And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. --T.S. Eliot
In Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Larry Woiwode introduced us to the Neumillers, rendering episodes in the life of this North Dakotan family like so many snapshots from a photo album. Woiwode's new novel, Born Brothers, takes up the lives of the Neumillers again--chiefly, this time, those of Charles and Jerome Neumiller. Born Brothers is more like a puzzle than a family album, though--a giant picture puzzle composed of a thousand pieces.
The total image of the novel, the picture on the box if you like, presents the life of Charles Neumiller, the novel's principal character and its narrator. Throughout the book Charles addresses his brother Jerome, telling of their life together as children and his own life as an adult. Reading the book is something like overhearing an intimate conversation. In the end we arrive at an understanding of Charles's life that is grounded in the love the brothers share. Because they are "born brothers," Charles can dispense with self-justification and confront the truth about himself and his experience.
This picture, though, emerges only gradually and requires a kind of assembly. The novel at first seems to consist of a thousand anecdotes, narrated in the present tense, whose edges hook and grip and button into one another. These incidents unreel like the scenes of a film. Each has its own story logic so that it nearly stands as a short story by itself.
As we read, groups of these scenes begin to cluster, and we are able to distinguish some major time divisions fairly rapidly. We see Charles in four principal stages: as a child in North Dakota and Illinois; during a sojourn in New York as an unemployed actor and writer; through a period of psychological disintegration and marital crisis; and as a mature and relatively happy family man. These major time divisions, like the pieces of the dominant elements of our picture puzzle, have characteristic colorings that identify them as belonging together. Once we get all the blue and white sky pieces together, the green and brown pieces of the oak tree, we start to see the picture come together in separate constituent images. Eventually, the major images themselves blend into a complete picture.
Why tell the story in this way? With a kind of grand madness, the text directs us to concentrate on each moment of Charles' life.
The chief pleasure of the text lies in the power with which every scene is rendered, a power that makes manifest the author's technical facility. Woiwode is a writer's writer, one of the best prose stylists in English today. The demands of the various scenes lead him to produce poetic descriptions of nature, comic dialogue, action sequences, surrealistic renderings of dream states, and epic catalogs. He does it all brilliantly. Here is a cleaning woman describing one denizen of a slum apartment building:
“He's a troublemaker. No, he start that boompity-boompin, I call him on it that minute. Ain't no way he getting home this time. No, I'm all gibbeted up because of him now. Ain't Jesus or you people here. It that man. A trouble-maker
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