The Case of Lena S., David Bergen (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002)
It may be years before we fully understand the mental health and cognitive impacts of prolonged self-isolation necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, early research suggests that lack of mental stimulation and the sameness of experience from one day to the next contribute to “brain fog” which is as good a term as any to describe the cognitive diminishment and memory impairment many of us are experiencing. A recent article in the Guardian addresses this. I am particularly struck by the following sentence: “Experiences under lockdown lack “distinctiveness” – a crucial factor in “pattern separation”.” The quoted professor of cognitive neuroscience goes on to explain that such distinctiveness is important to the process of encoding memories. Without that distinctiveness, one day blurs into the next and soon we lose the ability to recall when one thing happened in relation to another. Our sense of sequential time becomes muddled.
It occurs to me that what is true of lived experience is probably true of reading, too. If we read too many books in one genre or by one author, and all in close succession, we risk recalling them as a single giant and indistinct blob. Plot details from one novel blur into the plot details of another novel. We forget where we first encountered a memorable character, and maybe it doesn’t matter in any event because all the characters resolve into types that are interchangeable, like Lego pieces. The confused and rebellious teen in book A works just as well in book B. And his authoritarian parental figure is equally fungible.
I recognized this as a danger when I decided to read David Bergen’s novels in close succession. This danger is compounded by the fact that, whether it’s an early novel or his latest effort, he consistently writes in a clean and stylish prose. Clean and stylish is a pleasure to read, but after six or seven novels, it raises the spectre of sameness. Fortunately, Bergen appears to be aware of this danger and addresses it squarely. Fortunately, too, I began my Bergen reading exploration with what is arguably his best-known novel, The Time In Between, where he most obviously addresses the danger. It’s right there in the title. Whether in our lived experience or the narratives we share, we are drawn to the “important” events—birth, death, marriage, illness, infidelity—but we give little attention to the threads that connect one event to the next, the time in between. Horatio sees the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the battlements and the action goes from there. In Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, a woman drives off a bridge and the rest of the novel draws us to that moment. Television compounds this habit. Think of police procedurals and hospital dramas. Everything spins out from the discovery of a body or from a medical emergency. Bergen is one of the few people I’ve encountered who is willing to risk deviating from the assumption that audiences won’t care for the time in between.
Bergen’s third novel, The Case of Lena S., was published before The Time In Between and so does not have the benefit of this more explicit effort to name his approach, and yet it has about it the traces of an incipient literary philosophy. Even here Bergen is willing to investigate the quiet moments that stitch together experience while eschewing the tendency to give greater weight to the momentous events. He is the sort of person who would remark on the whiteness of a page even though a tiny ink blot had marred a corner of it and was attracting everyone else’s attention.
The subject matter we find in The Case of Lena S. is the sort of subject matter that resists the quiet moments of the time in between. It’s ostensibly a coming of age story. Mason Crowe is a reasonably conscientious and sensitive 16 year old who is introduced to all the usual suspects—sex, love, betrayal, heartache—by a classmate named Lena Schellendal. It is easy to understand why Mason is drawn to Lena because she is like the ink blot on the white page. She is interesting, unpredictable, impulsive, charismatic, uninhibited. She draws all the attention to herself. She is also, in all likelihood, bipolar. Bergen convincingly presents the challenge for someone in Lena’s situation: the need for attention reflects a desire to affirm to herself that she does indeed exist; but for someone who is ill as Lena is ill, such an affirmation is never enough and her existence becomes more and more attenuated until, at last, she disappears. She steals a car and runs away. At the end of the novel, Mason bumps into Lena’s mother who says, “We lost her.” It’s unclear whether, by “lost,” she means Lena has physically vanished or is emotionally unreachable. It’s clear that, whatever her meaning, the Lena that Mason once knew is irretrievable, almost as if she has died.
Lena has her opposite in Mr. Ferry, the blind voyeur. Where Lena draws all eyes to her yet cannot help but vanish, Mr. Ferry casts his sightless eyes on the world around him yet cannot help but see everything. He hires Mason as a reader but extends their encounters beyond the simple transaction of reading. He quizzes Mason about his life and, in this way, uses the boy’s eyes as surrogates. He learns about Lena and invites Mason to bring her to one of their reading sessions. Lena views Mr. Ferry as a hapless twit and eggs Mason to steal books from the man since, after all, of what use are books to a blind man? Mason intuits that Mr. Ferry will know about the theft, but Lena is the source of his first experience of sex and, well, who can say no to that? Later, when Lena runs away, she steals Mr. Ferry’s car since, after all, of what use is a car to a blind man?
In the presence of the dazzling Lena, it is tempting for Mason to lose sight of others in his life. We might call them “the people in between.” They are the ordinary, the boring, the ones who, in spite of what we might think, are necessary to us if we are to live anything approaching a grounded life. There is Mason’s father whom all the other characters dismiss as a spineless non-entity. He’s on the road for days at a time, selling encyclopedias until the internet kills that job, then driving cab, all the while oblivious to the fact that Mason’s mother is having an affair with another man. We’re apt to dismiss him, too, until he makes an appearance in the novel and presents in the (fictional) flesh. We discover for ourselves that he is patient and kind, perhaps invested with more depth than his family is willing to acknowledge. And there is Mason’s mother who, like Mason, is drawn to bright sparkly people. She has left Mason’s father for Aldous who drives a Boxster and has lots of money. Bergen never presents her in judgmental terms; she is neither horrible nor shallow; the worst that can be said of her is that she probably married too young and had no idea who she was when she made that decision.
A final note about something I have previously missed in Bergen perhaps because I have been reading his novels in no particular order: characters and events in one novel can make an appearance in another of his novels. Mid-way through The Case of Lena S., Lena’s grandmother takes her to see a movie and, afterwards, tells how she had been in love with a boy named Ralph who died while parachuting. He had intended to touch down on her lawn as a birthday surprise but landed fatally a mile away in a sheep farmer’s field. This anticipates the opening of The Age of Hope, published 10 years later. Hope is in love with a boy named Jimmy who buzzes her house on her birthday and crash lands his light plane in a nearby golf course. Not identical, but close. Especially in The Age of Hope, the account has about it the feel of Atwood’s opening in The Blind Assassin, a traumatic event that deserves a novel’s worth of unpacking to understand. But that is not Bergen’s way. He briefly acknowledges the event and trusts the reader will intuit that the event bears a weight even if he doesn’t make it explicit. I haven’t read enough Bergen novels to know yet if he does this frequently. However, I do know that his upcoming novel, Out of Mind, scheduled for publication on September 14, 2021, revisits characters from The Matter with Morris. As a preliminary thought, I wonder if Bergen is using his novels as nodes which he draws together with interstitial threads, space in between, implied plot lines, with a view to creating something larger. By September, I will have read more of his novels and will report back on this at that time.