Heppner's characters are miserable, for no reason
PIKE'S FOLLY, by Mike Heppner. Knopf. 317 pages. $23.95.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2, 2006
Pike's Folly is a miserable book. It's about miserable people who make each other miserable. For no reason. It's hard to discern a theme here, but if there is one, it's "for no reason." "I hate 'why,' " says the book's central character, Nathaniel Pike, who has recently erected a parking lot on the top of a thickly forested mountain, inaccessible except by helicopter and hiking boots. "I declare war on why."
Author Mike Heppner, a Rhode Island native who set the book largely in Providence, seems to have done the same. In the tradition of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, Heppner uses caricatures instead of characters, and sets the plot in an absurd version of the real world. But where Pynchon and Wallace use caricature and absurdity as a means of satire, Heppner uses them-- you guessed it -- for no reason.
Nathaniel Pike and Gregg Reese are both outrageously rich. Pike is cocky, self-important, and defiantly uncharitable; he spends extravagant sums on intentionally useless, wasteful things. Reese, on the other hand, is dogged by guilt about his wealth and feelings of inadequacy in the face of the Reese family legacy. Although (or because) the source of its money is shadowy at best, the Reese family is a philanthropic force, one whose name is plastered on every do-good project in Rhode Island.
Some of the book's other miserable characters include Stuart, Pike's personal assistant, who wrote one pretentious novel some years ago and vacillates between berating himself for his pretension and berating himself for not being able to write another. Stuart's wife, Marlene, is a pathetic creature with no self-esteem who takes to exhibitionism so someone will finally look at her. Gregg's daughter, Allison, is a lost soul who dreams of doing something, but lacks any motivation to do so because she can comfortably live forever off her family's money. And Allison's boyfriend, Heath, is a "filmmaker" interested in "transgressive cinema" (read: downloadable clips of naked Marlene circulated around the Internet). The overwhelming sense is that even Heppner has no love for these characters, that he made them pathetic and miserable just to march them naked in front of us and say, look how pathetic and miserable they are.
The plot revolves loosely around Pike's "Independence Project," which consists first of the parking lot, and then a fully-stocked Kmart at the top of the inaccessible mountain. Various environmental activists and government bureaucrats get involved as they channel their righteous indignation at this latest incarnation of Pike's waste. Things almost get interesting in several spots - when the factions come to loggerheads in the contested parking lot, for instance, or when one of the bureaucrats digs up some skeletons, literally from Pike's (or is it Reese's?) closet -- but in the end, it all comes to nothing. The fight fizzles before it even begins, and the skeletons? They're made up. For no reason.
Heppner could have done a lot with this book. It could have been a comment on capitalism, on wealth, greed, consumerism. It could have been a comment on philanthropy, on the obligations we have to one another as human beings. Instead, it is adamantly about nothing. "The only things worth doing are pointless things," says Pike. I disagree. Reading this book was pointless. And not worth doing.
