A Handbook for Visitors who Haven't Read Kathryn Kramer

A much lauded debut gets washed away like tears in the rain

The rare understated Vintage Contemporaries cover

It’s perhaps a reader’s greatest fear, or maybe a writer’s, or maybe both, some collective unconscious nightmare across the literary world: a great book forgotten by time. There’s always a more obscure book out there that would change your life, if only you could find it, or you think you’re well-read and then you find a whole group of people who have read all that and also more, or you think you’ve written something great and then you find a great novel, loved at its release, that’s gone nearly out of print.

What are we to do with the washed-away novel? Faced with such a question, I turn to my Bible: The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick. In her essay on Christina Stead - “The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead” – Hardwick lays out the problem: “It is annoying to be asked to discover a novel that is neither old nor new. When it must be admitted that the work lacks, on the one hand, the assurance of age and, on the other, a current and pressing fame, our resistance grows and our boredom swells.” She goes on to explain that literary posterity comes down mostly to “a good deal of luck, accident, ‘timing’ and sheer chaos,” before fighting the good fight for Stead’s wild and excellent (and now also again nearly out of print) The Man Without Children, but the sticking image of the essay is a dinner party metaphor: “the work being offered to us appears cold and flat, like a dish passed around for a tardy second helping. It is gratifying to our dignity to be able to turn down the offer.” Well here I am holding Kathryn Kramer’s 1984 novel A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space like some leftovers from the back of the fridge; I swear everything’s actually gotten better now that everyone’s gotten to know each other in that tupperware.

The book came out in 1984 to some rave reviews, an American debut novel a la mode. Front page review in the New York Times Book Review, raves elsewhere, heck, even a Vintage Contemporaries edition, which usually presaged good things… and yet, the book is right on the edge of out of print now; my edition is from something called “Authors Guild Backinprint.com” and the cover is heinously ugly.

Four images that have barely anything to do with the novel. Europe? What the hell is Europe doing on there??

Though I guess we have to tip our hats to the Author’s Guild, and Backinprint.com, for keeping the flame alive, and for good friends who tip you off to books like this, which have been left behind in, as Hardwick once wrote, the “common and lowly fate of most books,” a kind of “shabby gentility,” “amiably received… and then … set aside, misplaced, quietly and firmly left out, utterly forgotten, as the bleak phrase has it. This is the dust.”

Who can say why this one got picked up by the dustbuster; I can’t vouch for the quality of Kramer’s next two novels, Rattlesnake Farming and Sweet Water (also available from our friends at Backinprint.com), but generally the quality of succeeding novels retrospectively confirms or condemns the quality of the debut. If someone with an exciting debut fails to make good on that promise, any initial excitement looks foolish, no matter the quality of the work.¹

The book was also just a bit out of step with the prevailing trends, a Pynchonian maximalist and sneakily earnest novel released during the crest of chunky K-Mart minimalist and heavily ironized fiction. (Think Bret Easton Ellis.) If an enduring classic must be the representative of some literary trend, A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space doesn’t fit neatly into the broader literary timeline; if it had come ten years later alongside the countervailing forces of David Foster Wallace style New Sincerity, it might have become a touchstone. Or maybe not; like Liz said, it’s all random in the end.

All this talk about broader historical trends and accidents of history while ignoring the text itself? Here I am repeating one of the mistakes that’s likely led to the book becoming forgotten; in a vacuum, with nothing else besides the book – poorly designed cover and all – in our hands, A Handbook for Visitors From Outer Space is an excellent book, an exuberant display of style, inventiveness and heart that never tips over into treacly sentimentality. To get back to Pynchon, it keeps cool but also cares.

---

There’s a war on, or maybe there isn’t; the country’s been in a sort of cold war state of readiness for so long that no one can quite tell whether there’s just no fighting, or whether, for our own good, the populace just isn’t being told about the battles. Even the soldiers on the front aren’t even sure they’re on the front; there could be another front somewhere else where the real war is happening. Back on the homefront a general paranoia reigns, wherein the most normal ways of living look different in the imagined wartime mode of crisis:

The most commonplace phrases of speech seemed mysteriously encoded. They had the feeling their grasp of current events was incomplete. And the measures of relief from these were only too temporary: drunkenness, lying until scorched in the sun, exercise to the point of exhaustion. The malaise only deepened in proportion to the time spent it did not exist.

