He lived every second of his life for acclaim while pretending it was merely this unexpected, unwanted byproduct of his oh-so-authentic and eccentric cutting-edge art. Like he would produce that art whether or not he got the veneration. Bollocks. Everything he did he did to be adored. That’s neither good nor bad. I’m not judging. It’s simply how it was.
A few years back, some leading novelists from several countries set out to do something virtually unprecedented in the history of fiction. Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard was the most cited, but Britain’s Rachel Cusk described the impulse more clearly. Quite simply, these and other writers, having become disillusioned with the time-honored techniques of inventing characters, locations, events, and all the other necessary materials of story telling, began to draw their creations not from their imaginations, but from pre-existing, available sources. Knausgaard allegedly told his life story, recollecting more detail than readers could readily credit, and eventually being forced by some members of his family to modify his version, or admit he’d done so. Cusk’s protagonist journeyed through her story without revealing much about herself, but instead recounting at length and in great detail the stories of those she met. One of the most interesting of these excursions came from the University of Utah’s Lance Olsen, who, having digested several encyclopedias-worth of the biography of the late rockstar, David Bowie, turned it into a novel that he gave the metaphorical name of one of the musicians more influential songs: Always Crashing in the Same Car.
An example of the superficial dilemma with which Olsen thus challenges the reader is seen in the opening above. This is Mary Angela Barnett, also known as Angie Bowie, the first of Bowie’s wives and the author of a memoir that may contain this passage. One could check, of course, or for that matter reject it entirely as the sour grapes of a failed marriage. But that would spoil several things: entertainment, to be sure; welcome verisimilitude; and most importantly, insight. The readers of this never-flagging retelling of a whirlwind life—actually, mostly just the last few years, with flashbacks to set the various scenes—will more likely be tempted to match that template against artists of various stripes they have encountered in person, or witnessed by reputation or through the vast, prying journalism of our age of endless personalities and indiscretions.
This is not to say that imagination doesn’t play a large part in Always Crashing. Bowie was known to have consumed massive amounts of drugs, sometimes recreational and at other times medicinal, but scarcely less hallucinogenic. Record and performance reviews and interviews can only go so far in opening up such experiences. Ultimately, fictional invention is called on, as in a chapter-like section in which the narrative voice careens through and beyond history, traveling centuries and millennia into the past and present in the blink … blink … blink of an intoxicated eye. That these flashes are vividly detailed and full of verifiable references makes them more convincing, but also more bewildering. Or is it possible that some drug known to Bowie, or forget that— some inborn recombinant genius that helps explain the performer’s transformative effect on the world audience—is here revealed …
—and Delacroix’s resort, Vauxhall Gardens, erupts helter-skelter out of ploughland. Time leaps. Delacroix’s lease expires. There is Astor again, moving in, cutting a new street—a hundred-foot-wide, three-block long, packed dirt strip—down the middle of where Delacroix’s resort once stood, christening it Lafayette Place in honor of the French aristocrat and military officer who victoriously commanded American troops in the Revolutionary War—
Trying to keep up with such rushing events is more than a little like the feeling of being stoned in the 1970s and trying to follow Major Tom through the arena of orchestrated chaos, cacophony and strobing visuals of a fully produced Bowie performance. Then again, these passages may prepare readers for what happens to the man as his cancerous liver spills biological toxins into his brain and life becomes the inescapable drug trip it secretly always is. What happens then is perplexing at first, but becomes deeply moving. Only in fiction can a single life story have two such contradictory and revelatory endings as this one has.
Each is totally convincing, but any thought that we readers are free to select the one we prefer is undermined initially by their placement: the first ending simply isn’t the actual end, is it? Another of the characteristics of modern reading is the widely-discussed dilemma of whether it’s necessary to finish a book in order to claim it, or whether one may stop when it feels enough. Then again, maybe it’s the difference between reality and art, but any reader who doesn’t ache for the final ending arguably wasted the effort of what has gone before.
Which might be like crashing again, in the same car.
Always Crashing in the Same Car
Lance Olsen
The University of Alabama Press
2023
272 pp.
$18.95
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Book Reviews | Literary Arts
