Goodbye to All That: Benjamin Kunkel's "Indecision"

Dwight has only just arrived in Ecuador when disaster strikes. Natasha escapes. But she leaves a note encouraging him to travel to the beach with her roommate, Brigid. Heady with the expectation that his medication will soon kick in and make him decisive, Dwight accepts the idea and boards a bus with Brigid. Without a single reference to Y Tu Mama Tambien, the two travel deep into the country, and soon decide to forget the beach in lieu of the jungle. The jungle is hazardous, full of spiders, the dark, and extremely tiresome politics. We've had some bum traveling companions, including a guy with three nipples, but no one has ever turned to us and said, "And yet in South America as you notice the people are quite poor and lack genuine freedom with their economies, and have not a lot of cosmetics companies?"

Somehow, somehow, this kind of commentary does not strike Dwight as a dealbreaker. In fact, by the end of the book he has had a series of drug-induced epiphanies that "withstand sobriety" and become a democratic socialist. After firing off a round of emails to all concerned parties and telling his classmates about it at the reunion, Dwight takes off for Bolivia and writes this book we hold in our hands, which he intends as a way to publicize the plight of Bolivian farmers.

Several reviewers have taken the stuffing out of "Indecision" for its plot, which features boarding school, hallucinogens, backpacking, psychotherapy, divorce, crushes, 9/11, and the passive-aggressive use of email. But to look for a plot would be to miss the book's most obvious point. If Dwight had a noble quest or interesting challenge to think about, there would be fewer opportunities for him to waffle, and little would be left of his eponymous affliction. But for Dwight, as for most of his (college-educated, middle-to-upper-class, young, childless, urban) cohort, quests and challenges are hard to come by. His parents have blown up the idea that you can build your life around other people. His sister, who takes an avid analytical interest in his life, has undermined Dwight's chances of achieving unexamined happiness in his friends, girls, books, drugs and parties, which may be an underrated lifestyle. The disconnect between Dwight's feelings for his kind-of girlfriend Vaneetha and hers for him exposes the undercurrent of pathos that characterizes a depressingly large number of interpersonal relationships. Those people of his acquaintance who have achieved worldly success are unable to translate their professional competence to personal happiness. Science, a proxy for knowledge in general, has sold out to commerce, as evidenced by the pathologizing of a perfectly normal experience, indecision. And then you have the larger forces of history. Dwight can't make sense of 9/11, an event that Kunkel handles convincingly, any more than anyone else can.

Dwight's cheerfully banal façade conceals a streak of nihilism, a rational, if not ideal, response to the world. It surfaces only intermittently and to devastating effect, as when he savages Vaneetha over e-mail. Her emailed response to Dwight's breaking up with her is helpful, he writes:

I see you as liberated from me and this makes me feel better. I can imagine that I would feel like this a lot if I could date many wonderful women (not to compare them with you—you're incomparable!) and then leave them, feeling that in this I had done them a good turn.

Then in the next email he sends, to his friend the med student, Dwight alludes to his occasional thoughts of suicide.

It's plausible that Dwight would latch onto activism as a way to give his life meaning. But Dwight's conversion to secular do-gooding is a little too neatly packaged, and as a result it's morally unsatisfying. Dwight's most redeeming quality is his loyalty, not to women but to his family and friends. His sudden bolting for Bolivia can surely be taken as a rejection not just of his former way of life but of these relationships. It's true that his sister would probably support his move on political and philosophical grounds. But Alice, an ecoevangelist esconced in a prewar one-bedroom, needs a brother more than she needs a messenger pigeon. There's an element of apostasy in Dwight's move that could be explored to interesting effect, but is not.

For a writer of Kunkel's caliber, it feels like a dodge. In his criticism, Kunkel has often been incisive. "Diana Abbott," for example, an essay on J.M. Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello," presented a female character more compelling than any of those who appear in "Indecision" while garroting Coetzee for his humorlessness. "Indecision" is funny and fast, but it's not as trenchant as one would hope. But as Dwight himself tells his sister, "It's interesting. So that helps. I feel that anything that's interesting helps a great deal."