808 The American Century: Literature since 1945smoking and spending money as if there were no tomorrow. He hires April, or
Spring as he knows her, for a private dance in the Champagne Room. And, once he
has her there, he appears to be driven by curiosity about her: her real name, which
he eventually persuades her to reveal, the scar on her body, which he longs to touch,
why she does what she does in the club. April/Spring is not so much an elusive object
of desire for Bassam as an enigma – the enigma being precisely the otherness of
April/Spring to him, the otherness of a culture that he is both drawn to and loathes.
As with the other characters, what Dubus registers above all is this character’s
confusion, as he vacillates between resolution and panic, the conviction that he has
embarked on a course of action that he wanted and the suspicion that he is being
carried along by the remorseless and irreversible logic of events. Things happen to
Bassam; experiences flow through him, while he and the reader watch.
Which is not to say that Dubus makes the terrorist blameless. Bassam is complicit
in the events that occur to him. He is not simply a victim of circumstance. He is as
responsible for what happens as April is when she takes Franny to the strip club and
A.J. is when he then takes Franny away. If there is an ethic at work in this novel,
however, it is existential: right and wrong are measured behaviorally, in terms of
action, what each character does as he or she becomes immersed in the stream of
events. That stream is never fully understood by any of them; still less do they enjoy
more than partial control. They can behave more or less well or badly, but that
behavior does not lead to moral assessments that venture beyond the momentary
and conditional. Judgment in The Garden of Days, like character, is fluid, performa-
tive, the product of a constant negotiation. Haunted by crises that have not yet
occurred but hover over them like a thundercloud, people like April, A.J., and Bassam
struggle to enact their identities; there are differences here – of gender, ethnicity,
political affiliation, and so on – but the differences are a matter of superficial defini-
tion. What matters is their shared location in a liminal space between stream of
events and stream of consciousness: a territory where the distinctions between ter-
rorist and stripper, stripper and abductor, while indisputable, receive far less empha-
sis than the interface, the spaces where the characters thereby distinguished meet
and engage. Here, at this interface, characters like Bassam try to work out what is
happening to them, but that attempt is mostly unsuccessful. Meaning remains latent
for the characters in The Garden of Last Days; they watch, they witness, but they do
not work out. April ends up finding a new life with Franny, A.J. ends up in jail,
Bassam ends up dead. These are all endings of sorts, but they are inconclusive to the
extent that, implicitly, the streams of events and consciousness continue to flow.
Even with Bassam, the conclusion is inconclusive to the extent that the verdict on
him remains open. Asked what the terrorist she entertained was “like,” April says
simply, “Like a boy. Just some drunk and lonely boy.” Which says everything and
nothing. What we are left with is what we have encountered throughout the novel: a
resistance to the kind of holistic and historically continuous narrative on which
ideas of nation and nationality depend. That April, A.J., Bassam, and others at the
Puma Club are from the underclass is precisely the reason for telling their story.
They occupy a terrain quite separate from that of the dominant culture. As a result,GGray_c05.indd 808ray_c 05 .indd 808 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM