There Must Be Some Mistake by Frederick Barthelme
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Junk Culture

There are two dominant architectural genres in America: the tacky ad hoc industrial/commercial sprawl available on every federal highway in every town from Brownsville to Appalachicola; and the private designer communities tucked in between - like Destin, Florida and Kemah, Texas - which are equally tacky but considerably more expensive, given that they are planned to be an escape from the first. Both genres are vacuous and depressing, physical representations of a lack of any real purpose among their inhabitants. At least that’s what Barthelme conveys to me in this drama of quiet middle-class desperation.

People seem to drift haplessly in There Must Be Some Mistake . The entire cast drifts into various strange relationships for reasons that are unclear. They drift into or out of jobs and house purchases with no rationale other than it feels right at the time. Their aesthetic sensibilities seem to be a permanent state of suspension lest they recognise the general ugliness of the world they inhabit. They, like the architecture they inhabit, are also vacuous. They are, therefore, moved, influenced, and motivated by the slightest random stimulus to do self-destructive things.

This is “junk culture.” It consists of elements so tawdry that they have a demanding aesthetic presence. I suppose they seem to require a kind of Hobson’s choice: either to develop a sort of immunity to their garish, overwhelming repulsiveness; or to force an entirely new standard of beauty, as if there were no other societies than the one which tolerates such violence to the idea of beauty. Wallace Webster, the once aspiring architect turned ad man, has made his choice; he has learned to love it: “I thought I’d get tired of the tacky crap, the minigolf and souvenirs and franchise restaurants, but I never did.”

Bathelme writes here about the Gulf Coast but it’s clear he intends all of America: “Everywhere along the coast, from south Texas to Louisiana, there was this worn-out feel, some godforsakenness that drifted through the air like sad Latin music.” What’s there is a history of destruction and wealth turning into destruction. Things are bad but no one wants them any different. They don’t even want to escape; that would be un-American. Wallace lives on Forgetful Bay, a non-place of condos among other non-places that litter the entire Gulf coast, with other non-people who have similarly decided that this is the best to be expected from life.

There is a certain level of nostalgia about an imagined past of quaint seaside towns and the quasi-frontier life in the old industrial areas. But the memories of such things are thin and have no motive force. The murky past anticipates an equally murky future. Life at its best is a sequence of brand-name purchases. The brands are what have survived in a deteriorating world. They are the only things which provide comfort and stability, a sense of cultural continuity. No wonder Wallace is constantly thinking about returning to the God of his boyhood Catholicism - the most enduring brand name available.

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