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Family Ties
by
Paul Clark
Hard Laughter, published in 1979, was Anne Lamott’s first novel. I read it in 1987, after North Point Press in San Francisco re-issued it. I was going through my stage of reading anything I could get my hands on that was published by North Point Press, which I considered the finest publisher in the U.S. at the time. I didn’t know anything about Lamott when I bought her book—the North Point colophon was reason enough to buy. Lamott stood apart from the other North Point authors I enjoyed—Guy Davenport, Wendell Berry, Evan Connell. For one thing, she was a woman. For another, she was young, probably two or three decades younger than many of the other authors that North Point was doing such a good job of bringing back to print or keeping in print. (To get a sense of North Point’s stable of writers back then check here.
I haven’t looked at Hard Laughter since the first time I read it, but I’ve never been tempted to get rid of it as part of any of my book purges over the year. And as I re-read it this week, I had that small thrill that veteran readers get from time to time—learning something from a book that you thought was too familiar to offer anything new.
Now, let me be frank—Hard Laughter is not the Great American Novel, a significant stylistic break-through in American fiction, or a necessary addition to the literature of the unvoiced. The novel simply provides readerly pleasure for a few evenings.
The story is simple; Jennifer, the narrator, is the daughter of Wallace, sister to Randy and Ben. They all live in the town of Clement, near San Francisco Bay. Wallace is a writer of semi-radical magazine articles and novels. At the start of the novel, he has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Over the course of the novel, Jennifer recounts the family’s reaction to the diagnosis, and Wallace’s surgery and recovery.
The backdrop is the town of Clement and the people Jennifer encounters in her daily life as sometime housecleaner, sometime tennis instructor, and aspiring writer. Jennifer observes, “Most of my friends are motley, antisocial, deranged, semialcoholic, and black-humored, each one stranger than the last.” Jennifer, a thinly veiled stand-in for Lamott, as I learned later, provides thumbnail sketches of many of the townspeople throughout the novel. Jennifer’s best friend, Kathleen, is one of these strange ones (although that judgment is coming more from me, the reader than Jennifer, the character.) Kathleen does research for a drug company but her essential work, as far as Jennifer is concerned, is as drinking buddy and dream consultant. Jennifer’s other close confidante is an unbelievably precocious 10-year-old named Megan who is in town for the summer living with her dad, but who spends much of her time with Jennifer.
Jennifer, not surprisingly, is knocked off center by her dad’s condition. She is lightly employed in her various jobs, but she gives up most of them, initially, to devote herself to being with her dad, visiting him in the hospital, bringing him to his post-surgery radiation treatments, and just being near him, not knowing how much time they have left together.
One of the revelations for me in re-reading this novel is that we get inklings of two of Lamott’s passions that she would later extend out to full-length books. There’s a very funny sequence where Jennifer decides to devote her day to writing, and initially spends more time doing anything but writing—until she finally hunkers down.
Somehow confidence and concentration set in and I wrote for three hours in a row. When I finished writing for the day, I felt calm and pleased and disciplined and smug. I had once again got away with all the benefits of hard work without having a boss or an office or a cubicle in an office. It might be added that I hadn’t made any money, but all the same I hadn’t been bored for a minute and was in an excellent mood. Happy work is as gratifying as sex or hard laughter or love or good drugs.
Lamott, of course, provided all sorts of tips about writing in her 1995 book Bird by Bird.
Later in the novel, Jennifer kvetches with her friend Kathleen, as they watch the sun set over the ocean, about the injustice of her father getting a brain tumor.
“How can this all be so beautiful, so fucking perfect, so obviously inspired by the gods—I mean, how could the same gods create all this perfection and then let Wallace get a brain tumor? How can everything look so beautiful and function so exquisitely if a god or gods weren’t involved, and if there is a god involved, how could the world’s nicest man get a tumor? I mean—“
“You’re just about the only person who still believes,” said Kathleen. “I don’t have any answers for you, except I think your theory of the drunken stoned gods is as good as any. Sometimes they’ve had two beers on an empty stomach and they’re all light and happy and inspire good things, and sometimes they’re hung over and divinely diarrhetic and inspire lousy shitty things like Hitler and cancer. I’m quoting you.”
Lamott, years later, expanded on her faith journey in three separate books, starting with Traveling Mercies in 2000.
When I first read this novel, it was like an anthropological trip to a mythical land for me. Aside from four months in Macon, Ga., I had spent most of the first three decades of my life living not much farther than 10 miles from the shores of Lake Michigan and the streets of Chicago. (Two decades later, this still holds true.) What little I knew about California came from movies and books like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, certainly worthy parts of the California canon of fiction, but not necessarily relevant to 1987 (or 2007). So I was fascinated by Lamott’s depictions of a town that seemed populated solely by refugees running away from the stereotypical depictions of American life. The residents of Clement—including Jennifer and her family—are not interested in the Great American Dream or a steady income or a nuclear family or politics. (Lamott shows a lot of love and affection for all her characters, reserving her only negative commentary for Richard Nixon, not surprising for a book written in the late 1970s. But at the time of the novel, Nixon is safely resigned and retired to San Clemente.)
On re-reading, Lamott’s descriptions often seem quaint—the laidback lifestyle and casual attitude to sex and drugs and marital relations. What resonated the second time around is the strength of the family ties between Jennifer and her brothers and her father. I grew up in a family geographically and culturally very different from Jennifer’s, but the emotional similarities were significant. Lamott’s depictions of healthy family chemistry—the family stories told and re-told over the years, the ease at which Jennifer and her father and brothers communicate with each other, the love they show, in words and deeds—resonated with me. The novel closely parallels Lamott’s life, something I suspected at the time but confirmed only later. Hard Laughter is warm and witty and a real pleasure.
Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at
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