Author Percival Everett’s choice of genre and subject matter in novels always surprises his readers. Whether Everett is skewering the ghettoization of Black academics, interrogating the concept of “nothing” inside a spy caper, or writing a zombified comedy about the history of lynching, he is the master of seasoning traditional literary fiction with the flavors of genre. What results delights as often as it gut-punches. In Telephone, Everett asks us to consider the plight of the existential hero. Faced with death, are there any choices that can save us or give us meaning?
Telephone may be Everett’s most audacious novel, but the risks he takes in the narrative pay off in remarkable ways. The book begins with a tripartite plot, a goosefoot, on a trail that tempts the traveler into believing that choosing one of the trails will lead to a different outcome, but the monster that stalks each trail is grief. As Everett maps out, some monsters are unavoidable.
The main character, Professor Zach Wells, is a scientist, and he will test the scientific idea that experiment, result, and falsifiability can lead him to understand life’s realities. Everett crafts the plot so that Zach will be given multiple opportunities to experiment with choice—that is, to make a choice and to follow it to its logical conclusion. As part of Everett’s experiment with form, he’s published three versions of the novel, each of which has Zach making different choices. Sometimes, Zach thinks about doing something and then doesn’t follow through. What we realize, though, is that while, ultimately, choosing or not choosing requires us to weigh one bad choice against the other, neither solution may be satisfactory. Both may lead to overwhelming grief.
Early in Telephone, Zach and his daughter, Sarah, are playing chess when she makes an uncustomary mistake. She doesn’t recognize an obvious trap. “Her gaze was bright, aureate, penetrating, yet this unmindful move seemed somehow important.” The error will turn out to be a symptom of a fatal degenerative disease.
But just as Zach and his wife, Meg, are learning of their daughter’s terminal prognosis, Zach is challenged in other parts of his life. At work, a struggling colleague requests his help, and one of his students has a crush on him, and, oddly, when he opens a mail-order jacket, he discovers a secreted message inside asking for help. Which of these pressing issues can he set aside? Preoccupied by trying to figure out a way to save his daughter from the inevitable, Zach puts off decisions in other parts of his life.
Knowing his daughter will die prematurely forces Zach to acknowledge what many parents know. To love a child is to also acknowledge the fear that dare not speak its name: that child may die, and the parent will not be able to protect them from that. “My daughter was my reason for waking each day, and I wanted to kill myself for having in some fashion already resigned myself to losing some part of her. Selfishly, I saw my world as illusionary, fragile, existing only because others allowed it to exist. I realized that I was ever awaiting such a moment of loss, that I was, in fact, daily resigned to death but had never resigned to life.”
Zach and Sarah frequently play chess, and in the chapter “Castling Short,” Zach, like the disillusioned knight in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, seems to believe that if he can keep the game with his daughter going forever, death will be outwitted. But the more he tries to play toward stasis, the easier he makes it for his daughter to beat him. Sarah explains to him that winning at chess necessarily requires choices that hurt. He loses, she says, “because you hate to lose pieces.… You can’t protect everybody. You just have to get the better of it or get the position you want.”
So what, then, must one do? To believe that all choices might be bad is not to accept that nothing matters. The abyss of meaninglessness has always beckoned existential philosophers, who have posited that we are on our own. Søren Kierkegaard chose a leap of faith to resolve the eternal contradictions of being forced to choose, as Abraham did when God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac. Albert Camus argued instead that one can be aware that none of our actions can create universal meaning, but we must be prepared to constantly act in order to create our own meaning. As he once told an audience of monks, “perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” Maybe Zach cannot prevent his own daughter from dying, but can he do something that makes a difference for someone else?
“The way we treat each other changes at a pace…we find…intolerable…or, most accurately, glacial.… So it is with the indecency, harm, and evil we inflict on each other, prejudice, neglect, torture, and slavery,” Zach observes. The nihilist might look at that pace and decide that nothing they do matters. But for Zach, what becomes apparent is that as humans, we’re incapable of changing the course of the glacier, but we can certainly rescue others in its path. Even if we cannot save those we love, saving others affirms our humanity.•
Join us on May 18 at 5 p.m., when Everett will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to talk about Telephone. Please visit the Alta Clubhouse to discuss the book with your fellow California Book Club members. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
