The Handyman: A Novel - Hardcover

See, Carolyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037550155X ISBN 13: 9780375501555

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

With this brilliant novel about the surprises of destiny and the origins of fame, the critically acclaimed author of Golden Days ("Extraordinary . . . a very, very important book"-Los Angeles Times Book Review) and Making History ("Radiant . . . exciting and imaginative"-Cleveland Plain Dealer) firmly establishes her place as one of the preeminent chroniclers of our times.
    
The Handyman is the story of Bob Hampton, an aspiring young painter who has had to face the humbling fact that he doesn't know what to paint.  And how are you supposed to be an artist in this world if you don't have a vision? Bob trades in his artist's palette for a minivan full of house paints, hammers, and nails, and sets about earning a little cash as a handyman.
    
Although he turns out to be very bad at fixing the things he's hired to fix, Bob demonstrates quite a knack for fixing the lives of the people around him. In the midst of his jerry-built repairs and inspired home improvements, Bob meets an extraordinary cast of characters--rendered in all their delightful eccentricity and human frailty as only Carolyn See can-each of whom shows Bob the true scope of his own remarkable talent. There's Angela Landry, a housewife with far too much time on her hands, a sexpot of a stepdaughter, and a son in need of  attention; Jamie Walker, whose allergy-prone and ADD-afflicted children keep a menagerie of scaly pets that far exceed Jamie's managerial skills; Valerie LeClerc, older, sadder, and certainly wiser than Bob; and Hank and Ben, who leave a narrow-minded Midwest only to find unremitting illness and isolation in the California of their dreams.
    
Replete with stunning images and all of Carolyn See's trademark humor and wisdom, The Handyman depicts the countless ways in which our lives are intertwined and the profound effects we can have on one another. It is the kind of surprising and miraculously uplifting novel we have come to expect from the woman Diane Johnson has called "one of our most important writers."

About this title

About the Author

Carolyn See is the author of nine books. She is the Friday-morning reviewer for The Washington Post, and she has been on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN/West International. She has won both Guggenheim and Getty fellowships and currently teaches English at UCLA. She lives in Pacific Palisades, California.

From the Back Cover

"If you want to know what the United States will be like in ten or twenty years, all you have to do is read Carolyn See's wonderfully acute and perceptive novels."
-- Alison Lurie

Advance praise for The Handyman

"The Handyman proves once again that Carolyn See is one of this generation's most talented and versatile writers."
-- Fannie Flagg

"Misleadingly conversational in tone, borne aloft on deceptively offhand currents, The Handyman ascends, detail by detail, into the realm of mysterious profundity Carolyn See has made her own. Only a master novelist could have written this book; only Carolyn See could have informed the mastery with such grace."
--Peter Straub

"Carolyn See's handyman is an inspired creation--saint, sinner, life-filled artist and commonsense savior. As she did in Golden Days, Ms. See
conveys a wry, radiant vision wholly her own."
--Andrea Barrett

"Carolyn See is our fearless and rapier-witted leader in whose hands it is simply heavenly to visit hell. The Handyman is a wonderful read,
so acrid and sweet, crisp and compelling."
--Beverly Coyle

"Perfectly pitched, this book is a charming, indeed a heartwarming ride through the City of Angels, a ride you won't want to get off of."
--Greg Sarris

"The Handyman is a marvelous book, so funny and inventive, so sexy and so kind. I loved it."
--Alice Adams

From the Inside Flap

illiant novel about the surprises of destiny and the origins of fame, the critically acclaimed author of Golden Days ("Extraordinary . . . a very, very important book"-Los Angeles Times Book Review) and Making History ("Radiant . . . exciting and imaginative"-Cleveland Plain Dealer) firmly establishes her place as one of the preeminent chroniclers of our times.<br> <br><b>The Handyman</b> is the story of Bob Hampton, an aspiring young painter who has had to face the humbling fact that he doesn't know what to paint. And how are you supposed to be an artist in this world if you don't have a vision? Bob trades in his artist's palette for a minivan full of house paints, hammers, and nails, and sets about earning a little cash as a handyman.<br> <br>Although he turns out to be very bad at fixing the things he's hired to fix, Bob demonstrates quite a knack for fixing the lives of the people around him. In the mid

