Rebel Without A Clue
On David Gates's "Jernigan"
For a couple years back there we were really into the ‘anti-hero,’ or at least thinking about the concept: the golden age of teevee featuring such bad-but-you-can’t-look-away guys like Tony Soprano, Walter White, Jaime Lannister, Don Draper. (Even if Don was more pathetic than anything else.) Grand Theft Auto let you do whatever you wanted, and most people blew stuff up and ran over women. Even the literary set got into it: the lurid novels of Michel Houellebecq and the exhaustive misanthropy of Karl Ove Knausgaard reigned tall for a bit. Hands were wrung: what does it all mean? Why was the anti-hero so popular? Think of the children! Maybe enough hands were wrung in all the right places and we swung towards the current goody-two-shoes set: your Ted Lassos, your Leslie Knopes, good earnest people trying to do right, the bad guys all end up in therapy (and not in the Tony Soprano way). But c’mon, admit it, it was pretty fun to watch someone do all the things you wouldn’t do yourself, to watch a person really fuck their life up, broadcast all the interior nasty thoughts you have and quickly banish away and thought no one else had… it’s art as vicariously living through others; if we all have the small desire to touch a hot stove, you can simply experience that yeeeeeowch through someone else’s eyes. Not so many of those these days, though — even the runaway mom in All Fours still loved her family, she just wanted to make it different — what with the news and all, seems like there’s enough very real self-destructive fucking up everything for everyone to go around… so we have to go back a bit to get our really good anti-heroes, to get the sick thrill of watching someone really steer into the skid. And so: 1991’s Jernigan by David Gates, his debut novel.
I can’t really remember why I bought Jernigan; I can’t tell if it’s because of the Frederick Exley connection (his blurb is on the back, though he might have cursed David Gates by saying the book will be read for a long time, like A Fan’s Notes it seems to wallow as a Vintage Contemporaries book loved by a shrinking cadre of readers) or some unremembered recommendation from a bookstore customer (maybe I was extolling the perpetually drunk narrator of Joy Williams’ The Changeling?) Who knows, it’s one of those books that lives on sale carts and in the fittingly hazy interregnum of Gen X lit.
Half of being an ‘anti-hero’ is that hero part; they’re presumably fighting for something you can at least kind of get behind. What does the titular Peter Jernigan rail against? What is his lonely crusade? Put simply, he’s against all the trappings of the American Dream: a house, a steady job, a family life. What if you got all that, and it stunk? Not in the Revolutionary Road-type way where it’s spiritually void, a disappointment, but actually just materially lousy? A dead end job in New York City (some kind of bum real estate gig), a house pointedly not in New York but in some crappy New Jersey town, and his wife drove herself into traffic on a bender (not his fault, technically or legally, but your spouse essentially killing herself will raise some questions, weird, sort of a Killing Stella situation again), leaving him a single indifferent dad to a crushed and indifferent son, Danny. Well, all that work for nothin’, so any ambition at all, really, is antithetical to Peter Jernigan, who has been beaten down by the world and is not getting up during the count. Better to slug at a bottle of gin to dull the pain, and boy howdy is Jernigan full of that, self-created and otherwise. As Paul Westerberg, another Gen X icon, sez, “God what a mess / on the ladder of success / take one step and miss the whole first rung.” Like Paul Westerberg, Jernigan is full of wisecracks, highfalutin allusions, puns, fingers in the eye of authority, the only authentic one among all the phony suits. (The comparison to Holden Caulfield is already there, just a version of who never got any help.) He slides between terminal irony poisoning and a wounded sweetness (mostly towards Danny, the last link he has to his old life), a guy who can’t help doing the wrong thing over and over and over and over again, just to see how low you can go. “But the point is,” he announces on early on in the bool, “here I was wanting one more fucking thing. And I could see that after that I was just going to keep wanting the next thing and the next thing and the next.” He’s the martyr of This Debased American life; shooting yourself in the webby part of your hand with a little pop gun just to see what it will do — how’s that for stigmata?
Gates’s novel is structured as an A.A. recounting of all Jernigan’s misdeeds after he’s hit what seems to be rock bottom, but the telling reveals that he’s really been dragging himself across rock bottom for years. Jernigan has an alcoholic’s non-logic throughout his travails, the desperate swing from ‘I can function this way and no one’s the wiser’ to ‘everyone knows I’m drunk but this is how I can get things done, actually,’ transforming the simplest of day-to-day acts into labyrinthine ordeals, drink before simple errand, acquire more booze on the way, drink as you drive, get the groceries or whatever (all cocked up, of course), coast back home drinking some more and bask in the achievement, and finish off the cycle with a celebratory drink to mark the accomplishment. All that drinking lubricates the downward spiral: grieving Jernigan (but not admitting it), a couple years after his wife’s death, hooks up with Danny’s girlfriend Clarissa’s mother, Martha, also a wounded single parent.
