Going travelling to lose oneself

John Haskell

Canongate 12.99

IN DANTE, the arduous journey through Purgatory is undertaken in order that the soul might purify itself. John Haskell’s first novel takes the very idea of the soul, or the self, as the elusive quarry of the journey it describes.

The novel opens at a New Jersey gas station with Jack, the narrator, buying provisions for a road-trip while his wife Anne fills up their car. He emerges from the shop to discover that Anne and the car have disappeared. "Something had happened, that much I could translate."

This stunned appraisal, in which Jack contemplates his fate as if from the outside, is entirely characteristic. And it soon becomes clear that Anne’s disappearance, the real circumstances of which become apparent much later, will be the occasion not for mourning but instead for a kind of quasi-Buddhist destruction of ego.

Jack’s surrendering of his self is something he wants but at the same time resists. He retreats, on foot, to his and Anne’s Brooklyn apartment and determines to "excise [himself] from the outside world". Yet he is not quite able to give up ‘wanting’ to live. And after finding a map on Anne’s desk marked with the route of another road-trip, ending on the west coast of the United States - in San Diego, her birthplace - Jack buys a car and sets off on a journey through the American heartland.

In an echo of Dante’s work, in which the author is led through Purgatory by Beatrice, "the lady sent from heaven", "Anne" becomes the name for a "delirious dissatisfaction".

Jack travels from Kentucky to Colorado, and finally to California - in the company, at different times, of an octogenarian artist, a fortune-teller, a yoga adept, a trio of Native Americans and a beach bum.

The further Jack travels, the more dissociated he becomes - both from the memory of his wife and from any recognisable sense of self. When he reaches Phoenix, he abandons his car, having already abandoned most of his possessions.

Haskell skilfully uses the gaudy picaresque of the road novel as a vehicle for Jack’s metaphysical pilgrimage, filling the frame with dense and hallucinatory explorations of the narrator’s moods where one might usually expect to find expansive descriptions of the American landscape. (This latter passes mostly in a blur of scrubby parking lots and gloomy motels). And most of the time Haskell’s prose is up to the job of anatomising Jack’s unravelling. Its assiduously dulled surfaces fit nearly perfectly with the narrator’s detached acquiescence in the world.

At the end of Dante’s Purgatorio, Virgil tells the author: "Your will is free, erect, and whole". What Jack achieves in Haskell’s novel is not plenitude, but a sort of perfect disintegration.