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The Author
on his Work
Money, Love grew (I
think) out of my own obsession with the small-time
edges of celebrity, a circle of enchantment wide enough
to include door-to-door salesmen—celebrities in
their own right. In the suburbs, in the late '60s,
the oppressive quiet of an afternoon spent with coloring
books and The Munsters would be interrupted
by the low diesel rumble of the speckled Charles Chips
van gliding down the street and parking in front of
our house, the salesman (I assumed his name actually
was Charles Chips) ringing our front doorbell, bringing
speckled tin canisters of chips and pretzels, caramel
popcorn, and cheese curls, then riding off again until
his next mysterious visit. For years, I stood behind
my mother's skirts watching the Fuller Brush man deliver
his spiel, his shoes shiny, a tiny feather in his
hatband, a case full of samples. He would give my
mother free bottle openers or pens with plastic bases
meant to stick to the telephone. She gave him orders
and money. I watched. The whole transaction always
struck me (though I hadn't the language to articulate
it then) as a kind of performance, a tiny one-man
show on the narrow stage of our front porch, the same
show appearing on all those other stages up and down
the block, a hundred performances a day.
Part of the fascination for me is understanding now
that those front-porch pitches were performances,
that those men (as they strictly were in those days)
would take the whole abstract idea of transaction
and turn it into a kind of art form, a work of theater.
Those door-stoop audiences paid money not just for
the brushes and cleaners and vacuums and globes but
also for the visit, the shiny shoes, the ready smile,
and the quick joke. As the drummers and commission-men
have slowly gone the way of phonographs and hat wearing,
I think we've lost something, squandered some of the
texture of our lives. Today, that idea of transaction
is embodied not by those sharp and lively performers
but by the homogenization of another Wal-Mart, another
generic mall manned by teenagers. I'm not sure exactly
when we phased out door-to-door salesmen (there are,
as with everything else, still a few stragglers);
we still have people selling things, obviously, but
usually it's only a soulless transfer of "goods" to
"consumers," and that sense of transaction as game
or art or calling has been lost. Maybe all of that
disappeared for good during the Reagan years, when
greed was good and the bottom line became the bottom
line. Face it, selling potato chips door to door is
not very expedient, though it is a romantic, sweet
notion. But buying and selling no longer has any place
for romance or sweetness. We have efficiency in its
place. Who needs to sell vacuum cleaners on front
porches when an infomercial and a credit card will
bring the Fantom Fury to your door by overnight delivery?
It may be that this very copy of this book was ordered
online, without the need for any salesman at all.
The whole idea has just gone the way of the milkman,
or the iceman before that. We pay only for the product
now; all the artistry and longing have been factored
into oblivion.
Except, perhaps, at the county fair.
There, even today, we pay not just for the act of
tossing a ping-pong ball into a goldfish bowl or for
the chance to win a stuffed panda but also for the
pitch, the con, the come-on, the rap. We pay for the
carney to make us into true believers for that five
minutes, to take us in. We hand him our gullibility,
and he sells it back to us. During those easy suburban
days of the '60s (all the turmoil of those times seemed
like fiction, a show on TV about violence in Asia
and campus unrest), I was a twice-yearly visitor to
the fair, the best of which was the Dixie Classic
in Winston-Salem, a town where the air carried the
ambrosial smell of curing tobacco. The carnies also
fit into my circle of obsession, the veneration of
small-time celebrity. They seemed exotic, with their
tattoos and alcohol breath and sideburns, with their
effortless way of demonstrating their own games, winning
every time. More artists, selling nothing more than
their own easy charm.
It was during one such trip to the fair that another
major strand of the novel got woven into my consciousness,
though of course I didn't know it then. I saw on display
Buford Pusser's bullet-riddled Corvette. For those
who may not remember, Buford Pusser was the name of
a real-life sheriff depicted in a series of redneck
drive-in movies in the early '70s (being a redneck
who frequented the drive-in, I was naturally interested).
The sheriff was shot to death by local bad guys (or
his wife was; the details are fuzzy), and the death
car was on display. Though I admit that Buford Pusser
is pretty much scraping the bottom of the celebrity
barrel, the idea stayed with me and came back as I
was working on the novel. I did some research and
discovered that a number of celebrity death cars had
at times been displayed around the country. I wondered
about that, what the draw was . . . morbid curiosity?
A sick kind of voyeurism? I don't think that's it,
or else almost any death car would do, celebrity or
otherwise.
