When we read a novel whose young, bookish protagonist is seen, within its pages, working on a novel, a familiar literary conceit is encouraged: the novel he is depicted trying to write becomes, ideally and figuratively, the one we are reading. This principle operates even when the young, bookish protagonist, like Jacob Putnam, in Caleb Crain’s first novel, “Necessary Errors” (Penguin), hardly manages to write anything at all, and has only vague, if fierce, literary ambitions. Jacob, a recent Harvard graduate, has arrived in Prague, in 1990, to teach English—but he has really come to write his novel. In the bildungsroman, more often than not, it is understood that the Bildung is building to the Roman.
But, as I was reading “Necessary Errors,” this slightly academic circularity began to resonate on a deeper and more personal frequency, for Crain is roughly my own age, and incarnates as well as anyone else the literary ambitions of my generation. He has taken his time in publishing his first novel, while others of that generation (including me) apparently lacked such fine patience. I began reading it, I’ll admit, in a parched spirit of competitive calculation: let it be good, but not so good that I must envy it. Yet “Necessary Errors” is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth. To experience again those awkward, joyous ambitions in a fictional work so consummately the achievement of them was, for me, a complicated, rueful pleasure. Necessary errors, indeed.
But a pleasure, undeniably. Starting with the richly calm way in which Crain evokes Prague in the early nineteen-nineties, in the seesaw wake of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like Jacob, Crain was living in Prague in 1990 and 1991, and he seems to have re-created, with extraordinary fidelity, the texture of everyday life in a society embarking on a long journey of transformation.
Jacob teaches at a language school in the city, but lives, in rented rooms, on the outskirts:
Crain’s Prague, of course, contains the famous buildings and statues, the gorgeous vistas, and they are given their descriptive due, often in interesting ways. (Jacob feels, at one point, that there were “so many eyes carved in Prague’s façades, belonging to caryatids, masks, reliefs of politicians, and the figures of ideals, that one was never free of the sense of being observed.”) But he is more taken with the shabbily proud city of daily Communist survival—the mystifying food shortages (he hoards boxes of dumpling powder), the challengingly ugly concrete buildings and their plastic interiors, the impoverished clothes, the ritualized compromises: “On Mondays he always took a bath before dinner, because on Monday at eight p.m. the hot water stopped flowing and didn’t come back on until Thursday at the same hour—a shortcoming that the landlord had disclosed during negotiations but which Jacob hadn’t quite believed in at the time.”
In order to get into town, Jacob takes a long tram ride, which runs through
The novel moves from seasonal warmth to seasonal warmth, from October, 1990, to August, 1991, but for much of the time Prague’s weather seems in a state of wintry arrest: a comic motif features the daily existential struggle, for a man blessed by easy American sunlight, with the gray baffle of the city’s skies. Sometimes that sky is like gray silk or very fine mail. At others, it is “chalky gray like cigarette ash.” Often, it is an “evenly quilted, colorless blanket of cloud,” which glows softly “with the light that it was holding back.” Even when it snows, “the flakes continued at millions of separated points the suppressed gray light of the sky”—a striking description of the strange anticlimax of snowfall in a northern European town. Jacob knows that the sky is something you need inner resources to fight: “It was one of the city’s weapons.”
“Necessary Errors” is an achievement of detailed recollection, and as such has a dense, realistic heft. But its true spirit is closer to Henry James (and even Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen) than to documenters like Balzac or Howells. If Crain is a patient painter of furniture and food and weather, he is a pointillist of human motive and interaction, systematically capturing elusive and fugitive feeling. Jacob lives alone, but he shares Prague intensely, with a group of young friends, most of whom, like him, are privileged temporary immigrants, drawn to ragged new opportunity and unstable frontiers. There is Henry, an Englishman who has lived in Prague “since before the change”; he studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and is responsible for the presence of two Scots, Thom and Michael, who teach with Jacob at the language school. There is the beautiful Melinda, a young and intelligent Englishwoman, and her confident boyfriend, Rafe, a politically knowing American, who may or may not be working in some form of espionage. And there are Jacob’s intimate relationships with two Czech men, Luboš (a brief affair that founders on misreading and misapprehension) and, later in the novel, Milo (a much happier relationship, which ends—or seems likely to end—only when Jacob returns to America).
Crain’s novel is not only a long book (at four hundred and seventy-one pages) but a large one, with a big, cascading cast. The friends convene and reconvene, party and argue, eat and smoke, dance and make love, conscious that their time together is precious, brief, and eccentric. Prague makes it eccentric, because the city is a peculiar utopia for them, a place where “real life” can be suspended. After graduating from college, Jacob worked, in America, in an office, and dreads going back: “To be here was something more than a holiday; it was a kind of rift in the net, so new that it was not yet clear how it would be rewoven into the systems of money and responsibility.” The novel captures this sense of golden interruption, when to be young is to feel that time will never run out, that you can “talk for hours over lunch about the purpose of life, without embarrassment.” Prague functions as a university should have—as a place where error and accomplishment are close kin, and waywardly explored.
