The park bench is perhaps a little tired.
Tired of serving as a vehicle to enable quirky relationships to form between
complete strangers. If I see someone is sitting on a park bench, I personally
don’t sit down there for fear of them becoming my friend over time and helping
me to overcome my personal issues, while I help them to overcome theirs through
my openness and generosity. You’ll be familiar with the format, I assume, from
countless films and books. Are we really like that? I suspect not. If I were
writing a novel about random strangers who open up to one another, they’d be
two women who meet in the queue for a nightclub toilet. Drunk.
From Edward Albee to Lee Rourke, though,
the literary park bench trope can actually do the trick if you treat it right. The
question is, can each new writer who uses the park bench avoid the trap of the
twee happy ending?
Milena Michiko Flašar, I would argue,
almost manages it. She certainly has the requisite pair of
couldn’t-be-much-different characters, and her setting is an unusual one for
German-language writing. Ich nannte ihn Krawatte is 32-year-old Flašar’s third
book. Her bench is in a park in an unnamed Japanese city and its inhabitants
are a “salaryman” and a “hikikomori”. The white-collar worker is out of work
but hasn’t told his wife yet and so has to spend all day wearing the tie of the
title, eating his bento on said park bench. That plot device gets another cliché
minus-point, I’m afraid. The reclusive youth has just started leaving the house
again after an unspecified period in his bedroom. I’m not entirely sure what
made him do so.
As you would expect, the novel deals with
the two men gradually opening up to one another and giving each other strength.
They talk about their respective problems in plainish prose – the young man is
the narrator but the dialogues are strangely, I assume deliberately,
unrealistic. There is shame here and mistakes and regrets and pressure, so much
social pressure, all finally voiced in therapeutic clarity. The characters are fleshed
out with memories, vividly narrated. And then they agree that the salaryman is
to tell his wife and the hikikomori is to cut his hair, and my heart sank after rising continuously as the story proceeded.
Please, don’t let that be the end. Please don’t let this be a heart-warming
tale of strangers reaching out to one another across class and age divides.
This evening I was reading this piece about Ingeborg Bachmann by Elizabeth Bachner, and I felt quite inspired to write
about loneliness and literature, but then I didn’t feel quite ready enough to
expose myself as she does. It’s tempting, I’m sure, for writers to solve their
characters’ loneliness almost like we try to find ways to dissolve our own. And
it wouldn’t make a good story if the two drunk women in the nightclub toilets
decided to go to an evening class or chatted to remote friends on skype or read
lots of books, rather than forming an unexpected bond with each other and each
of them instinctively knowing just what the other needed to do to make her life
better.
But Bachner quotes Bachmann, whose character
Ivan tells her writer character Ich in Malina, “It’s disgusting to put all this
misery on the market, just adding to what’s already there, these books are all
absolutely loathsome. What kind of obsession is this anyway, all this gloom,
everything’s always sad and these books make it even worse in folio editions.”
And after Flašar I read Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son, which is so far removed from either of these books as
to be incomparable, and yet is full of misery and gloom with even the glint of
hope at the end absolutely loathsome, and I came away in awe.
It’s all right. Flašar’s ending is a
compromise. Things go badly for one character and well for the other. There is quiet
misery, rendered very well, and there is resolution.
