Midair
By Frank Conroy
Dutton, 149 pages, $15.95
Perhaps that is why opinion is so divided on 'Stop-Time'; Conroy's life, while it does have its sad and good and interesting parts, is mostly unremarkable. Everyone's life, when reminisced on with comparable clarity, has such parts of scintillating interest and deep tragedy. It is then Conroy's skill at writing that gives such merit to the memoir. Stop-Time by Frank Conroy 2,118 ratings, 3.93 average rating, 212 reviews Open Preview.
Almost 18 years have elapsed since Frank Conroy published his extraordinary autobiography, 'Stop-time,' which enjoyed considerable commercial and critical success. Conroy`s new book, a slender collection of eight stories entitled 'Midair,' will inevitably be compared to his autobiography. Just as inevitably, that comparison will be damaging, for Conroy has produced nowhere near as fine a book.
'Stop-time' told of Conroy`s youth with humor and at times an almost unbelievable candor. He lived an unruly, romping boyhood: running free in the woods of Florida, mastering tricks with the yo-yo, skipping school, running away from home. Conroy`s natural father, a former literary agent and neurotic who died of brain cancer at the age of 40, did not live with the family but rather in various 'rest' homes--a sad, fate that had a telling effect on Conroy. His home life was an odd, fractured sort of existence filled with boredom and family squabbling. At the point where 'Stop-time' ended, Conroy`s sister, Alison, had had a breakdown, and he himself had just squeaked his way into a respectable college.
One naturally wondered, then, what these new stories would reveal.
'Midair,' the opening story in the collection, begins by striking a distinctly autobiographical note. The year is 1942. Sean Kennedy, age 6
(Conroy, too, was born in 1936), is picked up from school one day by his father, who has been away at a rest home. Sean, his sister, and their father then break into the family apartment by climbing onto the roof and down the fire escape, entering through the kitchen window. In the rest of the story, Conroy knits together scenes from more than 40 years of Sean`s life and marvels at their delicate interconnection, at the way they have come together across time. As fiction, 'Midair' succeeds only modestly. Its merits lie mostly in the autobiographical details it provides and in its accomplished prose.
A thin, insubstantial quality characterizes the other stories. 'Roses'
tells of an artist, an unregenerate womanizer, who has a spontaneous affair one morning with a bored but successful fashion model. 'Car Games' is no weightier. It is reminiscent of the prologue to 'Stop-time,' where Conroy described his driving at night through the streets of South London at 50 or 60 miles an hour, dead drunk, with the lights off. In 'Car Games,' a 35-year-old broker named Jack plays a dangerous game of tag in his Aston Martin, speeding down streets at 90 miles an hour, gently bumping a dark blue Chrysler driven by a woman who had cut him off. When, in 'Celestial Events,' a character begins talking with his deceased mother, one at last concludes that some of Conroy`s characters are just a touch crazy.
Several leitmotifs surface in these stories: the links across time between seemingly unrelated events; the almost supernatural intensity of some memories and experiences; the need for a writer to wait on inspiration; and the protectiveness and nearly inexpressible love of fathers for their sons. Often Conroy attempts in his stories not so much to narrate events as to dramatize states of feeling--the moods and emotions that color life.
That was his ambition in 'Stop-time,' too, but what one misses in these stories are the autobiography`s candor, fine humor and many stretches of brilliant writing. A book of rather humdrum stories might sound like a disappointment. Perhaps it would be in a lesser writer than Frank Conroy. But, even in low gear, Conroy makes pretty fair reading; besides, it is simply good to see him writing once again.
Stop Time is a disjointed memoir, essentially a collection of reminiscences, held together by the thread of the author’s life. Frank Conroy’s father’s was institutionalized for mental illness, and this fact provides the foundation pattern of Conroy’s life: shaky finances, rootlessness, lonliness, and the contradictory impulse to disappear. The title, Stop Time, is a jazz reference, and it is an apt one. A band plays a pattern of chords on the downbeat and third measures while one musician riffs through the chords and intervening silences, or stops. Conroy’s solo life performance is comprised of adventures, second-hand crises, and a range of awakenings set against conditions that are beyond a boy’s control. In the “stops” Conroy portrays the mind of the boy he had been, recording the motion as the boy rolls through the silences and careens off of people and events.