Reviews

In a surprising about-face from the apocalypse she predicted in Golden Days, See begins this vibrant and provocative novel with a hopeful vision of a more spiritually atuned, less venal California in the 21st century, and with a positive spin on the role of an artist in transforming society. Bob Hampton is an enormously talented artist whose works convey a mystic view of people living harmoniously with the natural world. In flashbacks from 2027, we discover that the nucleus of his mythic creations, called Los Testigos (the witnesses) and described as a fusion of the ordinary and the divine, is largely created one summer in the late 1990s, when Bob is a floundering 28-year-old, verging on panic because he can't find his artistic identity. In desperation, he sets himself up as a handyman in the L.A. area, operating out of a group home that he shares with other grungy and equally directionless young people. His clients turn out to be needful of more than carpentry repair; each one is suffering marital turmoil or debilitating depression, and Bob becomes an unwitting St. Francis who heals injured psyches and salvages messed-up lives. Without specific intent, he set off chain reactions that bring all his new friends together, in love and salvation. And in each situation he creates vibrant futuristic art to fill a specific need in his clients' lives. One of the unexpected benefits of Bob's handyman summer is the opportunity to hop into bed with nearly every woman he encounters; See writes these scenes with verve and erotic humor. In fact, she has never before created a male character who is so alive on the page; slightly flaky, casually profane, beer-drinking and pot-smoking Bob is the epitome of the guileless person in search of his destiny. This is difficult in 1990s California, where the sun puts a pretty shine on spiritual emptiness and the soul-shrinking excesses of a consumer society. With deft narrative pacing, See follows a scene of slapstick domestic chaos with a searing portrayal of a young man dying of AIDS. In a compulsively readable narrative, she conveys a philosophy of life for the Y2K and beyond: after the millennium, maybe we will make dynamic choices that tap into cosmic energy, and accept the presence of the miraculous and the divine. Witty, insightful and compassionate, this book has a beguiling message and mainstream appeal. Author tour; movie rights to Warner Bros.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An enchanting story by the ever-adventurous See (Making History, 1991, etc.) depicts an aspiring painter-turned-handyman who discovers the infinite within the quotidian. The framing devicea Guggenheim application dated August 15, 2027, and rendered in flawless grant-speakinforms us up-front that Robert Hampton will become the preeminent international artist of the New Century and that a group known as Los Testigos (witnesses) received both artworks and spiritual sustenance from him during his formative period. But when 28-year-old Bobs dejected first-person narrative begins in May 1996, hes just another drifting Los Angeleno, convinced he will never be a painter, sharing a dingy house with three other disconnected souls, marking time until the fall. Meanwhile, his flyers boasting WHATEVERS WRONG I CAN FIX IT! bring calls from various people, some of whom dont need a handyman so much as a rescue squad. Among the more desperate cases: a recently transplanted gay midwesterner unable to cope with his AIDS-stricken teenage lover, and two women so overwhelmed by bad marriages that they can care neither for their children nor their houses, which stink from ankle-deep dirty dishes and clothes. The neglected wife of a sports agent, her sexy stepdaughter, and a 60ish widow are more capable, if almost as needy. Over the course of a single summer, Bob does laundry, scours bathrooms, sorts papers, beds down with several customers, connects his roommates with others, and finds his identity as an artist in the casual pieces he creates to cheer up his unhappy clientele. The story may sound schematic in summary, especially since most of the characters can be matched with a Testigo from the grant application, but Sees customary wit and sharp eye for the particulars of American life at the turn of the century flesh out the whole with human complexity. Undertones of spiritual as well as creative awakening are perfectly calibrated to enrich the text without weighing it down. An ambitious exploration of artistic inspiration that could have been unbearably pretentious but that instead, thanks to Bobs down- to-earth voice and the authors delicate touch, proves magical. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Bob Hampton's at loose ends in the hot Los Angeles summer of 1996. While pondering art school in L.A., he earns his living as a handyman?he'll do anything, much of it involving women of all ages. He meets charming Old World widows, shell-shocked about-to-be divorcees, randy teenagers, militant feminists?but he also becomes involved in the messy lives of single unattached men and lost children. Everyone he touches ends up better or happier for the experience. Making a difference in the lives of others, however, doesn't do much for his own problem?he's unable to come up with anything original or noteworthy in his art. Slowly, though, the new pattern of his life becomes interwoven with his creative side. Reaching out to life's losers, he finds himself creating original and complex works. See (Making History, LJ 9/15/91) has written a feel-good novel reminiscent of the best work of Allison Lurie with a dollop of Ann Tyler; it's been bought by Warner Brothers.
-?Jo Manning, Univ. of Miami, Coral Gables, FL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This charming novel from a writer with a growing readership revolves around an interesting premise: the time is 2027, and a man named Peter Laue is applying for a grant to study the work of artist Robert Hampton, who is internationally recognized as a major talent. Then we go back in time to learn the story of Hampton's life, in his own words, and this forms the meat of the novel. That Hampton became famous seems a great irony, given what we read about him before his ascent. After graduating from college, he went to Paris to enroll in art school, but the experiment quickly went sour, and he returned to his hometown of L.A. Once home, he took a job as a self-employed handyman. He built up a clientele of customers, but he was more often called to help with their private lives than to fix things around their houses--in other words, he functioned more or less as a social worker, his most poignant "case" being the care of a teenager with AIDS. Hampton is such a likable person that the reader applauds, all the way through the book, the fact that he is destined to become famous. And the cast of characters supporting him is just as human and beguiling as he. The result is a novel of compelling drive and great warmth. Brad Hooper

