The Grave (1981)
Approaching Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)
“There were shadows here in broad daylight that he did not like to see.”
The Grave
Readers unfamiliar with The Grave may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.
[....] In both the Freudian and the Marxist traditions (for the second, Lukacs, but also Sartre's discussion of "stupidity" in Journal of the Phony War), "boredom" is taken not so much as an objective property of things and works but rather as a response to the blockage of energies (whether those be grasped in terms of desire or of praxis). Boredom then becomes interesting as a reaction to situations of paralysis and also, no doubt, as defense mechanism or avoidance behavior. Even taken in the narrower realm of cultural reception, boredom with a particular kind of work or style or content can always be used productively as a precious symptom of our own existential, ideological, and cultural limits, an index of what has to be refused in the way of other people's cultural practices and their threat to our own rationalizations about the nature and value of art. Meanwhile, it is no great secret that in some of the most significant works of high modernism, what is boring can often be very interesting indeed, and vice versa: a combination which the reading of any hundred sentences by Raymond Roussel, say, will at once dramatize. We must therefore initially try to strip the concept of the boring (and its experience) of any axiological overtones and bracket the whole question of aesthetic value. It is a paradox one can get used to: if a boring text can also be good (or interesting, as we now put it), exciting texts, which incorporate diversion, distraction, temporal commodification, can also perhaps sometimes be "bad" (or "degraded," to use Frankfurt School language).
Fredric Jameson
* * *
Perhaps Charles L. Grant's fictions are painstakingly composed. Then half-erased, forming a palimpsest. The palimpsest is then folded into the shape of a paper fortune-telling device. Over which we are then invited to make what sense we can.
A mystery thriller with supernatural plot elements, Grant's 1981 novel The Grave is an excellent example of this procedure. It takes place in the town of Oxrun Station, CT. It begins in spring, and ends before summer ends. Older citizens of the Station have been disappearing; a local doctor says he had them transferred to an out-of-town clinic. Grant has a field day with red herrings and other methods of misdirection. All the characters have competing confusions and misunderstandings, typical of Grant characters.
The Grave is a brief novel (228 pages in my ebook) with a single third-person limited point of view. One cannot call it a medical thriller. It does epitomize the ontological horror novels of the period: existential questions are left in suspension; small-town horror conventions are neglected when not negated into unfamiliar categories; perception and motivation are unusually confused for the characters; the ending is distanced and gruesomely open-ended.
Protagonist Josh Miller, in his thirties, is an uncannily successful finder of treasures: obscure theater posters, forgotten music albums, and antiques. He makes a living at it, has a downtown office, and an indispensable office manager, Felicity Lancaster. As the novel opens, he is crisscrossing overgrown farm land, trying to dowse the location of an old plough requested by his best client, Melissa Thames.
As with many other stories and novels by Grant, sexual jealousy and carnal desire skew Josh's interactions with women in his life. He may be a talented detector of lost artifacts, but he is oblivious to the fact that he is judging which of three women in his life might be worth a long-term commitment. In addition to the aforementioned Felicity Lancaster, he also weighs Andrea (Andy) Murdoch, seductive daughter of a newly arrived Hemingwayesque novelist with a hidden agenda. And then there is Randy Stanworth, a former inamorata and the wife of his pal, local doctor Lloyd Stanworth. I suspect Josh’s oblivious acting-out of Homer's “judgment of Paris” would also include Melissa Thames, a wealthy and widowed client he has flattered before, and whose flattery he covets.
As with much of Grant, the sex is freewheeling. While viewed from a distance, Josh's couplings with Andy Murdoch veil a connection with local disappearances and several acts of vandalism against Josh's office files. (Said vandalism focuses on papers related to Josh’s hunt for the aforementioned abandoned plow for Mrs. Thames).
* * *
"Josh, please don't think I'm crazy, but I think everything that's happened to you over the past couple months has been deliberate."
He looked up to the ceiling, but kept his expression as blank as he could. There were any number of sarcastic replies he could have offered, but all of them suddenly seemed petty and untoward. Instead, he waited, already traveling along the lines [Felicity] had suggested.
"It's like someone out there doesn't want you to do the things you do best, Josh."
He heard her, felt the moisture break on his palms as he believed her.
"I mean, you get going on the hand plow and something comes along to distract you. Then something else comes along to distract you from that. And then something else. And something else. Like you were being herded around in a corral or a circle, and you never have time to stop and really think. Your head gets filled, Josh. You know that. You get a bug and you don't let it go, you worry the damned thing to death, and more if you're not satisfied with the corpse.
"So every time you get close to one thing, you get turned around to something else. And it was the hand plow, Josh. It was the hand plow that started it."
He nodded. She continued to speculate, to apologize for the speculations, and he nodded through it all because she was right. He had felt it once before, and the feeling now returned: one of quiet, unobtrusive, long-range manipulation. Events orchestrated to keep him in line, but events spaced out over days and weeks so that discovering the connection was virtually impossible. Until Melissa had given him the clue, the clue he hadn't known until it was too late.
The Grave presents many Charles L. Grant writerly strengths. And idiosyncrasies. Weather, as always with Grant, serves as a correlative embedded in each chapter:
Chapter 1: The end of April in Oxrun Station; the weather is turning from winter to spring, with the temperature rising and a week of rain adding to the thawing. Pavement and blacktop are washed clean, storefronts are polished, and the air loses its melancholy. A faint green haze appears on branches and twigs, and lawns show signs of new life.
The changeable weather of North American spring also serves as a figure for Josh's break-neck and multiple personal and professional peripeteias as The Grave unfolds.
The graves he finally uncovers on the overgrown hillside farm field serve as a memorial and marker of occulted history. Not until the last chapters of the novel does Josh realize his discovery unknots the villainy afoot in the Station.
* * *
Readers will enrich their reading experience if they keep both definitions of the word “grave” in mind. Grant’s web of complicated plot problematizations operates through the echoing of grave as noun and adjective.
The Grave’s grave plot, ultimately, leads but to the grave.
Jay
27 June 2024
