Fiction:Mark Slouka's second novel hits a tone of gentle, almost diffident melancholy from the opening sentence and he sustains it throughout a story that lingers for all that it says about the small hurts that determine a life, and the lives around it, writes Eileen Battersby.
A son remembers. "One night when I was young my mother walked out of the country bungalow we were staying in in the Poconos. I woke to hear my father pulling on his pants in the dark. It was very late, and the windows were open."
Mark Slouka's second novel hits a tone of gentle, almost diffident melancholy from the opening sentence and he sustains it throughout a story that lingers for all that it says about the small hurts that determine a life, and the lives around it. The Visible World is very much a son's story: the narrator steps back from centre stage, his experiences are only mentioned in relation to his reaction to his parents. He is preoccupied in an examination of the love that defined his parents: his father's enduring love for the narrator's mother, his mother's love for another man. "I don't know that there was ever a time when I didn't know their story. It was always there, like a ray of light cutting into the room."
The narrator, now in his middle years, is not really trying to recreate his family history. Instead he is recalling his parents as they were when young. It is not as parents but as young people that he presents them.
That opening sentence acts as a clue but it also may hamper readers fully engaging with Slouka. This is because it sounds as if Slouka is ambitiously fashioning his story in the style of the great US southern writer, Richard Ford - and Ford has endorsed it as "a moving book". It will catch the eye, but the writing will strike the ear. Read the first sentence and immediately Ford's beautiful novel, Wildlife (1990), comes to mind. In that book, the narrator is looking back at a marriage fraught with tension. Still on the opening page, the narrator records: "My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake." That sentence in particular evokes the curiously elegant physicality of Ford, who can summon up a conversational ease in dealing with desperate situations.
But Slouka's narrator is far more diffident, his approach to memory closer to that of an investigator than a memoirist and his use of language more tentative. There is nothing of the rhythmic grace of Ford, no attempt to seduce the reader. It is as if Slouka's narrator is making sense of the past for himself and he is dealing with a very different situation. There is no infidelity, no betrayal, only two young people who had had to deal with the impossible love one of them had encountered.
There is an additional dimension: the narrator has been raised as an American by parents who arrived in the US from wartime Czechoslovakia. "At night, high in our apartment in Queens, my mother would curl herself against my back and I would smell her perfume . . . and she would hum some Czech song or other." Two cultures are involved; the narrator is American but can also look to his Czech roots. Here it acts as both a distancing device and a vital link.
It consolidates the idea of a son trying to engage with his parents at a time when they were little more than teenagers themselves, and it succeeds in establishing the story as more an investigative quest than a history. "Half a lifetime after the night my father left our cabin to look for my mother, long after they were both gone, I met a man in Prague who told me that the city I thought I'd come to know actually lay four meters under the earth . . . to resist the flooding of the Vltava."
Even in the sequences where he recalls his father reading him Czech fairytales, the intimacy is undercut by the force of the romance that devastated his parents before he was born. Everything appears to acquire a relevance related to that doomed love. A page in the fairytale book acts as a symbolic representation of all that took place. The page is covered by a sheet of tissue, a common enough protective feature in old books. Yet here it is loaded with meaning: "Under it [the covering tissue] was a picture of a beautiful girl in a dark forest. She had thin arms and she wore a white dress like one of my mother's scarves. She was leaning back against the trunk of a huge, mossed tree as though trying to protect it, a hunter's arrow buried deep in her breast."
Sympathy for the father's dilemma as a kind, quietly heroic man who loves (and knows his love is more of a comfort than a passion) is conveyed in a subtle way throughout, as is the mother's plight as a broken-hearted lover who settled for less. The narrator describes the father as a determined reader who seeks life in books, while his mother is given to fits of furious concentration which collapse into spells of daydreaming.
On page 101, the narrator reaches a moment of near-perfection in which he recalls meeting an old woman on the road, "And suddenly - perhaps it was the heat - I had the absurd desire to ask her if by any chance she remembered a couple, a young man and a woman with very black hair from the early years of the war . . ." Memory and yearning inspire such notions. Later, conscious of the ghosts who surround us and aware of the weight of lives lived, he observes: "They had been here, all of them, and now they were gone . . . Someone once said that at the end of every life is a full stop . . . Like beggars we must patch up the universe as best we can."
In the closing section, Slouka recreates the love triangle. It is an obtrusive sequence and undermines much of the subtle grace of the earlier parts. The final pages of this gentle, melancholic novel are disappointing because Slouka, having wrought such elegiac tension from the sense of mystery, then risks it all in attempting to offer his version of the wartime romance that both made and destroyed his mother.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Visible World, By Mark Slouka, Portobello, 242pp. £14.99