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In May of 1996 I flew to Paris from Los Angeles, to get settled in the city before I enrolled in the fall semester of the École des Beaux-Arts. I was twenty-eight years old; I had a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from UCLA and ten thousand dollars in traveler's checks. I'd spent one summer in Paris before, when I was eighteen. I'd been out of school for five years, "finding myself"--thinking I might be an artist--but that search had turned up nothing. In Paris, at least, I had the idea that I could see what others had done, and what I might do. I was scared shitless.

My plane landed at Orly at quarter of six on a cold Tuesday morning. I had a long wait for my luggage, since I'd brought enough in theory to live for a year, and I had a hard and embarrassing discussion with a cab driver when I finally got out of the airport. I'd expected to feel great, but the jet lag--maybe--kept me from being happy as the taxi drove through suburbs and grimy fog. I had to keep reminding myself that a lot of other artists had come to this city. All of them must have had a first day, and that day had to have been lonesome.

I kept waiting for the city to turn into something beautiful, but I had a fair wait. After about forty minutes, we came in sight of the river, and yes, everything was as great as everyone said. I gave the driver the address of the Hôtel du Danube on the rue Jacob, on the Left Bank. It was too expensive for me but I'd allowed myself a week there, since it was close to the École, the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest church in Paris. I think I would have to say that everything in me at that time pointed in one direction, to find out what it meant to be a fine artist, to put my life on the line for art, to combine everything I'd learned and everything I felt and then distill that into paintings. It hadn't happened in LA--"the art scene" in LA was crap--but if it were going to happen anywhere, it would happen here. In two years I'd be thirty, and then the whole thing would be ridiculous.

The cab pulled up to the Hôtel du Danube at ten in the morning, and right away I saw I'd made a mistake. The lobby was dark and glossy and touristy, and a clerk my age gave me a chickenshit stare. I asked for their smallest room and I got it--a dark little cubicle toward the back with a single bed, a shorted-out television, an armoire set at an angle on the sloping floor, and wallpaper that went on all the way across the ceiling--brown cabbage roses on a tan background. The one small window looked out on a roof made of corrugated tin.

I felt lousy, but, again, I put that down to jet lag.
After I washed my hands and face I went out for a walk. I knew a run would make me feel better, but I thought I should know where I was running before I suited up and started.

I walked along the rue Jacob to the rue des Saints-Pères and turned up toward the Seine. The sun was out by now. Things looked the way I expected, but not the way I expected. The river was amazing. I could look across it to the Louvre and that was amazing too, more than I could register, more than I could take in. That so many people, so long ago, had been so dedicated to beauty! I thought of LA, weeds sprouting from the sidewalks and retaining walls bulging with dirt from the last earthquake and all the stucco bungalows on the sides of all the hills and how they faded into that beige background of dead ryegrass. I thought of Salvadorean women on Western Avenue with little kids in strollers and more kids strapped to their backs. Everything I remembered seemed monochromatic and sad.

I came back from the river, walking in the direction of the hotel. I thought I should see Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and the famous cafés on the boulevard Saint-Germain. I was getting hungry. Take it a step at a time, I thought. A thousand people, a thousand thousand people have done what you're doing. They got through it. So you can get through it.
Half the people around me were French, but most of the other half were American--hunched together on sidewalks, poring over guidebooks and maps. The French pushed past them. The shops had windows filled with high-class tourist junk--etchings cut out of books and framed, tarnished jewelry you could pick up in LA in thrift shops for ten bucks. And stuff only a moron might want--life-sized stuffed leather pigs.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés was great. Old, old, a mass going on at the far end, groups of Parisians and tourists wandering around in the dark. It calmed me down. I was facing a depressing fact, the fact that I didn't want to go into a place by myself for lunch. I
had to remind myself that I was an American, well educated, able-bodied, with enough money to last a while. Picasso had done it (not that he was American). Hemingway could do it. (But thinking of myself at the Ritz Bar in a trench coat might have made me laugh, if I could laugh.)

