Porter Shreve. When the White House Was Ours. Mariner. 288 pages. $12.95
Porter shreve’s When the White House Was Ours is perfect in its mediocrity: an exemplary formal specimen of the didactic social novel, and a work of fiction completely blind to its own larger implications. Its prose is hard to discuss, because it is so unremarkable, so unconsidered; the novel as a whole is still harder to talk about: Its central theme — political disillusionment — has degenerated into a cliché that defeats all but the most masterful artists. It may be almost redundant, here, to mention that this disillusionment is the disillusionment of what is called — however obtusely — a political progressive. Or that it is effected by the usual antigen, the discovery of flawed human character as the primary agency in the world. The question, then: Why discuss White House at all?
One reason — perhaps the sole reason — is a phenomenon completely incidental to Mr. Shreve’s labors: the rise of a charismatic and untested junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, to a summit of astonishing political prominence — the ultimate summit. There can be little doubt that Obama’s rhetoric — however hopeful and stirring its calls for radical, systemic change — has been predicated on the assumption that political, social, and moral wrong are obdurate and intrinsic in America, that we must abase ourselves before the offended rest of the world, that we must look to the Western constituents of Europe for our political inspiration, as their revolutionaries once looked to us, that we must, through some unclear mechanism, renounce our own status in the world (as though this were a matter merely of volition). Whatever the merits of this political philosophy — and we can discern from its long lineage in American politics, which stretches back to its most rarefied and focused incarnation, George Washington’s farewell address, that it possesses considerable merits, undeniable attractions — there is no question that Obama has built his house in accordance with it, as his closest presidential antecedent, Jimmy Carter, did some three decades ago. American malaise; American hubris — self-inflicted, shaming, requiring severe expiation. So Carter saw, and so sees Obama.
And so, too, Porter Shreve, albeit on a far more modest scale. In his novel, narrated from the perspective of fifteen-year-old Daniel Truitt, both hubris and malaise figure prominently, most clearly concentrated in the person of Pete Truitt, Daniel’s father, a Wisconsin progressive whose hazy Whitmanic visions of American promise are matched in size and force by his capacity for self-deception and self-frustration and his final spinelessness. White House recounts the summer when Pete, having been fired from his job at a tony Chicago private school, drags his wife, Valerie, his daughter, Molly, and Daniel to Washington, dc, where he plans to start a school founded on solidly egalitarian principles. Shreve makes no secret of the doomed nature of this project, and the book is a chronicle — a minute and humiliating chronicle — of Pete’s failure, Daniel’s hideous entry into adolescence and adulthood, Valerie’s desperation and increasing volatility, and the collapse of the post-60s dreams of one very weak husband and one very frustrated wife.
Shreve takes meticulous care — the kind of care taken by authors who have not much to say — to add local color: the urban decay of Washington in the 1970s; the arrival of Valerie’s freeloading hippie brother Lincoln; a gifted and troubled black teenager; sweatbands; basketball; pot and pills; the Bicentennial. But these are ancillary to Daniel’s unwilling observation of his father’s descent into ever-deeper delusion and his family’s disintegration, and his eventual rejection of his father’s attempts to make a fellow conspirator of him — against Valerie, Molly, the landlord, society at large. And largely because of Pete’s strange self-positioning as a figure embodying Alexis de Tocqueville and the English anarchist William Godwin, the school — called with great optimism Our House — tears itself apart, along with Daniel’s family: Valerie leaves, taking Molly with her, and Daniel is left among the wreckage of his father’s dreams.
All of this points — at least to an objective observer — to some irrefutable conclusions: that the watery political idealism of the 1970s died by its own entropy and rejectionism, that Pete Truitt is a laughable victim of his own aspirations, and that the theoretically uplifting political agonism — its often-advertised propensity for feeling itself in the midst of a world-shaking moral-political crisis, a love of shouting, slogans, conflict, and zealous anger — that characterized the American left after the collapse of its radical agenda is just as dangerous and debilitating as the ostensible moral stupidity of the Eisenhowerian right (and, indeed, perhaps shares more with that politics than is commonly admitted). All of these things could, of course, be admitted without delegitimizing the larger philosophical framework of that agonism — the Truitts, after all, are imaginary beings, and all political systems are riddled with manifold caries. But Shreve doesn’t admit any of it — and it is only in his refusal to do so that he sheds his mediocrity.
