This is my kind of novel. The disenchanted, urban, pan-European middle-aged protagonist is the only type of character that interests me at the moment. This book goes deeper into the kind of philosophical yet entertaining writing that Parks' readers have come to expect of him. The novel captures its protagonist at the riveting crisis point after a son's suicide, as he contemplates the breakup of his marriage.
If so wonderful, then why not five stars? Too much back and forth in the narrator's head, time sequence confusion, the way we can't figure out if we're in the present or the immediate past or both sumultaneously. There are always at least two thoughts being conveyed simultaneously, because the narrative strategy aims to mimic the jumbled thought processes during the hero's crisis. The author succeeds in getting this effect across, but it makes for a roller coaster effect. One has to read passages over and over to get at the gems of insight, of which there are many. But I'm afraid many readers will simply not be willing to battle the rocky terrain. Too much of the writer's effort, and the reader's attention, are expended on this wild ride, when I longed for information that would make the auxiliary characters more real to me. I still don't have enough of a sense of the dead Marco before his schizophrenia descended to feel a real sense of loss on behalf of the narrator. And throughout most of the book, the wife Burton is determined to leave seems more a larger than life symbol of Italian national character than a flesh and blood woman. She only acquires a name, for example, in the last chapter.
It also seems a bit of a lame anti-climactic afterthought when, late in the book, Burton reveals, "I can't forgive my wife for growing old." When remarks like these are thrown out, almost out of context, and a past mistress surfaces but is only sketchily dealt with, I sometimes suspect that Parks uses these male fiction conventions not because they are true to character, but because they are simply male fiction convetions, a way of saying, "Yes, I'm a regular guy, a twentieth century adulturous man." The mistress of almost five years' standing seems tacked on -- if he loved the girl as he says he did, why don't we feel it? Such tricks do not sit well with the philosophical sweep of the rest of the book, seem lazy when the reader knows what depths the narrative is capable of plumbing. Some auxiliary characters, such as the wife's former lover, Gregory, earn their space, but too many appear as plot-driven, conscious creations.
Yet, these are rather minor faults. Parks offers something unavailable in mainstream literary fiction today, rising above the typical clever-clever postmodernist wordplay of most "leading" British authors, or the ponderous political correctness of their American counterparts. How many books these days seriously explore ideas without sinking into preaching?
I applaud this book for questioning the current culture's over-emphasis on blaming and explaining through simplistic pop psychology formulas. As in Martin Amis' Night Train, we have the aftermath of a suicide without apparent motive, people struggling to find meaning behind an apparently meaningless act. But the phenomenon is rendered both so much more personally and universally: " ... we all invent stories to explain these horrible things to ourselves. We invent the past. When perhaps there is no explanation." The central concept of destiny, rather than psychology, determining the course of people's lives also figures in some of Anita Brookner's novels. I wish the often too chaotic style of Parks' novel could have borrowed just a little of Brookner's calmness, in order to let such concepts breathe.
The idea of going deeper into a marriage, into an experience, rather than starting over is explored in this novel. Likewise, in the writing itself, Parks goes deeper into his own style -- deeper into the workings of a human mind, deeper into faith, into philosophy, deeper into meaning, or the mystery of its lack: " ... And it occurs to me now that the brighter the light, the more evident it is that revelation is denied. The more clearly one sees, the more inescapable enigma becomes ... Whereas in a shady room ... It is just possible to imagine that mysteries will one day be revealed." Wonderful stuff.
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- D R HandleyReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2019
Reflection? Action? Everything!
