Kody Rawlee Green and Tella “Teal Cartwheels” Carticelli are young. They’re in love. And they kill people. At the beginning of Bud Smith’s newest novel Teenager, Kody’s just broken out of juvie, spurred on by a letter from Tella’s father telling him Kody will never see her again and that he better stay away because he, Mr. Arturo Carticelli, has a gun. Tella’s home might as well be a prison. Inside is a horror show from which she cannot escape, where her father sexually abuses her while her mother stands idly by (Neil Carticelli, her brother and only protector aside from Kody, has recently enlisted in the Navy and left Tella abandoned and alone). And even Italy, where Tella’s parents will exile her away from the rebellious Kody, will have the trappings of prison: dislocation from family, friends, and the one person whom she loves. Both lovers must escape—one from the law and the other from a sadistic family—and they must do it together. They plunge headlong into the world in order to escape it. This fever dream of beauty, madness, and violence begins with Kody’s murder of Tella’s mother and father to break them both free.
The fever dream and the desire for escape will be familiar to readers of Smith’s previous work, especially his 2018 collection Double Bird, and his story “Violets,” published in The Paris Review in 2020. Both of those works deal with characters self-destructing amid the precarity of American life. In “Violets,” two lovers receive a notice from the bank that their home will be foreclosed, so they burn it down and run away, smiling and laughing and, for the first time in a long time, enjoying themselves. Double Bird is filled with similar desperate acts: a dying man who says to the woman who’s just hit him with her car, “Don’t call an ambulance. I don’t have health insurance and that’s too much money”; a recent college graduate, saddled with student loans, digs a hole to live underground; a woman loses her unemployment insurance then takes a wild ride on a giant bird. In Teenager, Smith builds upon his previous work while invoking, paying homage to, and inserting himself into the genealogy of a classic American genre: the Bonnie and Clyde narrative. The result is a work in which Smith’s thematic preoccupations arrive matured, expanded, and beautifully rendered. Smith has said, “I figured it was always best to have a large body of work and then maybe the public at large would catch up with it all down the road.”[1] Smith’s new readership—this is his first book published by a major press—will experience in his early writing something akin to looking under the hood of a new car. They’ll see all the hard work done over a decade to develop voice, style, character, the machinations of great fiction, which arrive like a Mustang in this latest novel.
Like many Bonnie and Clyde narratives, Kody and Tella premise their escape on certain fantasies that, as our heroes attempt to actualize them, become delusions. Kody imagines himself as a cowboy, riding horses and pioneering the Wild West. And the fantasy enters the realm of delusion as he drives them across the country toward Montana, a place Kody has never been but insists it’s where they have “elbow room,” where there are glaciers and hot springs, and where it’s “inferred a person could make an honest living as a trapper and fur trader” (183). As they pull across the state line in this “piece of shit” Cadillac, one of the cars they’ve hijacked, stolen, nabbed, whatever, driving toward the ranch where Kody apparently has a job lined up, Tella leans over to Kody and asks him, “Well, is it everything you dreamed?” (176, 183).
At the center of Kody’s delusion is a morality that demands an authentic life. At the ranch, in search of true freedom, goodness, and “honest work,” Kody and Tella find nothing but the cheap knockoffs of a bygone era (183). The foreman, Bill Gold, makes Kody dig ditches and fill them back up just for the hell of it. The “Cattle Drive” isn’t one at all; the ranchers head to a resort and take tourists on a four-hour loop with some rented cows. Tella catches Becky Carson—Christian fundamentalist and her spiritual mentor—and Santo, an employee of the ranch, having sex while Becky’s husband watches, applauds them afterwards, then gives notes. These ruptures are damning not for their transgression of sexual mores or their allegiance to a tourist economy but for their inauthenticity, for these people’s self-misrepresentation. In one of Kody’s darkest, most cynical moments, after these various revelations, he thinks: “life wasn’t a movie you watched. Bosses all the way back to the big bang had been frauds. Phony stardust. Phony deities. Impersonators, all. Dazzling con artists” (232).
But what is Kody worshipping if not a false deity? Before the ranch, he dreams of playing bandits, of robbing trains with Colt .45 Peacemakers and dynamite, of getting busted out of jail by Tella. Kody’s real America is itself phony, and the novel’s greatest con artist is himself. But he’s not alone in the con. Even Tella, who reins Kody back into reality, has a great dream that Elvis is her biological father. This dream partly propels her to accept her parents’ murder and run off with Kody. The tension Smith creates between a morality premised on authenticity and our heroes’ delusion spells certain disaster. But before I get to their end, let me invite you to take a detour. Even though the reader of the novel knows—under the strictures and logic of their escape (and the generic expectations of stories like these)—that these two lovebirds must meet a tragic fate, let us pause briefly within the promise of their fantasy.
After they leave the ranch, Kody and Tella find magic at the top of a mountain, where a man called Dead Bob, who had died in a river, had been taken to a medicine man and was brought back to life. And they find it again, high up, “Halfway to heaven” in a sequoia tree where they live for a while, hiding out after Kody shoots and injures Tella’s brother, who deserted his post in the Navy go after his sister (348).
