C10| Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Norway’s
leading
‘mystical
realist’
explores
the
mind-
altering
power
of
sensory
and
social
depri-
vation.not just with family but with pretty
much everyone: his clients, the ten-
ants in his building, his girlfriend,
Cass. That is to say, his soon to be
ex-girlfriend Cass, just the latest in
a series of ex-girlfriends who have
come to learn that the battle is
futile. “Oh, Micah had not a verygood history with women. It just
seemed they kept losing interest in
him; he couldn’t say exactly why.”
It’s more than a little ironic that
the guy who spends his days help-
ing customers with their internet
connection problems—the author
of the modestly successful com-
puter manual called “First, Plug
In”—has serious connection issues
of his own. (For the record, he
named his company Tech Hermit.)
“Sometimes when he was dealing
with people,” Ms. Tyler writes of
Micah, “he felt like he was operat-
ing one of those claw machines on
a boardwalk, those shovel thingswhere you tried to scoop up a prize
but the controls were too unwieldy
and you worked at too great a re-
move.” The push/pull struggle—
family life vs. life alone—is a cen-
tral theme of Ms. Tyler’s fiction.
The smooth surface of Micah’s
existence is roiled when a well-
groomed teenager with the very
preppy name Brink shows up unan-
nounced at the apartment building.
Ms. Tyler has a gift for atomiz-
ing eccentric behavior. When Micah
tidies his apartment, for example,
he assumes a foreign accent, lately
either German or Russian. “Zee
moppink of zee floors,” he says.
“Zee dreaded moppink.” When he
drives, he never fails to use the
turn signal, even in his own parking
lot, never fails to make space for a
driver who decides at the last min-
ute to switch lanes. Micah likes “to
pretend he was being evaluated by
an all-seeing surveillance system.
Traffic God, he called it.”
And in conjuring the chaotic en-
gagement party of Micah’s nephew,
Ms. Tyler notes the bafflement of an
attendee when a discussion pro-
gresses in linear fashion. “As a rule,
conversations in this family didn’t
so much flow as spray in bursts.
here and there, like geysers, and she
wasn’t used to this pursuit of a
single subject.”Redhead by the Side
of the Road
By Anne Tyler
Knopf, 178 pages, $26.95
But in “Redhead by the Side of
the Road”—the title refers to a fire
hydrant that Micah mistakes for a
short woman with Titian hair be-
cause he jogs without his glasses—
the characters are either little more
than the sum of their idiosyncra-
sies or mere foils for Micah. The
latter group includes several ten-
ants of the apartment building,
among them a chatty dating ser-
vice habituée who is looking for
the kind of intimacy that is foreign
to the tech hermit.
Those who’d like to know how
Micah came to be the way he is,
why he avoids intimacy and em-
braces the traffic God, won’t get
much help from Ms. Tyler, who
now and then intrudes on the story
as a rather baffled, rather exasper-
ated commentator: “You have to
wonder what goes through the
mind of such a man. Such a narrow
and limited man; so closed off.”
Alas, the ripped-from-the-pages-
of-a-soap-opera-script plot is as
thinly conceived as the characters.
Micah’s surprise visitor, Brink, is the
son of Micah’s college girlfriend and
first love, Lorna. As for his father,
well, Brink has gotten in his head
that it’s Micah. This paternity ques-
tion is the fulcrum of the novel, and
the catalyst for Micah to move,
if not exactly to the center of the
stream of life, at least to the water’s
edge. He sees the light with credu-
lity-straining speed after Lorna’s
comparison of their romance to
Micah’s childhood obsession with a
10-speed bicycle. “Now that it was
yours you were noticing things
wrong with it, like squeaky brakes
or a scratch in the paint,” Lorna
says. “Well, I am the bicycle.”
