By Benjamin Kunkel
Available at National Book Stores
Wouldn’t it be great if all our decisions were guided by some external force, be it spiritual or pharmaceutical? That’s the premise behind Benjamin Kunkel’s first novel, Indecision. And if it sounds too good to be true, this shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying – and possibly relating to – Dwight Wilmerding’s metaphysical plight.
Dwight suffers from abulia. It’s a condition that prevents him from making everyday decisions in his life, big or small. Whether it’s choosing a girlfriend, settling on a career, or which color underwear to wear, Dwight engages in lengthy philosophical debates over each decision. (Note to parents: Don’t let your kids become philosophy majors.)
A Gen-Xer who was recently "pfired" from Pfizer, Dwight decides to become a test monkey for a new drug – Abulinix – that supposedly empowers its users to make quick, snappy decisions – and live with the consequences.
Men, it is said, are natural decision-makers. So what if we never ask for directions on the road? We’re taking this exit, damn it! But something must have short-circuited in Generation X. Few of this wanna-be generation have the equipment to stick with their choices or chart their own direction in life. It takes someone from the earlier Baby Boomer generation – George W. Bush’s generation– to plunge on boldly and irreversibly in the wrong direction.
Gen-Xers like Dwight, meanwhile, are plagued by all of life’s possibilities. They’re paralyzed. Dwight’s the kind of highly educated young white male who throws the I Ching to help him get out of bed in the morning. His roommates – roosting in a lower Manhattan loft right before 9/11 – are also slackers, given to Ecstasy parties and lazy acts of rebellion. No one does much to change the world.
"I don’t mean to be ambitious on your behalf," said Vaneetha, "but you need to think about what you want from a job."
"But largely what I want is just so basic. I want shelter, warm clothing. I want food… My desires are so minimal. It’s good that I live in New York, because just food and rent take up all of my income. If we lived somewhere else I wonder what I’d spend it on. I mean, in New York it costs a lot of money to be satisfied with so little."
"But clearly you’re not satisfied. It’s not a fulfilling position you’ve got. Your talents are languishing."
"I have a certain talent for modest contentment."
She smiled with friendly cruelty. "You know what I think of when I come by Chambers St.? Nineteen ninety-three, the boys during freshman year. The greasy hair, the deliberate aimlessness… And Dwight, you have been smoking–"
"Come on," I said, "Sanch is unemployed – he shouldn’t always be getting high by himself."
Despite his Ivy League degree, Dwight works as a glorified call-center operator for a pharmaceutical company – he tells people over the phone about the possible side effects of their medication. But when his job is outsourced to a Third World country – Hello, India! Hello, Philippines! – he decides to make some drastic changes in his life.
Dwight dumps his girlfriend Vaneetha and accepts an invitation from a former comely college mate to visit her in South America. Along the way, he takes a smuggled sample of Abulinix from a pre-med friend – and soon finds himself hopping on a plane to Ecuador. There he hooks up with, not the college buddy, but a Belgian beauty named Brigid who sees right through his bullshit, and could just make a man out of him.
Indecision is reminiscent of other Gen-X manifestos, from Doug Coupland’s crew of talky college kids to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It has a shaggy-dog quality, and you never once actually believe the story’s labyrinthine twists – a jungle hike through Ecuadorian rain forests to cure indecision? Huh?? – but you’re willing to take the ride because Kunkel has created an engaging narrator in Dwight. Part Holden Caulfield, part Jay McInerney, part Rob from High Fidelity, Dwight inhabits Manhattan’s glam edge without ever fully meshing with it; he always seems to be practicing for life, not living it. This can get exasperating: his tangents become so solipsistic, at times you kind of wish someone would just whomp him upside the head with a fresh mackerel. But Gen-Xers, especially males, may also recognize a bit of their own sly, wised-up shoulder shrugging in Dwight’s cod Hamlet moments.
Drugs, naturally, play a large part in Dwight’s deconstruction and rebirth. Maybe too much emphasis, but if you take Indecision as a satire of rampant Western consumer capitalism, it fits just right.
Dwight’s wealthy Boomer parents (divorced) also cling to their generation’s addictions – booze in Dad’s case, self-discovery in Mom’s – and Dwight leans to an unhealthy degree on his sexily-drawn sister, Alice (how Lewis Carroll can you get?), a psych professor who offers to give Dwight free psychoanalysis sessions. Instead, Dwight makes a pass at sis, thinking seduction is a key part of therapy.
Another drug scene takes place in the Chambers St. loft where everyone takes E – right on the eve of Sept.11, 2001. Their ecstatic free-love raving quickly descends into a horrible hangover by the next morning, when commercial planes begin crashing into downtown. (This may be the most casual, exploitative use of 9/11 in fiction thus far.)
But does this Gen-X batch learn anything from the events of September 11? Possibly that, if you insist on avoiding the important questions in life, or trivializing its choices, someone will inevitably come along and start making choices that directly impinge on you.
Dwight’s trek through Ecuador brings him in touch with his inner global perspective (though this, too, is facilitated by yet another unnecessary drug-taking scene). Brigid’s European liberalness is in sharp contrast to Dwight’s Gen-X Americanism, but she gradually teaches him something about how the globalized world market works – favoring the First World and raping the Third World. Ultimately, the two hit it off and Dwight proclaims himself a "democratic socialist" ("not the anarchic kind!"). But somehow, it doesn’t really feel like a decision that will last much longer than his current pair of underwear.
But maybe that’s just seeing this generation as half empty, instead of half full.