A Usable Past

THE VISIBLE WORLD

By Mark Slouka

Houghton Mifflin. 242 pp. $24

It is a rare thing for a novel to split open the illusion of narrative -- like one of those 17th- century anatomical drawings where the corpse helpfully holds back the flaps of his own stomach -- to reveal the underlying mechanics of creation, memory and desire. It is even rarer for a tricky book like this to hit you in the heart. But Mark Slouka's second novel, The Visible World, not only questions the purpose of narrative and the connection between history and the present, it is also a vibrantly told love story.

The first section of the book, subtitled "A Memoir," presents vignettes (all with the flavor of autobiography) from the narrator's life with his parents, two Czech immigrants, and their expatriate communities in Queens, upstate New York and Pennsylvania. In a brief middle section, following his mother's death by suicide and his father's by cancer, the narrator journeys to Prague. Everyone he encounters during these two sections, except his mother, is a storyteller -- and the novel's central mystery is her lifelong silence about a man she loved during World War II. But as the narrator listens, the other stories begin to group themselves around this gap "like iron filings around an invisible magnet, suggesting a shape."

Slouka explored this thematic territory in his first novel, God's Fool, and especially in his 1998 book of short stories, Lost Lake, from which this new novel borrows not only ideas but also characters, settings, subplots and even phrases. The major flaw of The Visible World, in fact, is that the opening sections read too much like a short-story cycle, with each section self-contained, providing little momentum -- which, in a novel, feels like a series of attempted liftoffs before the final flight.

Once we get aloft, however, it's a wonderful view. With both of his parents dead and history being rewritten and replaced in the Czech Republic, the narrator produces the final section, subtitled "A Novel," which rethreads fragments from the first two sections into an imagined narrative of his mother's lost love. Thus he "patches the universe," explaining his mother's secretiveness, his parents' estrangement and their connection to the assassination of Hitler's deputy Reinhard Heydrich by Czech resistance fighters.

This fiction acts as a necessary supplement to truth: The stories we tell about our past allow us to leave it (as the narrator's mother, not a storyteller, never did). And yet the history is still there with us, all the while, moving almost simultaneously with the "visible world": "All I could do was peer from above as the people went about their day, unaware that with every step, every kiss, every tram ticket tossed to the curb, they were constructing the world that would shape my own."

-- Britt Peterson is the assistant managing editor of the New Republic.