Texan author Greg Baxter is attempting to leave tradition behind, with a new novel, written in Dublin, about a househunting former US marine who loses his grip on chronology, writes DEREK SCALLY
TO THE UNTRAINED EYE, the cafe where Greg Baxter sits is an edgy, tradition-filled establishment.
But the patina of the place, in the eastern Berlin neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, has been applied carefully in recent years to feign a past it doesn’t have.
The shabby-chic cafe is only a few years old, a false memory stage set with retro green chairs, rough plastered walls and distressed tables.
In that sense it’s an ideal place to discuss Baxter’s novel The Apartment, a study of alienation and dislocation, that is lying face up on the nobbled table top.
Next to it are a drained coffee cup, a yellow notepad and another book called A Preparation for Death. What sounds like an Agatha Christie whodunnit is, in fact, Baxter’s memoir in essay form, which elicited a strong reaction when it was published in 2010.
The 37-year-old Texan author, eyes alert behind hornrimmed glasses, seems perfectly at ease in his new home of six months.
“Berlin feels like a vacation, to be honest,” he says, American vowels flattened somewhat by eight years in Dublin. “Ireland is still home.” The feeling of belonging somewhere, even if it’s not here, is not a certainty he grants the narrator of his new novel. Instead The Apartment, written in sparse, terse language, is an unsettling manifesto of a nowhere man.
Given neither a name nor physical characteristics, the narrator of the novel describes both a day-in-the-life and life-in-the-day.
The former US marine tells of his service aboard a nuclear submarine followed by a tour in Iraq, returning to that country for a second time as a military contractor. Whether submerged beneath the North Pole or ensconced in the Subway sandwich shop inside the US Camp Victory base in Baghdad, the narrator’s life to date – told in flashback – feels like a series of out-of-body experiences. He lost his sense of place, if he ever had one, and now he has also lost his grip on chronology.
“As time diffuses, my preoccupation with it ebbs,” he notes dispassionately.
Just arrived in a nameless European city and living in an anonymous hotel, the narrator has, by the novel’s outset, already hooked up with Saskia, an aloof and insomniac economist as unsentimental as himself. At her insistence they begin a hunt for a new apartment for him, the journey through the day presenting a relationship that is both honest and ambiguous.
“I wish we could remain strangers,” the narrator confesses early on.
The odd couple meet friends of Saskia, friends who are variously welcoming and wary of the narrator. He is aware that he creates “an alarming foreignness” in every situation, but is just as wary of fitting in.
Coffee is drunk, cigarettes are smoked, public transport is taken and, eventually, an apartment rented.
And that, from a plot point of view, is about it. Baxter makes no concessions to his readers by supplying a concrete setting. Instead, the nameless city is a slippery place to place, feeling both provincial and capital, with architectural and infrastructural nods to Paris, Prague, Vienna and other cities. Eventually the reader realises the narrative – and American narrator – is both everywhere and nowhere in Europe.
“It was important for me to build an illogical city,” said Baxter. “The problem, setting a book in Paris or elsewhere, is that immediately it enters the realm of cliche. If you know a city you know how to get out of it – you go to the train station or the airport. In this book the reader has no idea how to get out, nor does the narrator.”
Providing no geographical footholds, no exit and only a slight plot, Baxter bulks out the picaresque narrative with lengthy essayistic detours into visual art, architecture and music – but also into the narrator’s past.
Relationships with his parents and friends loom up from the shadows, as does his career as marine and contractor. It is these personal episodes that reveal something resembling guilt as first a participant and then as a parasite of war.
“He’s not running away from anything specific in his past that he regretted,” says Baxter. “We are talking about a far more existential guilt and intense hatred bound up into politics, economics and history.
“His moving to this city, slipping out of that dynamic, is in some ways an ethical decision.” The Apartment had many starting points, he says. First was his “torment” at the reception of his last book Preparation for Death.
“Brave” is a word that cropped up often in reviews of his collection of essays about work, family, sex and his prodigious drinking habit. While the book was presented as autobiographical, Baxter says now that this was “misrepresented” in the media.
He now says that his intention was to “lay claim to” and explore what he viewed as the neglected memoir form.
“The self you present in an autobiography is not the self you are,” he says. “It’s only after it’s written that it becomes clear how many factual inaccuracies exist in the text that it’s probably best to call it a novel.” After setting the record straight with his first book, a major building block for his second was his own interest in the last war-filled decade of US history.
“The Apartment came out of my inability to write an essay about my relationship with America,” he says. “You can’t have gone through something like Iraq and not be uneasy, but how to turn it into fiction?”
He spent the last decade reading widely about the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. With no personal experience of war, however, he felt he had no claim to authenticity. Then he began an email correspondence with a friend who had served in Iraq. Baxter serves up rich passages of these emails verbatim, with his friend’s permission.
“I wanted to try to observe, to let people just witness,” says Baxter.
The narrator, too, is a passive witness, a small cog in a larger military complex. He is not driven by anything in particular, Baxter says, nor is he in a position to do more than observe the concrete effect of his abstract experience of war on himself.
“He’s not greedy, he’s not mean, he’s not heroic, he’s simply there,” says Baxter. “But even if you get involved in something like this with the best of intentions, it changes you.”
Eventually a chance for catharsis presents itself. But the narrator sees no need to justify the vague sense of guilt over his war activities, which he feels has pursued him from the Iraqi desert. And so the novel follows the maxim of the Seinfeld comedy show: no hugs, no learning.
A third driver behind The Apartment is a mixture of disinterest towards the dense, complex novels that tend to attract the most acclaim in the English-speaking world.
Frustrated, Baxter tried a different path in the last decade, reading only novels in translation and, more recently, novels in German. As an expat writer it was a doubly liberating experience, he says, helping him find a form that suits him and “getting away from the cluttered conversation as a writer about the tradition you’ve inherited.
“You just get on with things without having to worry about, in my case, ‘am I American enough, or edgy American enough?’” he says.
A particular revelation, he says, was discovering the work of Thomas Bernhard, the author and dramatist from Austria – where Baxter’s father was born.
“I didn’t want to write big novels with complicated plots and characters transformed and we learn something about existence,” he says.
“I was looking for something smaller, simpler, cleaner and innovative without being clever.”
Travelling with his partner’s job to Berlin, Baxter has no plans to put down roots in the shifting soil of the German capital. But he sees new possibilities in his adoptive home and central European literary tradition.
“What’s interesting is that this grand, illogical, imaginery city was written in an estate in north Dublin,” he says. “But had I not made the break, and decided to change traditions, I couldn’t have written it. I do have Austrian background and there is something drawing me back.”
The Apartment by Greg Baxter is published by Penguin