The necessary errors of the novel’s title have to do with judgment, ethics, love, various forms of political innocence. Because Crain proceeds slowly and calmly, and because he allows himself plenty of narrative room, he has time to probe several rich themes. One of them, centrally, has to do with the sentimental education of Jacob, a gay Flaubertian flâneur who, at the novel’s start, is still hiding his sexuality from most of his friends. Jacob is “an earnest, idealistic young person who was comfortable with only one pleasure, reading.” He discovers other pleasures: one of the novel’s sweetest is the depiction of the gradual unfolding of Jacob’s sexuality. When we first encounter him, his scant knowledge of gay Prague comes from the pages he furtively tore out of “a guide to gay life abroad purchased in Boston,” but he ends up happily incorporating his boyfriend, Milo, into the older group of friends.
One of the novel’s blurbs likens it to “The Ambassadors,” but “The Portrait of a Lady” seems to cast a longer shadow, for “Necessary Errors” is powerfully absorbed by Isabel Archer’s dilemmas—the question of what constitutes true liberty, and the drama of choice. Melinda puts it this way: “the question of how to know whether one is choosing or whether one is giving in to something one hasn’t understood.” She means her decision to leave Rafe, her boyfriend of years, and run off to Rome with Carl, an old friend of Jacob’s from Harvard days, whose arrival in Prague—about a third of the way through the novel—disrupts the tight weave of Jacob’s friendships. Jacob has about him something of Ralph Touchett, the sickly spectator who manages Isabel’s life from behind the arras, in “The Portrait of a Lady.” Jacob is not obviously manipulative, but he quietly encourages Melinda’s moral swerve, partly because he is in love with both her and Carl (as Ralph is in love with Isabel).
Jacob sees much very clearly, but is also dangerously disengaged and unworldly: “He thought that nothing finally attached him to the world that had formed him, and that this separation was what he had instead of a skill or a legacy; this was his special advantage.” It may be an advantage in the writing of novels, but it is not an advantage in the living of life. Jacob is politically complacent; hearing the first President Bush give a speech in Prague, he enjoys its very blandness, feeling that “it reflected America’s stability and confidence.” When the Gulf War breaks out, he barely follows its progress. He seems not to have thought hard enough about the dimensions of personal and political liberty. A series of experiences in the second half of the novel—his relationship with Milo; his increasing intimacy with a group of Czech chemists, eager to learn English—tutor him in new realities.
This makes the book sound dogmatic when it is feelingly unemphatic, light on its moral feet. Unlike much contemporary American writing, the prose eschews glitter and exhibitionism in favor of a limpid evenness. But the clarity of this lucid prose is often lyrical, not just prosaic. How beautifully, for instance, Jacob realizes that it has begun snowing. He is standing in a restaurant, with his back to the window: “An unexplained calm in several faces prompted him to look over his shoulder and discover it.” When Jacob talks on the phone, to arrange his first date with Luboš, he nervously presses his fingers “between adjacent revolutions of the phone cord’s cool spiral.” (That adjective, “cool,” is wonderfully placed.) Or this description of a first drink: “They were nearing the end of their first round, which they always drank more quickly than those that followed, and which they hardly felt except in the way one feels the looseness in a boat that has been untied from its mooring but has not yet left it.”
The French writer Maurice Blanchot, in an eloquent essay entitled “Friendship,” suggests that great friendships are grounded only superficially in proximity. Their real element, he argues, is distance, a kind of separation that “becomes relation.” He calls this separation “discretion,” a discretion that foreshadows “the final discretion,” which is death. Blanchot seems to mean that true friendship, true love, encompasses, comprehends, and anticipates loss. This is perhaps the deepest of Jacob Putnam’s lessons. He must learn about loss, and in doing so he learns that the separateness on which he congratulated himself at the start of the book (his “special advantage”) was not in his control: it has become hapless, unavoidable separation. As the time approaches when the friends will be scattered, Jacob comes to see their months together as an Eden, from which they must be expelled. In a plangent passage, he reflects that the difference between life in Prague and life in America is between what a Marxist might call “use value” and “exchange value.” Life in Prague is a matter of looking forward only to “the events of the day for themselves. . . . One did not think about getting through the day, or about winning anything with the use of it—there was no idea of losing the day as if in trade for something else. It was lost innocently, for nothing.” And now, Jacob thinks—for his time is almost up and he must return to America—“this quality of loss would have to be lost, in turn.”
The novel ends with the picture of this loss, with loss turning into a picture. Jacob boards a bus for Paris; it is August, and the Prague adventure is at an end. All his friends come to see him off, and he carries an unopened letter from Milo. As the bus pulls away, he cries: “From being people whom he had lived among, his friends became a picture of the same people, falling behind him.” It is real loss, but it is also something like the discretion of distance: it makes possible the writing of this novel. ♦
