The city and the country were poised on the cusp of a great fall, although no one knew it back then.
Optimism coursed through the citizens of Seattle and the US with the jolt of a triple shot of espresso. Stocks soared to unreal heights, paper millionaires gloated about their fortunes, surety about the future ruled. Hubris remained the drug of choice as 1999 turned toward the new millennium.
It was a time of supreme folly and pretense, the perfect time for the novelist to skewer in a dark comedy of manners. Jonathan Raban demonstrates that in his incisive and witty new book, Waxwings. The Seattle dot-com world has its very own Bonfine of the Vanities, only the author is not Tom Wolfe, but rather a latter-day Evelyn Waugh in the person of the crusty, iconoclastic English ex-pat writer who has lived in this city since 1990.
"The dot-com boom was interesting to me," Raban relates, "because the bubble was about to burst before the much larger bubble burst, the bubble of self-contained, complacent, money-making America. That larger bubble burst on 9/11 and this book was written with full consciousness of the consequences of 9/11."
Waxwings, which takes its title from a type of ravenous bird but also refers to the myth of Icarus, is set in Seattle and provides the most compelling fictional portrait yet of the new era Emerald City. This concise novel's pages are brimming with fresh insights, brilliant character studies and hilarious asides, from Raban's descriptions of a huge Dale Chihuly glass sculpture as "representing either a tropical marine life-form or the biggest vulva in the world" to Belltown as a place where restaurants "opened and closed so quickly that by the time you got a reservation, the place had changed from French to Afghan."
At the center of Waxwings is Tom Janeway, a Hungarian-born Englishman who teaches creative writing at the University of Washington and does droll commentaries for National Public Radio; his wife, Beth, a former Post-Intelligencer arts reporter now enmeshed in the life-consuming stress of an Internet start-up called GetaShack.com; their young son, Finn, a precious tyke with attitude and some behavior problems that may perhaps be the result of his father's constant spinning of scary bedtime stories featuring a Seattle character named "Mister Wicked."
All is not well under the roof of the Janeways' aging home on Queen Anne Hill. Tom is the clueless academic, whose head is in the clouds or somewhere far beyond, a man who is "utterly thoughtless in his bookish self-absorption." Beth is just as self-absorbed but in other ways, consumed by never-ending work and its stock-option mania, but also by the notion that her husband, whom she once considered "brilliant," is so hopelessly out-of-touch with himself and other human beings that she likens him to "fog in human form."
Tom is the only one surprised when Beth suddenly announces she has bought a condo in Belltown and is moving out, leaving the thunderstruck professor with "thoughts of the family he had lost as casually as one might lose an umbrella on a bus."
The Janeway family's fortunes plummet just as Jin Peng's fortunes start to rise. This Chinese stowaway sneaks into Seattle amid horrid conditions on a container ship, then begins to demonstrate his will-not-be-denied immigrant pluck, reinventing himself as "Chick" and taking a succession of low-rung jobs until he is established as a renegade contractor with a crew of Mexican workers.
Raban's non-fiction in such memorable books as Bad Land and Passage to Juneau has always been laced with intense reflections on his personal life, the death of his father, the birth of his daughter, the dissolution of his marriage, the quest for home in a foreign land. So readers of his novel may assume that Jonathan Raban is indeed Tom Janeway, right down to the bookish ways, the fractured family, the fondness for fine drink and an occasional cigarette.
But Raban counters, "If anybody takes a closer look at Tom Janeway, they need to consider: Could Tom Janeway have written Waxwings? No. Could Tom Janeway have sailed a boat along the Inside Passage to Alaska? No. There are streaks of me in all the characters. Chick is collecting American words like "sweat equity" in a notebook and that is me; I keep that notebook. And Beth's infatuation with her new car, that Audi? That's me too, although my car is a Miata.
"A writer has to discover himself or herself in every character. Of course, there are elements of autobiography, although there is as much of me in Chick as there is in Tom. That's why writers turn out to be such shits in real life. Would you trust a novel that's written by somebody who's observed all of the Ten Commandments, or, for that matter, any of them? To write about greed, you need to know greed yourself. Envy? Ditto. Lust? Ditto. I think that, in this novel, there are all sorts of bad feelings and bad behaviors among several characters and I hope there is a bit of me in every one."
Raban has not written a novel for 18 years, yet the 61-year-old author's non-fiction has always been crafted with fiction techniques, so returning to fiction was no great challenge. Nor was writing a novel set in America, although he emphasizes that Waxwings is not an American novel.
As Raban says, "An American novel is what I was scared to write, given my English accent and my English teeth. Writing an American novel for me would be like a dog trying to walk on its hind legs. Living in Seattle for 13 years does not qualify me to write an American novel, so I stayed away from reading American writers I admire like Don DeLillo; I didn't want my work infected with American fiction about life in a city.
"I restricted my reading to English writers, Evelyn Waugh, PG Wodehouse, Charles Dickens. And my favorite is Waugh, for his extraordinary bleakness, especially in A Handful of Dust, which is comedy veering on tragedy and tragedy veering on comedy.
"I was mostly reading English social comedies where brilliant high comedy and nightmare are never far away from each other and that has relevance for Waxwings. It's nothing if it's not funny. And it's also nothing if it's not pretty damn serious."
Two more novels set in the Northwest are on Raban's drawing board, with characters in Waxwings expected to make brief appearances. The writer is settled in Seattle, proud to be a "resident alien" in his adopted hometown, with his house on Queen Anne and his 10-year-old daughter, who spends half her time with her father, delighting him with "funny and gossipy conversations."
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