the colorful Runyonesque characters they meet in casinos, oblivious to the fact that such characters populate half the barrooms in America, that, in truth, they need only have driven a few blocks for their “colorful characters,” had they been inclined to transgress the rigid stratifications that (in their hometowns) stack the classes like liqueurs in a desert drink.
America, in other words, is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place than Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home. The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize—and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. Thus the whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication.
Moreover, since I must regularly venture out of Vegas onto the bleak savannas of high culture, and there, like an aging gigolo, generate bodily responses to increasingly abject objects of desire, there is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home, of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the heart of the pitch-black desert—of coming home to the only indigenous visual culture on the North American continent, a town bereft of white walls, gray wool carpets, ficus plants, and Barcelona chairs—where there is everything to see and not a single pretentious object demanding to be scrutinized.
I remember one particular evening in the spring. I was flying back from Washington, D.C. after serving on a National Endowment for the Arts panel. For four solid days, I had been seated on a wooden chair in a dark room looking at racks of slides, five at a time. Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, ad infinitum. All hope departed somewhere near the end of the second day, and I started counting popular iconography: skulls, little houses, little boats, altars, things in jars, etc. By the end of the third day, despair had become a very real option, but we finally selected the correct number of winners—and a number of these actually won. The rest won the privilege of having their awards overturned by a higher court on the grounds of propriety.
The moment I stepped off the plane, I sat down in the terminal to play video poker. Basically, I was doing the same thing I had been doing in Washington: looking at banks of five images, one after another, interpreting finite permutations of a limited iconography, looking for a winner. Sitting there at the slot machine, however, I was comfortable in the knowledge that Vegas cheats you fair—that, unlike the rest of America (and Washington in particular), the payoffs are posted and the odds easily calculable. I knew how much of a chance I had to win. It was slim, of course, but it was a real chance nevertheless, not some vague promise of parental benevolence contingent on my behavior.
In the reality of that chance, Vegas lives—in those fluttery moments of faint but rising hope, in the possibility of wonder, in the swell of desire while the dice are still bouncing, just before the card flips face-up. And win or lose, you always have that instant of genuine, justifiable hope. It is always there. Even though we know the rules governing random events are always overtaken by the law of large numbers, there is always that window of opportunity, that statistical crazy zone, before this happens, when anything can happen. And what’s more, if you win, you win! You can take it home. You cannot be deemed unworthy after the fact—as we all were in Washington, where we played our hearts out and never had a fucking chance. So right there in the airport, I could make a little wager, and there was a real chance that luck and foolish courage might, just for the moment, just for a couple of bucks, override the quagmire of status and virtue in which we daily languish. And if I got really lucky, I might move up from food to cocktail. Hey, don’t laugh. It could happen.
SIMPLE HEARTS
In the autumn of 1875, Gustave Flaubert suspended his Herculean labors on Bouvard and Pécuchet to write three stories about saints. They were published together in April of 1877 under the title Trois Contes. The finest and strangest of these stories he wrote for his friend George Sand, who never stopped pleading with him to mitigate his customary bleakness a little and write “a work marked by compassion”—and “A Simple Heart” (Un coeur simple) is certainly so marked, although not in any way that George Sand would have recognized. Set in the early years of the nineteenth century, in the bleak, provincial milieu around Pont-l’Évêque and Trouville (only a few miles from Flaubert’s home at Croisset), “A Simple Heart” tells the story of Félicité, an isolated, illiterate, Catholic house-servant; it narrates her life from birth to death as a poised, sotto voce litany of labor and loss, of emotional neglect and wasted time that dissolves, suddenly, in the last sentence of the story, into this dazzling image of mercy—a vision of grace as gaudy and permissive as a Tiepolo ceiling.
Eighty years after Flaubert finished writing “A Simple Heart” in provincial France, I finished reading it in provincial Texas, sitting in the wooden swing on the shady porch of my grandparents’ house in south Fort Worth, and, having finished it, Flaubert’s story, which had transported me out of the present, delivered me back into it with sharpened awareness. I can still remember the hard angle of the morning light and the smell of cottonseed in the lazy air as I sat there on the swing with my forearms on my knees and Trois Contes between my hands, amazed that writing could do what it had just done.
Since I was reading not just as a reader, but as a reader who wanted to be a writer, I also felt a glimmer of insight into a question that had troubled me since I had read Madame Bovary and Salammbo in quick succession, as Flaubert wrote them. Why, I wondered, would the cold-eyed master of Madame Bovary, the scourge of provincial ennui (whose consequences I felt qualified to judge) have abandoned that worthy project to write a romance of Mediterranean antiquity? Why would he have barricaded himself with books and dreams in the study of his mother’s house, out there amidst the fields of mud and vegetables, to reimagine the oriental glamour of ancient Carthage?
To what end? I wondered, and, now, in the tiny apotheosis at the end of “A Simple Heart,” I saw a door opening between the two books—between the banality of Madame Bovary and the splendor of Salammbo—and I understood, if only vaguely, something about writing and what it does in the world. Since then, I have come to regard “A Simple Heart” as Flaubert’s great allegory of his own vocation—and have always assumed that if Madame Bovary is none other than Flaubert as a fool in abjection, as he himself suggested, the servant Félicité is almost certainly Flaubert as a saint in glory, rising up, in the final moments of the story, out of the banality of his home country into the opening wings of this dazzling, improbable parrot.
The tacit parallel between Flaubert’s endeavors and those of his character, I think, may be inferred from the peculiarities of tense and tone that complicate “A Simple Heart”—more certainly since, given Flaubert’s methods, we may presume that these peculiarities are far from inadvertent. In two passages describing the local landscape, for instance, Flaubert slips abruptly into the present tense. This jolts in French, but it has the effect of collapsing the distance between Flaubert and his narrative by substituting the voice of Gustave, the local citizen, for that of Flaubert, the all-seeing author. A similar collapse of authorial distance occurs in those moments when Flaubert’s cool narration of Félicité’s existence suddenly glitters with sophisticated contempt. In these passages, I suspect, the cosmopolitan Flaubert wants to remind us that, even though he can forgive Félicité’s provincial innocence, he cannot forgive his own lost innocence in her—for they are two in one.
Considering Félicité as a character in a story, then, it helps to think of her as Flaubert’s Job, a character equally afflicted, yet bereft of Job’s anger at the injustice of his afflictions. Because, although Félicité suffers, she never feels that she is suffering injustice. Things are stolen from her that she never suspects are hers to claim. Her family abandons her, then exploits her. She doesn’t even notice. Her only beau humiliates her, then abandons her. She accepts the rejection and seeks no further. Her employer, a provincial widow, underpays her and treats her like a domestic animal. She is grateful for the shelter. She goes to church and prays for everyone.
Beyond this, Flaubert would have us understand, the entire