Something Missing
Book Review:
Something Missing: A Novel
by Matthew Dicks
Broadway Books © 2009
304 pages
Matthew Dicks’s first novel begins with the careful machinations of a
professional thief cataloging the contents of a person’s refrigerator:
“A gallon of milk, long since expired, cold cuts, opened jars of jam,
tomato sauce, a carton of eggs, and, in the door, what Martin had
predicted: salad dressing.” After the first hundred pages, I felt like I was reliving the book The Boy Who Could Not Stop Washing. We quickly learn that the protagonist, Martin Railback, is an anti-social, neurotic sophisticated thief.
He thinks nothing of taking a person's liquid plumber but agonizes over a dropped toothbrush in a toilet. Crazy guy that Martin Railback.
Martin
has a cleanly strategic work week that includes breaking into the homes
of at least a dozen homes a week stealing stuff. He stakes out the
homes of upper middle class home dwellers in Connecticut who would make
for good unsuspecting victims of his kleptomania. No single people. No children. No people with roomies. Only married couple without children. He systematically
absconds objects people will least likely notice to go missing. Martin
is no ordinary thief. For example, he has been stealing Liquid Plumber
and Parmesan Peppercorn salad dressing from the Pearls for a decade,
along with the occasional pearl necklace or bowl hidden in a dusty
corner of the house. Martin goes through great pains to determine whether an item will go missing or not. I don't want to adumbrate his meticulous steps he undergoes to determine whether an item is steal-able or not. It is ammusingly exhausting and Dicks does a fine job of bringing us into Martin's world.
The odd thing about Martin is that he not only steals from people; he is a first class creeper. He notices his clients’ (the name he gives his
victims) idiosyncrasies, the kinds of toothbrushes they use, whether or
not they lift the toilet seat when they go to the bathroom, even the
contents of their journals, e-mails, and grocery lists. Martin is the
ultimate voyeur, which makes him creepy in most people’s estimation.
Dicks attempts to make him likable, even adorable at times. I found
myself hoping he would not get caught as a thief when in one scene he is
trapped inside a client’s home when they arrive before he can make an
exit.
The novel reads at a quick pace. The first quarter of the book
introduces you to Martin’s burglar lifestyle and gives background to how
he became the kind of person he is. We quickly learn his anti-social
habits. He has a crush on the waitress at the diner he frequents for
breakfast but he never asks her out on a date. He has one true friend,
Jeff, who does not know of his daily break-ins into people’s homes. He
lives in his deceased mother’s house where he stores the objects he
steals behind refrigerator panels and inside sofas. He doubles on Ebay
as a chic Northeastern woman who has a penchant for handbags. In one of
the novel’s funnier moments, we learn how Martin uses Ebay to sell off
his client’s unmissable stuff.
Right away we are led to believe that Martin is not an ordinary thief. I
did not find myself hating him for his thievery simply because he
seemed to steal only out of a sense of odd moral principles. He never
stole items from his clients that they would miss. In this regard the
novel seems to be a criticism of middle class America. Martin’s clients
are people who work many hours a week, have amassed a large amount of
cash, buy plenty of things, but do not have the time to enjoy what they
buy. The Steinway piano that sits in the living room unplayed without an
open music book, or the wood burning stove that no one uses, or the
extra set of diamond ear rings that go unnoticed. The novel appears to
be saying that Martin steals out of a high moral standard. As if his
thievery suggests the hypocrisy of a middle class that buys stuff that
could be used to support others (and they would not notice the loss).
But Dicks never brings the novel to moral indictment of the upper middle
class. We only know that Martin does not care for dogs, the very rich
(because they do notice when their stuff goes missing), and general
disarray. In fact instead of moral disdain, Martin acquires a bizarre
intimacy with his clients even though he has never met them.
The novel encourages us to root Martin on in his search for intimacy and love. Not finding the love of his life with the diner gal, Martin seems destined to find love with a client, or at least we are led to think so. I won't spoil the plot but suffice it to say this book enters boy meets girl territory. Why begin a novel that promises to be a critical rapprochement with American middle class values with the formula of a brazen romance. I wanted more class struggle and less amour between burglaries.
the best scenes are the voyeur moments Martin has with his clients. He seems more at ease with the migh-have been moments in his life than real in your face person-to-person encounters. Dicks wants his Martin Railback to be both a quriky neurotic and a lovable boy next door. I don't completely buy it. In perhaps the most moving passage from the novel, Martin overhears a
client speak of the sadness she feels of never having received a single
rose from her husband. Martin crafts an anonymous letter to the husband
suggesting he buy his wife a rose tomorrow. At this point the novel
shifts in timbre from film noir espionage to the reverse of Gyges’s
Ring. Instead of doing the immoral act when no one is looking. Martin
turns out to be the hero who does the good despite the fact that he
breaks the law for his day job. I thought the novel presented the
character of Martin as too glib and neatly OCD. It never seemed to me
that Martin ever questioned the rightness or wrongness of things in a
searching, palpable way. His neuroticisms easily aroused him to make a
quick buck from his svelte thieving as well as create delusions about
his relationship to his clients.
The novel kept me in its quasi-ethical grip until about three quarters through. By the last hundred or so pages I felt the author had become too self-aggrandizing and his character appeared to don hero wings without sufficiently revealing what made him tick. The book ends too neatly on the premise of another book to follow.
