“Blessedly Devoid of Subtext”: Or, Iain Levison, Come Back
Some years ago, I was on vacation with my family in South Carolina. I think my parents may have still been together at this time, but I’m not sure. What I definitely remember is making a daytrip to Kiawa Island, a beachside resort that was more expensive and tasteful than the kinds of places where we usually stayed. While in a restaurant in Kiawa, I picked up a copy of the area’s local free alternative rag (I can’t remember the name) and read an interview with an irascible author who’d worked a bunch of crap jobs and written a book about his experience. In the interview he lobbed insults at the soft and feckless types that stayed in Kiawa on vacation. My guess is no one on the island bothered to read the interview, or much of anything in the free rag besides suggestions for where to drink wine or which links to tee off on. It’s doubtful a restaurant would stock an edition of a free paper in which their clientele is openly insulted, unless they hadn’t bothered to read said article.
Flash forward some time and I stumble on the book for which Levison was being interviewed, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, and started to read. Readers have been suckers for tales about working crap jobs for some time now, probably at least since Charles Bukowski started violating the great taboo with his books Post Office and Factotum. Individual exceptions obviously exist, but it seems that pre-Bukowski, writers liked to be thought of as artists above such meager pursuits as earning their daily bread. Being all the way down and out (a la George Orwell in his early years) was okay and romantic, as was being uber-wealthy (this “top-out-of-sight” class as sociologist Paul Fussell would have it, exerted a mighty hold on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination). But people whose jobs weren’t arduous enough to say, compete with Steinbeck’s day laborers, weren’t keen on revealing how they kept the lights on when the writing wasn’t paying the bills.
Iain Levison’s book was a much better-than-average contribution to the genre. It was hard-edged, funny, insightful, and written in clear and precise language. I liked the book and then didn’t think about it much more after finishing it.
Flash forward again some years and I’m in the Army (as was Levison, although I believe he was in the Scottish Armed Forces). I’m stationed at Kelly Barracks with the 22nd Sig in Darmstadt, Germany. Cambrai-Fritsch (the other barracks / Kaserne) actually had a quality library where I’d found everything from Chomsky to Burroughs to first editions of Gunter Grass, that helped me pass to the time.
I found another small book in the library by Levison, who I vaguely remembered from before. This one was even shorter than the previous one, though, and fiction. The title was Since the Layoffs. It took me something like three hours to read the whole thing (if that) and I devoured it in a sort of trance. It was a straightforward tale about an unemployed/underemployed guy who agrees to work as a heavy for a local crime figure. His logic isn’t too complicated and his morality isn’t too complex. Either be broke or break the law and have better gear, like a leather jacket, and a nice car to cruise around in.
Once, while lounging around in the bees (barracks) with a friend, burning incense and chilling on a lazy weekend, I heard someone shout, “Damn right!” I looked up and saw that my friend was reading the Levison book that I’d forgotten to return to the library at Cambrai Fritsch (I think it was a cold and snowy November weekend and I didn’t have a car). My friend looked down at the book and said, “This dude is right.”
“You can borrow the book,” I said. “Just take it back when you’re done.” My friend lived at the other Kaserne, so he would be able to drop the book off on his way to formation in the morning.
This friend and I were drinking at a bar a couple of weeks later and he confessed that Since the Layoffs was the only book he’d read that he hadn’t been forced to read, in his entire life. “I’ll read TMs (training manuals) but only because I have to.”
One more flash forward and I’m out of the army (finally, thank God) and I’m sitting there thinking, Say, that Iain Levison was a better-than-average writer. I wonder what the hell became of him?
I picked up two more books from Levison, the only other two I could find. The first one was How to Rob an Armored Car. It was, like his previous books, about working crap jobs, and, like Since the Layoffs, it was about the moral dilemma of how many laws a man is willing to break in order to live with more dignity than his station will seemingly allow. Unlike Levison’s first book, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, this one wasn’t didactic at all. It was straightforward, unalloyed, and made its point without any kind of Michael Moore manipulation or histrionics. It was a fictional foray, like Levison’s second book, Since the Layoffs, but it was longer and much more mature, and better written.
I handed the book off to a writer friend of mine, John, and he passed the recommendation on to another writer we both knew, named Jon. John told me he dug Armored Car, but that Jon wasn’t impressed.
“Why not?” John had asked him.
“Something’s missing,” Jon replied.