More time with Martha and more drinking gets him just off-track enough at work to get him fired, and then he gets convinced to sell his old home and move full time into Martha’s, creating an extremely slapdash family unit, a house glued together by resignation and small hopes. Figuring he can live off the house money for a bit, Jernigan doesn’t do much to find a job — not that he could really stand a job, and he’s too proud to admit he’d like to be a poet — and mooches off Martha, who he discovers is a freegan / homesteader / survivalist type, seasonally working when she needs to pay the bills but otherwise trying to live off the land, including a somewhat disturbing rabbit hutch in the basement. Having wormed his way into this situation, alarm bells start to go off, and he wants to worm his way out, but Danny’s still with Clarissa, and he doesn’t really have a home anymore… and so, like any drunk stuck in a hole, he attempts to dig his way out, further and further down.
Abegnation of duty across the board is Jernigan’s greatest sin; he’s someone too smart to buy into the world and all its drudgeries, which means everyone arounds him suffers. As his boss says during his termination,
“you actually have a lot on the ball. You’re smart, you’re presentable . . .” a third attribute seemed to escape him. “All this has really accomplished is to keep you from doing” —he shrugged—“whatever it is that you should be doing. And I’m a great believer in this, that people do have, each person, a right job or a right niche or what have you.” He pronounced it nick.
Well, Jernigan is the man without a nick, or niche, “rebel without a clue / searching for something to do” (Westerberg, again, that construction later picked up by Tom Petty.) Everything seems to be below him, even if he is, as mentioned before, at the bottom of a very big hole. He is constantly aware of the roles he ought to play — father, employee, partner, functional human — and bows out instead. All the stuff you have to do that you’d rather not, the daily obligations of labor and care, well, he’s ixnayed all that, one part of out of grief, but the other out of pride, a sense that there’s no point meeting the world halfway when you’re reaching down, just because he’s got any number of poetic allusions at hand. The hard lesson every English major ends up learning — it’s just not that kind of world! Amid learned descriptions of the decaying world — “the leaves looked morbidly colorful: the hectic yellow, orange and red stages of a wasting disease” — Jernigan waffles on responsibility like Hamlet:
I mean, if at some point you wanted a job, then fine, go get a job, right?
Though like what? And how would you explain when they asked you what you’d been doing for the last year or whatever?
Which in turn was a whole other question: what would you do with yourself all day long? Though on the other hand, just getting some job merely to avoid having to figure out what to do with yourself all day long —Christ. This hand, that hand, the other fucking hand.
Enter Don Draper (hey! he’s back!) shouting “That’s what the money is for!” and you have a good sense of what it’s like reading as Jernigan shirks doing anything that he doesn’t absolutely want to do, for his own ends. It’s just drinking, sex, and Star Trek re-runs, and the first rules and ruins all. A laissez-faire attitude towards the concept ‘parental supervision’ leads to disaster for Danny and Clarissa, and then that lack of care extends finally towards himself. Why face the world when you can salt it away instead. “I guess what happened with me is that I just sort of indefinitely put off trying to decide about any of it,” he says to his son in what might be the world’s worst pep talk. “Not that I’m recommending the unexamined life, mind you.”
Well, the world makes you decide and examine sooner or later, it’s undefeated in that regard. Jernigan in many other hands would be a simple ‘there-go-I-but-for-the-grace-of-God’ story of addiction and affliction, but Gates has such control of Jernigan’s voice that you can almost be lured into cocking your head and looking at it his way. He is smart, he is funny, he is right about a lot things; the tragedy is that he’s not wrong, he’s just an asshole. Even amid all the haze and blurred vision, there is a clear sense of moral right and wrong that only one slipped way too far into wrong can know. As Jernigan says about a northern Connecticut landscape:
You could see the different shapes of the different kinds of trees: some squat with branches like antlers, some straight and slender. It amounted to a moral failing not to have learned the names of trees. A moral failing too, that this landscape looked dead and tattered to me, instead of sternly beautiful. In this part of the world, if you couldn’t see a leafless tree as sternly beautiful you were in deep shit half of the year. And probably pissing away the other half worrying that it was transient.
This is the “moral” double vision characteristic of the novel: the world as it is, the way it ought to be seen, and the little gap between them, right where Jernigan steals away for another nip or two. The particular attraction of this anti-hero is how often he spots the lie of life on this either dead and tattered or sternly beautiful or transient world, and learning just how far that skill can get you: practically nowhere.
You can get Jernigan at your local bookstore or local library. If you have to get it online, bookshop.org supports independent bookstores across the country.
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with a friend!