The first several chapters of David Homel’s sixth novel Midway (Cormorant) are written with such sure-footedness of structure as to float the promise of a story that would really be going places.
The protagonist is Ben Allan, a middle-aged Montreal college professor who writes an award-winning paper on an obscure 19th-century psychological condition called dromomania, an uncontrollable urge to wander. His inner circle consists of a crusty old widower father, Morris, who lives in a seniors’ residence; his art-therapist wife, Laura, and TV-addicted teenage son, Tony; and Willis Barnstable, his collegial friend who, having caused a sexual fracas on campus, yet advises him on political correctness.
Both Ben’s father and son seem to reside in a mental fog, a condition that Ben, midway between the two, may also be experiencing. When a dim bulb named Carla McWatts comes to interview him for a college newspaper, Ben seems to lose his familiar moorings and contemplates an affair, seemingly just for the sake of shaking himself out of his stupor.
Homel writes with intelligence and humour; the way that Ben and Carla keep missing each other, like two nocturnal vessels on a vast ocean, is comical. Ben’s deep satisfaction at inhabiting her empty apartment without consummating their relationship signals that there is much more than a case of the seven-year itch at play here. (He also spends oodles of time hanging out at his father’s place.) A reservoir of middle-aged angst, Ben is desperate for some new vistas and secret worlds to explore.
While ever elusive, Carla draws him into a weird little psycho-drama that takes over the rest of the novel and transforms it from the outward-bound journey that the reader expects into a frankly strange and confused inner journey with sharp gothic overtones (mad doctor, secret dungeon, dazed inmates, mysterious females, allegorical halls of mirrors).
I admit that Ben’s fascination with dromomania had created an expectation in me that he would walk away from his life; not unlike, say, the middle-aged protagonist in Anne Tyler’s masterful 1995 novel Ladder of Years, who unexpectedly walks away from her husband, children and luggage at the beach, then sets up a parallel life for herself in another town. There is, alas, no such exterior action in Midway.
Like the little boy who wants to run away from home but is not allowed to cross the street, Ben pursues his psychic quest around his own town on evenings and weekends. Midway into the novel, part of me began humming: Get on the bus, Gus, make a new plan, Stan, drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free. But that just didn’t happen.
Don’t get me wrong: Homel has crafted many sharply drawn scenes and much good dialogue, and he possesses a wonderful Nabokovian sense of play. But characters must change in a fundamental way if a story is to have meaning, and the only discernible change in Ben Allan at the end of Midway is that he develops a nervous tic.
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Like Midway, Adam Mansbach’s The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) is a witty literary miniature with Jewish characters.
Published in 2008, it tells the story of three interlocking characters – a grandfather and grandson both named Tristan Brodsky, and Nina Hricek, a teenage photographer in Czechoslovakia. The narrative unfolds in the present tense with as many twists and turns as improvisational jazz. In fact, jazz and jazz musicians play a prominent part in the story, and – as is said of good jazz – the writing at times seems to be “really cooking.”
In one memorable scene, the younger Tristan’s parents drop him off at Tristan the Elder’s place, needing some respite from their teenager, hoping the old man will help tone down his wild excesses. But, possessed of a spark of rebelliousness himself, Tristan pours Tristan a drink, then gleefully accompanies him on a graffiti-painting spree.
Decades earlier and half a world away, Nina lives with her mother in Prague after her Refusenik father has been allowed to travel to the West. He was supposed to get a job and send for them, but instead he abandons them and disappears. Years later, Nina is hired as a photographer for a touring jazz band, then escapes her mother for America. Eventually, she finds her father with a new wife, working at a small college in California. They mean nothing to each other anymore.
Through plot and dialogue and lyrical writing that aspires to poetry, Mansbach brings out the magic of the moment in delightful and unexpected ways. He moves the focus from one to another of his three protagonists until their stories merge. As for the novel’s strangely over-reaching title, it is seemingly a comment that in the spontaneous world of action, tradition-bound Judaism acts as a wet blanket, taking the fun and spontaneity out of life.
Morris Allan, the elderly character in Midway, has a similar complaint when he harangues a group of chassidic Jews on the streets of Montreal because tradition has forced them to sweat it out beneath heavy black coats on a warm day. It is this shared tendency to complain that definitively brands both Homel and Mansbach as modern Jewish writers.