B-
In J.M. Coetzee’s novella, The Lives of Animals, protagonist Elizabeth Costello is an aged novelist famous for writing The House on Eccles Street, in which she imagines the life of Marion Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses. She has been invited to lecture on a topic of her own choosing at Appleton College, where her son is a physics professor. The novella is interesting because it is dubbed an academic work, a strange genre form that offers footnotes and, in this case, two full lectures on animal rights, as part of the University Center for Values Series. Elizabeth, a non-human animal sympathizer, provokes a visceral response from the faculty — and her family — because of her views. People cringe to sit at the same dinner table with a vegetarian — “an animal lover” — because it puts into question their own self-assumed values and assumptions that they may have held since childhood. so, when Elizabeth sits down at the dinner table with her son and daughter-in-law (who is a philosopher) she wonders where are the children. Norma answers that they are eating in the other room because she doesn’t want to inculcate in them the belief that eating chicken is wrong. In this delicate scene, it is obvious that Elizabeth’s beliefs are not strictly theoretical and impervious to the sphere of breaking bread in the domestic sphere, for her beliefs concerning animal rights impose upon the familial as well as the academic. What we considered clean to eat and what we consider polluted, has perhaps, defined us as human beings, and when these basic assumptions are challenged, it causes us to defend ourselves because we do not want to be considered “polluted.” As Mary Douglas in her book, Purity and Danger, wrote, “Pollution dangers strike when form has been attacked” (130). Pollution — or dirt — is a deciding cultural factor that humans worry about; dirt makes us anxious — especially if we feel dirty or polluted or made to feel that way, for it threatens our sense of form and “unity of experience.”
Coetzee’s novel is interesting because, as readers, we are privy not only to the two lectures Elizabeth gives at Appleton college on animals: one on animal rights and another on animals in literature — but also the responses and behaviors of those who hear her speak. Again, the theme of who is polluted and who is clean surfaces. Elizabeth makes the startling claim that the Germans, living near the Treblinka death camp, were willfully ignorant of the slaughter of millions of human beings. They could have acted, but they went on with their lives, acting otherwise. This willed ignorance, this inability to act, argues Elizabeth, is a mark of their self-inscribed inability to be human. They refuse to see the death camps as a mark of their own pollution.
Costello makes the analogy that the willed ignorance of the Germans of the Third Reich is tantamount to the willed ignorance of those who refuse to do anything about the inhumanity of the factory farms or lab testing on animals. This is a shocking claim. For isn’t Burger King and McDonalds an industry we tolerate? Costello and writers like Peter Singer would claim that in both cases, the ill-treatment and murder of human beings like cattle, and the actual ill-treatment and slaughter of cattle, are considered equally unethical, and a mark of a human being’s propensity to use his reason, his practical mind, as a means to use someone or something for his own end. The inability of humans to recognize this unethical state of affairs is a sin, according to Elizabeth. Because it makes the human being less human. The Germans who refused to recognize the horrors at Treblinka or Dachau, their inability to realize that the gold chain they wore, or the soap they used to wash their children — once belonged to a dead prisoner marks them as polluted. This inability of the citizens of the Third Reich to realize their own complicity in the systematic transportation, labor and eventual slaughter of millions of people is the same — and Singer would argue too — of the industrial raising and feeding of factory farm animals for eventual slaughter and consumption. The point being raised, is that the common element we share, all sentient beings, nonhuman and human — is the capacity to suffer. The inability to recognize the animal who has the ability to suffer is what animal rights seem to address. No one would rather think of a sentence like this, written by Singer, about a slaughterhouse in his book Animal Liberation: “Millions of gallons of liquefied feces and urine seeped into the environment from collapsed, leaking or overflowing storage lagoons.”
But I don’t think most carnivores think of an actual, living, sentient being who suffered when they bite into their burgers. Most American, would not consider Plutarch’s ancient, infamous expression “Of Eating of Flesh,” concerning animal rights, “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds.” (quoted in Coetzee 38).
Most Americans, it has been said, don’t care how their meat is produced as long as it doesn’t kill them. Probably, many people would assume it is a Darwinian survival of the fittest: eat them before they eat you! We may care tenderly for our pet canine or feed affectionately the doves at the local park, but it seems, that we do not consider the ethical complicity we share in the disavowal of the animal to be nothing other than a means without any real end.
I would agree, that at this level, we are prone to see the animal as merely an automaton. We would rather not think that the animal has the capacity to suffer, like us. We would rather consign to a non-ethical realm our decision to eat meat, to be carnivorous — for as Coetzee, suggests, most of our beliefs about what is clean and what is polluted lie in deeply set cultural and familial mores. The prevailing ethos in the West is the notion that only the human, the most perfect in the animal kingdom, has the Adamic privilege to render that which is less perfect, as subject to himself (see Aquinas on this issue).
As concerns my own beliefs, I have had several stints of vegetarianism throughout my life, but I have to admit, I have not been consistent in my resolve to put away a carnivorous appetite. But, as we mentioned in class, even the vegan probably has animal leather on their sandal. So even they are not fully removed from involvement in the suffering of animals. We are all complicit at some level with the suffering of the sentient creatures that inhabit this planet. None of us can exonerate ourselves completely. But, I think the heart of Animal Liberation, and any liberation for that matter, is consciousness raising; for, we cannot think, that just because we freed the slaves, or that we gave women the right to vote, that all forms of oppression have been eliminated.
Matthew Dicks’s first novel begins with the careful machinations of a
professional thief cataloging the contents of a person’s refrigerator:
“A gallon of milk, long since expired, cold cuts, opened jars of jam,
tomato sauce, a carton of eggs, and, in the door, what Martin had
predicted: salad dressing.” After the first hundred pages, I felt like I was reliving the book The Boy Who Could Not Stop Washing. We quickly learn that the protagonist, Martin Railback, is an anti-social, neurotic sophisticated thief.
He thinks nothing of taking a person's liquid plumber but agonizes over a dropped toothbrush in a toilet. Crazy guy that Martin Railback.
