The parental investigations of a young man who never knew his father and only knew his mother on a first-name basis
“Harry” met “Sally”—their names changed to protect the guilty—on a blind date in 1969 that culminated in an inebriated coupling in the back seat of an Oldsmobile at a drive-in movie theater. Nine months after this first and only date, Sally gave birth to Joseph. After Harry met Sally, then, is the story of Joseph’s growing up, a compelling confession of a tortured young man struggling to understand his brilliant, driven, but self-destructive mother and to come to grips with the mystery of Harry, who disappeared when he learned of Sally’s “family way.”
Joseph’s “good fortune,” he tells the reader at the beginning of his narrative, was to have a mother and father whose long lives of “misbehaving” act out a fascinating drama with an emotional wallop. The careers of Harry and Sally, as captured by their son, compose a chronicle of disillusionment and deviance—a droll and sardonic commentary on the darkness that makes its mark on the modern world.
As I set out, I slowly began to see how fortunate I was. Most peoples’ moms and dads are good folks — good enough, anyway. Being good, obeying the rules, and holding a steady job is the best way to get from point A, your joyous entry into the world, to point Z, your sad departure, with the least amount of pain — or “grief,” as Hobbes puts it. But a long life of quietly behaving yourself — with teacher praise, spouse approval, boss kudos, adding to your 401(k) — is not all that attention grabbing. Cradle-to-grave happy-time, like it is for the borgaren of Sweden, may be desirable, but the contemplation of it could only be tedious and boring…
My good fortune was to have a mother and father whose lives were attention-grabbing — decadence and deviance that packed a wallop. Thanks to them, I had the material for the best kind of adventure chronicle — a combination of entertainment and enlightenment. Vice is the entertainment side. Connecting it to the raging pathologies of contemporary America is the enlightenment half of the equation. What was wrong with my parents was what was wrong with everything. Well, almost everything.
-from Chapter One
In the backseat of Larry’s 1962 Oldsmobile Starfire, on Harry and Sally’s first and only date, I was conceived. This maculate conception occurred during the unwatched double feature of “How the West was Won” and “Tom Jones.” Most likely, if you think about it, it must have been during “Tom Jones.” “Life imitates art” suggests that this had to be how it all “came off,” so to speak.
I know what you’re thinking about my mother, Sally. “Jeezus H. Christ! First date? A drive-in? With a couple in the front seat?” But take a breath. Come on now, Mr. and Mrs. Judgmental. Remember? This was freaking 1969. Give her a break! Liberation from rules was then the only rule. Those “feelings” as reliable guidelines I talked about — “in continual mutation,” per Hobbes. Remember? They come and stay a while. Then, poof! Off they go like acid indigestion or an Excedrin migraine.
-from Chapter Two
She went the home-school route and hired a tutor, who took me through mathematics over the next several years — enough to get a decent score on the ACTs. The rest of my time, I spent reading the Greek playwrights — Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus — and the 20th-century Oxford language philosophers, like J. L. Austin and John Searle. I ploughed through Plato’s Dialogues and a bit of Aristotle — De Anima, Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.
To have eluded the grasp of the Babylonian educational establishment was good fortune for me. I was better off not being programmed to resist the constraints of reality, if it displeased me in some way. I refused to wear the educational establishment’s designer-brand outfit that signaled I was fit to be absorbed into a “system” that would either turn me into a thin, brittle husk of a human being or eat me alive.
-from Chapter Thirteen
In spite of its technical-scientific-medical triumphs over so many limitations of past centuries, the modern world was, for me, an empty vessel. The modern world: A “blind, deaf machine, fertile in cruelties.” These were the words of Baudelaire. The source of my alienation? A simple answer. I was living in, and occupying myself increasingly with, an accumulation of abstractions. Worse, for all their sophistication and power, they had tenuous connections to things that linked people together in physical and emotional ways that made them better for each other. Abstractions — systematized, stylized, professionalized, and commercialized — drive people apart. Our bodies live longer; our souls die sooner.
The modern world rules with abstract systems, tangentially related. Each one moves independently, autonomously, with no purpose, logic, or standards for success other than consistency with its own standards — removed from and indifferent to the damaging effects on the people caught up in it. Moreover, these systems move relentlessly toward increased specialization. Specialization, by its nature, marks an increase in power. Every specialization creates specialists with enlarged authority who exert that authority and its power over those dependent on their specialized knowledge.
I pondered Abramson’s masterful performance. The façade cracked open. A naked, modern world popped up and laughed at me. It then gave me the finger.
