THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509280456
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
THE FATIGUE ARTIST
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ
Scribner. 317 pp. $23.
My immune system has surrendered. It's been insulted once too often. I'm a miniature ecological disaster, reflecting a larger global breakdown. A walking metaphor.
- The Fatigue Artist
When illness disables Laura, narrator of Lynne Sharon Schwartz's fifth novel, The Fatigue Artist, her legs turn to sand, her brain fogs over and her hands can't seem to grasp anything. ``I'm losing my grip,'' she exclaims. And, indeed, this appears to be the case.
Laura's illness - Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - brings psychological, as well as physical, suffering. The author, who has herself endured a bout of CFS, wryly chronicles the solipsism of the chronically ill. In a tone both compassionate and droll, Schwartz depicts Laura's mounting frustration and fury.
Increasingly, Laura turns inward. Soon, her illness defines her reality. Tidal changes, spilled juice, the flimsy bumper of her car - these are all portents of decrepitude and defeat. Significance is everywhere: A Chinese dinner is delivered, but it's not the one she ordered. ``It's not what we wanted. Someone else is having what we wanted. . . . That's the secret of life, isn't it? To like what you get?''
A dying squirrel, a sinking lighthouse, a shipwreck on the horizon are images of inevitable loss. Things themselves, Laura tells us, are less significant than the images they convey.
The Fatigue Artist, like Schwartz's other novels (Leaving Brooklyn, Disturbances in the Field, Rough Strife), is a deft portrait of contemporary urban intelligentsia. As always, Schwartz's characters are flawed but forgivable. Unlike her other works, however, The Fatigue Artist poses questions about body and soul, healing and traditional medicine, in the tradition of other notable fictions about disease.
The dry irony of The Magic Mountain echoes in Laura's report of her fight against illness: ``I sink back in the easy chair, facing the river. Now is as good a time as any to test creative visualizing. I'll picture my innards as a battleground, the organs as the killing fields. A very intimate landscape, with strategic valleys and waterways.''
When Laura encounters dead and dying rodents, Camus' diseased rats (The Plague) slink to mind. And when Laura and her lover meet and part, always between losses, the mixed scent of sex and death recall Love in the Time of Cholera.
Finally, it is Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist that gives Laura a framework in which to defeat her illness. ``It came to me that this was a juncture . . . when life begged to be lived as art. That way, it could be tolerated. Very well . . . We've all heard of the hunger artist. I could be the first fatigue artist. Give it my best shot.''
In Kafka's story, a performance artist puts himself in a public cage, like an animal, and, by fasting, makes hunger his art form. The act is to last 40 days, and is meant to illustrate the difference between artists and animals. But the public loses interest in the artist. The artist loses interest in food, and ultimately he dies of starvation.
Writing is Laura's ``performance'' medium. She begins to write everything down: sickness, the diagnosis, despair. The ludicrous, imagistic narcissism of disease. The voices of friends. Unlike the hunger artist, Laura realizes, she has no audience but herself. And, unlike the hunger artist, she didn't choose her art form. Maybe, Laura muses, illness is one of those art forms, like fiction writing, that chooses you. If so, fiction writers report, characters will come alive and take the plot to an inspired resolution. And, in this very literary illness, they do.
An herbalist/acupuncturist treats Laura's ``imbalances'' and suggests that perhaps she has had a bad experience of some kind that set her off-balance. As a matter of fact, Laura explains, her husband has recently been killed, among other problems. The bald, matter-of-fact way Laura describes her history is alarming. Readers, more alert than the brain-fogged patient, now begin to grasp the nature of her illness.
Laura doesn't have the life she ordered. Neither does she like the one she's received. She's been widowed, miscarried her only baby, loved a man who couldn't be hers. She can refuse to eat what's been dished out - pain and loss and bitterness - or she can ``invest in loss'' and accept what's happened, grieve and go on. Finally, then, her choice is the same as the hunger artist's: Eat what is served, or die. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a short-story writer and poet who has been diagnosed
with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She lives in Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
by CNB