'The Thing That We Have Made': Friendships in Norman Rush: The New Yorker "He tells our story with extraordinary understanding, except of what we most feel," thinks Neville, a character in Virginia Woolf's novel "The Waves," of his friend Bernard. For he does not need us. He is never at our mercy. Could this be one definition of friendship, to sometimes have another person at our mercy? It seems brutal, yet friendship is the same as any other kind of love: it gets snagged on the problem of power. Exclusive contracts of best friendship - the matching bracelets, the mood rings - are for kids. Growing up, in theory, is supposed to teach us that total reciprocity is even harder to find in a friend than in a lover, that needing a friend, as Neville needs Bernard, is no guarantee of being needed back. In novels, the most heated friendships tend to blossom at the same time that sex does. In much literature of the past century, that means during college, when affection can be insulated from the rest of the world. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" gives us Stephen Dedalus and his college pal Cranly, whose "minds, lately estranged, seemed suddenly to have been drawn closer, one to the other." When Joyce writes that Cranly, getting ready to do battle over Stephen's waning Catholicism, looks "up into Stephen's face with moved and friendly eyes," the moment is as charged as if the men had embraced. In "Jacob's Room," Woolf projects herself into the sitting rooms of Cambridge and imagines that between the young men there "the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly...the room was full of it, still, deep, like a pool." More recently, Juan García Madero, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives," is inducted into the coterie of the visceral realists in Mexico City after its leaders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, show up in the university poetry workshop that he's on the verge of quitting. As he confesses to his diary, García Madero has no idea what visceral realism is. It doesn't matter. For someone as hungry as García Madero is to be a part of something, to belong is to believe. "Subtle Bodies," Norman Rush's new novel, concerns idealized male undergrad fellowship decades after the fact, when inflated nostalgia has had ample time to do its work. The action begins in transit. Ned, a mild-mannered political organizer in his late forties, is flying from his home, in San Francisco, to New York, where he will join Joris, Gruen, and Elliot, three friends from his N.Y.U. days, in the early seventies, to mourn a fourth, Douglas, who died in an accident on his Catskills estate. It's early 2003; until news of Douglas's death came, Ned had been mounting a protest march that he believes might prevent the American invasion of Iraq. For Ned, working against the probability of mass killing, Douglas's death is cataclysmic on its own scale: "His great friend was dead. Ned wanted to embrace his great friend. An imaginary burning feeling ran across Ned's chest and down his arms. He wanted to embrace his friend. Embrace, not hug; great, not close. Ned's thoughts don't ring false, exactly, but they seem elevated a pitch, grief straining to reach a somber register. At N.Y.U., Douglas was the undisputed leader of their pack and revered by Ned, although, aside from a few spammy e-mails sent over the past few years, "avant-garde tips on nutrition or postings from the Committee for Ethical Tourism which proved there was nowhere in the world you could go for a vacation except possibly Canada," they had all but fallen out of touch. Ned's pilgrimage to New York is part homage, part fact-finding mission to uncover what the great friend had made of his adulthood. The evidence is bewildering. After inheriting money in his twenties, Douglas managed to amass a small fortune in "the questioned documents business," something to do with exposing forged Kundera diaries and papers from the Dreyfus Affair. He had grown estranged from his wife, once upon a time a gossip columnist in Czechoslovakia, and his sketchy business dealings have left her in dire financial straits. Most damning is his attitude toward his son, the symbolically named Hume. Though Douglas seems to have once taken an interest in fatherhood as a theoretical experiment in pedagogy, he had lately built Hume a yurt where he could live alone, and abandoned him to his own devices. Rush is drawn to idealists and eccentrics, to men who retreat into isolation in pursuit of some singular vision, as Nelson Denoon, the errant intellectual at the heart of "Mating," Rush's masterful first novel, from 1991, retreats to a patch of desert in Botswana to build a utopian commune for women. But where Denoon had an actual project, and the enterprising mania (a high virtue in Rush's universe) to see it through, Douglas has only a set of affectations in place of emotions, postures in search of real ideas. (The funeral is treated as a kind of homework assignment for the mourners, with Ned assigned to speak on Douglas's "philosophy." He comes up empty-handed.) This is just as true of