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Meet Daniel Wellington: art historian, academic star, devoted husband, and total basket case. Although Daniel has known nothing but success, he’s convinced the future promises nothing but disaster. When his wife, known simply as R., presents him with a tiny, size-XXS Yale sweatshirt, Daniel is seized by the impulse to bolt; the specter of imminent fatherhood sends him into a full-blown existential crisis. Soon this well-intentioned young professor finds himself plotting bigamy, lying about his past, imagining his pregnant wife in the arms of an androgynous grad student, and explaining to the dean his obscene e-mail to the lead in a student production of Miss Julie.
From an idyllic New England campus to the rarefied art worlds of Berlin and London, The Catastrophist charts the rise and fall and partial rebound of an ambivalent but endearing Everyman and heralds the appearance of a major new comedic voice in American fiction.
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The narrator of this morbidly comic debut novel is Daniel Wellington, a 30-something art historian recounting the arc of his own self-destruction. Married, tenured, a rising star at Massachusetts's fictional Franklin College, Daniel falls apart piece by piece, beginning with the onset of "prepartum dread" when his wife "R." gets pregnant. He briefly recovers when she loses the baby, but the damage to their marriage is already done. The hapless Daniel proceeds to make a series of personal and professional misjudgments, including several unconsummated affairs. An expert on war memorials (he's at work on a manuscript titled Art and Atrocity), Daniel is appointed to the commission for a Berlin Holocaust Memorial, a position he jeopardizes by impulsively and falsely claiming to be the child of Holocaust survivors. Though Douglas covers familiar territory-the insularity of academia and the neurotic male in crisis-he does so with arch homage to Philip Roth. Even if the novel's landscape feels derivative, Daniel's maddening, pitiable voice is all his own. (May 16) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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Tony Nurtin
reviewed The Catastrophist on July 15, 2018 The Catastrophist
I found the relationship at the heart of this tale compelling and wrenching, as two such different people try to live as husband and wife and then as expecting parents. There is much that is funny, in a Richard Russo sort of setting, with the male professor at the small college with lots of colorful colleagues, some of whom are women with an eye for our hero, and he certainly flirts and thinks about having affairs but he never quite seals the deal. His wife on the other hand, does not seem to have infidelity pop up as a regular topic and then it happens. And she is so much more practical than he--when she thinks the time is right for then to make love she tells him to just "stick it in"--that's all the romance she attaches to love making.
It is hard for me to put my finger on why I found the plot development so well done (which the exception of one gross detail that I just wish had been left out). I guess our main hero seems to have so much going for him but can barely live his life happily when things are going well and then they don't go well he just cant get anything right. And his wife is an equally intriguing character--she seems like she understand each little nuance of her husband's soul, which isn't always an advantage.
But I like both of them.
The structure of the book was, for me, one of the highlights. From the very beginning when a train rumbles through at night we know it will come back, as it does at the very end, and that was so satisfying as a reader. By the end we understand why his life includes being woken up by a train at 3 in the morning. In fact we were told lots of things at the beginning--how his academic star would soar and quickly fade, as it does. So perhaps this is a little bit like a Greek play, in that we are told of upcoming downfall which indeed happens.
But there is hope at the end. His son is born, he and his wife are living apart, but I thought there was hope, that they will reconcile and put their newly won wisdom to work.
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