2014 read #73: In the Drift by Michael Swanwick.

In the Drift by Michael Swanwick
195 pages
Published 1985
Read from July 28 to July 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I've long listed Swanwick as one of my favorite authors, but I wonder now if that declaration was a tad hasty. Much of his elevation rests on the power of his short fiction. "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," "Riding the Giganotosaur," "The Edge of the World," "The Very Pulse of the Machine" -- all of these, when I first read them, overwhelmed me with their remorseless brilliance. His novels, those of which I've read, are markedly uneven in comparison. Stations of the Tide is one of my all-time favorite novels (though I wonder how well it would hold up to a reread now; too bad my copy departed with an ex girlfriend and is probably in a dump somewhere). Bones of the Earth, expanded from "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," has none of that story's abrupt charm; it rambles and seems to get lost in its own hazy sense of time. And then there's In the Drift.

This is another book I bought in the Fayetteville days and hadn't read in full until now. I made an attempt many years back (2006 or so, perhaps?) and found the first "chapter" (actually an expanded version of a short story) remarkably inventive -- eerie and memorable, evolving a bit of local color into a decadent and threatening power structure in the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. I was brought up short by the very title of the next chapter. Even in 2006, I didn't think white guys should toss around racial slurs like they're nothing. I'm on the side of unrestricted free speech, but I'm also a fan of responsibility and accountability. Any white guy who casually employs the N word should be free to do so, but also earns my distaste.

This illustrates something of the problem with Swanwick. He's an author of absolute privilege. I've only read three of his novels and a handful of his short stories, but I can't recall seeing anyone but straight white men and tough, straight white women portrayed sympathetically. In the Drift may perhaps be written off as a product of its time (the early '80s were a time when white guys grew especially bold with minority themes, but before anything like sensitivity and restraint had evolved), but every single black character is gap-toothed, jive-talking, singing and capering, cackling and back-slapping. Women reek of menstrual blood, and the more confident and empowered they are, the more inevitable it is they will casually disrobe in front of the male hero and quirk an eyebrow until sex results. All sex in a Swanwick tale, seemingly, must be a power play, sealing an alliance or bringing an underling more firmly under their superior's sway. After a few repetitions of these motifs, one begins to question whether Swanwick really deserves the esteem he gets.

Swanwick's diffidence with the long form is especially evident in this, his first "novel." It consists of two excellent, highly polished novelettes -- published separately in an anthology and a magazine, respectively -- connected by a shakier, far less engaging string of vignettes sketching in the intervening years. With such a minimalist structure, making a point of, say, Keith's severe aversion to black people stands out all the more, because it's left dangling with no resolution or payoff, as if it were included, '80s style, for "shocking" verisimilitude. In a way I'm sorry this got turned into a novel; on their own, "Mummer Kiss" and "Marrow Death" would be a compelling, self-contained diptych of post-nuclear horror.