Novel drops concept of family lore
Philip Larkin’s most famous poem, “This be the Verse,” cannot be printed in a general interest newspaper.
It begins:
They [eff] you up,
your mum and dad. They may not mean to,
but they do.
They fill you with the faults
they had
And add some extra,
just for you.
They may not mean to, but for better or worse, we inherit our parents’ stuff. Some of it is in our genes, a marker for cancer or a receding hairline or alcohol abuse. Some of it is in the superstitions they pass along on articles of faith or bad information they believe in.
Before the internet hijacked the word, it was common for those in the psychiatric field to say we were composed of “genes and memes” — cultural information inherited from our parents and ancestors.
Renee Branum’s debut novel “Defenestrate” (Bloomsbury, $26) is about a twin brother and sister, Nick and Marta, who have received from their mother a legend that members of their family are cursed to fall.
Apparently in 1895, their greatgreat grandfather, while overseeing a construction project in Prague, “gave a gentle push to the back of a Roma stonemason” and sent him hurtling to his death from the window of a church steeple.
The act of throwing someone from a window is called “defenestration,” and is said to have been coined to describe two incidents that occurred in Prague.
THE INCIDENTS
In 1419, seven town officials were executed by being thrown from the Town Hall, an incident that precipitated the Hussite Revolution. Then in 1618, disgruntled Protestants threw two royal governors out of a high window in the Hradcany Castle, which triggered the Thirty Years’ War. (There was yet another defenestration that took place in the city in 1483, but this is usually not considered a “major” defenestration since only one city official was killed — the other seven councilors were already dead when they were pitched out the window.)
Defenestration was not uncommon during the Middle Ages; it was often an act of mob violence with political overtones imbued with some symbolism. (Some might remember that in the Hebrew Bible, the idolator Jezebel was defenestrated by her eunuch servants at the behest of the conquering Jehu.)
The stonemason’s defenestration at the hands of the great-great grandfather of the twins might have been an act of revenge; the victim may have seduced their ancestor’s youngest daughter. In any case,
the incident was not taken as an accident and precipitated a hasty immigration to the American Midwest, where Nick and Marta grew up hearing stories about how various relatives suffered and sometimes survived terrible falls.
TRUE STORIES
Nick, in particular, became obsessed with practicing pratfalls. The twins became enamored of Buster Keaton, whose theatrical film career was built on his apparent rubber bonedness.
Branum weaves in some metafictional touches; she makes Evelyn McHale, a 23-year-woman whose body was photographed immediately after she lept to her death from the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building, a distant relative of the twins (the photograph, often referred to as “The Most Beautiful Suicide,” shows her body in apparent repose).
Among the true stories touched on in the book are those of Juliane Koepcke, who survived a fall of nearly 10,000 feet after the airplane she was riding in was struck by lightning, and Frane Selak, a Croatian man who had a remarkable streak of either good or bad luck depending upon your point of view.
After a revelation that shocks their deeply Catholic mother, Nick and Marta repair to Prague, the scene of their family’s original sin, to try to come to grips with their history and their fate.
There’s a foreground story about how, after they returned to the U.S., Nick suffers his own serious fall, which Marta suspects might have been an attempted suicide. In the meantime, she is sliding into dark regions, drinking too much and simmering in regretfulness for having not pursued her own dreams.
But the story of a broken family is not the chief reason to invest in “Defenestrate.” Branum reveals herself as a remarkable writer, with a lyrical and surprising voice that carries the reader through even when the plot seems to evaporate.
BOOK OF VIGNETTES
This is a book of vignettes, keenly rendered episodes that have about them the air of experience, so that one is tempted to infer something about the life of the author. (Totally unfair, I know.) Still, “Defenestrate” reminds me more than a little of Jhumpa Lahiri’s presumably semi-autobiographical novel “Whereabouts” from last year.
Here Branum describes Nick and Marta’s setup in Prague:
We were on the top floor — the only apartment in the building with both east- and west-facing balconies. Some days Nick would be on one balcony while I was on the other, watching both horizons like a pair of sentries.
Other days, we’d move together from one to the other as the sun moved, soaking up or avoiding the light, depending on the season. We had no living room or common area — just a shallow entryway opening onto the two bedrooms on one side and the kitchen on the other with the bathroom in between …
We drank dark beers and made toddies with plum wine and fruit tea. We drank cheap box wine you could buy in the markets for a mere 25 crowns … Drinking together felt right
because it meant that, regardless of what that day or week had been like, we were, at that moment, sharing in the same grief or joy.
This is an investigation of the cost of closeness, an episodic and accretive study of how we build a self from the scraps and wishes of family lore.
It’s about how complicated it can get when you love people and how we fashion our stories from the materials our ancestors provide us — the genes and memes and illogical magic of family.