To which John replied, “I know. It’s blessedly devoid of subtext.”
He had a point. How to Rob an Armored Car was about some friends who work in a big box chain store, smoke weed on the weekends, and decide to pull off a heist. One can extrapolate from it what they want, but it’s not an allegory or a metaphor. It is what it is, and there’s something appealing about its simplicity. At least for me, there was. I respect Jon and his opinion, but that doesn’t mean we always have to be on the same page.
The last Levison book I read, Dog Eats Dog, was also fiction, and, as in all his previous works, it showed maturation. This book featured Levison’s usual gimlet eye for class, but it was more a cross-section study up and down the economic ladder, a bit like that film Crash (not the one based on the J.G. Ballard book about people who get off on car wrecks, but the one that swept the Oscars). Dog Eats Dog was about an escaped con who worms his way into the life of an affected professor working on some massive study about the Third Reich, and the professor’s Humbert Humbert-esque relationship with his Lolita-like neighbor. A female Federado who reminded me a bit of Clarice Starling interjects herself into this weird mix, and Levison turns the tension up to ten and leaves it there.
Dog Eats Dog was chockfull of subtext, as opposed to Levison’s How to Rob an Armored Car. It was also perhaps an even better book. I looked forward to the next book that Levison would write, and I waited. And waited.
I’m still waiting. Based on the little bit of research I’ve done (not much sleuthing, I’ll admit) Iain Levison said “Screw it” and left for China, where he became an English teacher. It’s possible he’s still doing well based on foreign sales (he’s not “big in Japan” as they say, but like a lot of writers whose view of America is a bit too unvarnished for Americans, his stuff is big in France). Two other books by the man appear in the search on Amazon, but they’re in German. One is Gedankenjäger (Thought Hunter) and the other is the wonderfully titled Hoffnung ist Gift (Hope is Poison).
It’s hard for me to tell if these are translations of his English works, or if they’re Deutsch exclusives. Having a good translator can make or break a writer’s career abroad (look at the beautiful things Ralph Manheim has done) and I can only hope that something gives for Levison, that someone notices how good he was, and that he can somehow be convinced to believe that the game is in fact worth the candle.
Then again, if he’s happy teaching in China and he wishes to maintain radio silence from here-on-out, that’s his prerogative. I miss his voice, all the same. He perfectly documented the lives of the American former working and lower-middleclass that’s been hollowed out over the past few decades, and he took that incredibly depressing and enraging subject and made fiction that was funny and smart and tough.
Anyway, I’d wish Levison a “Happy New Year” but I know the calendar is much different in China and I’m too lazy to learn it. Are we in the year of the monkey or the dog, or is it the rat?
Flash forward some time and I stumble on the book for which Levison was being interviewed, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, and started to read. Readers have been suckers for tales about working crap jobs for some time now, probably at least since Charles Bukowski started violating the great taboo with his books Post Office and Factotum. Individual exceptions obviously exist, but it seems that pre-Bukowski, writers liked to be thought of as artists above such meager pursuits as earning their daily bread. Being all the way down and out (a la George Orwell in his early years) was okay and romantic, as was being uber-wealthy (this “top-out-of-sight” class as sociologist Paul Fussell would have it, exerted a mighty hold on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination). But people whose jobs weren’t arduous enough to say, compete with Steinbeck’s day laborers, weren’t keen on revealing how they kept the lights on when the writing wasn’t paying the bills.
Iain Levison’s book was a much better-than-average contribution to the genre. It was hard-edged, funny, insightful, and written in clear and precise language. I liked the book and then didn’t think about it much more after finishing it.
Flash forward again some years and I’m in the Army (as was Levison, although I believe he was in the Scottish Armed Forces). I’m stationed at Kelly Barracks with the 22nd Sig in Darmstadt, Germany. Cambrai-Fritsch (the other barracks / Kaserne) actually had a quality library where I’d found everything from Chomsky to Burroughs to first editions of Gunter Grass, that helped me pass to the time.
I found another small book in the library by Levison, who I vaguely remembered from before. This one was even shorter than the previous one, though, and fiction. The title was Since the Layoffs. It took me something like three hours to read the whole thing (if that) and I devoured it in a sort of trance. It was a straightforward tale about an unemployed/underemployed guy who agrees to work as a heavy for a local crime figure. His logic isn’t too complicated and his morality isn’t too complex. Either be broke or break the law and have better gear, like a leather jacket, and a nice car to cruise around in.
