Although it’s not possible to write fiction while you are stone-out asleep, mediocre novels have a way of sounding as if they were written while the author was, at least, under sedation. Better writers, on the other hand, give the impression of being consistently wide awake; while great ones, aware of sensations and connections their readers never realized, seem to inhabit a kind of super-waking reality.
In his first two novels, Brad Leithauser offered the chance to spend time with someone whose view of the world around him is perfectly clear, unfogged by the sleepydust of complacency and cliché. Picking up one of these books is like picking up a new pair of eyeglasses at the optometrist, with a new and stronger prescription. A trained lawyer and a poet, Leithauser published his first novel, Equal Distance, in 1984. In the mid-Eighties, the bookshops were full of coming-of-age novels about young Americans who travel to Japan to absorb the funny foreign culture and teach English to the funny squint-eyed natives. Equal Distance was by far the best of these, which, given the competition (the closest being Ransom, by Jay McInerney), doesn’t tell you much.
The dryness of Leithauser’s comic take on the Japanese is apparent from the moment Danny Ott, one of Leithauser’s Midwestern boy heroes, arrives at Narita Airport. The Japan presented here is a sort of half-cracked mirror image of America. The Orient turns out to be not so mysterious after all.
Coffee
