Fred Wursup, the protagonist of Richard Stern’s new novel, is a journalist. Something of a celebrity, the author of a best-seller titled Down the American Drain, he is perceptive, intelligent, serious about his work—and his life is falling apart. One parent is senile; the other lives in a nursing home and cannot even recognize him. His two children are leaving; his wife has already left. Even his work seems shallow, trite, empty. He has, he thinks, become insensitive, removed; the journalist’s necessary distance has made too much seem artificial and unnecessary. As the novel opens, Wursup is standing atop his New York apartment building, peering through binoculars at his former wife in her apartment across the street. It is a symbol, of course, like so much in the novel, but it carries a beautiful kind of irony. “I’m sick of it all,” he says. “I can’t even see straight.”
At one point Wursup likens himself to Lambert Strether, “the Henry James hero who wouldn’t let himself profit from his mission. There was charming Maria Gostrey ready to cheer his awakened heart, but Strether backed off in a cloud of scruples.” Natural Shocks is about one man’s movement through a personal wasteland. Wursup, caught between the poles of his professional and his private life, attempts to fuse the two. In the process, his heart is indeed awakened—but to what?
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