Kunkel, Benjamin - Indecision

The narrator of Benjamin Kunkel’s first - and ultimately unsuccessful - book is Dwight Wilmerding: 28-years old, a “cum nada” graduate of Eureka Valley College in California with a degree in philosophy, and recently fired from his $26,000 a year job doing tech support for Pfizer. (“I am pfree…but also pf***ed.”) Dwight also suffers from abulia, or chronic indecision, and can’t make up his mind (of course) whether he is flying to Ecuador to spark a romance with an old friend and wait for an experimental decisiveness drug to kick in, or if he’s postponing his life in the United States because it already has.

Dwight’s biggest choice, essentially one of purpose, is whether to pursue his “own little version” of the American dream -

The Abulinixes might or might not be duds, but in any case I had arrived at a major life decision, which was that I really didn’t give any particular f*** what happened to me once I got back to America, as long as I did make it back and got some new job there as unsatisfying as the last one…As long as I could sit in a comfortable chair, in a private home fumigated against spiders, watching some quality programming on TV, as long as I had some non-Ecuadorian food and upholstered furniture, fresh laundry and regular access to a hot shower, if I had shaving cream and razors, and shampoo and conditioner in a jungle-free environment - that was going to be fine with me. And since it wouldn’t be fine with my kids, who would feel ashamed of dad’s lifestyle, I wouldn’t have them. Little f***ers.

- or live with empathy and recognize and serve global justice.

The choice is not for Dwight alone. He seems to be making a decision on behalf of an entire generation, one that must confront the aftermath of the September 11th attacks (which he witnessed from six blocks away with Ecstasy-induced if short-lived optimism); a “consumer society”; boomer parents who just won’t die; and the end of the Cold War with its threats of nuclear annihilation. “We could never imagine growing up because the future could always be cancelled at any time,” Dwight’s sister, Alice, says while leading him through psychoanalysis. “So beyond a certain narrow time frame our desires ran into a kind of horizon and had to stop. There was no such thing as the long term.”

Despite its length (just 241 pages) and colloquial tone, Indecision is bold in its scope and style. Kunkel alternates between a sort of droll Socratic dialogue and a lucid (recreational drug use notwithstanding) interior monologue. He also moves deftly between continents and across time. The book is sometimes tender, often hilarious, and always smart. Its characters are intelligent and mostly kind - Kunkel is generous, there are no human antagonists here - and they are comfortable with their contradictions. Kunkel has chosen an equally ambitious theme: what Dwight’s favorite philosopher (the fictional Otto Knittel) might have called the existential paralysis of an aging Generation X. To fulfill the promise of his brainy prose and to bring the tale to a satisfying and credible conclusion, Kunkel has to remain watchful, nimble. And he almost makes it.

It’s not very often that a reader can pinpoint the exact spot where the wheels come off a story. Even more rare is for the wheels to come off so spectacularly, so very close to the end. Here, that moment is on page 212, the final word of the fourth paragraph, in an epiphanic moment so contrived that it diminishes the effect of an otherwise provocative and enjoyable work. In the last 30 pages, Indecision devolves neatly and finally from novel into social manifesto and, sadly, it fails at both.