By Michael Collins
Andy Mozina’s fourth book, Tandem, follows middle aged, recently divorced economics professor Mike Kovacs through a chain of events resulting from a hit-and-run in which he accidentally kills a young couple. In addition to allowing us access to the excursions and evolution of Mike’s consciousness, the novel complicates our conditioned responses to his accident and subsequent efforts to evade the law, in several ways. One is the qualifications presented through other characters’ perspectives, all of whom suffer, wound, misinterpret, and love – much like Mike. In addition to these impressions, every other chapter is told from the point of view of Claire, the mother of one of the crash victims, who subsequently begins a relationship with Mike – You’ll have to read the book to find out how that all works out. The other fundamentally – and at times paradoxically – deepening aspect is Mozina’s probing and incisive humor, Twain-esque in its ability to demand that we reconsider both our own moral assumptions and those of the central characters while – and often precisely because we are – laughing. Humor and the interplay between and the characters’ perspectives balance one another throughout the work, often calling into question our basis for judging – or even understanding – other people’s lives, choices, and relationships.
Humor is also part of Mike’s own charm – perhaps in large part due to its preexisting role in his psyche as a coping mechanism. Mike’s halting and sometimes hilarious adventures of trying to refurbish his damaged car and reorient his own irrevocably altered life and worldview after the accident show us how self-aware he is and how desperately he wishes for a moral universe that would contextualize what has happened, what he has done, what he fears will be done to him, how he can continue to live in community with others. The result is alternatingly disarming and unnerving. Discrete daily awakenings erode psychological, legal, and even theological assumptions as Mike’s conscious quest to be “very good” results in incrementally deeper questioning of what this could even mean.
The pivotal event of Mike’s life-story, the unintended crime that horrifies the perpetrator, precipitates several iterations of a journey with his conscience, beginning with examining and rejecting the presumption of forfeiting his freedom: “Of course, he still needed to turn himself in. But they were dead, so, at this point, why? There was his own conscience, but was his own conscience important? Up until now, his random fits of conscience had only caused trouble at work and in his marriage. And if his conscience didn’t feel right, who would suffer other than himself?” (13-14). There is a convenient assumption here that laws and punishments serve merely to prevent death without also deterring behaviors that could lead to it. On the other hand, everything he says about his conscience proves true.
Perhaps his own apprehension of this apparent insufficiency of punishment leads to the “bargains” by which he intends to structure his prospective life thereafter: “…he would be a much better person to everyone, from now on, all the time. ‘I will be very good,’ he said aloud” (18). However, the unintended irony in his thought process already reveals the comparative triviality of his desperate, almost prayerful offerings of penitence: “He would volunteer for things so other people wouldn’t have to do them.” Mike isn’t trying to be funny here. Mozina is letting us perceive in the irony something amazing and horrifying about the psyche’s inclination to remake itself in ways that seem to offer survival. The brief chuckle here is the distance necessary for our reflection. As Mike recovers and grows, such insights shift, increasingly becoming the products of his own self-reflection.
Mike’s quest to “be very good” provides more laugh-out-loud moments as well: “He sat ostentatiously close to his window, inviting someone to sit next to him and launch into their pathetic life story. He would listen his ass off. He would listen like no stranger on an interstate bus had ever listened. He would make comments that would reveal how attentive a loving person could be” (51). Note the delicate use of “a” and “could” at the end of the passage, as if Mike’s unconscious strategy is to construct a hypothetically super-good individual and then somehow become them. Again, this is preposterous, but also: Just go through one day conscious of how many times goodness is equated with pleasing others in recognizably socially acceptable ways.
This do-gooder-ism, however, seems ultimately unable to convince Mike of his own fictions, to mask the need for unburdening, response. He visits a priest, ostensibly and hilariously to negotiate a “fair” rendering of punishment and absolution. Here, his humor grows increasingly self-aware of the impossibility, intuiting his need to stage his understanding of the void of comprehensible moral response to his situation: “He was actually glad the priest was thinking carefully. He wanted to weed out the weak excuses in the hope of – he had to admit it now – finding an excuse or two that would stick, morally. Or, barring that, maybe they could agree on a spiritual accommodation: Maybe he could wear a hairshirt for a set period of time, or otherwise earn the modern version of an indulgence” (117).
Interestingly, it is the self-aware humor itself that Mike intuitively returns to as a stabilizing practice, through which he nearly simultaneously appreciates small moments of insight, his goodness in investing the psychic energy necessary to notice them, and his silliness in congratulating himself for it: “People didn’t appreciate gasoline – they were numb to it, in a way. But he did” (157). Such moments are often brilliant razor-edges of the narrative presentation of Mike’s thoughts, calling into unresolvable question whether they show a desperate need to find the good in himself or a growing sense that the search itself is irrelevant to his survival. Or, perhaps such quips simply show his mind returning to its pre-accident habits.
Indeed, humor has had an intuitively soothing and socially protective role for Mike from the beginning: “A replica car – a replicar – distracted him in a pleasant way” (45). This is opposed to the original car, which he ironically renames “the murder weapon.” The car quietly presents an objective correlative for Mike’s impacted, then split – and then reconstructed and repainted – sense of self. This includes his humorous rehearsal of the fictions upon which this ongoing personhood, itself an overt fiction at this point, will be based: “Mike had cycled through so many possible lies about his Camrys that he had to write out on his legal pad The Final True Histories of the Two Camrys to get his latest stories straight” (156). The “legal pad” points toward some ongoing dramatic irony.