Somehow we need our tragic and famous, need them not
as people but as emblems, as ideas. Where I live you
still see guys in their sixties who wear jeans with
wide cuffs and white T-shirts with cigarettes rolled
up in the sleeves. They have motorcycle boots and
slicked-back hair and sideburns. And they dress this
way because when they were eighteen or nineteen, James
Dean and Marlon Brando dressed this way, and that
style sealed the whole idea of coolness for them,
so they are grounded in that way of thinking. It becomes
another kind of transaction, a person made product,
a container for our own nostalgia. We pay for the
celebrity—not the human being—for the right
to lift these people up and make them embody some
idea of ourselves. Right now Marlon Brando is just
some obese ex-actor living on an island, but don't
tell that to the guys with the jeans. They bought
their tickets; they've seen The Wild One. They've
owned that image for fifty years now, and they wear
it every day. James Dean has been dust for decades,
but the teenagers at the local Spencer Gifts store
still purchase his pretty face emblazoned on everything
from beer mugs to T-shirts to life-size cardboard
cutouts. Dead or not, he's still cool. And we still
buy.
I like to think of the act of writing as one of these
aesthetic transactions, the pleasing purchase of words—adding
them up, hoarding them away on pages. In this case,
though, the tradeoff is my own time and effort bargained
away for the opportunity to spend a couple of years
with characters who still, to this day, are capable
of moving me, of making me laugh. What a deal I got.
Discussion
Questions
1. In the above piece, Brad Barkley comments on his
early fascination with carnival carnies, referring
to them as "artists," and likewise Gabe seems more
drawn to the skills and methods of his salesman father
than to the pop artists who display their work downtown.
What does the novel have to say about the nature of
art? In what sense can salesmen and carnies be thought
of as artists? Does defining something as "art" have
to do solely with the medium (e.g., Gabe's struggle
with sculpture) or more with the relationship between
the artist and his or her medium, no matter what it
is? Another way of thinking about it: who is more
the artist, Dutch when he plays guitar, or Roman when
he sells cleaning products (or, for that matter, Rod
McKuen when he writes poetry)?
2. Near the end of the novel, Gabe reflects on Gladys's
new marriage, saying that she would learn that while
wild, blind, crazy love will not work, neither will
an ordered, systematic approach to love. Is there
an example in the novel of love that does work? Do
any of the characters love the right way, or love
purely? How so? What defines the "right kind" of love,
and how can it work between two people?
3. As a follow-up, consider the title and the epigram
from which it is taken: "Money, love . . . no money,
no love." While most people would automatically say
that love cannot be bought, can love be traded? Do
we use love as a kind of commodity, as a system of
barter? How so? What are some examples from the novel
and otherwise?
4. One of the major themes of the novel is the evolving
relationship between Gabe and Roman. At one point,
Gabe even wishes for "normal" parents, from whom he
could keep things hidden. Is Roman a great father
or a terrible one? What makes him great or terrible?
How would you think about your childhood looking back,
if you had a father with traits similar to Roman's?
5. At one point, Sandy accuses Gabe of being the only
person she knows who is worried how his past is going
to turn out, and, in fact, looking backward and feeling
nostalgic are constant threads through the book (consider
Roman and all his leftover '50s clothing and manners).
What does the novel have to say about the nature of
nostalgia and why we feel it? How do the James Dean
and Jayne Mansfield "characters" and the presence
of old cars relate to that theme? Is nostalgia generally
a positive emotion or a corrosive one? Is it honest?
If so, why?
6. In his essay on why he wrote the book, Barkley
talks about what he sees as the "homogenization" of
buying and selling, the increasingly generic quality
of commerce. Do you think he's right, or is this just
another kind of nostalgia? Have we lost something
in the arena of commerce in the name of increasing
efficiency and profit? If so, what exactly? Is it
"art," as the author suggests, or something less lofty?
7. Barkley grew up in North Carolina where the story
is set. He has said elsewhere that his experience
of the South was not the typical south of pickup trucks,
shotguns, beer-drinking, and backwoods, but rather
was characterized more by subdivisions, shopping centers,
strip malls, and middle-class suburbia. Has this description
now become more typical than the former? Is the author's
experience reflective of what many call the "New South"?
If so, what does it say about the direction that the
South has taken (collectively, as a region) in the
last generation? Is it more homogenization? Is this
progress, or is the South in some way losing its identity?
Given the absence of pickup trucks and shotguns, what
quality is present that would cause us to still regard
Money, Love as "southern fiction"?
8. Despite all the sadness of the characters and events,
Money, Love is still touted as a comic novel.
Where do the humorous elements most fully come into
play in the story? How is this novel in keeping with
what is understood as the "comic tradition," in the
sense that it is comic as opposed to tragic. What
traditional elements of the comic are at work here?
9. Which character did you most strongly identify
with, and why? In a larger sense, what is it in characters
that causes us to identify with them, since their
circumstances rarely match our own? What is it in
fiction that causes this kind of connection to occur?
10. Why is Gabe the one who tells this story? Do we
need him at the center of things, acting both as an
anchor and as our surrogate? Why? Is he reliable as
a narrator? Why do we trust him (if in fact we do)
given that during the course of the novel he lies,
cheats, lusts, and steals?
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