Louis C.K. Writes the Great American Trash Epic

As a fan of Louis C.K.’s stand up and his outstanding FX streaming series Louie I cracked opened his debut novel Ingram with some trepidation. Was C.K. — while still on what Jerry Seinfeld called the required “crawl-back” stage of a disgraced public figure’s return to the spotlight — going to embarrass himself?

Ingram  
By Louis C.K.
BenBella Books; 288 pages

The initial promotional material from his publishers was not encouraging. Readers were invited to “see the world through the eyes” of a “neglected child” with “no practical understanding of the world” thrust “by overwhelming poverty and spiritual exhaustion” into a “harrowing yet hopeful odyssey” across a rural dystopian Texas. Oy! Was this going to be a thinly disguised pity party for C.K.’s no doubt still-smarting inner child? A maudlin indictment of this cold cruel world’s treatment of a well meaning but socially inept manchild with the wondering soul of an artist?

Nope. In Ingram, readers will pleasantly discover, C.K. went a whole other way.

Genre wise it is best described as a Southern Gothic dark comedy dystopian novel. Sort of Cormac McCarthy meets Flannery O’Connor. Or if you want writers’ writers — Charles Portis. There are real stylistic similarities between the author of the divergent masterpieces True Grit and The Dog of the South and C.K.’s own picaresque. This is high praise. The recently deceased Portis is considered perhaps on par with Mark Twain and the “the Lincoln of American Literature” is indeed a liberating comparison. Which gets us to the book haunting Ingram — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Perhaps it was something in the nature of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence that kept C.K. from directly name-checking Twain’s opus in Ingram. The influences are evident from Ingram’s relationship with his father to the multiple Jims who Ingram encounters. Instead, there are recurring references to the other candidate for the Great American Novel (Dead White Male Edition) Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Not as clear an influence. But a clear indicator of C.K.’s ambition.

All this praise said, the novel is not perfect. You need to get past an unpromising start: A dead-affect cruel alcoholic farmer failure of a father; a defeated dead-affect mother; and a suffering-from-selective-memory-loss mysteriously confined to his shed little Ingram. All surrounded by a dark secret and bloated cows putrefying in the sun. We have seen this sort of set up before.

This unpleasant preliminary anti-idyll is structured to transmit how little interaction Ingram had with his parents. Let alone the outside world.

The novel truly sings, though, once our stoic little hero carrying a tiny rag filled with rotting pork hits the road, engages the world and starts laughing. The joy, need, and devouring impulsion to learn is one of the great themes of the novel. Once placed in a wider environment that can slake that thirst Ingram never stops drinking.

Each new lesson is typically flagged by a word the initially illiterate, limited vocabulary Ingram has never heard. “Exit sign,” “internal combustion engine,” “counting,” “Jesus Christ,” “cool.” Thus starteth the lesson.

The other great love of the book is eating. Particularly, it deals with eating when you’re hungry, and the joys of lower class and lower middle class cuisine. C.K.’s descriptions of satisfying meals like “spaghetti with chili” topped off with “orange soda” or “two or three bullfrogs cooked over a fire of long dead grass and twigs” rank with Portis’s descriptions in Norwood of bar peanuts fizzing in a just poured glass of Pepsi or Clark chocolate bars fresh from the freezer.

As bad as things get there is always a joyful sense of discovery that underlies it all. Even the painful discoveries. Free from the isolation of the farm Ingram is now like Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass “Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.” Nothing is going to impede his forward progress. Not even his recurring nightmare of “the red eyed creature who called himself my coming death.”

There is also a darker, broader, wider story unfolding in America during Ingram’s journey. It is only hinted at by abandoned towns, offhand comments about the country splitting between haves and have nots, and reports of platoons of soldiers marching down highways. It comes to the forefront in Ingram’s brief encounter with the utopian New Austin with its pink roads and quiet gliding electric cars. Then again during his longer stay in oilfield country, a place of permanent darkness and men missing arms and feet that is “owned by the companies.” However, mostly these wider events just bubble under the surface. Something Ingram cannot quite grasp.

As you would expect, as with any good picaresque, Ingram encounters an exciting array of mentors. Each help the growing boy — who proves to be one tough cookie — to build, block by block, a better personal operating system to interact with the wider world. Among these are “The Mountain” a homeless black man settled hermit like into the hills who teaches him the distinction between white and black and, as a quasi helpless young boy, not to trust the face that smiles.

For the son of a Mexican Hungarian Harvard graduate father and software engineer mother C.K. writes feelingly, convincingly and unpatronizingly of white trash and aspirational America. He’s not so fond of the people in suits.

The set piece, the greatest and transcendent section of the book, begins with a Wizard of Oz-like tornado. “A big black walking tree” in Ingram’s eyes. In a stunning sequence it darkens the sky then rips him from the ground tossing him into the air then slamming him back on the ground snapping his arm.

It is in this condition he meets his next mentor Bull by a pond while desperately hunting for frogs.

Dressed in a round black hat, brown leather jacket with no shirt, blue pants with white stripes and white and brown shoes with black soles the white haired Bull is an escaped prisoner. Ingram first encounters Bull perched in a tree. Bull tells tall tales that would not be out of place in Twain’s Roughing It, sets Ingram’s arm and imparts worldly wisdom on a wide range of matters including the benefits of lying, interpersonal relationships, and sex.

Most crucially Bull points Ingram towards oilfield country and the high-risk, no-questions-asked money to be made there. These chapters are the great achievement of C.K.’s book, on a par with the best of Portis and comparable to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

In the pages that follow, Ingram ages to 17 in the face of the ongoing pain, indifference, joy and the too short lived camaraderie and kindness of the road, both given and returned, only to learn the truth of T.S. Eliot’s assertion from Four Quartets.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

At 58 years old C.K. has written something close to a great American novel. One gets the sense he is just getting started.