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“Ed
King” by David Guterson; Knopf, 304 pp., $26.95
———
The Greek
gods ran a pitiless universe. In the pre-Christian
world, even the most standout specimen of humanity could
get ensnared in the cogs of fate. If you showed even a
glint of human hubris, you were asking for it —
remember Icarus? Oedipus?
David
Guterson’s brilliant new novel, “Ed King,” mirrors
that world, but it sets the wheels in motion in none
other than 1960s Seattle, as it follows the city’s
transformation from a sleepy, self-satisfied city to a
21st-century tech powerhouse. Ambition and desire drive
the plot (it must be said that there is a whole lot of
sex in this book) along with the fundamental irony that
the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
“Ed
King” begins in 1962, the year of the Seattle
World’s Fair. Actuary Walter Cousins hires Diane
Burroughs, a British exchange student, as a nanny after
Walter’s wife is hospitalized for a mental breakdown:
“At just the right moment, this dazzling girl,
brimming with pluck and perpetual good humor,
domestically energetic, chipper, and playful, had landed
on Walter’s doorstep. What a miracle!”
And what
luck — but not the good kind. A born-and-bred con
artist, Diane gets pregnant with Walter’s child,
extorts lifetime support payments from him, runs away
and leaves her baby son on a Portland doorstep. She
moves up and on, using high-class prostitution as an
entree to marriage to the heir to a Northwest
sporting-goods dynasty, which allows her to lavish time
and money on slowing the ravages of age. It is downright
eerie how ably and gleefully Guterson has channeled
Diane, a lower-class Brit without a moral bone in her
body but with a genius for finding the weak and sweet
spot of her targets.
Diane’s
abandoned baby is adopted by Dan and Alice King, a
Jewish couple living in Seattle’s North End, who
attend a liberal synagogue and almost certainly walked
right out of Guterson’s upbringing (Guterson, author
of the best-selling “Snow Falling on Cedars,” was
born and raised in Seattle and still lives in the area).
Ardently devoted parents, the Kings decide — for baby
Ed’s sake, of course — that it really would be
better if they don’t tell their son that he’s
adopted. They brush off the bleak warning of Alice’s
father, Pop, an oracle of Jewish fatalism:
“Pop
sneezed into the phone. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘It’s lying, this business. The tooth fairy’s
lying, the golem is lying, Santa Claus is lying, all of
it lying, but this, Mr. Eddie, not adopted, that’s
lying lying, that’s Number Nine of the Ten
Commandments lying. Listen Daniel, I’m telling you
from my heart, you want more tsuris than you already
got? Go ahead — tell this lie!”“
At first,
it seems no one will suffer. Ed thrives, and Alice soon
gives birth to another son. Both boys are brilliant,
avid to excel at just about everything. Ed loves
superhero stories: “For Eddie to be playing so
powerfully with myth and story at such a young age is, I
think, an excellent sign,” writes one of his teachers.
Or maybe
Ed just likes to play with fire. As he enters his teens,
Ed spurns private school, hangs out with the stoners and
slackers at Nathan Hale High School, and has wild sex
with his Goth girlfriend in the back of his 1966 Pontiac
GTO in the back alleys and back roads of the state. In a
moment of blind rage and youthful hubris, he runs a
hapless middle-age guy off a deserted Eastern Washington
highway, launching himself on the road to his own fate.
“Ed
King” is compulsively readable and witheringly funny.
Guterson’s narrative voice — by turns savage and
sad, amused and outraged — becomes a kind of Greek
chorus of one. From the self-reverential blather of
Seattle liberals to the gaming industry’s nihilistic
love of violence to the winner-take-all world of
software and search engines, Guterson skewers it all, as
he tracks Ed’s ascendancy to the top of the tech world
as the “King of Search.”
He
interweaves the story with enough mythological
references to keep even the most ardent classicist
entertained. Cybil (Sybil), an automated voice
programmed to react to Ed’s every whim, question and
demand, is the guide to the underworld in Virgil’s
“&Aelig;eneid.” Pythia, Ed’s search company,
is the name of the priestess of the Oracle of Delphi.
Chance and probability play a huge role in this book,
from Walter’s actuarial profession to a tarot-card
reader who tells Ed, a randy young Stanford student with
a thing for older women: “Get out of here, you
arrogant bastard. You’re dangerous to the world and to
yourself.”
It’s
almost as if Ed is demanding that attention be paid. And
he gets it — Diane. A creature of pure selfishness,
she has a Brit outsider’s gimlet-eyed view of
hypocrisy, American-style, using her smarts and wit in
the service of snaring Walter, marrying up in Portland
and dealing dope in Kirkland, reeling her customers in
with her “diligently nice” persona and her posh
English accent. From high-class prostitute to “life
coach” for wayward young Eastside millionaires, Diane
has her finger on America’s yearning, fluttering
pulse.
Ed is
less finely drawn; it’s not entirely clear what drives
him, other than the will to succeed, dominate and get
what he wants, whatever the cost.
And maybe
that’s the point.
The
technological titans of “Ed King,” walled off in
their Eastside estates and San Juan Islands kingdoms and
privy to the best life (and life-extending methods) that
money can buy, strive and strain with little thought to
where all their efforts might be headed. It forces the
thought: What have all the technological achievements of
Microsoft, Amazon, Apple wrought, when it comes to
changing certain fundamental certainties of human
nature?
Ed
believes the sky is the limit: “Superior intelligence
will beget superior intelligence, until, in theory, all
problems are solved — that’s the promise, the hope,
the glory, the Holy Grail, the dream of a messianic age.
...
“‘I
mean change the world,’ said Ed. “I mean overcome
death itself.’”
Will Ed
cheat death? Will he dodge the bullet of fate? In the
world of “Ed King,” what brings the all-powerful
“King of Search” to his final reckoning will keep
the reader enthralled until the final page of this
transcendently dark and dazzling book.
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