Hailey Finds The Fountainhead

Who buys the books at the top of the New York Times bestseller list? According to an article in the current Esquire it's not the masses of common folk who've been denied exposure to Jonathan Edwards, but strategically placed flunkies from the movie conglomerates who want to use "BASED ON THE NUMBER-ONE BEST SELLER!" to hype their pictures. And so if exposure to an evening of TV commercials promoting acrosol sprays to be aimed at seven different crucial bodily junctions doesn't convince you of the role of corporate capitalism in fomenting the ongoing crisis of taste in America, you might take a look at the current "number-one", where bad taste at last swims home to spawn at the fountainhead of the corporate aesthetic--Detroit, Motor City, Michigan, the town that brought you fins, concrete, smog, motels, controlled obsolescence and drive-in movie theatres.

A word about Detroit: a city with a metropolitan population twice that of Boston, its three main "sights", after the auto plants, are all corporate monuments built next to highways: one is "the largest tire in the world", on the road in from the airport, a multi-story whitewall job by Goodrich; another is a huge electronic billboard sponsored by Goodyear, greeting GM executives returning to Bloomfield Hills, which reveals--not the time, not the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, but the minute-by-minute total number of cars and trucks produced since the beginning of the year; finally, there is my favorite--a six-story-high flaming spark plug which flashes to drivers along Woodward Avenue the pious message, "Use A.C. Sparks and Watch Bonanza Every Sunday." Hailey calls Detroit "a great cultural center", and he is right.

In Wheels, without the geographical limitations of his earlier schlockbusters, Hotel and Airport, Hailey lets his high-octane narrative wander throughout the city: black-white confrontation in a parking lot, murder in a car factory, adultery in a motel. Eerily for me, many of the scenes take place in the shopping centers, auto dealerships and driveways of my home town of Birmingham, also home of the rocky marriage of Adam and Erica Trenton. Adam, the book's hero, is reportedly modelled on GM Vice President John DeLorean, known in the industry as a young Turk because he used to drive foreign sports cars until successive promotions forced him to start driving Chevrotlets. At any rate, Adam and Erica are suffering from the Great American Angst because each has begun to find inanimate objects more sexually attractive than the other's beautiful body. Adam's attentions have turned toward the Orion, a new model car General Motors is preparing to foist upon the public; Erica, in turn, has taken to shoplifting small items from the local Bonwit-Teller's. Brett DeLosanto, meanwhile, is facing the classic dilemma of the artist-in-society: should he continue to design cars or should he flee to California and make sculptures out of automobile parts? And poor emerson Vale--consumer crusader and author of "The American Car: Unsure in Any Need"--why, the man clearly has a fixation of seat belts and exhaust pipes.

But poorer still Arthur Hailey. For all his understanding of the machinery and machinations of the industry--much of which is described very well--he ultimately underestimates the emotional void in which auto men operate. The wealthier one gets in Detroit, the more one is expected to isolate himself amid an ever-growing mound of private possessions. The more Hailey's characters succeed in over-coming their various object fixations, the less real they become. In his attempts to bring auto-executive characters to life, Hailey is trying to turn stickmen into figures of flesh and blood. He doesn't understand that people in automobiles simply do not allow themselves the same human excesses as people in airports and people in hotels. The book doesn't ring true at moments of such attempted tenderness as the one where--during a weekend affair with a black schoolteacher--Adam says softly. "For the first time in my life I know, really know, what it means when they say 'Black is Beautiful.'" No, the real moments are like the one at a business conference where Hailey has the GM Board Chairman 'whimsically' saying, "Unless anyone has a better suggestion, we might as well begin." Yes, that's the way it is. That's exactly what passes for whimsy in the Motor City.

Naturally enough in this best-engineered of all possible worlds, Hailey ends his book on a happy note. The black factory worker character has been duly dispatched (kidnapped by the Mafia), Erica has decided to give up shoplifting in order to devote full time to her husband, and Adam--realizing this means that he can have his wife and inanimate objects too--begins planning for a new baby and a new car, code-named the Farstar. (The baby, one presumed, will have to settle for Buick.) Adam and Erica kiss, in a car, in a driveway.

"Well," she said, "between us we seem to be creating things." It was true, he thought happily. And his life was full. Tonight he had Erica, and this. Tomorrow, and in days beyond, there would be Farstar.

So much for little Buick, who won't see Poppa again until his sixteenth birthday, when he's presented with the keys to a 1987 Farstar Supreme with racing-striped window wipers and 792 cc's, shortly after which popps dies of a coronary in a traffic jam under the flaming spark plug, his last sight on earth being those electronic words, "Use A.C. Sparks and Watch Bonanza Every Sunday." But we leave this to Jacqueline Susanne.