The Freedom of Fiction

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer: Pete Dexter's Spooner and Dave Eggers' Zeitoun

by Justin Bauer

So reflects Warren Spooner, after touching off a blue-haired scrum at a rubber-chicken literary awards banquet. Spooner, the title character of Pete Dexter's new novel (Grand Central, Sept. 24), has followed Margaret Truman's reading with an off-color selection of his own, and the ladies who left after seeing Ms. Truman have been stampeded by those fleeing from Spooner's foul mouth.

Dexter is not strictly a Philadelphia writer. But he spent enough time poking through dark corners of Philly to understand certain crucial parts of the city's character and self-image. And he left town with one of the least funny man-walks-into-a-bar stories on record.

That story is about a newspaper columnist who profiles a fatal small-time drug deal in a way that offends the family of its late subject — and the retribution that family exacts (in the form of broken bones and missing teeth) on that writer when he comes to a Devil's Pocket barroom seeking resolution.

The result is something like an autobiography, a novel that takes the incidents of Dexter's life and turns them into a picaresque through the effects of a columnist's style: close observation, striking details and quick, ironic inversions.

This runs counter to the ways autobiographical fiction usually works. Dexter does not take the opportunity to shape the thinly veiled events of his own life into a coherent narrative, or to impose the tidiness of form or character arc on Spooner's actions; with the exception of a couple of incidents, like the night in Devil's Pocket, he even resists the freedom fiction allows him to pass unequivocal judgment.

If one of the benefits of fiction is the tidiness Dexter avoids, then Dave Eggers' scrupulously nonfictional, issue-driven Zeitoun (McSweeney's, July 15) runs the danger of being easily overwhelmed by both incident — Hurricane Katrina and Homeland Security — and judgmental polemic about the storm's messy aftermath. Instead, it's Eggers' commitment to a limited perspective, bounded entirely by interviews and fact-checking and documentary evidence, that creates a portrait that's both focused and vividly resonant.

Zeitoun revolves entirely around its title character, Syrian-American painting contractor Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who chose to stay in New Orleans as Katrina approached to safeguard his small business and the handful of rental properties he owned. The book admits only two perspectives, rendering Zeitoun's experiences and impressions from inside the waterlogged city, and his wife's story during her separation from Zeitoun as she evacuated with their children.

Indeed, because Zeitoun is so focused — and because Eggers is so skillful at translating Zeitoun's thoughts and reactions while entirely effacing any authorial intrusion or judgment — it carries a clarity that more comprehensive histories of the storm have lacked. Eggers may be very fortunate in his choice of subjects, with Zeitoun serving not only as rescuer and detainee, but also as a Muslim immigrant entrepreneur who, with deep roots in his community, embodies the best of the American Dream. Eggers demonstrates impressive restraint in allowing the Zeitouns to speak for themselves.

With the benefit of our knowledge now, the events surrounding Katrina are as predictable and familiar as the stations of the cross. But through the sympathetic and fully realized character of Zeitoun, Eggers renders them new and personalized and shocking all over again. Detained and caged in a bus-station parking lot, Zeitoun has been caught in the mismanaged mess of FEMA's paranoid response to disaster. Zeitoun, uncomprehending, assesses his situation with a contractor's eye, estimating the time and labor involved in constructing his ad hoc prison, heartbreakingly itemizing the resources that went into detention rather than rescue.

Throughout, Eggers resists editorializing, knowing that simple reporting can make its own powerful case. Zeitoun himself chooses only to bear witness, rebuilding his business and life in New Orleans, and allowing time and history to exact retribution. And, in much the same way, Spooner makes peace with his own catastrophe: "As for the Devil's Pocket, he thought once in a while of the young citizens in the street with their bats and tire irons, but also imagined them now, wallowing all these years in what they were, with their bad teeth (though admittedly their own teeth) and dead-end work, and wives daydreaming of collecting insurance payments after they were killed on the job, and wished them nothing more or less than the lives they had made for themselves to live."

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)