It’s all a bit pat. The saving
grace of “Redhead by the Side of
the Road” is Ms. Tyler’s empathy,
the empathy she has for her char-
acters and the very high value she
places on empathy. In one of the
novel’s deeply affecting moments,
Micah’s lady friend, Cass, a fourth-
grade teacher, tries explaining to a
few disgruntled students why it’s
so important for them to go carol-
ing at a nursing home.
“Some of these people get to see
children only once a year at Christ-
mas....Andeventhegrownups
they know are mostly gone....
They remember something that
happened when they were, say,
nine-years old...butnobody else
alive remembers it too. You don’t
think that’s hard? You’ll be singing
to a roomful of broken hearts, I tell
you.” Micah, take note: That’s the
kind of girl who’d make it worth
changing your running schedule.Ms. Kaufman writes on culture
and the arts for the Journal.The Ghost in the Routine
EYEEM/GETTY IMAGESThe author of the
popular computer
manual ‘First, Plug In’
has serious connection
issues of his own.BOOKS
‘People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.’—ANNE TYLER
“ONE THING I’LLnever be
done with: withdrawing to sit
in the solitude of my room,
surrounded by a deep darkness.
In spite of all, that’s the last
joy.” So wrote the Norwegian
novelist and crackpot Knut
Hamsun, and, frankly, in our
present state of social
distancing, we could do worse
than to consult him and his
sun-starved countrymen.
Today, one of Norway’s most
prestigious writers, and surely
its deepest philosopher of
isolation, is Jon Fosse, whose
“The Other Name” (Transit,
336 pages, $17.95)now arrives
in English, a volume that con-
tains the first two installments
of a seven-book “septology.”
Like most of Mr. Fosse’s
numerous works of fiction,
“The Other Name” is stark,
serious, thoroughly interior and
written in an unbroken stream
of consciousness that does not
call to mind the flowing of a
river so much as the steady
drip of a thawing glacier. The
narrator is a widowed painter
named Asle, who lives and
works alone in a remote village
in western Norway. Among his
few acquaintances, one is
notable—another painter of the
same name. While buying art
supplies in a neighboring city,
the narrator has an intuition
that he should visit his name-
sake: When he finally does,
he finds Asle half-conscious in
a fit of delirium tremens. The
surface of the story recounts
their trip to the hospital, thenarrator’s attempt to care for
Asle’s dog, and other more
prosaic interactions that occupy
the day, but beneath it are
meditations and uncanny
flashbacks into the pasts of
both men.
Mr. Fosse writes what he
has called “mystical realism,”
and the doubling of the Asles
is purposefully ambiguous.
The men are like reverse-
negatives—the narrator is a
teetotaling Catholic whose art
enjoys modest popularity,
whereas the other is an
unknown drunk—yet they have
a conjoined artistic vision and
each is working on a painting
of two intersecting lines that
form the shape of St. Andrew’s
Cross. To the narrator, the
cross speaks to something
numinous and essential about
the relationship between
darkness and light, and his
mind frequently returns to
the track of that mystery,
elaborating ideas drawn from
the negative theology of the
Christian mystic Meister
Eckhart: “It’s a strange habit,
always wanting to look at my
paintings in the dark, yes, I can
even paint in the dark, because
something happens to a picture
in the dark, yes, the colours
disappear in a way but in
another way they become
clearer, the shining darkness
that I’m always trying to paint
is visible in the darkness, yes,
the darker it is, the clearer
whatever invisibly shines in
a picture is...”In Damion Searls’s expertly
restrained translation, the
writing has the artless,
improvised feel of an extended
prayer, passing through
repetitions, drab descriptive
formulas and sudden moments
of fervency. The aim is to tap
into a sensibility beyond
consciousness. “In a weird way
both life and death are things
you can understand but not
with thoughts,” Mr. Fosse
writes. And indeed there is,in this book’s rhythmic accu-
mulation of words, something
incantatory and self-annihilating
—something that feels almost
holy.
