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In John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Neddy Merril’s running to and from obstacles, literal and metaphorical, blooms from a sense of sadness and loss. Woken from a gin-soaked sleep, he decides one day to swim from pool to pool in his Westchester neighborhood to clean himself off. It’s a performance for the people who watch, one of strength and solidity. Finally, the volta, the story’s final moment: Merrill’s family is gone, his house foreclosed.
Rivka Galchen, staff writer at The New Yorker and novelist, most recently of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is A Witch (2021, FSG), riffs on Cheever’s classic story of bourgeois loss in her latest story “Crown Heights North” by inverting the drama: our unnamed protagonist has already died from cancer. “The dead man,” as he’s introduced delivers observations in italics and runs following the guidance of an app. He namechecks a Bradbury story (“There Will Come Soft Rains”), and he’s off on his first run in twenty years. He’s in his “early fifties” or will be “forever.” In the death-land purgatory, the Runner has feelings (embarrassment, exhaustion, pride), but time itself has died as well. Galchen, rather than indulging in the panopticon view of time paused, instead delights in the absurdity of a dead man’s conversations with an automated voice. Yet, our narrator has some sense of time’s passing and proper conclusion remarking about what was “then” and what is “now.”
Time is a “conundrum” for the Runner; the great expanse of “now” converges like a vision of heaven and hell. The latter, a “landscape in which everything was the same” and “sapped of…love”, and the former a familiar place, the same delights of Crown Heights, Brooklyn; “torn plastic bags,” the unchanged “trees and houses” he and his wife admired together. Life, he muses, was “an abundance, a gift.” The neighborhood was a “just society,” an exclamation said with wonder and joy, recalling the ecstatic nature of poetry.
Our narrator’s running thoughts about a “blue-eyed rabbi’s motorcade” that crashed into a child, the Jewish Orthodox legacy of the neighborhood, are punctuated by the sunny encouragements of the app's voice-over: “how strong”, “how good you looked”, “how proud” the voice was. Told in sentences that wind and curve from our narrator and then contrasted by the robotic app-voice, the Dead Man notes the entire experience is “infantile.”
That scan from the protagonist continues in a long section of flashback to a place where time stopped when he visited the Sinai Peninsula. The recollection comes during a “Comeback Run” when the app voice asks if he wishes to input his brand of sneakers: a bit of data mining he decides is “hawking wares.” In the Sinai, he recalls the “unfathomable intuitions and desires” that led a figure through a desert ravine. Like him, now running, the figure moved briskly in the “vast, shadeless regions” recalling the work of Thomas Browne and other 19th century classics he’d been reading. These choices came from a bookshelf in the house he rented; they were his roommate’s. Our Dead Man, rather than qualities, knows products, like the running app. The figure arrives at our speaker, unfurls her “thin cerulean-blue scarf,” lays out “bracelets, earrings [and] a few pins.” It’s understood our narrator scoffs: she too was “hawking wares.”
This phrase, “hawking wares,” is a bizarre one. The verb, in these sentences, used in the passive voice, moves from an aggressive attack to a nuisance. The narrator is bothered by the attempt to sell him things. “To hawk,” a 19th century invention with that spelling (originally “hauke”) placed by the OED with Tennyson comes into the English language along with the industrial revolution. As the new velocity of capital momentum arrives, so does the bird-like, predatory peddling of goods. That selling, the constant sales pitching, robotic voiceover that haunts our Dead Man, recalls then the desire within that term “to hawk.”
As Marx suggests, the creation of goods to sell is a process of emulation and desire. The fetish object, as all products within capital exchange become, develops into one of mirroring. Capital seeds itself within products made under its purview, its mode of production, and thus implants a bit of itself into the goods. The processes here could become more obvious as the layers of fuzz and dust are removed from one’s eyes, say if one died and saw a complete vision of time. Capital’s desire to produce new things, to find new markets for extraction, refracts the world back into itself. So a plot of grass becomes property, so a wild boar becomes a hog, so pork becomes a foodstuff, and so too, does man become a commodity for exchange. And yes, an undead runner could start to become an infantile voice-over on a running app.
What’s at stake here for our runner and thus the reader is a matter of aspiration, a sibling desire of emulation. Who is the Dead Man aspiring to be? What, as all literature must answer, does our character want?
We return to the prose.
Galchen’s story is populated with a contemporary speech that reveals, not the character’s view of the world but her own. The distinction here can be difficult to parse. Told in the close third person, the story should largely be the vision of our Dead Man. He is a fifty-year-old who has died from cancer with references to Thomas Browne and Ray Bradbury. Galchen has him seem “kind of” embarrassed; he notes the app consists “of a bunch of ‘Guided Runs’; he uses the metaphor “as if [turned] into lint,” to describe a dream. Do his visions really turn into a fabric bit? Sure, the “fabric of the mind” might be a useful cliché, but then is our narrator relying on cliché or is the writer?
One answer might be in the clichéd concept introduced earlier: our dead man thinking of life as a “gift.” Perhaps, Galchen suggests that the simple, robotic generated app voice is merging with our narrator’s, spilling platitudes and trite observations equally, holding the world at its feet and seeing only the glossy surface.
Late in the story, Galchen deploys an overwritten paragraph where each sentence uses a figure of speech: fifteen minutes goes “by like a coffee;” he didn’t want to “fall off into realms beyond his map;” he remarks on “later plots, termed literature” and “comrades turned to pigs.” The tone is playful, referential for a New Yorker reader—they love coffee, Animal Farm, and clever observations. It has the effect of a cartoon caption. The target, the thing at stake in Galchen’s sly story, is that “mysterious expanse” between man and machine, one we find ourselves colliding often. The terror might be in the arrival at death, the arrival in machine/man unity. Galchen ends with the app deploying italics, the font of our human narrator, to tell him one last time “you’re awesome…I’m so proud.” The merging of machine/human being might be horrible to imagine, but it also might be funny.