terrible. People don’t cook; they heat things up in microwaves, save takeaway for later and eat in a decadent array of budget fast food chains serving the same range of fried foods washed down with sugary beverages.
Caudell wants us to feel the near-horror of this world, showing us not only how such dubious sustenance enters the body, but how it leaves it:
The room reeked of stale piss and trucker turds. He flicked the loose light switch and saw a mud-streaked toilet seat and soggy tissue paper trailing from the bowl onto the floor. […] Liquid plunged into unflushed liquid. His stream broke through the stagnant soup of beer, liquor, coffee, energy drinks and amphetamines.
The scene in its totality is even more revolting. There are ‘loogies’ on the cracked mirror, even the flush button is ‘mouldy’. If there is a criticism to be made, it is that Caudell looks too hard to find the macrocosm reflected in the microcosm. But then, he has an extraordinary talent for doing just that, and for producing the kind of sustained symbolic descriptions—and, of course, structural parallels—that would put many poets to shame.
Now on to the main premise: Jessie is on the run from a semi-accidental murder (to say more would be a spoiler). To expand on our Odyssey analogy, he starts out happily married: the young couple have each other, and this is enough for them despite their hard-working poverty. Summoned against his will to leave the idyllic Ithaca for the world of work-as-combat-with-a-hostile-world, Jessie, unlike his Greek archetype, fails to distinguish himself in battle, ending up a dishwasher while his wife languishes in front of the TV after failing to complete her hairdressing traineeship. Another dissimilarity is that the couple have no child, no son and heir for Jessie, who has nothing to pass on anyway—himself a disinherited American everyman. So how does the analogy hold up? Well, temptations—the sirens and calypsos are all the more tempting for an ordinary man. Perhaps Jessie is not so much Odysseus himself as one of his hapless retinue who eats the lotus of oblivion or is turned into a pig by Circe and needs saving by a paternal hand. One thinks back to Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of Odysseus tied to the mast, yielding to and at the same time resisting the sirens’ song, sacrificing himself to its mythic power while at the same time triumphing over it through instinctual renunciation—the negative sublimation that, according to Freud, lies at the basis of all cultural achievement. But what if Odysseus were not tied down? What if he were beset with all the temptations of consumer-capitalist modernity and had no powers of self-control to save himself? He had better hope the gods are on his side.
Indeed, there are drugs, women and women on drugs who are more than willing to waylay our hero to prevent him reaching his homeland and wife in time to save them or himself. On the other side, Amber certainly has her suitors and lacks Penelope’s skill in dealing with them. Another similarity is that the story is told in non-linear fashion, via flashbacks, then and now; how he got into his current mess and how he tries to escape it. Should we decide that the Odyssey analogy holds up, then Caudell seems to be implying that a birthright has been stolen; that Jessie is on some sense a rightful king reduced to pauperism, his unborn descendants likewise slighted. As a denizen of the First World and the world’s most influential and oft-romanticised nation, it seems reasonable to read these implications into Jessie’s story. Once again, the American Dream has failed to deliver.
So what are the social problems that Caudell highlights? Once again, the food is terrible. Jessie and everyone he knows is sick and his diet is so bad that it might even by hypothesised that this is main cause of all his problems. There is a sad irony is a young couple trying desperately to conceive while subsisting on ‘cheez whiz’ and crackers. There is not a fresh vegetable or home-cooked meal in sight. Jessie meets a series of aged kings of their own isolated little kingdoms: a truck driver who makes ‘good money’ and buys him a burger meal; a retiree working on his house in the woods and an alcoholic evangelist, both of whom come across sympathetically (indeed, almost identically, with a repetitiveness that might be questioned). Each one offers unstinted hospitality and even friendship, but the bread they break is ever in the form of a sesame seed bun. In Jessie’s world, everyone is unhealthy, an addict of one kind or another: whether of the relatively benign type of the neighbour who, in the prologue sees a pizza box crawling with cockroaches and thinks “I’ve always wanted to try that place”, or the neighbour on the other side who peddles opioids and whatever else to the scabrous masses.
Certainly this book is on the most obvious level an indictment of fast food and prescription opioids, the latter being the real villain besides the character Ace who is their sleazy embodiment. The Neighbor is written against the social background where such drugs are America’s leading cause of premature death. The forces against which a man like Jessie must fight are hard to personify outside of the Pfizer boardroom or the US Congress; they exercise their malign power from a great height, over people ill-equipped to understand let alone resist them. This is why, to return to our Odyssey analogy, the enemies are really the hostile gods who make sport of mortals’ lives. There are momentary adversaries to face, whether it be the unsympathetic boss, the neighbourhood drug dealer or the pursuing policeman, but none of these is the true enemy, which might be a faraway elite, post-industrial capitalism, or social decadence itself.