Once, while lounging around in the bees (barracks) with a friend, burning incense and chilling on a lazy weekend, I heard someone shout, “Damn right!” I looked up and saw that my friend was reading the Levison book that I’d forgotten to return to the library at Cambrai Fritsch (I think it was a cold and snowy November weekend and I didn’t have a car). My friend looked down at the book and said, “This dude is right.”
“You can borrow the book,” I said. “Just take it back when you’re done.” My friend lived at the other Kaserne, so he would be able to drop the book off on his way to formation in the morning.
This friend and I were drinking at a bar a couple of weeks later and he confessed that Since the Layoffs was the only book he’d read that he hadn’t been forced to read, in his entire life. “I’ll read TMs (training manuals) but only because I have to.”
One more flash forward and I’m out of the army (finally, thank God) and I’m sitting there thinking, Say, that Iain Levison was a better-than-average writer. I wonder what the hell became of him?
I picked up two more books from Levison, the only other two I could find. The first one was How to Rob an Armored Car. It was, like his previous books, about working crap jobs, and, like Since the Layoffs, it was about the moral dilemma of how many laws a man is willing to break in order to live with more dignity than his station will seemingly allow. Unlike Levison’s first book, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, this one wasn’t didactic at all. It was straightforward, unalloyed, and made its point without any kind of Michael Moore manipulation or histrionics. It was a fictional foray, like Levison’s second book, Since the Layoffs, but it was longer and much more mature, and better written.
I handed the book off to a writer friend of mine, John, and he passed the recommendation on to another writer we both knew, named Jon. John told me he dug Armored Car, but that Jon wasn’t impressed.
“Why not?” John had asked him.
“Something’s missing,” Jon replied.
To which John replied, “I know. It’s blessedly devoid of subtext.”
He had a point. How to Rob an Armored Car was about some friends who work in a big box chain store, smoke weed on the weekends, and decide to pull off a heist. One can extrapolate from it what they want, but it’s not an allegory or a metaphor. It is what it is, and there’s something appealing about its simplicity. At least for me, there was. I respect Jon and his opinion, but that doesn’t mean we always have to be on the same page.
The last Levison book I read, Dog Eats Dog, was also fiction, and, as in all his previous works, it showed maturation. This book featured Levison’s usual gimlet eye for class, but it was more a cross-section study up and down the economic ladder, a bit like that film Crash (not the one based on the J.G. Ballard book about people who get off on car wrecks, but the one that swept the Oscars). Dog Eats Dog was about an escaped con who worms his way into the life of an affected professor working on some massive study about the Third Reich, and the professor’s Humbert Humbert-esque relationship with his Lolita-like neighbor. A female Federado who reminded me a bit of Clarice Starling interjects herself into this weird mix, and Levison turns the tension up to ten and leaves it there.
Dog Eats Dog was chockfull of subtext, as opposed to Levison’s How to Rob an Armored Car. It was also perhaps an even better book. I looked forward to the next book that Levison would write, and I waited. And waited.
I’m still waiting. Based on the little bit of research I’ve done (not much sleuthing, I’ll admit) Iain Levison said “Screw it” and left for China, where he became an English teacher. It’s possible he’s still doing well based on foreign sales (he’s not “big in Japan” as they say, but like a lot of writers whose view of America is a bit too unvarnished for Americans, his stuff is big in France). Two other books by the man appear in the search on Amazon, but they’re in German. One is Gedankenjäger (Thought Hunter) and the other is the wonderfully titled Hoffnung ist Gift (Hope is Poison).
It’s hard for me to tell if these are translations of his English works, or if they’re Deutsch exclusives. Having a good translator can make or break a writer’s career abroad (look at the beautiful things Ralph Manheim has done) and I can only hope that something gives for Levison, that someone notices how good he was, and that he can somehow be convinced to believe that the game is in fact worth the candle.
Then again, if he’s happy teaching in China and he wishes to maintain radio silence from here-on-out, that’s his prerogative. I miss his voice, all the same. He perfectly documented the lives of the American former working and lower-middleclass that’s been hollowed out over the past few decades, and he took that incredibly depressing and enraging subject and made fiction that was funny and smart and tough.
Anyway, I’d wish Levison a “Happy New Year” but I know the calendar is much different in China and I’m too lazy to learn it. Are we in the year of the monkey or the dog, or is it the rat?
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