Marc Estrin

What’s In A Name?

Friday, November 10, 2006

What’s In A Name?

Marc Estrin turns a gimlet eye on postwar American life for a kid named Hitler

By Matt Konrad

The Education of Arnold Hitler

By Marc Estrin

Unbridled Books, $14.95

Marc Estrin is well on his way to becoming a master of what Hollywood types call “high-concept:” his is the kind of work that takes off from one simple premise and runs in unexpected directions. His debut, Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa, started with a whopper—what happened to Kafka’s man-turned-cockroach after the original story ended? And his second novel appears to start with an equally compelling question: what would life be like in post-WWII America for a kid named Arnold Hitler?

But while that is the central conceit of The Education of Arnold Hitler, there’s also a higher concept at work here: is it possible to write a compelling novel about a guy who isn’t all that interesting? Because, at first, Arnold doesn’t seem to be—there’s not much to the guy aside from the unusual cognomen and family circumstances (his dad, an American soldier, nearly killed his Jewish-Italian mom during the war, then saved her, albeit minus a leg). He grows up a football and academic star in his small Texas hometown, popular but a loner. He’s good at grammar, lousy with girls, prone to drawing irrational hatred—Estrin sharply compares him to Melville’s Billy Budd, faced with one Claggart after another—and best friends with his unseen grandfather, with whom he communicates … er … through his knee. (Okay, that last bit’s kind of intriguing.)

Fortunately, Estrin answers that big question in the affirmative. His solution to Arnold’s drab situation is rather elegant, in fact: he puts Arnold through the standard coming-of-age paces in some of the most charged settings possible: the bumpily integrating, post-Brown v. Board of Education South; the Grassy Knoll on Dealey Plaza one fateful day in 1963; the late-’60s Harvard of Timothy Leary and SDS; the streets of early-’70s New York City. Estrin lets the world’s weirdness hit our hero like a bucket of cold water, along the way crossing his path with those of Al Gore, Noam Chomsky, Leonard Bernstein, and dozens of folks without famous names, each with their own preconception of what “Arnold Hitler” must be like. And lest you be cringing right now, afraid this sounds a lot like a certain Tom Hanks tearjerker, be assured: this is more like what Forrest Gump could have been, had it been written with more skill, style and a gimlet eye toward satire.

Nowhere is the latter more evident than in the book’s strongest section, the middle portion dealing with Arnold’s Harvard years. He arrives at college having just lost his first girlfriend to freshman-seminar feminism and an older man. Before his first week is up, he’s also lost a pair of roommates, one a Jewish music student, the other a Brahmin afraid to be associated with someone not named Cabot or Lowell. And things roll downhill from there—Arnold loses his passion for football; a promising relationship is nipped in the bud the second he mentions his surname; he’s shooed away from the infamous SDS occupation of the administration building because of the field day the student newspaper would have with the headline. When he visits Chomsky’s office to find out what he can do about his name, the famous linguist can only offer him one bit of advice—change it or suffer.

And you thought your freshman year was rough.

Even worse than those who disdain poor Arnold for nominal reasons, though, are those who are drawn to him. He gets a mysterious invitation to the Foxx Club, one of the school’s prestigious in-lieu-of-fraternity “dining clubs;” his host is Richard Mather, a descendent of the fiery Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who will eventually prove to be Arnold’s most persistent and fascinating bete noire. Angered when young Mr. Hitler quietly refuses to join the eerily fascistic group, Mather devotes much of his time and considerable erudition to making Arnold’s time at Harvard a living hell. His efforts—from exposing Arnold’s theatrical pseudonyms to wrecking a platonic-but-sensual relationship with an open-minded professor—are weirdly hilarious, biting send-ups of the power inherent in privilege. What’s in a name, indeed.

In addition to the ample satirical opportunities, Arnold’s Harvard years also let Estrin construct some of his marvelous set pieces, which alone are charming enough to recommend Education. The scene at the Foxx Club, for example, captures perfectly the concentrated purgatory of a college party gone desperately out of hand. Like Dante being ushered through the afterlife by Virgil, Arnold is led by Mather through room after room of incredibly smart people doing incredibly odd things, from a group grope “in its early stages” to the various games of the “Slough of Despond intramurals” to a guy “pitting the human mind against the tensile strength of aluminum” … by smashing his head against Coors can after Coors can, and drinking what’s left.

Opposite on the emotional spectrum from the debauched awkwardness of a college party is the recounting of Arnold’s performance in a choir directed by Leonard Bernstein. (He’s there, naturally, because of an earth-shatteringly huge crush on the conductor’s daughter). Estrin is a musician himself, and writes gorgeously about music; where the Foxx Club vignette is a recipe for painful laughter, the description of the final chorale in Mahler’s Second is just a beautiful confluence of great artists:

[Bernstein] raised his hands, and closed his eyes, and held his breath. A hundred other breaths were bated. Then, with almost no visible signal except a slight rise and fall of his spine, a hundred voices conspired in a sound wave of infinitesimal amplitude, an etheric vibration so subtly pervasive that it met with no resistance from the self-protecting material world. Auferstehen. Ja, auferstehen.

Arnold’s hair stood up on the back of his neck and he felt marrow pricks in his long bones. He had sung these notes before, but never in such a context. A quiet cutoff.

“That, sweethearts,” said the Maestro, “is wholly exalted expression.’

And he lit a cigarette.

As would anyone.

It’s a mark of Estrin’s skill, too, that he writes with equal acuity later in the book about skinhead punk music—and that Arnold’s broke, post-college life on the streets of New York doesn’t seem like too much of a letdown after the dazzling Harvard section. Instead, as the School of Hard Knocks portion of Arnold’s education takes over and the book careens toward its improbable, Dickensian ending, we finally get a feeling of the protagonist as a fully fleshed-out character. People are still projecting their perceptions onto his name, true, but after everything he’s been through, Arnold emerges with enough self-awareness to assert his own damn self.

And whattaya know? Turns out the guy’s pretty interesting after all. He just needed a little education.

Want to see this and other features in print? Don't miss another issue!

http://www.ruminator.com/freeissue.htmlhttp://www.ruminator.com/subscribe.html

Matt Konrad is Ruminator’s fiction editor.