The protagonist’s lack of forethought and motivation, his lack of character, can make him hard to sympathise with or care about, on one hand; but on the other, Caudell’s recording of Clemons’s often passively registered sensations and emotions, his mastery of subtext, make up for these shortcomings and render his protagonist compelling throughout. The life of such a character might more conventionally be told in deadpan Bukowski-esque prose—a valid if by now somewhat clichéd option. Instead, Caudell’s prose is extremely vivid, reminiscent more of Tom Wolfe than Bukowski or his epigones.
Clemons pressed down on the gas, his body all heartbeat. Lights shone up and down the streets. He passed gas stations and diners and bars and drive through tobacco shops and liquor stores. Glowing marquees and billboards with giant faces and sculpted smiles and uncanny eyes, eerily tracking passengers passengers like haunted paintings of murdered patriarchs on castle walls.
The use of third person narrative is masterful, conveying the dissociation and alienation that are such constant themes throughout:
Clemons grabbed the bag and went to the cooler and got a 24oz can of triple shot iced salted caramel latte, moving as if in a dream, as a composite of himself and mythical beasts and nonsensical and rootless entities, present everywhere at the same time, making decisions and movements but also watching himself from an immaterial place
Something, we feel, is wrong with Jessie Clemons right from the start, and Caudell only drops hints as to what it might be. Certainly there is no clear indication in his backstory for his lack of energy, his evident chronic depression—no formative trauma he is fleeing from. What we do note is that Jessie is not alone; in his trailer-park world of single mothers and feral children, drugs, alcoholism, bad food and underpaid, unrewarding work, his problems are systemic. He is no unique individual but a product of social forces he cannot control and has no time or energy to understand, lacking free will though not entirely without self-reflection; Jesse, indeed, can come across as a philosopher, as in his conversation with the most fully realised and compelling character in the novel, Ace the small-time druglord.
‘I don’t believe people do wrong on purpose. They just have a funny idea of what’s right and what’s wrong.’
‘You don’t believe what you see with your own two eyes, buddy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean look around you. You see who comes around day and night. You see what you live next to. You think we don’t know what we’re doing?’
‘I think people get confused, they forget what’s right.’
‘The trouble is, some of us are cursed with being good at bad things. What are we gonna do?’
The Dostoevskian conversation between these two characters, each in a way the other’s foil and nemesis, is for me the intellectual and moral heart of this book. Neither is right or wrong, and the question is both metaphysical and psychological: Jessie and Ace each know themselves equally well, but they represent diametrically opposed character types. The drug dealer has embraced the dark side to the full extent of his strength, becoming who he was all along, while his lost young neighbour can only remark:
‘Most people seem to know pretty early on what they’re supposed to be doing. I hear them talking about this and that dream, this and that interest, like it’s something inside of them that they can see. I look in myself and I don’t see anything. It’s just blank. There just isn’t anything there.’
In the context of our Homeric paradigm, this is very clever. The man with nothing inside him, no sustaining vision, is ‘No-man’ in a way Odysseus, who tricked the cyclops with his own clever wordplay, was not. This conceptual thread ties in with the book’s conclusion in a way that I unfortunately cannot sufficiently appreciate here without giving the latter away.
On one level, this a precipitate of the novel’s social critique: America has nothing at its core, no steady faith, nothing to live or die for. It is a critique that extends well beyond America’s borders and all across the vista of late modernity. On another, perhaps yet more intriguing level, it is about a certain kind of person: Jessie does not see himself as an everyman; he is set apart by what he sees as a constitutional defect. He is Sartre’s pour soi in the condition of mauvaise foi, looking for an essence that precedes his existence, and not finding it. As Ace rejoins to his lament, ‘You gotta make it up sometimes’.
The two readings are complimentary and taken together help the reader to see beyond any simplistic, reactionary narrative of a nation betrayed, a mass man in need of guidance from above, a more sophisticated version of the comment made by Jessie’s other neighbour who never tires of telling people how ‘the street has gone downhill’ and how the new neighbour ‘should have been here thirty years ago’—in other words, rather unhelpfully, that he was born too late.
Does Caudell present any hope for Jessie and the millions—perhaps billions—he represents? Again, I won’t give away the ending, but will only say that, although far from resolving all the world's problems, from a literary point of view it is highly satisfactory.
A word about the publisher:
In the short time that Bonfire Books has been publishing they have released a number of titles both original and vintage, across a wide range of genres. When one discovers a new publisher hawking their wares on social media one is naturally sceptical: How good is their critical judgment? How professional their production standards? Will the book be well made and the text properly proofread? In the case of Bonfire Books I can report that their standards are impeccable across all criteria. Their giving a home to Caudell’s excellent first novel is a triumph for Australian independent publishing and at once a loss and a gain to our friends across the ocean.
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