“I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” – John Coltrane
The author takes an occasional run well outside (another jazz term) the roughly chronological progression of his stories. Free of chronology, Conroy composes by juxtapositions. He uses disperate moments from his life to create sense of aching dislocation. The most striking of these is found in chapter twelve. At the close of the preceding chapter Frank is a fifteen year old boy sleeping under a tree in Delaware. When chapter twelve opens we have Frank as “a very young boy (177)” accompanying his mother’s housekeeper to her home in Harlem for the night. A page and a half further, we find him “Five years later, in Florida, up a tree.” Three paragraphs on we have landed, “ten miles south of London at four in the morning,” where he is driving drunk. This one-page series of digressions closes this way: The drunken noise of my mind suddenly stops as an extraordinary feeling comes over me. I’m not in the car at all! I’m under the tree in Delaware! One page later we are back where we left off at the close of chapter eleven. It reads like madness, which is an inescapable motif in Conroy’s memoir. We see it represented by his father, his mother’s time working at a state mental institution, an emotionally unstable boarder, and finally his sister. The dislocated chronology reads a bit like a fever dream, taking the reader from roughly the middle of the book to points from early in the author’s life to the very last page of this story’s epilogue. The effect is disorienting, and leaves us wondering how to interpret such a telling. Another jazz reference is called to mind. Free. It’s the word for a jazz musician’s abandonment of constraints. Meter, key and structure yield to whimsy and passion in order to created a singular and fleeting idiom. A change in consciousness is possible outside the accepted constraints of any form.
The quality of Conroy’s writing that stays with the reader is his attention to the particular. Some of the most remarkable passages in Stop Time are those that reveal his state of mind at various points in his life. Even the emotionally neutral description of falling asleep on the job stand out for its precision and originality.
The image of the cat . . . is a signal to the mind to come to rest. There is no immediate sense of beauty, only the act of seeing. A scanning mechanism in the brain locks in a cycle of cat.Without an ego to break the equipoise one’s mind is like an electirc motor with the poles perfectly balanced at positive and negative (139).
Frank Conroy Memoir
The comparison of the mind with an electric motor has been done before, but a mind beyond sense and in balance, though ready, like a motor without direction –this is a first, and it encourages a hightened awareness. Obd facile pronunciation.
“It’s the hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: you feel this, you play this.” – Ornette Coleman
When Conroy captures a state of mind he creates a sense of distance from the scenes’ event and the feelings. The scene and the action are stopped so that we pull the mind out by its roots and examine it outside of its context.
Frank Conroy Author
Sadness crept over me—a sadness I didn’t question, a sadness so profound I understood it could not have come from life, or any source within my conceptual scope, but instead seeped into me from the very air, from the whole extant universe in which I was less than a speck, sadness that was not emotion but the awareness of vast empinesses (164).
Stop Time Frank Conroy Quotes
This story and the author’s mind begin to appear as two separate things that merely interact. The result is a tone of objectivity from which sadness is a thing to be studied and considered dispassionately–and the book has been praised for the author’s lack of self pity. In the final chapters the young Conroy takes firm steps onto a conventional path: first love, college acceptance, and, in a chapter entitled “Unambiguous Events,” that tells of his arrival for freshman year. In a mode of writing that owes much to solidy avant garde jazz sensibilities, Conroy provides a one page epilogue to sound a dischordant final blast. We are returned to his intoxicated drive ten miles south of London at a time that is ten years after starting college. Following a miraculous spin-out he climbs from the car and vomits into a fountain. “My throat burning with bile, I started to laugh (284)”. It’s a jangling coda that recalls the motif of madness and the sense of a life untethered in place or time.