The unreliable narrator is often a sly figure. Think of Humbert Humbert or Patrick Bateman – or, for that matter, anyone who has ever written a memoir. They entangle us in their narratives, in their version of events, as we blindly saunter along as hapless as pawns. Making a fool out of the reader is the point, and it’s one of the few times the author can get away with it. However, it must be done subtly and shadily, never too obvious that we are the butt of some big joke.
So what happens then when an unreliable narrator isn’t even aware that they are an unreliable narrator? What happens when a novel, nearing its home stretch, starts suggesting that the previous couple hundred pages could’ve all been hokum? This is the garden path Joshua Ferris leads us down with his intriguing and intelligent new novel.
Charlie Barnes isn’t a healthy man. Or, at least he thinks so. Having diagnosed himself with pancreatic cancer (the “priority mail” of cancers), Charlie makes contact with his estranged adult children to break the apparent bad news. When it is revealed that Charlie is actually perfectly healthy, his kids see it as their deadbeat father pulling another one of his great cons for attention. Things take something of a turn, however, when, later on, the man who cried cancer is proven absolutely right.
If you’ll forgive my attempt at a sports metaphor, A Calling for Charlie Barnes is very much a novel of two halves. The first half is something of a biography of Charlie that jumps around time periods in order to give an overall picture of this somewhat hapless, somewhat heroic man as he tallies up wives and lies in equal measure.
As the novel progresses, the omniscient third-person narrator is slowly revealed to be one of Charlie’s sons, Jake Barnes, who is seemingly the only one of his children who doesn’t revile him. In the book’s second half, the focus switches more on Jake himself and the reaction to the fact that he has decided to write a novel about his father. This is where things get interesting.
The narrative of poor Charlie Barnes, while reminiscent of a whole host of other novels, does feel fresh and justifiable
It seems Jake’s novel about his father not only exists in our world but in the world of the book itself, and people are not happy. The characters that litter our novel’s first half – friends, siblings, wives, relatives – begin to question their appearance in Jake’s novel, and many openly refute many of the events described therein. This final section is pure unabashed Vonnegutian whimsy, and Ferris quite clearly revels in just how far he can take his conceit.
Ferris is not Jewish but his work would not look out of place within the great canon of Jewish-American literature. In fact, his previous novel, the Booker-shortlisted To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award. It would be quite the challenge to read A Calling for Charlie Barnes without Saul Bellow’s Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March in the back of your mind as clear antecedents.
When the novel takes its metafictional turn, Ferris’s style brings to mind the work of the actually Jewish writer Joshua Cohen, in particular his vast metafictional tome The Book of Numbers, in which a writer named Joshua Cohen is drafted in to ghost-write the biography of a tech billionaire, also named Joshua Cohen. Thankfully, where Cohen’s metafiction tends to take the form of an ouroboros, Ferris’s foray is more akin to a fairground helter skelter.
There is a feeling while reading A Calling for Charlie Barnes that Joshua Ferris has finally stepped up to the plate. Ferris’s name has rarely been said in the same breath as contemporaries such as Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer and, of course, Joshua Cohen, despite the fact his work has frequently been acclaimed by both the public and prize juries.
A Calling for Charlie Barnes may just be the work that finally wins Ferris his place on the podium. The humour throughout is exquisitely judged, with some passages genuinely eliciting belly laughs. The narrative of poor Charlie Barnes, while reminiscent of a whole host of other novels, does feel fresh and justifiable. And the descent into metafiction, the novel’s true crowingly glory, is extremely well done without ever feeling hammy or clunky, as it often does in less experienced hands.
Ferris can now truly sit back and enjoy the ride. He’s finally done it.