Not for anything philosophically or aesthetically exalted, certainly. But it is impossible to call a zealot mediocre, if only for the alarm and pity he inspires in us. The book’s epilogue — Our Country — takes place in the days immediately after the contested election of 2000. We learn that Pete and Valerie have reconciled, that Daniel has become a writer, and that the Truitts still display the same naïve certitude about the rightness of the beliefs that destroyed their common life and enterprise. But — and this strains credulity — they go back to visit their old house in dc, Our House, as the recount is slated to begin, (“‘The fix is in,’ my father says as we take off in Molly’s Subaru. ‘Looks like Bush has got it.’”) and discover that the city has put up a notice of condemnation and intent to raze. Pete refuses to take pictures; Valerie urges him. Daniel finds a box, left there by a former student and addressed to his family. The four stand there, watching a curtain move in the breeze in the rotting window.
How could a scene so banal be so frightening? Here are two generations, both fully adult, of a family that sacrificed itself for its political ideals — a pointless sacrifice, and one made to the most clay-footed of idols, Jimmy Carter — standing before the place of shipwreck itself and wallowing in memory, without even the hint of ironic laughter, with only a formulaic sadness — “no pictures, Val” — for the death of their ideals. No recognition at all of a human element in this scene, only the suggested conviction that, in the end, the Truitts suffered because Pete was not enough of a fanatic, that he failed because he lacked devotional strength in his political beliefs. That, to me, is as frightening a picture of political life in America as could possibly be drawn. But even examined from the perspective of an American progressive, this must seem repellent — this endless focus on a two-decade snip of American history as the crucially decisive factor for all future political potentialities.
The novel’s climactic (and most authorially clumsy) act of political betrayal — Carter’s canceling a special tour he had arranged for Valerie on the strength of her daughter’s friendship with Amy — is precipitated by the forced resignation of Carter’s head of omb Bert Lance, the pious and corrupt smalltime Georgia businessman and another brother in the long fraternity of coattail riders who have embarrassed every administration from, one presumes, George Washington’s on. (Lance coined the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” A true progressive!) The meta-tragedy of the book, which coincides with the smaller-scale tragedy of the Truitts’ ruin, stands almost empty of meaning. This double event, in Shreve’s fraught political vision, is the negation of every liberal dream for the American future.
It would be absurd to suggest that the vast groundswell of public support and excitement that has swept Barack Obama to the presidency is powered by such deeply-sublimated fanaticism. Obama is, whatever criticisms you may bring against his policy platform, or even against his philosophy as a politician, one of the most charismatic political figures in recent memory, someone who displays a Clintonian magnetism without Clinton’s poorbox-rifling choirboy’s simper. And it would be impossible for any observer of the American experiment not to feel at least a twinge of excitement at such visible vindication of the proposition this nation is dedicated to. (When, I wonder, shall we see similar developments in France and Germany?)
But it would be equally absurd to deny that, despite the hollow mantra Change, there is much of this Carterian pessimism in Obama. And in many of his adherents we can find the same belief that the descent of the energy and rage of the 1960s into the inanition of the 1970s stands as the eternal sign under which all American life must be viewed, an obsession that seems to have been handed down, genetically, to people my age, who came into political consciousness during the great love-fest of the second Clinton term, and were introduced early to the horrors that human beings are capable of, albeit, thankfully, on a historically-negligible scale. But there is that same murky impulse to self-blame: The barbarism of the Islamists is our fault as a nation, a deserved thing, brought about through imperial ambition, insensitivity, or perhaps the sheer scale of America as a going concern (another phenomenon requiring expiation). Never mind, of course, that this barbarism’s recent impact on the West has been near-invisibly minute compared to its long-standing depredations against Islamic civilization, and never mind the massive egotism necessary to ignore those depredations. And it is impossible to pretend that this pessimism, the pessimism of the nursery, wherein one views oneself as the prima causa of all world-historical ill, did not play its role in breathing life into Obama’s campaign and election.
It is, of course, impossible to know as of this writing how Barack Obama will govern, and whether or not the tendencies so present in Mr. Shreve’s writing will enjoy another four to eight (or eight to ten, in Obama’s estimation) years of national prominence. But there is little evidence, if any, that the American left will be able to avert its collective eyes from the ruin of its fieriest utopian fantasies, any more than the Truitts proved able to extract themselves from their narrow, saddening nostalgia, any more than Porter Shreve has been able to rid himself of his adolescent political attachments — and that the petulant, expansive Ours of his title, the outraged cry of a child, may well be on American lips and in American ears for years to come.