If Mr. Fosse writes mystical
realism, the term you might use
for Linda Boström Knausgård’s
novel“The Helios Disaster”
(World Editions, 189 pages,
$15.99)is mythological realism.
The Greek goddess Athena has
returned in the guise of a
Swedish teenager named Anna,
who emerges fully formed from
her father’s head. Her father,
diagnosed as a schizophrenic,
is sent to an asylum and Annais fostered by a caring Pente-
costal family. But despite her
attempts to fit in, she too is
institutionalized for crippling
depression, and this short novel
takes a harrowing turn inside
the prison of the hospital.
Solitude is in this novel
purely a torment, the painful
consequence of Anna’s separa-
tion from her father, whom she
imagines to be the one person
who understands her true
nature. Ms. Boström Knausgård
is good at evoking the fragility
that can afflict even the most
loving families. Her sentences,
translated from the Swedish
by Rachel Willson-Broyles,
are short, dry and brittle,
like tinder on the verge of
combustion. The writing then
takes fire in the desperate and
disturbing portrait of mental
illness in the second half: “Oh,
how I hated myself and what I
had become without noticing.
Day by day, week by week,
I had created this monster
that was myself.”
That’s the realism.
The mythology, on the other
hand, is vague and confusing.
I wasted far too much time
trying to figure out what
Athena has to do with any of
this—the answer seems to be
very little. Ersatz allusions to
antiquity litter the narrative,
interrupting a powerful story
in the most needless way: by
goading the reader to stop to
look things up on Wikipedia.
“No two times of solitude
are alike, for we are neveralone in the same way,” Henri
Bosco writes in his 1948 novel
“Malicroix” (NYRB, 278 pages,
$16.95), newly translated by
Joyce Zonana. In this charming
back-to-nature fantasia, an
ordinary Frenchman inherits a
house from his reclusive great-
uncle Malicroix on an island in
the Rhône River delta in south-
ern France. Thus he leaves the
blandishments of civilization to
survive on “fire and dreams”
on a lonely, wind-driven rock,
where the natural world is
fierce and elemental and
even the strange blood feud
bequeathed from Malicroix
against a neighboring clan has
a timeless, romantic quality.
Bosco (1888-1976), who is
known in France for his young-
adult classic “The Boy and the
River” (1945), was an ornately
old-fashioned stylist even in
his day, and Ms. Zonana’s
unabashedly baroque
translation—words like
“grandeur” and “majesty”
appear regularly and without
irony—seems appropriate.
What later generations would
seek in psychotropic drugs,
Bosco’s hero finds in his
uncushioned isolation in the
roaring wilderness. The doors
of perception swing wide open:
“All my sensations—the glow,
the breath, the fragrance, and
the quiet animal cry—etched a
sparkling design within me....
My awareness of the scene in
front of me was so vivid it
became hallucinatory. Isaw
what I saw.”Seeing in the Dark, KnowingWithoutWords
THIS WEEK
The Other Name:
Septology I-II
By Jon FosseThe Helios Disaster
By Linda Boström KnausgårdMalicroix
By Henri BoscoFICTION
SAMSACKSFICTION AUTHORSare some-
times asked: “Do your characters
ever take control of the stories
you’re writing?” Sulari Gentill’s
“After She Wrote Him”
(Poisoned Pen, 233 pages,
$16.99)pushes that question
even further. “What if you wrote
of someone writing of you?”
asks this book at the outset. “In the end,
which of you would be real?”
Madeleine “Maddie” d’Leon, a 30-year-old
lawyer-turned-author living in Australia, is the
creator of a series of mysteries about a “work-
ing-class, feminist” housemaid “who solves
crimes by looking at what people throw away.”
Maddie wants to create a different protagonist
for her next mystery: a wealthy “literary”
novelist who pens “the kind of worthy,
incomprehensible stuff that wins awards.”
Her new character is the “intriguing” and
“brooding” Edward McGinnity, and he soon
takes on a life of his own. As Maddie tells her
agent: “I can see him so
clearly. It’s like he exists,
like I’m being allowed
to watch.”