Referring to his original car as “the murder weapon” also opens another interesting way Mike mirrors those of us who haven’t hit people with cars, his attempts to treat anxiety as if it were moral struggle. He tries to think of his personal disassembling of the smashed parts of the car as “humanizing and dignifying the experience by personally performing the awful mechanical processes,” yet this requires taking a break to remind himself with calming breaths and seemingly no awareness of the irony that “[h]is life was no worse now than it had been when he woke up this morning” (84). In a similar attempt, “He believed shopping at an independent bookseller banked him only a speck of redemption against a mountain of guilt, but he needed constant positive offsets to tolerate being with himself” (132). Nonetheless, after returning home, “He had time to install the assembly, but instead he imagined being outed and stabbed to death by a ring of highly literate women wielding shrimp forks” (133). Consciously terrified of being confined in prison, Mike spends all of his time confining himself in constricting cycles of thought attempting to free him from apprehensions that it cannot.
Relative freedom from this confinement could not come in a more counterintuitive way than beginning a relationship with the mother of one of the crash victims. This leads to more deeply questionable versions of the previous cosmic-bargains as they are complicated by his own desires: “Wouldn’t the person who facilitated her escape from a sinking relationship be doing her a service? Wasn’t doing her such a service a form of recompense for killing her daughter? Wouldn’t that good be a better good than confessing? If he felt love for her, and she felt love for him, and she no longer felt love for her husband, weren’t they, in fact, morally obligated to consummate their love, even though, he had accidentally killed her daughter? (123; italics original). The passage is uncomfortable as it arises from the fact that Mike’s odd situation doesn’t prevent him from exhibiting common thought patterns, like trying to convince ourselves we are good people by convincing ourselves that we are thinking as if we were. Or trying to convince ourselves that wanting something is the same as it being good.
From another perspective, people who are falling in love tend to contort logic in any way necessary to convince themselves it’s a good idea. One effect of this cognitive cocktail of highly conscious cover-up and emotional openness is that Mike renovates his worldview from the ground up, focusing on relational aspects: “Maybe there was no way out, he’d thought as she’d led him to her front door – only a way elsewhere. And maybe not all was lost. Maya Angelou wisely said people won’t remember what you did, just how you made them feel, and maybe making Claire feel loved could atone for what he did” (146). Ad hoc morality still blurs with existential insight, but, then, perhaps this very awareness that his moral universe will always be subject to correction constitutes an aspect of the atonement he originally, misguidedly sought in hastily reified goodness. His apprehension of self-pardoning thoughts only quickens as the relationship moves forward: “for several delirious moments, he almost believed only he could comfort her, because he had been the one to hurt her” (154).
Ironically, – perhaps – his predilection for self-awareness, his alternatingly self-justifying and self-lascerating but nevertheless abiding self-reflection, have been keeping him relatively sane through a sort of fascination with his mind’s own fictionalizing: “He dimly grasped that his instinct for self-excuse was limitless. He gave himself a sort of credit for this dim grasping” (53). Here, too, he often delivers his insights to himself with a spoon full of humor: “Just as he hoped to ameliorate his guilt by weighing acts of love against it, so was he sometimes tempted to ameliorate his guilt by accusing others of acts against him. He resolved to keep an eye on the latter tendency, as he sensed it could undermine his moral development” (54). In other places, he quietly notices changes in his thinking that would lead to wise moral advice if he could say them to other people without being incarcerated: “Being unable to read history with a pure sense of moral righteousness was another unfortunate consequence of committing a hit-and-run” (132). Mike says it best himself during his experiment with returning to confession: “He wondered what he would say in the name of truth, and what he might learn about himself in the process” (116).
It increasingly seems as if Mike provisionally evades literal prison to live in an existential one in which all is provisional. At times his humor presents deeper complexities about human relationships as if they were merely things he should work through on his increasingly subtle quest for self-betterment: “It occurred to him he could no longer distinguish between the care and attentiveness required to manipulate someone and the care and attentiveness required to love someone. He could no longer distinguish between what was self-serving and what was serving another. He felt he should know these differences” (216). This is an objective problem that self-reflective people will engage with over and over again in their lifetimes. Wrestling with it himself may well make Mike a better person, but it will never release him from the accident.
Redemption is not possible here, partly because there is no one to offer it: “…now there was no sign of the accident. There was no sign of God, either. Mike was alone in the world with his actions. That was all” (165). More deeply, we learn with Mike that the human psyche itself is the cause of human manipulation and division; hiding the crime in the novel often looks a lot like the ways in which we hide aspects of ourselves from one another in “regular” life. Yes, this opens up several convenient excuses for evading prescribed social penalties, but if he feels the isolation implied in these thoughts, there is also no time off for good behavior. The question the reader will never be able to answer is how deeply he actually feels this lack of relational grounding – and how much it actually troubles him: “Mike couldn’t remember an important conversation in which someone told him what he wanted to hear. He wondered if there was a point in talking to people if this continued to be the case” (196). We don’t ultimately get to know such things about other people: “He was getting used to hiding right in front of her” (108).
From another perspective, what Mike does in finding another also-broken person and making a new life together actually makes a lot of sense, knowledge of redemption’s impossibility the psychological “hairshirt” that reminds us of our shared need for others, perhaps even forming relationships more lasting for their acceptance of our common shadows: “Bad Faith multiplied by Guilt equals Love. It didn’t capture everything – no series of equations could, of course – but it was a start” (163). The characters’ inner struggles with these contingent and insubstantial moorings of reality open to consideration of both their freeing and alienating aspects. We’re lucky this is all presented to us with humor that tacitly offers understanding of much of what it needles, as if knowing we will shiver its insights more than enough when we are along with our own thoughts. In doing so, the Tandem offers readers something deeper than forgiveness: It sees through us as if we were other people. Luckily, the story is so engaging, insightful, and funny – we won’t realize this until it’s too late.
You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Tandem-Andy-Mozina/dp/1948954834?ref_=ast_author_dp
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. www.notthatmichaelcollins.com
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North of Oxford 