Speak and Write to Make Millions 2016 Reviews
The Fledglings, by David Homel: Review
David Homel's new novel is a story-inside-a-story whose frame hangs on an ex-architect living in Connecticut
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The Fledglings
By David Homel
Cormorant Books
303 pp; $21.95
David Homel'due south new novel is a story-within-a-story whose frame hangs on Joey Krueger, an ex-builder living in Connecticut who's made a fortune with a serial of businesses preying on peoples' fears of environmental catastrophe.
He'due south had less success with his two marriages. Joey's first wife left him after he hit her during an argument almost the children she was denying him through her "wilful sterility." Now Elke, his 2d, has insisted on carve up rooms because of what she considers his excessive devotion to his 80-year-old female parent, Bluma.
In improver to dyeing his hair purple and embarking on an impulsive matter with his married next-door neighbour, Caroline, Joey has decided to tackle the ennui of eye age by writing Bluma's life story. "What did he know of his family story? There was a bad man, his male parent, who was bad in an ordinary fashion, and a good woman, his mother, who was extraordinarily good." The question is one in a serial of narratorial paradoxes, one that is perhaps best answered with more questions; namely, how could a middle-aged only child who adores his mother be then uncurious about her past? And if he knows and so little, on what does he base the notion that her story is then worthwhile and fascinating?
Acknowledging that he'south "no author," Joey decides that the final document will be not be a volume but "something truer than a book: a life story — hers, told past her." To ensure it is preserved for posterity, he plans to bury the transcript in a fourth dimension capsule.
And yet the story that we get, starting with Bluma's coming of historic period in a Prohibition-era Chicago suburb, and which alternates with Joey'due south life in the present day, is ultimately non told by Bluma herself simply by a narrator in the third person, 1 who sounds very much like he (or she) considers himself a author. Some of the intimate sexual details it includes, moreover, don't seem like the kind of thing a mother unremarkably shares with her son — peculiarly ane whom she's ever kept in the nighttime nearly her past.
It's a tale, putatively, of feisty immigrant derring-do and girl ability — qualities that exercise manage to emerge, albeit inconsistently, in glimmers. Fifteen-year-old Bluma spends her days running drinks and dealing cards to a sentimental grouping of Irish cops at her male parent's speakeasy until her earth view is expanded by a vacation at her cousin Bella's rented summertime house. Dubbing themselves "the Fledglings," the two girls vow lifelong, married man-free allegiance to each other. After that, the relationship more or less fizzles. Bluma falls in with a small-time thief named Agnes and the two quickly graduate from knocking over wealthy women for their furs and wallets to robbing gas stations at gunpoint.
One of the places Homel does hit narratorial footstep is in his fable-similar telling of Bluma's parents' meeting before they immigrated to America. When she married Abraham Tabiliak in their small Orthodox Jewish Lithuanian hamlet, Rachel had expected him to reject Libby, the "Mongoloid" daughter of her first union. Instead, Abe treats Libby with a protective tenderness that fifty-fifty her female parent isn't capable of. Abe is a "bull of a man," and an ogre with his own children, so his relationship with Libby is meant to show he has depth. Still, Homel's right to use period-specific pejoratives like "Mongoloid," "halfwit" and "retard" is undermined past some of the blatant stereotypes about people with Down's that he subsequently trades in; to wit, that they're unerringly cheerful and affectionate and love music.
Continuity is a frequent problem. Homel writes scenes as if they were detached entities, with no obligation to what comes before or after. Bluma's married man is shocked when it's revealed she'due south a target in Joe McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt. It's a discombobulating surprise for us, too, given that we were there at the start of their courting and, similar her married man, never caught wind of the fact that she "went all the way" as a Communist. Later on on, the narrator, channelling Joey, tells us: "Public radio was his one concession to New England intellectual life. You had to mind in one time in a while to find out what the culture vultures were upwards to." A few paragraphs subsequently, nosotros're told he only started listening to NPR two weeks agone, when he met Caroline.
A persistent undercurrent of lasciviousness is some other unnecessary source of distraction. Way as well much is fabricated of Bella and Bluma'south adolescent breasts, which are referred to in a range of terms, sometimes in the aforementioned sentence. At times, the novel'south prurience has a bizarre border. Bluma's medico's reaction to her pulling up her shirt to bear witness her appendectomy scar is, "Please, put that abroad, don't tempt me. I might non be able to control myself." And when Elke tells Joey she too is having an affair, he asks only if she's "taking precautions," a response she out-weirds by boasting well-nigh her power to self-lubricate.
And that's the thing: When The Fledglings does manage to cohere, it tends to get bogged downwards in these off-putting sideshows. The devil may exist in the details but in this instance it's also in everything else.
Emily Donaldson is a freelance critic and editor
Source: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/book-reviews/the-fledglings-by-david-homel-review
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