Cultivated Detachment: On Tariq Shah's "Whiteout Conditions"
Tariq Shah | Whiteout Conditions | Two Dollar Radio | 2020 | 115 Pages
Even before Tariq Shah’s Whiteout Conditions opens, Antioch (Ant) has lost all of his loved ones. Ant’s losses have numbed him; they’ve also fostered a death wish within him. Now, Ant regards funerals coolly, as “a kind of social pursuit…a kink, of a kind.” The rawness of others’ grief—its artless vulnerability—stirs him. In fact, he finds funerals “kind of fun.”
Thus, with a cultivated detachment, Ant decides to attend the funeral of his childhood friend Vince’s teenage cousin Ray. Ant has been away from his hometown, a suburb of Chicago, for five years, and he and Vince haven’t maintained regular contact. In fact, Ant learns of Ray’s death on the morning news: Ray, a high school freshman, has been mauled to death by a dog. Like many of Whiteout Conditions’ characters, the dog, Bullets, is an acquaintance from Ant’s past.
Whiteout Conditions follows Ant and Vince’s road trip from O’Hare Airport to Ray’s funeral. At the airport, Ant greets Vince with “Your hair is long” and promptly launches into a banal account of his day. When Vince makes an overture toward the more personal (“Things are good with you then”—a statement, not a question), Ant simply shrugs “at him, and at everything I could tell him, at all I could say in response, my hoard of thoughts and tidings and urges that want a voice, a breath.” Most of the pair’s interactions are like this—familiar, but inhibited. Periodically, one makes a bid at vulnerability, but the other always shuts him down. When Ant discovers that his childhood home has been torn down and paved over, Vince scoffs at his distress: “Expect the world to stand still for you? You need a hug?” The night before Ray’s funeral, Vince, under cover of darkness, concedes that “Tomorrow’ll be pretty hard.” Ant shunts aside his grief: “I think it’ll be okay.” Mostly, the friends cope with their sadness—and with one another—by drinking, smoking, and popping pills.
En route to Ray’s funeral, Ant dredges up memories of his childhood. In them, we meet eight-year-old Ray, nicknamed Raygun, who tags along with Ant and Vince, as they idly wander their neighborhood. We meet Bullets, too, “a vanilla-white pup, its nose as pink as a piglet’s.” Ant also catalogues his lost loved ones—his grandparents, parents, and a miscarried sibling. The death of Ant’s ex-girlfriend Wendy (to Vince, he describes her as “just a girl. You know. Came and went”) appears to have precipitated his descent toward nihilism. Wendy’s death was the point at which Ant’s grief hardened, the point at which funerals became “kind of fun.”
Whiteout Conditions ostensibly builds toward Ray’s funeral, which takes place some two-thirds of the way through the novel. But Ray’s funeral is not cathartic for Vince or Ant. They ply themselves with Oxycodone, to manage their emotions. Ray’s mother, whose anguish is too immense—and too openly expressed—for her family to bear, is likewise plied with pills.
Whiteout Conditions meanders, but its last twenty-five pages, a stomach-churning account of Vince’s vengeance upon Bullets, pick up speed. It is not surprising that Vince, who has shown little facility for self-reflection, might see Bullets’ torture as the only conceivable recompense for his cousin’s death. After all, brutality is a concomitant—perhaps, constitutive—of the toxic masculinity that hampers Ant and Vince’s communication throughout the novel. Nonetheless, the violence is wrenching.
There is redemption or something like it for Ant. In rescuing Bullets from Vince’s revenge, Ant realizes that his losses have not wholly anesthetized him against fear, pain, or love. He retains his most humane impulses. He fears for, hurts for, and cares for Bullets—like him, a stray.
Whiteout Conditions is grim and, occasionally, viscerally upsetting. But it is also frequently, darkly funny. On the way to Ray’s funeral, Ant and Vince stop at an Arby’s, where they barter joints for roast beef sandwiches. The episode is surreal—no doubt, in part, because Ant, both stoned and sober, is somewhat disconnected throughout the book—but also plausible, and humorous in its plausibility. The boys trade three joints for “two burgs, two curlies, and two large Dr. Peppers” and roll them in their car for a bored Arby’s employee.
The fact that the preceding transaction occurs at an Arby’s—perhaps the most à propos of fast food restaurants for such a transaction—testifies to Shah’s feel for place. The larger setting of Whiteout Conditions—the dead-end suburbs of Chicago—is also aptly delineated. The Midwest’s harsh winter weather chases Ant and Vince throughout the novel, particularly in its fevered final pages. And the community that Ant grew up in should be broadly recognizable to those of us who grew up in similar communities, even outside the Midwest. Whiteout Conditions’ suburbs—the idleness, the inertia that pervades them—remind me of the small town in southern New Mexico where I grew up.
Shah is a published poet, and it shows in Whiteout Conditions’ prose. When he speaks, Ant says little—he is inexpressive and inarticulate—but his thoughts are starkly poetic. In bed at night, “keeping watch for the burnt orange sky to freckle with stars, for them to offer some kind of solace,” Ant notes, “Best to take a good look at yourself in dim light, when you are small, closest to sleep, to death.” That gap between the quality of Ant’s thoughts and words—the gap between the felt and the expressed—is, as I have already noted, widened by toxic masculinity, by strictures against men’s vulnerability. But it is also endemic to any immense emotional experience—that is, enormous joy, as well as grief. Can words do justice to our emotions?