Up in the tree, Kody and Tella lose themselves in the hard, honest work of building a life for themselves at high elevation: putting planks down, strapping a mountaineering tent to the tree, attaching a rope ladder. In the tree they’re able to breathe easy for perhaps the first time in their lives. Tella takes up a bit of painting. Watercolors, mostly. And Kody’s constant headache, with him since he was pulled out of a cherry tree by his foster mother’s boyfriend Dale and hit his head, almost goes away. The tree and the life they create for themselves is “exactly what they’d both searched for” (351).
The tree promises quietude and a second shot at a domestic life. The first version in New Jersey failed each of them spectacularly. There they lived their entire lives beaten, bruised, kicked, told that they didn’t mean shit to anybody or anything. But in their tailor-made redo, Tella and Kody can finally revel in the magic of having been chosen by someone else, are able to find happiness and beauty and peace precisely because they are enjoying a brief respite from the pursuit of the law. In other words, what allows for the fantasy is the fact that they are alone.
But the novel’s great tragedy is that the only feasible life is the one they cannot have. In Smith’s words, “Time caught up” (375). Their traumatic experience makes living in normal, polite, regulated society unbearable, but to escape it is impossible. Kody just wants to be left alone with his girl. Sounds easy enough, but what that means in practice is murdering her parents—and trying to murder her brother—because none of them will let go of their daughter and because they themselves threaten Kody with violence. Violence is the only path to resolution in Kody’s mind. It’s what he’s been taught through brutal experience. While this is not an excuse for his violence, it reveals the hopelessness of the young lovers’ situation.
So Kody and Tella must fail. And their fantasy-turned-delusion illustrates why their escape is impossible and their destruction inevitable. Kody’s fantasy of Wild West lawlessness and violence is premised on the false—yet very American— idea that that outlaw violence was committed against the wishes of the state. In this view, rogue cowboys roamed in the name of justice, stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, advocates of the common people. Kody doesn’t understand, or, more likely, was never taught, that lawlessness, which he imagines as an anti-statist rebellion, instead facilitated a state-sanctioned project of expansion and genocide. The West was a state of exception: the law suspended because it served the state’s interest. But the violence Kody and Tella commit—violence very much at odds with the values, mores, and laws of the government—will never be tolerated precisely because they arrive too late. By the time the state reaches the Pacific, there is no state of exception (except for the state itself). So it is inevitable that the full weight of the system will crush these kids in their anachronistic pursuits.
Nowhere is this more salient than in the last section of the novel. After months of bliss, two policemen happen upon Kody and Tella’s camp. Havoc ensues, and both cops end up dead in a ditch. Kody and Tella steal the police’s armored vehicle and make a mad dash to the hospital to treat Kody’s gunshot wound, but this final escape ends with a phalanx of police surrounding the vehicle, trapping them inside of it. Kody pretends he has kidnapped Tella, and she is let free. The police beat Kody to death.
But is he really dead? In the moment when Kody’s heart stops, Smith tells us that “he felt fine.” Kody is ripped apart, and every atom is “cast up into a new swirling merry-go-round of sharp light.” But after it’s over, “he waited there in the dark” (376). The world, the state, has just beat his brains out, and we might presume that this means the dream is over. But still we see him, if not alive, then still there, somewhere, sitting in the dark, waiting for Tella, whom he can see sometimes if he stares hard enough, emerging “out of the darkness, glowing with a billion droplets of water, catching a sun he was not privy to. She shone momentarily, in lusters, rainbowlike and iridescent, before diving out of view, her eyes wide and her teeth showing in joy, swept away in a surging wave of light he could not follow” (377). Smith is highly aware of the conventions of the Bonnie-and-Clyde genre, whose version of escape is a parabola: a steep ascent, a reckoning, a steep decline, collapsing in a hail of bullets.
But here, Smith asks a different question and offers a new proposal. Kody’s life after death, the kiss he shares with Tella before they leave the armored vehicle, a kiss that lasts several lifetimes, asks: who are we to say that the dream is less real than the physical world? Smith’s proposal—and Kody and Tella’s, too—is that the process of moving past the world is just that: a process. It’s a cycle of near escapes from the pressures and constrictions of living in society. Herein lies the tragedy and delight of Smith’s novel: our heroes are in search of a life free from violence but convinced that the only way to get there is by enacting it. We root for them and are appalled by them, cry for them and cheer for them. We want them to be free while knowing their freedom means destruction, death, and violence. Kody and Tella diagnose the diseases of their culture with the eyes of a good doctor. But their course of treatment—joyful and wild—is not without its consequences. Perhaps healing never is.
Notes:
[1] Andrew Byrds, “Reading Always Got Me Out of Hell: Bud Smith on Fever Dreams, Publishers, and Making Art Now,” Entropy, (February 15, 2019), https://web.archive.org/web/20210118160050/https://entropymag.org/bud-smith-interview/.