A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris
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A Calling for Charlie Barnes
by Joshua Ferris
Little, Brown, 2021
If you fondly remember Black Humor—Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, DeLillo’s End Zone—and enjoy no-taboos-barred bleak humor, then Joshua Ferris could be your throwback man. His three previous novels—And Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed, and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour—have progressed (or regressed) in absurdist desperation: from the social despair of work in an ad agency to the existential compulsion of constant movement and the impossible religious quest. A Calling for Charlie Barnes initially appears to be softer comic relief, an adopted son’s reconstruction of his eccentric father’s sometimes farcical life. Yes, Charlie at 68 has been married five times, has failed at a long series of hare-brained enterprises, and has an episodic relationship with the truth, but the 40ish son, who calls himself Jake Barnes (after Hemingway, perhaps because of this Jake’s withered arm), loves the man who chose to take in Jake as a child and who keeps in contact even though Charlie has little use for Jake’s profession as a novelist.
In an Esquire essay, Ferris has written tenderly about the problems of composing this book about a man and family very close to Ferris’s own. Intending to write a factual account of his father’s seemingly fictional life, Ferris admits that ultimately he had to fall back on inventions—what he calls “illusions”—to complete the book. And illusion, the reader increasingly learns, is also narrator Jake’s strategy: he conceals facts, leaves out some family members, ignores other characters’ protestations, and in the last third of the novel misleads the reader by making up a fantastic successful post-68 life for Charlie. Jake is more than an unreliable narrator who forgets and skews. He’s a stand-in for an unreliable author who admits, in that Esquire essay, that the facts of his personal life, as well as life in a pandemic, can be accommodated only through useful illusions. So what first seems to be a family comedy turns into a larger tragedy, the desperate need for illusions in a world whelmed by death.
At the beginning of A Calling for Charlie Barnes, Charlie awaits a phone call from a doctor who Charlie assumes will tell him he has pancreatic cancer. While he waits, Charlie calls family and friends, telling them he is doomed. Then he gets the call telling him he doesn’t have cancer. Only when he talks to his nurse wife, who looks at his report, does Charlie learn that he does in fact have pancreatic cancer and must undergo a Whipple surgery. (If you have not heard of this radical resectioning of one’s torso, look it up.)
Ferris is good on the possible consequences of surgical trauma, charting Charlie’s slow recovery, which includes a temporary psychotic break and extended lack of energy. Gradually, Jake writes, Charlie becomes more successful than he has ever been. He has finally discovered his “calling” in founding and running a company that resembles Kickstarter. In tandem, Jake manages to work on his book, even if parts of it are resented and contradicted by other family members.
There’s one large problem with this extended happy ending: Jake admits—and this is a spoiler--at the end of his narrative that Charlie died a few hours after the Whipple, that the last third of the book is an illusion, an invented afterlife. It’s difficult to understand why Ferris felt the need to create the fiction of Charlie’s post-operative life--and then to negate that fiction. If life is cruel (plenty of evidence in the novel), should the novelist be cruel to the reader to represent life? This is at odds with the congenial and humane version of himself that Ferris projects in the Esquire essay, but trust the tale and not the teller. Charlie Barnes suggests that the novelist driven to be a desperate double-dealer of cruelty is the limit case of the desperation that Ferris has written about in his earlier novels.
If you can tolerate this kind of novelistic sadism, there is plenty to like in Charlie Barnes. Set primarily in 2008 when the economy melted down and Charlie’s Illinois small-town assumptions about success were mangled, the novel is a critique of the American faith in upward mobility, a faith to which Ferris has Jake Barnes subscribe in his Gatsby-like portrait of Charlie’s post-death success. As in To Rise Again, Ferris well represents the competition and conflicts of Jake’s siblings, none of whom sees the goodness in their father that Jake does. Just as Charlie expected to be wealthy, his children expected to have a stable family. Neither happened. Life can be cruel. Not even Jake, the master of illusion, can keep his grand illusion afloat. All the characters gnaw on themselves and each other. Maybe Charlie is better off not surviving the Whipple and piling up more financial and familial failures —that bleak implication may be the bottom line in Ferris’s accounting of life in America now.
Given the illusions that Ferris both represents and inflicts, one understands better his second novel about a successful New York attorney who commits slow suicide by leaving work, home, and family behind to walk alone across America. No more rat race and complications. Until Charlie gets cancer, he keeps plugging away, holds his ground, refuses to fly, continues to hope. The Whipple ends his illusions and the pain of believing in them. Better dead than in the red.
It’s difficult to imagine where Ferris can go after the essential nihilism of A Calling for Charlie Barnes. He did seem to take the title of The Unnamed from Beckett, who spent many years and books getting to a still, silent point, so maybe Ferris can imagine further down the futility hole. Or even out of it. Vonnegut, Pynchon, and DeLillo all wrote pessimistic—but not despairing—books after the three mentioned at the beginning. It’s the function of novelists to create illusions. But here is my bottom-line objection to A Calling for Charlie Barnes: Ferris does not persuade me that humans, whether characters or real, can live only by adopting illusions.
—Tom LeClair. His fifth and final "Passing" novel--Passing Again--will be published in March.