Americans always have an itch for war; post-Vietnam, that itch became something of a wound, and Kramer’s book – coming out of the break between Vietnam and the Gulf War – is the portrait of a country looking to make right, to once again prevail in the world’s imagination, while not actually having any war to fight in. It’s a strange mix of optimism and fear, a world where “[one] knew better than to believe the future could ever be what one had hoped,” but one that “did not keep other people from hawking such happiness on street corners, from advertising it on billboards, from even at times believing in [one’s] own ability to attain it with the faith that in the early part of the century had inspired someone to twist a waffle into an ice-cream cone when all the cups were gone.” This eerie, fabulist feeling of suspicion and hope is fitting air for the book’s characters’ to breathe, the story at its basest level being one about the various uses and misuses of concealment.

The story centers on the Quince family, specifically young Cyrus Quince, who’s in thrall to his maternal grandfather, Charles Street, a retired General with a mysterious past. They live in Arborville, a hyperbolically bucolic midcentury suburban town, an imagined homefront to get back to from an imagined war. Like most suburban facades, not everything is right in the Quince household, despite the blinders-on American stolidness of the family patriarch, Harold. His wife Rose is depressed and prone to fits of extreme melancholy, stemming in part from being abandoned by her mother; Cyrus and General Street are constantly playing war games, surveilling the neighborhood, giving Cyrus at once a savior complex and an overwhelming fear of nuclear annihilation; and Harold’s youngest child, Lark, has a rare genetic disorder slowly killing him. Harold, faced with all this, just wants normalcy, or at least the appearance of normalcy on the great proscenium of the American front lawn. His attempts to keep things together provoke in him tremendous bouts of anger but also a deep-seated sadness; driving Lark to an institute, he has to pull off the road, “hunched over the wheel, racked by sobs, while long trucks roared by and sleek limousines whisked past, underlining his presence in the middle of nowhere, a place he would always be, alone with his inarticulate love.”

Cyrus resents his father for taking Lark away, and that resentment deepens into full-on rebellion when Harold sends General Street off to a retirement home. With resolution impossible, Cyrus is sent off to Fifeld Academy, where he has to become an adult on his own. He’s taken under the wing of the school principal, the garrulous Captain Turner (reluctantly on Cyrus’s part), becomes best friends with his roommate, Billy Daphne, and becomes involved with one Sarah Simms when she comes and visits with her boyfriend on an alumni weekend trip. When Lark dies, Cyrus runs away and finds his grandmother, Sophie, and the plot from there becomes a series of Cyrus’s lies and omissions regarding who he tells what about himself and his life. Add in to that the general revealing of General Street’s past – the General’s refusal to reveal his past to Sophie leading to their separation – and you have the classical novelistic plot of successive revelations, letters never sent or never read, an unraveling of carefully constructed personae across multiple characters, generations, and milieus. Cyrus, in discovering his grandfather’s past misdeeds, gets intimately wrapped up in them, finding his way into a genealogical curse not unlike those found in Greek tragedies.

While Cyrus and his circle of friends and family make up the bulk of the novel, Kramer also keeps us in touch with an expansive number of other concerns; the soldiers on the ‘front,’ the military leadership behind the line, the old generals in the generals’ retirement home, the people of Arborville, Cyrus’s postgrad friends, “The Campers,” a sort of version of Pynchon’s ‘Whole Sick Crew,’ and the Ludwickers, a curious set of rich loafers stowed away in a bizarre New Jersey mansion. Unlike the theatrics of, ahem, other first novels, all these disparate sets of characters are given enough attention, and more importantly enough feeling, as to feel like equal parts of a portrait rather than an afterthought. Similarly to some of the more popular maximalist novels that came after (Infinite Jest, for one), there are story strands that tie up across time, and others that stretch out beyond the novel’s horizon, into some future we don’t get to see but can surely imagine.

There’s a silly crutch that some critics lean on when reviewing an older book: that things read differently ‘now,’ as if a reader could bring anything other than their immediate historical surroundings to a book. It’s tempting to read a passage like this, a briefing between Charles and Cyrus –

‘people are getting crosser all the time, and why? Because they’ve come to realize that, no matter what they do or how hard they work, at any minute some imbecile can decide he’s going to fight some other imbecile and pretty soon one of them will get mad enough and push a button and make the whole world pop like a balloon.”

‘What button, Granddad?’