I came out of the church into the cobblestone yard and looked over to my left, at the café where Sartre and de Beauvoir had eaten lunch every day, if you could believe the guidebooks. I walked off on a diagonal to my right, toward a café that to my knowledge had no reputation at all. I sat down, ordered a Croque Monsieur, a salade des tomates, and a glass of red wine. Not quite what I expected, because there was a red-faced Irishman stuffing down a pair of fried eggs right next to me, telling a story about the computer company he worked for and how he'd just come in from Hong Kong the night before and how he'd be damned if he'd take the company house out in the banlieues, he'd live in the city or nowhere. On my other side, an American woman in a tight suit explained to someone who looked a lot like her mom that the French were terrific pill poppers, and that she, the daughter, was terribly disappointed that her mother had let herself go, because how could she introduce her to François, when she was looking like that?

Everyone I saw had someone to talk to; everyone had a friend. Everyone had somewhere to go. Everyone had a plan.
I paid my check and walked back to the hotel.
My room faced away from the sun and smelled of mildew and smoke. I pulled off my clothes, got under the covers, and slept.

When I woke up, it was the next morning. I ordered coffee and croissants and the maid brought them up. I sat in bed and ate and began to feel terrible. I got ready for the voices that would be rolling by soon, and sure enough, here they came: my dad, the redneck Texan carpenter who'd taken off when I was fifteen. "You're gonna be a what? An artist? Gimme a break, Bob!" My mom, sitting alone in her apartment down on Virgil: "That's fine for now, when you're still young, but pretty soon life is going to catch up with you. You can't go on living for yourself and expect to get away with it." Living for myself. Man, she was convinced of it.

My old professors: "Hampton, pretty good. No, a B1 is a good grade, especially at UCLA. No, I'm not going to change it. No, I can't tell you what's 'wrong' with the painting! It's just not A work. I know A work when I see it, and I don't see it here. No, I can't tell you what to do. I can tell you how to get a B, but no one can tell you how to get an A. If I could, we'd all be out on a yacht spending our millions."
Or, "You'd make a fine teacher, Hampton."
Or, "Disney needs animators. You work very rapidly and you're good with detail."
Or, "Did you ever think of special effects? You've got a real craftsman's eye. We're living in the special-effects capital of the world, remember."
But that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to knock them out. I wanted to knock their socks off. I wanted to change their lives through my art.
Yeah, well.

I got up and took a shower and headed on out to see the Musée d'Orsay.

The day was cold and cloudy and getting inside the museum was a relief: it was warm in there, it was beautiful. The art was something. Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, his Olympia. How'd he get that light? Renoir's Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette. How'd he get that great light?

I went through the museum, feeling worse and worse. The Renoirs--and Renoir wasn't even my favorite painter, for God's sake--made my stomach tie up. I stood for a long time in front of Danse à la ville and Danse à la campagne, and remembered what one asshole professor had said to me about what I could do to get an A. "You must be born again, Mr. Hampton! You must be born again!"

What if I couldn't be born again? The two pairs of Renoir's dancers--in the city, in the country--showed me a million things in terms of light and technique and even social commentary, but something else in them made me feel like crying like a kid. Some people, somewhere, had been as happy as that.

It didn't matter, because no one in this century painted like that anymore. I tried to remember, back in LA, Tony Berlant using nuts and bolts and metal in all his pieces, doing it for years now. Had Berlant been born again? Born again to what?

I got out of there after a couple of hours and went into a place for lunch, big chunks of veal in a red-orange sauce. I paid too much for it. I went back to the hotel, waited for an hour, went out to a café, and started talking to a good-looking American guy who worked for a French computer firm. Everyone did, he said. Work in computers.

"This is the best café in Paris, absolutely the best. Do you play squash? I make it a point to play three nights a week. Keep in shape. Have to. Going to the École? I have a friend who went there. Best education in France. Absolutely the best. Ever been married? Neither have I. That's the reason I stay over here. They can't get to me here. Not that there aren't plenty of women. Plenty of women! How long have you been here? A day! I've been here twelve years, off and on. Ex-pat for life, I imagine. Are you free for dinner? Like Greek food? I know ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037550155X
• ISBN 13: 9780375501555
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 221