ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO GET ALARMED ABOUT
The Complete Novels of Charles Wright
By Charles Wright
Out of print
Between 1963 and 1973, Charles Wright wrote three scalding autobiographical novels about a young black intellectual from Missouri, a Korean War veteran, trying to make it in New York City. To remark that Wright’s novels were also satirical and freewheeling does not begin to cover it. As one of his admirers, the novelist Ishmael Reed, put it, Wright was “Richard Pryor before there was a Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor on paper.”
Wright’s books — “The Messenger” (1963), “The Wig” (1966) and “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About” (1973) — were issued by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, arguably the most admired publishing house on our blue planet. They were, for the most part, ecstatically reviewed. “Malevolent, bitter, glittering,” the critic Conrad Knickerbocker declared about “The Wig” in The New York Times. Then Wright disappeared.
When he died of heart failure at 76 in 2008, his books were out of print and all but forgotten. He hadn’t burned out; he’d faded away. His obituary in The Times reported that he had “vanished into alcoholism and despair.” He’d spent decades living in the spare room of his editor’s apartment in Brooklyn. It was as if his name had been erased: The Tennessee-born poet Charles Wright, a recent poet laureate of the United States, was and is better known.
It’s time to exhume Wright’s novels. I won’t give you the already-exhausted Trump-era culture argument, that we need this writer now more than ever. Instead, I’ll give you this one: Reading Wright is a steep, stinging pleasure, and pleasure will be the guiding principle behind the undersung American books I’ll be speaking about twice a month in this new column.
It’s an apt moment to talk about Wright, as well, because of the deserved success of Paul Beatty’s breakthrough novel, “The Sellout” (2015). It’s possible to draw a crooked line between Wright’s insolent and melancholy novels and Beatty’s own. Indeed, Beatty is a fan of Wright’s work.
The comedy, in each of these writers’ novels, comes backloaded with pain. The laughter each writer provokes catches in your throat. Their African-American characters confront America’s shattered promises regarding race and progress and, as often as not, end up grinning and shaking their heads in disbelief. Life for them is, to borrow a phrase from the critic Albert Murray, “one hog ass thing after the other.”
Wright’s books — they were republished by HarperCollins in 1993 in an omnibus edition under the title “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About” — will not be for everyone. They are essentially plotless. They bristle with pimps and drug dealers and all-American hustlers of every variety. They were composed before the era of political correctness, and their social targets are free-range and multiform.
They’re each about a lonely young man, a fan of Billie Holiday and Langston Hughes and F. Scott Fitzgerald, adrift in the big melancholy city. He has dreams of becoming a writer, but for now he’s holed up in cheap apartments or cockroach-filled hotels, working as a bike messenger or a dishwasher or, though he doesn’t identify as gay, allowing older gay men to pay him for sex.
In “The Messenger,” he gives this account of one moment in his workday: “As I walked through the concourse of the RCA building, sneezing and reading Lawrence Durrell, dead drunk from the explosion of his words, I suddenly looked up and encountered the long face of Steven Rockefeller. He seemed startled. Doesn’t he think poor people read?”
The primal subject of Wright’s novels is loneliness. As a light-skinned black man, his narrator feels like a minority tucked inside a minority. But his solitary nature was baked in at birth. About certain Sunday mornings in Manhattan, the author reports: “The shameful, envious, eyes-lowered glances at passing couples. You recognize other solitary fellow travelers. Both of you go separate ways, moving with the knowledge of Sunday papers, endless cigarettes, tap water, the hoarded half-pint, and the feeling of having missed out on Saturday night’s jackpot prize.”
The jackpot prize among Wright’s novels is probably “The Wig.” It’s his most fully realized book, a frazzled picaresque about a young black man who, sensing he needs a gimmick to make it in the white world, employs an economy-size jar of hair relaxer (“the red, white, and gold label guarantees that the user can go deep-sea diving, emerge from the water, and shake his head triumphantly like any white boy”) to achieve what he calls “the wig.”
He’s not happy to be mocked about his new mane. When a female friend yelps, “You’ve conked your hair,” he replies, “Do you want me to bash your face in?” His hair is so resplendent, and later so vividly red, that he wonders: “Would Time magazine review this phenomenon under Medicine, Milestones, The Nation, Art, Show Business, or U.S. Business?”
The wig does not take him far. He ends up working in a feathered costume for a fried-chicken joint. (To his dismay, the costume dents the wig.) This novel’s first four sentences could also be its last four, and they put me in mind of the antiheroes in Jim Harrison’s fiction:
“I was a desperate man. Quarterly, I got that crawly feeling in my wafer-thin stomach. During these fasting days, I had the temper of a Greek mountain dog. It was hard to maintain a smile; everyone seemed to jet toward the goal of The Great Society, while I remained in the outhouse, penniless, without ‘connections.’”
The final novel in Wright’s trilogy, “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About,” began as a series of columns in The Village Voice. The narrator by now has found a certain amount of fame as a writer, but it brings him little money and less joy. This is an often desultory novel that the writer David Freeman likened to “the rough draft of a suicide note.”
Wright’s heavy-drinking narrator declares early in the book, as if punching out Morse code: “Desperately trying to get a reassuring bird’s-eye view of America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sunny philosophy had always appealed to me. I believed in the future of the country. At 14, I had written: ‘I am the future.’ Twenty-six years later — all I want to do is excrete the past and share with you a few Black Studies.”
Wright’s eye remains sharp in this last book. His narrator stares at a photograph of Norman Mailer in a glossy magazine and thinks: “The face of an urbane carpenter in a $200 suit.” There is still some antic humor and a good deal of bawdy sex. He sleeps with a woman whose breasts, he notes approvingly, “seemed capable of guiding an ocean liner into harbor.” But the fire had largely gone out of Wright’s work.
It’s one of the tragedies of the last century’s American fiction that he wasn’t able to relight it. Wright wrote like it mattered and, though he conjured a world of trouble, he clearly got a bang out of being alive.
American Beauties is a column by Dwight Garner, appearing every other Friday, about undersung American books of the past 75 years.
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner
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