Many of the best writers under 40 — from earnest pundits like Jedediah Purdy to teasing memoirists like Dave Eggers — seem to be converging on a common subject. This is the sense that all forms of public communication — advertising, television, literature, politics — are infected with dishonesty; instead of uniting us, they breed a debilitating irony that severs all our ties with each other and with earlier forms of culture. When it comes to literature, this problem takes the form of uncertainty about the future of traditional genres — novels, poetry, drama. Can these forms still communicate genuine experience, or are they also exhausted, blasted by self-consciousness?
Palladio, Jonathan Dee’s excellent new novel, surpasses most treatments of these subjects because he approaches them in a truly novelistic way — that is, indirectly, through character and setting and action. John Wheelwright and Molly Howe, whose stories alternate and then merge over the course of the novel, are both afflicted by the difficulty of true communication. John, an ad agency " creative, " is precisely not a creator; he is one of the many conduits through which the non-language of advertising flows, and he is growing troubled by his success in such a role:
" So what was behind the work they did? John knew that most people would have assumed that he himself was behind it, he and Roman and his other colleagues; yet he put nothing of what he believed into it. He felt much more like an instrument — an instrument of what seemed . . . like a vast and powerful blankness, an opacity. "
He gets the opportunity to escape this dead end when he is approached by Mal Osbourne, a legendary ad man and art collector in the Charles Saatchi mold. (Damian Hirst’s famous shark, a Saatchi discovery, makes an unbilled appearance in Osbourne’s collection.) He recruits John for a new ad agency–cum–artists’ colony, Palladio, with which he means to revolutionize the whole concept of advertising. He will convince corporations to replace traditional ads with sponsorship of avant-garde artworks, on the model of Renaissance patronage. It is an optimistic view of the mediatized future that John and the novel as a whole cannot quite bring themselves to share.
For John’s story is balanced by that of Molly Howe, a victim of the blankness he serves. Her story is familiar: we have seen the bourgeois hypocrisy, the aimless adolescent rebellion, the emotional deadness, many times before. (Molly’s parents come right out of the American Beauty school of suburban dysfunction.) But in this context, Dee makes her passivity and self-contempt carry a particular symbolic freight: she is reduced to silence because she has never learned how to speak genuinely.
As she gets older, Molly makes sex the focus of her alienation. For her it is always about power and humiliation, never genuine intimacy, and she drives a series of men wild with thwarted, possessive rage. She is a belle dame sans merci, a Mona Lisa, and Dee admirably attempts to get inside the mind of such a woman, who usually serves merely as the object of desire and fantasy.
Eventually the two stories intersect, as we know they must, in Molly and John’s brief love affair. Here Dee comes dangerously close to melodrama: Molly is the fallen woman, John the pure-hearted lover who wants only to rescue her. But Dee puts a characteristically modern spin on the situation. Molly’s problem is not loss of honor but loss of self-esteem, the inner contempt that leads her to seek sexual humiliation. And John’s love, idealistic and generous beyond the point of plausibility, is still not enough to fill the void. True communication fails here, on the grid of two, as it does on the grid of two hundred million. And the second half of the novel follows these twin failures to their spectacularly destructive conclusion.
All this suggests that Palladio is a novel of ideas; but it never thins into mere allegory. Dee is always able to locate the abstract in the concrete, and has a genuine curiosity about how the world looks and works. A Tribeca studio or a small-town abortion clinic, an ad-agency pitch or a Christian cultist sermon, are all equally interesting to him, and his clear, understated prose gives them a precise fictional life. It’s dangerous to praise a writer for being " of the moment, " since every moment soon passes, and Dee’s combination of strengths promise a more lasting achievement. But it is always exciting to see one’s own generational experience captured and validated in fiction, and any reader under the age of 40 will be gratified to see how much of it Jonathan Dee captures in Palladio.