college-era Douglas, who emerges through his friends" recollections and anecdotes as a composite of pretensions each more ridiculous than the last. This was a guy who would raise his hand "in a certain way to signal the group to stop talking so he could finish a thought he wasn't sharing," the wannabe smartass who sent "tart notes to the Village Voice correcting the views of their house movie critic," the cosseted teenager making a show of his hyper-inflated sense of entitlement: A big trope with Douglas had been knowing the names, and as much as seemed appropriate and practical about the servers and helpers and cleaners, the security guards, all the support workers who kept life so pleasant for the student body at NYU. He had been kind of ostentatious about it, but over time it had seemed like the right thing to do, and the working rabble, as Douglas had referred to them, seemed to appreciate it. Everyone does stupid stuff in college, but Douglas's "japes," as Ned calls them, are rigid, humorless, condescending. He is sinister, even tyrannical. His fun bears no relation to joy. "Nothing was funny that we did," says Joris, the cynic of the group. In place of this bitter, retrospective clarity, Ned has a confused sense of shame. "It was embarrassing to recall how seriously he had taken the whole thing," Ned thinks, "the world remade, friendship at the core of everything." All these years later, Ned remains, crushingly, at Douglas's mercy. Gruen owns an agency that sells public-service announcements to television stations, Joris is a big-time maritime lawyer, and Elliot is a stockbroker. They have taken life as it is. Only Ned, pressing his anti-war petition on anyone with a hand to sign it, still buys Douglas's doctrine of exceptionalism, that common collegiate illusion that, post-graduation, the future will be yours to shape. "Their group had been talented," Ned thinks. Letters they had written to the Aegis in college had always gotten attention. Maybe the others and he could collaborate on a statement against the coming invasion, in their old style. A forty-eight-year-old man who thinks excitedly of channeling the undergrad Op-Ed writer he once was into his present-day work is a pretty desperate dude. For all his good intentions, Ned's activism amounts to little more than a vanity project, a way of proving to his great friend that he still has a shot at changing the world. For Rush, men are the world's sentimental fools and women the creatures of fierce analytical clarity, the editors who keep the male creative impulse shrewdly in check. This conceit seems to be based on Rush's relationship with his wife of more than fifty years, Elsa, the recipient of some of the most ardent book dedications in contemporary letters. ("For my Muse and Critic, with gratitude for the last ten years of extraordinary forbearance, creative impatience, unfailing love," reads the one in his novel "Mortals." "Critic" is the operative word. Rush has taken about a decade to write each of his three novels, and the dedications to Elsa are, in part, apologies from a husband chronically late to dinner.) Sitting with Elsa on the porch of their home in New York's Rockland County for an interview with the Times Magazine this summer, Rush spoke gallantly of his writing as their "battle waged in common." Elsa refused the credit being thrust at her. "I don't want to be an equal in the creative process," she said. I know I'm not an equal. I'd be writing if I were an equal. Fortunately, the women in Rush's novels are not nearly so self-effacing. "The first few times he fell into these broodings it made me feel I was dealing with someone very pure, someone who in fact needed protection, shielding," says the female narrator of "Mating," an unnamed graduate student in anthropology who has abandoned her research and tracked Denoon to his village. If Rush had cut her off here, we might have reason to fear that he had resuscitated the Angel in the House, that Victorian saint who glides around dusting china and ministering to her man's moods. But instead of indulging Denoon's gloom, the narrator neatly deflates it: "I was just beginning to appreciate how deeply hung over he was." In "Subtle Bodies," it's Ned's wife, Nina, trailing her husband to New York in a subplot that involves her desire to get pregnant, who cuts through Ned's nostalgia and sees the N.Y.U. scene for what it really was: "They had been a group of wits, in their opinion, of superior sensibilities of some kind, was the idea. Everything she knew about Douglas was irritating. Where does Rush come down on all this? Is he satirizing Douglas's pomposity and Ned's pitiful idealization of the past, or, as Michiko Kakutani implies in her savaging Times review of the novel, is he pressed so close to his characters that he can't recognize them for the self-obsessed bloviators they are? Are we supposed to stand with Nina, or with Ned? "Subtle Bodies" is an uneven book, shorter by two-hundred-odd pages than either "Mating" or "Mortals," but of an oddly looser knit. Rush, who has never before set his fiction outside Africa, is used to working in