Things past
History’s dark side looms like a malevolent beast over John Wray’s first two novels. The protagonist of “The Right Hand of Sleep” is a veteran of World War I who witnesses the emergence of Nazism out of his native Austria’s perennial anti-Semitism. “Canaa
These books, which earned Wray anointment from Granta magazine as one of America’s best young novelists, were followed by “Lowboy.” Here was a very different kind of fiction. It’s told from inside the mind of a teenage paranoid schizophrenic as he travels — off his meds, escaped from a mental hospital and pursued by a detective — through New York City’s subway system. Intense and fast-paced, the book is an astute psychological study that reads like a thriller.
Wray’s new novel, “The Lost Time Accidents,” is as convoluted as “Lowboy” is bullet-straight. It takes up, in a way, where his first novel left off, tracking an eccentric extended family of scientists and pseudoscientists with roots in Central Europe and ties to the Holocaust.
First, there’s the humble Moravian pickle maker who, in 1903, supposedly stumbles on a means of “breaking free of the time stream,” that is, time traveling. Obliquely aware of this breakthrough, his sons move to Vienna to study physics. Kaspar von Toula becomes a professor there, while Waldemar von Toula eventually commands a Nazi death camp in Poland.
Kaspar, having married a Jew, flees to the United States, changes his surname to Tolliv- er, and ends up making a fortune as a watch manufacturer in Buffalo. His son, named Orson Card Tolliver (in the author’s wry nod to Orson Scott Card), achieves fame as a sci-fi novelist. Orson’s son Waldemar (or Walter, as he prefers) narrates this intricate, time-looping saga with a mixture of bewilderment, frustration, anger and fear. Yearning to shake free of family weirdness and guilt, he’s uncertain that he can.
That’s because Walter is sequestered within a crumbling Fifth Avenue brownstone near East Harlem that his diseased aunts had transformed into a claustrophobic labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling junk. He feels he’s been trapped there, forever out of time’s flow. He addresses his tale to a former lover, Mrs. Haven, who was an emotional sadist to his masochist. That she’s married to the founder of the Church of Synchronology, a cult based on the time-travel ideas found in Orson’s first novel, at first seems coincidence but later becomes central to the plot.
Whew! Got all that? As I trudged through this nearly 500-page novel, it felt much longer than the 900-pager I had recently galloped through. Talk about feeling trapped.
Let’s be clear: Wray has a talent for rich characterization and a precise ear for dialogue. His novel is enormously intelligent, deeply strange, always fanciful and sometimes funny.
He can write like an angel, too. Following interrogation by Nazis, an anarchist “moved haltingly and stiffly, straining his shorn gray head forward, like a newborn pigeon knocked out of its nest.” For Walter, cocooned on Fifth Avenue, “each instant was now distinct from those before and after, bite-sized and luminous, like a pearl on an invisible, indivisible wire.”
That said, you need to be comfortable with the likes of David Mitchell, Haruki Murakami or science fiction to appreciate this book to the full. Otherwise, not so much.
Apart from that, there remains the matter of Walter’s puzzling relationship with Mrs. Haven that meanders through the novel. He regards it as “the stuff of daydreams,” but it’s more accurately a nightmare. These sections tend to bog down the novel, with their woe-is-me whining, and Walter’s attachment strains belief.
Yet metaphorically, it does make some kind of crazy sense. His need to be emotionally dominated by this heartless woman seems to represent his thralldom to history, to the endless repetitions of the past.
“I want the past to be past,” he laments, “to stop spinning in circles, to stop sucking me in.” If he could stop time’s flow, he would surely block any repeat of the 20th century’s unspeakable evils, and thus dispel any fear that he and his namesake great-uncle share the same horrific qualities.
Where do reason and the scientific spirit fit into the equation of human wellbeing? Is time travel a refutation of the laws of modern physics or its unexpected vindication? Would its mastery mean that time would work for Walter rather than relentlessly crush him? If history endlessly repeats itself, what does that say about the persistence and inevitability of evil?
Wray’s novel raises fascinating questions. I only wish he had sought the answers in a more succinct form.