Not your standard family dramedy
While easy to distil into a reductive description, it would do the unexpected work a grave disservice
It would be easy to be a bit cynical, if not reductive, in describing Spoonbenders, the impressive new novel from Oakland, Calif., writer Daryl Gregory. The snark would go something like “take a standard, multi-generational family dramedy — the stuff of preferred inflight movies — add psychic abilities, mysterious government organizations and the mafia, stir and bake for a delightful summer diversion.” While accurate, that description does a grave disservice to Spoonbenders, a novel which, despite its familiar trappings, turns into something altogether unexpected, thrilling and curiously moving.
The Telemachus family is perhaps the perfect illustration of Tolstoy’s argument that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way: there’s no family quite like them. Grandfather Teddy is a con-man, but his children are actually gifted: Irene can read minds (“sort of”), Frankie is telekinetic and Buddy can tell the future. They clearly take after their mother, Maureen, a powerful psychic. Decades after her death, though, the gifts of her now-adult children have spoiled. Irene is practically paralyzed emotionally, shutting down at even the hint of a lie; Frankie’s ability to move objects is largely out of his control; and Buddy has barely spo- ken a word in years, renovating the family home seemingly at random.
And then there are the grandkids. Take Matty, Irene’s teenage son, who has discovered that he can travel outside his body. Of course, this requires him to be sexually aroused, a state most often inspired by his cousin Mary Alice . . . It’s complicated. And wonderful. While the novel’s events take place in the summer of 1995, the story shifts back (and forward) in time to show, among other things, Teddy and Maureen’s meeting (in a government-funded study of psychic phenomena) and the televised disgrace of their promising act, the Amazing Telemachus Family. By moving between time frames and shifting between the viewpoints of the major characters, Gregory skilfully invests the family with life, exploring the interior minutiae of each character (Irene’s halting movement toward love, for example, via an AOL chat room, is powerful and painful), which in turn fuels the more grandiose elements of the plot.
It all builds to a climax that is a marvel of clockwork complexity, akin to watching a master magician at work (I confess, I may have barked with laughter when things started coming together, and Gregory’s design began to fully reveal itself ).
It’s the sort of trick readers appreciate, a long con in which they are all-toowilling participants. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Seven Crow Stories.