miniature to cover a large terrain: he deals in elaborate expositions on politics and customs, socialism versus capitalism as a model for villages, the mechanics of a bathhouse in a place without water, the maneuverings of the C.I.A. The smaller, blander world of the Catskills, where a visit to the general store for the newspaper counts as a major event, has messed with his sense of scale. Scenes that should be allowed to play out are cropped short: the group gathered at Douglas's house is always moving between rooms, going in to dinner and walking out again, being called to a meeting and dismissed before much of anything has been revealed. When the men do get to sit down and talk, the abbreviated discussions about politics that Ned foists on his indifferent friends read like notes for a different novel - a thicker, richer one in which characters are more than indications of the ideas that they are meant to represent. Why did Rush deny himself the space he needs to show us how people work? He turns eighty this week. Maybe he figured that "Subtle Bodies" was his last chance to try something new. A similar problem registers in the novel's language. Rush is immune to the efforts of so many contemporary novelists to tamp down diction and restrict vocabulary to its barest units; his prose is full of "the general aural glitter" that the narrator of "Mating" finds in Denoon's village, "the jinkling of the wind chimes, the cowbells and goatbells and dogbells, the drivel of birds and poultry, and all the other as yet unidentified ingredients in the sinfonia domestica playing from sunrise to sunset in this intricate place." One of the pleasures of that book is how well matched Rush's narrator is to the idiosyncratic, superabundant language that he gives her; she takes on the weight of reality because we believe that Rush's prose belongs fully to her. In "Subtle Bodies," that same highly particular language is stretched to serve every character. College-student Douglas "announced his intention to die thin as a curate." Ned thinks of Douglas's abandoned study as "a fount of sadness." Nina tells herself that she "needed to be calm and alkaline." These are not three voices, but one: Rush's. Still, even as Rush can't convey just what it was that made Ned and Douglas's friendship beautiful, he is alive to the beauty itself, the incandescent quality of a very early love whose intimacy seems unbounded by the inevitability of disappointment. It's the same quality distilled in Frank O'Hara's poem "Animals," a nostalgia so funny and tough as to be almost tangible: "Have you forgotten what we were like then / when we were still first rate / and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth / it's no use worrying about Time / but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves..." The poem ends with a line that's both a sigh and a shout - "O you / were the best of all my days." This is what Ned wants to say to Douglas and, when Rush finally represses his instinct to show how clever a writer he can be, he lets Ned say it very well: He was succeeding in being confused by his thoughts and feeling strongly about them at the same time. This was about what you loved in a friend as a friend. He loved something in Elliot, still. Maybe there was a window in life and then it closed...But there was that window, before anybody had accomplished anything to speak of, when the ingredients, by which he meant the subtle bodies, shone their light. Douglas was only the first of the friends to die. Everything connected with him was foreclosed now, Ned thought. But there are four of us left, and if this is too mystical fuck it... I loved them. For they bring me into existence as certainly as you do," Bernard says in "The Waves," maybe the best book ever written about what it's like to be part of a group of friends. Ned's attempt to articulate his love for Douglas reminded me of a scene in which Woolf's six main characters have dinner together in a restaurant. They have known each other since childhood and are now in their early twenties, but something is profoundly unsettled about the gathering. The friends are wary of one another, of being seen and evaluated and found lacking, of having their lives ridiculed or, worse, pitied. They have grown apart. The feeling is closer to jealousy and resentment than to anything like affection. And then a change sweeps over the group, as subtle and quick as a cloud blown away from the sun. The old feeling blazes through: [A]s we are about to part, having paid our bill, the circle in our blood, broken so often, so sharply, for we are so different, closes in a ring. Something is made. Yes, as we rise and fidget, a little nervously, we pray, holding in our hands this common feeling, "Do not move, do not let the swing-door cut to pieces the thing that we have made, that globes itself here, among these lights, these peelings, this litter of bread crumbs and people passing. Do not move, do not go. Hold it for ever. The beauty of the thing is that you can't hold it forever, but you go on reaching out your hand anyway. Photograph by David Hurn/Magnum.