Penguin Books, 1994; first published by William Morrow and Co. 1983

This novel is almost as good as the hyperbolic blurbs that adorn its flyleaf would suggest. It’s also a first novel, which has now been re-issued under the mighty Penguin USA imprint, as a companion for Wachtel’s more recent work. The pathos of the title Joe the Engineer, and of the whole novel, lies in the remarkably narrow margin of agency the protagonist scrapes together under the pressure of his circumstances and background; he’s a Vietnam Vet who hurried into married life and a menial job reading water-meters. His high-school nickname promised a creative and genuinely civic vocation that never materialized, and his inner life, though animated by a profound longing for something, has little or no purchase on the flow of events. What happens in this novel? Joe separates from his wife, on her decision; a not-very-close friend dies; a fistfight comes and goes with few consequences, and a few hundred small social transactions fill several weeks, at intervals separated by a few months.

The reader isn’t in it for the plot, and what gives Wachtel’s prose its pull is the seamless authenticity with which it renders a crappy life. And it’s true: nearly everybody has a big portion of his time devoted to deadening bills and jobs, and the muddling-through that so completely dominates Joe the Engineer is swallowing more and more Americans nowadays, as the wealth of our nation gets gradually sucked up by fewer and fewer wallets. But what really makes the art of this book, and of others like it, is the tastefully meager sprinkling of wisdom -- or more poigniantly, the language of wisdom, without real insight -- upon all that quiet desperation. Wachtel sets himself apart from the drearier side of the naturalist tradition by his management of Joe’s terrible scarcity of self-knowledge: every thirty pages, Joe seems to acquire the capacity to reflect on his condition, and then loses that capacity just as suddenly:

He unhappily begins to realize that he is someone who is going to get up, have coffee, punch in, drive out to a strange neighborhood, go down into its basements with its rats and roaches and read its water meters until each of the names on his sector cards has little numbers written in the blank spaces next to it. (57)

The most beautiful of these insights comes, naturally, at the novel’s near-ending:

Joe is feeling two things which are, maybe, one thing: That the struggle he is in will take him somewhere and that this time it will not end. Maybe the place it will take him to is where he finally accepts that this is all there is. (215)

An un-married non-meter reader. The farthest his headlights reach. (216)

One never gets the spoiling sense that the novelist, who knows all this stuff about agency and derring-do, is malignantly paying out lengths of epistemological rope for his creature, and that the fictional form is a cruel joke (“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,� Lear laments, “they kill us for their sport�). Where all this compassion is coming from remains the writer’s secret, and the note on the author satisfies us that he really is a neighborhood guy, likely to feel the very ambivalence and yearning on which Joe’s character is based. Go figure.

A few brilliant strokes: the more-enlightened-foil characters are reversals of the precedents for this genre: the woman who leaves Joe to go to college is more usually the protagonist, not the foil. The “black smart-ass� Joe instantly dislikes (and from whom he can therefore learn nothing) seems like an answer to those white Communists who play the more-enlightened-foil to Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, perhaps the most famous stuck-in-the-shits novel of the twentieth century. Wachtel almost never bungles the working class lingo, though sometimes somebody in this novel will seem too deliberately nasty. In all, the thing is a triumphant contribution to a genre from which we’ll be hearing more and more, as things deteriorate here in the heartland.