‘The one at Imbecile Control Tower, Cyrus. It’s a big black button and every time an imbecile walks by it big red letters flash and say PUSH ME! PUSH ME!’

and to think of the latest imbecile to lead the country, but instead one should think of the long line of imbeciles who have led the country, a senile retired actor at the time the book came out, and anon since then, and marvel that that button hasn’t yet been pushed. A book reading ‘differently’ now is just the essential timelessness of good novels, of quality writing revealing eternal realities.

It’s similarly tempting to look at A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space as the Great American Forgotten Gen X Novel, as if Gen X could have it any other way. I mean, at one point a soldier says:

We weren’t fighting. We went out there like sheep and we’ve come back like sheep. We’re not heroes. We weren’t in any war. I’m not saying there may not have been a war, I’m just saying we missed it. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.

Which may as well be the defining statement of the (Blank) Generation.² But to pigeonhole it in a certain time, among a certain set of people, is also to further consign it to the dustbin. Its themes are more universal than just a narrow sliver of American life; this is a novel about the weights of lineage, the limits of a life lived by lies of omission, and of the twisted roots that make up the American family tree, those roots only legitimized later by wealth, persistence, or some combination of both. The book also has so many great lines, and enough inventiveness, as to transcend any narrow generational reading. It has its flaws, as does any novel – especially a first one – but they are washed away by the sheer accumulative pleasures of the rest of the novel. It is a novel with the energy to keep moving, and moving and change are the secret engines of the novel. To quote another Hardwick essay - "Sense of the Present" – "Life is not a prison. It is an airplane journey and on this journey the self is always disappearing, changing its name, idly landing and departing, spanning the world in hours." Kramer echoes this in A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space: "Life was too short now to spend time getting where you were going ... up in the air, separate from the ground – that was the only smart place to be when the earth waged war." Cyrus, and many of the other young characters, are struggling to get where they're going (adulthood) when the world expects so much of them so quickly, wants them fully formed and producing right off the jump. Later, another character thinks that "From outer space, the network of highways covering the country would have seemed the ley-system of some modern religion, and Going Somewhere the form of worship its gods demanded... Sooner of later, anyone who wanted to go anywhere ended up on this long gray path in search of his exit." Go, go, go, that’s the near manic drive of the country, and the animating drive of the novel as it speeds over any bumps.

Ten years behind the peak postmodernists, or ten years before the next wave of postmodern expansion, such was the fate of A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space; in a funny way, the book foretells its own future diminishment. (Gaddis’s Recognitions does the same thing.) One character speaks of

… this American fascination with royalty. For a so-called democratic country, its people were more in awe of royal blood than any European had been … He thought sometimes they seemed to be a nation of illegitimates, these intrepid pioneers – their perpetual desire to make themselves agreeable betraying a deep nervousness, as if the true proprietors of their land might reappear and evict them.

For all the rhetoric of bootstrapping mavericks who make their own way, Americans really do love royalty (or at least celebrity), divinely ordained talent that makes itself known over a long time, reifying itself with its duration. Kramer didn’t follow up her debut with another hit³, and so failed to uphold her end of the bargain, did not become a “true proprietor” of the American literary land. But hey, what's the matter with a one-hit wonder, anyway?⁴

The comforting belief is that the long arc of justice bends toward literary quality; even The Changeling was out of print for a while before getting picked back up. So we might imagine A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space getting the same treatment, no longer a tardy second helping, but instead a wild, weird, American classic, even if it’s ‘just’ a one-off. The title could even be its own inside joke in some far-off future, a book picked up by the next visitors to our planet and becoming a not true but real guide to the cracked American psyche. Tin House, Dalkey Archive, New York Review Books, where are you? I’ll take half the finder’s fee, my friend Vikram the other, and till then the book can live as a secret handshake between those in the know, ugly cover and all.

You can get A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space from your local bookstore, a used bookseller (for a better cover), your local library, or you can order it from Bookshop.org, where this newsletter receives a cut (alongside local bookstores around the country). If you liked this post, feel free to share it with a friend!

1. One of my favorite critical example of this: Interpol’s debut album being named Pitchfork’s number one album of 2001, and then not appearing at all on their later “Best Albums of the 2000s” list. The album didn’t change, but Interpol’s reputation did. On the flip side, no one paid much attention to Bruce Springsteen’s first two albums until Born to Run came out, when they suddenly became important formative exercises.

2. Or, if you prefer The Replacements to the Voidods, Bastards of Young.

3. as far as I know – the other two novels may be just as good, just similarly ignored!

4. Lovefool! Bittersweet Symphony! Come on Eileen! 96 Tears! You Get What You Give! All bangers!