Waiting for a Bang
This story of an unhappy, paralyzed family struggles to move beyond its literary tricks.
GENEALOGY
A Novel
By Maud Casey
Harper Perennial. 260 pp. $13.95
Maud Casey's Genealogy opens with the unusual image of an aneurysm described as "an exclamation point curled into a comma waiting for the end of the sentence." The same analogy of unfulfilled expectations could describe the victim of the aneurysm: Samantha Hennart, a poet who hasn't written a poem in nearly two decades. Her husband, Bernard, is a failing English professor fixated on a 19th-century Belgian visionary. Their daughter, Marguerite, hears her blood whispering, and their son, Ryan, spends his days listlessly smoking pot. All the Hennarts are caught, yearning for the extraordinary, waiting for the bang.
Genealogy explores the anomie and bewilderment of these disillusioned lives. It's a familiar subject for Casey, also the author of The Shape of Things to Come , but this new novel lacks her usually wry, comic tone. The Hennarts are incapable of speaking and thinking in voices that aren't collages of their various preoccupations, all of which seem increasingly like an inside joke that's no longer funny. "Where is your italicist?" Samantha says, over and over. "Who is the most?" Bernard insists on asking. It's no wonder Marguerite finds herself in a mental institution at age 18, unable to distinguish between literal and figurative idioms. The other Hennarts may be sane, but they are all depressed -- probably clinically.
An unhappy, paralyzed family is an old subject, but the style here is experimental. Casey has set out not only to portray alienated characters but also to enact their bewilderment in the very structure of her novel. It progresses in fits and starts, shifting abruptly between the present day, flashbacks and a tangled web of past events written sometimes in the present tense, sometimes in the past. Her writing can be superb: The scene where Bernard finds himself wearing a waitress's bloomers perfectly captures his sense of hopelessness and absurdity.
At other times, though, the novel is overwrought. It is, in some sense, crafted like a family tree: a web of associations and repetitions and echoes. But the connections are superficial. Nothing happens, nothing is said, that isn't later (or, confusingly, sometimes earlier ) a point of reference. Each connection is an artifice, not the real thing. None of the Hennarts could plausibly exist outside the confines of the novel.
This seems at least partly intentional; after all, to the members of this family, events that promise cosmic meaning -- a brush with death, a kiss, a beautiful view -- feel hollow. Marguerite hears a pun and looks for order: Shouldn't the fact that word "soul" sounds like the sole of a shoe mean something?
The Hennarts' problem is also the book's. A soul is not a sole, and language and structure are not a voice and a story. Casey writes with compassion and wisdom when she writes about people of flesh and blood, but here, she often seems more concerned with commas and exclamation points. ·
Louisa Thomas is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker.
