Weldon Kees, the great Larkin of American suburbs, wrote a poem ‘Crime Club’ that is also an impossible mystery. His case is an absence of helpful clues: ‘No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair. No eccentric aunt, no gardener, no family friend’ and a surfeit of misleading clues: ‘The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple/ The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased/The note: ”To be killed this way is quite all right with me.” It’s clear that the mystery of ‘Crime Club’ will never be unravelled, not least because ‘the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane, And sits alone in a white room in a white gown, Screaming that all the world is mad’.
The mystery of Inga Vesper’s The Long Long Afternoon is no less impenetrable. It is suburban California in August 1959. Joyce Haney, a married mother of two, has vanished into thin air. The only clues are a couple of beer bottles, a bloodstain and a child’s sleepsuit. Of course, Mrs Haney isn’t the most well adjusted housewife around. She takes a lot of medication – even for the time – she came from a rough background, she has a rough boyfriend in her past, and she is far too friendly to ‘the help’: brilliant young Black cleaner Ruby Wright, who gets the bus from Skid Row to do the jobs that white Californian housewives will not do.
We’ve been here before of course – the lonely struggle of Betty Draper in Mad Men, the research of Betty Friedan into the lives of upscale homemakers (‘Sixteen out of the twenty-eight were in analysis or analytical psychotherapy. Eighteen were taking tranquillisers; several had tried suicide’) – we know this time, and how crazy it seems now, men drinking and whoring in the city while their womenfolk fiddle with the air conditioning in their perfect little houses. We know Vesper’s characters. Mick Blanke is the haunted detective. Jimmy McCarthy, Joyce’s ex, is the haunted roughneck and war veteran. Ruby Wright is the aspirational young woman from the ghetto.
And yet Vesper’s novel never has the ring of overfamiliarity. Her prose is like the poetry of Weldon Kees – it’s understated but says everything. A half-finished freeway arches over the suburbs. Sunnylakes ‘looks like something from an election poster. The tidy houses, the flags, the mailboxes glinting in the sun’. Ruby suffers in her cleaner’s uniform: on the bus south, ‘her head is burning up under her little cap, and her feet are marinating in her sneakers’; cleaning the kitchen, ‘Ruby leans against the mop, which has gone slippery in her hands.’ Mick is from Brooklyn, kicked to the west coast for screwing up a case in New York, and he never gets used to the heat: ‘the sunshine makes him woozy every time he steps outside’. Investigating the Haney garden, he notices that ‘the sun flares from the tiles marching around the pool. Not a single weed dares to rear its head through the cracks.’ If that’s what it’s like to work in the oppressive summer town of Sunnylakes, living there must be worse. ‘There is hope in the morning hours,’ Joyce says, ‘just as there is desperation in the afternoon, which stretches like gum and yet contracts into nothing’. To be killed this way is quite all right with me.
Vesper writes brilliantly about male privilege and the struggles of the time. Joyce’s husband, Frank, is no Don Draper. He can work in a high paying office job but that’s just about all he can do; when Joyce disappears, Frank visibly disintegrates; without a woman in his life, he panics, and calls in his mother, a scary Lady Bracknell figure who quickly moves into the family home. Frank is a man who has been brought up to expect everything to be done for him, and is distraught to find that’s not always on offer.
In Ruby’s life there is the Sunnylakes Women’s Improvement Committee and the Skid Row Black Man’s Advancement Committee. Ruby’s not welcome at either. My life needs advancing too, she wants to tell her boyfriend. The tenement city where Ruby lives is described just as skilfully as the Sunnylakes ideal. Many of the homes are going to be bulldozed to build the new freeway. Evictions are coming, and near the end of the book, there is a riot. ‘When she steps into Trebeck Row, it’s nearly empty. Only a few people hurry to their homes or their work. Fine 49 is shut up. In the distance, Mrs Estrada is making her way to the bus stop, her dress aflame with evening light.’ You see the riot before it happens.
The head of the Sunnylakes committee is Genevieve Crane, one of the best drawn characters in the novel. Her committee is ostensibly about home efficiency and home economics, but Mrs Crane is also subtly trying to teach the housewives to think for themselves, and make their own decisions – to show them ‘that there is more to life than men.’ She understands that Sunnylakes women have been conditioned into believing they will never be complete without a husband, and that the conditioning leads some of these women into very dark places. But her neighbour Nancy Ingram snaps back: ‘You think all a woman ought to want is freedom. But freedom is damned hard, Genevieve.’
The Long, Long Afternoon recalls the 1930s noir writers in its fusion of workable mysteries and a portrait of a society. It is also a fine way to kill a long, long afternoon.
Max Dunbar 