| IT runs deep in life, the feeling that we have wandered down some corridor just alongside the one where we truly belong. An inattentive step or two and already we have traveled too far. The door has disappeared. Our place in the world has become irrecoverable. The past half-decade of American letters has seen the translation or publication of a little pack of kindred novels intended to reproduce this sensation, nearly all of them fascinating. Call it the literature of the ontological wrong turn. Some of its representatives have been issued to great gales of attention, like "1Q84," by Haruki Murakami, or "Remainder," by Tom McCarthy, others to the keen enthusiasm of a few lucky explorers, like "Metropole," by Ferenc Karinthy, or (by my lights the secret masterpiece of the field) "The Other City," by Michal Ajvaz. To that beguiling list add J. Robert Lennon's allusive and mysterious new novel, "Familiar," his ninth book and one of his finest. "All of this is impossible, we're doing impossible things," Lennon writes. "People do impossible things, all day long." For Elisa Macalaster Brown, returning to New York after a visit to Wisconsin, the world reveals its impossibility on a dull stretch of Interstate 90 when the crack in her windshield, by which she likes to align her car with the roadside, instantaneously vanishes. All at once she is carrying a different phone, wearing different clothes. The clouds have multiplied in the sky. She is still herself, or some version of herself, but what that means is no longer certain. Only gradually does her life disclose the full range of its differences to her. Some of those differences are mundane or amusing: the moment the change takes place, her mouth fills with the taste of mint from the gum she is suddenly chewing, and while she used to find politics meaningless, now she is known for her Sarah Palin obsession. Some pose a predicament: she has a job whose responsibilities she is not sure how to fulfill, a therapist she has never met and a best friend to whom she has never spoken. And some wrench her so far outside the history she recollects that she can barely accommodate herself to them: her son Silas, who died in a car accident, is alive, while her other son, Sam, has become alienated from her; the lover she once took now greets her as a stranger; and her marriage has become sweet, loving, "cheerful, cheerful, cheerful," rather than the "habitual, practical, inert" exercise it used to be. "To pick up the phone and find that love is gone, that's something a person can understand," she reflects. "To pick up the phone and find that love is here, where it doesn't belong: well." What happened? she wonders, and so do we, and while the novel produces a whole flock of theories, not one of them colors its pages for longer than a moment before it darts out of sight. Has fate offered Elisa the chance to shoulder her life onto a new path? Is she meant to correct the decisions she remembers making or to affirm them? Has she entered an actual parallel reality, or is the life she recalls entirely false, the result of an "imagination broken by guilt and grief"? Has her new life been her real one all along? Where does the glitch finally lie: in her mind or in the universe? Is there another Elisa, with whom she has traded places, and if so what has become of her? Or is Elisa herself merely a copy, duplicated and dislocated from the original, that lonely wife and grieving mother still out there enduring her days somewhere? Is there a reason for her transformation, an intelligence behind it? Can she ever find her way back home? Life is like a long fall from a tremendous height; or no - like a condemned house collapsing abruptly into the earth; or no - like a cell undergoing mitosis, "straining to separate . . . pushing at the edges of its tiny world"; or no - like an ornate video game ("INSTRUCTIONS: FIND YOURSELF"), the maneuvers it permits abundant but not limitless; or no - like the static on a TV screen, "a mesmerizing and random and utterly boring thing," Elisa thinks, "that nevertheless compelled and frightened her." The book doesn't forbid any of these possibilities, but it doesn't insist upon any of them, either. Instead, it offers readers a swerving existential mystery of the sort that Dennis Potter used to champion: all clues, no solutions. (Lennon's recent collection "Pieces for the Left Hand," with its hundred alluringly peculiar little stories, is all clues, too, but with one important difference: Each story is a clue by itself, sequestered from every other, and each seems to answer some tiny unspoken mystery of its own.) Elisa might feel that her experience has passed beyond her understanding, but even the most conventional life occasionally presents the same feeling. Turn your head a bare inch to the left and you'll catch a glimpse of something you can't explain, something strange shimmering beneath the dirt and asphalt of the ordinary. The book reflects this sensation down to its very title, "Familiar," a word that indicates the normal, of course, the commonplace, but also the supernatural, the witchy. Late in the narrative, when Elisa "starts painting diptychs: nearly identical panels, save for slight differences," the moment seems to volunteer an insight. I paused when it occurred to me that the novel had been displaying this same property all along, that it was a kind of diptych encouraging us to take its incidents and adopt two different perspectives toward them simultaneously, asking us to see, right alongside each other, the story of a woman who journeys between realities and a woman who takes leave of her senses, a woman who loses a child to death and a woman who loses both children to estrangement, without allowing either perception to blur. Lennon's sentences are often diptychs, as well, exhibiting some image or incident twice, with only a small modification of effect. "To Elisa this seems disruptive, drastic: isn't there a kind of hush in the room just now, a suspension of movement and sound?" "The therapist is not looking at Derek, but at her, gazing at her with a strange intensity, as though for the first time, as though she's naked." "She realized that she had moved on, that her life had been restored to her. And then the thing that happened happened." All of which is to say that this novel, like every other, is a novel of patterns. What makes it greater than that is the insight it displays - sometimes moving, sometimes horrific - into the mind of a woman who requires the machinery of science fiction in order to realize she has failed her children and her life is incommunicable, who does not begin to see herself clearly until the entire universe has altered itself to repair her windshield, who wonders if maybe, after all, the world isn't better with a crack in it. Has Lennon's heroine entered an actual parallel reality, or has her new life been her real one all along? Kevin Brockmeier's most recent novel, "The Illumination," is now available in paperback. |