Edward, in Maddie’s
telling, is also writing a
book—one involving a
crime writer named Made-
leine d’Leon. “It’s an exploration of an author’s
relationship with her protagonist,” he tells his
artist friend Willow Meriwether, “an examina-
tion of the tenuous line between belief and
reality, imagination and self, and what happens
when that line is crossed.” (“I’m not sure what
that means,” Willow replies, “but it does sound
award-winning.”)
What we have, then, in “After She Wrote
Him,” is a tale of two writers, each a figment of
the other’s imagination. In Ms. Gentill’s clever
construction, both characters inhabit a world in
which reality and make-believe blur and blend.
This meta-fiction becomes a whodunit when,
at a gallery opening for Edward’s friend Willow,
a waspish critic is knocked down a flight of
stairs and killed. Who might have murdered
him? Willow, whose show he’d just trashed in
a review? Edward, who is in unrequited love
with the married Willow?
As Edward (thanks to his quick temper and
intemperate behavior) becomes the police’s
main suspect, Maddie is appalled at the
situation she has created for her handsome and
vulnerable hero. She barely hears her real-life
husband’s complaints—as written by Edward—
that their marriage is suffering from her
fictional obsession. She’s fallen madly in
love with her protagonist, and the feeling
is reciprocated.
“After She Wrote Him” careens toward a
fateful culmination as Maddie and Edward write
each other into personal limbos that, it seems,
will prevent them from saving one another.
Readers are left to their own devices to
escape from this infinity of mirrors.THIS WEEK
After She
Wrote Him
By Sulari GentillThe
Pygmalion
Syndrome
MYSTERIES
TOMNOLANH
ERE’S HOW cer-
tain Baltimore resi-
dents know that
it’s 7:15 a.m. on the
dot without check-
ing a watch, a clock or a phone.
They just need to look for a sight-
ing of Micah Mortimer, out for his
daily run. Micah, the focus of Anne
Tyler’s novel “Redhead by the Side
of the Road,” has his route (a long
oval). Micah has his routines (long
inviolable).
A computer consultant with a
side gig as the live-in super of a
small apartment building in a
lower-middle-class neighborhood,
Micah swabs the floors of his
cheerless basement flat on Mon-
days and vacuums on Fridays. “It
was Micah’s personal theory,” Ms.
Tyler notes, “that if you actually
noticed the difference you made
when you cleaned...itmeant you
had waited too long to do it.”
Rest assured, Micah never waits
too long. Dishes are washed imme-
diately, dried and put away rather
than left out to air-dry on the drain
board. Too much clutter. Once a
mystery or biography is read, it
goes right back to the book give-
away place where he got it (see:
clutter). These habits get Micah
through life but—God knows—not
into life.
This is just another way of say-
ing that the 40-ish Micah is a clas-
sic Anne Tyler character, another of
the slightly melancholy, more than
a little clueless oddballs and sad
sacks who populate novels like
“Searching for Caleb” (1975),
“Morgan’s Passing” (1980) and
“The Accidental Tourist” (1985).
Ms. Tyler is especially good at mak-
ing us feel for these loony lost
souls, making us ache at all their
blown opportunities for intimacy
and connection even as—especially
as—they’re shoved, however un-
willingly, to a moment of reckoning.
But “Redhead by the Side of the
Road” doesn’t quite satisfy. While
it shares the concern of Ms. Tyler’s
best work, the story feels forced
and hurried despite being lifted
by Ms. Tyler’s customary and wel-
come style without a style.
Like other Tyler protagonists,
Micah is an odd fit within his fam-
ily—the sole male and shining-star
manqué among four cheerily ex-
pansive sisters, all of them with
an affinity for ruckus and disorder.
Keeping a blinkered if courteous
distance is Micah’s default posture
BYJOANNEKAUFMAN