Humanity bests ugliness in poignant father-son journey
In Jesse Ball’s new, deeply engrossing novel, “Census,” a man is digging; he is contemplating blankness: “To be blank, to contain at your core, a blankness, it must be a talent — a person must have it, and must have it, possibly from the very first.” This man has been on a journey with his son, and as he digs, as he stops to study “the slender red roots down and down into the grave,” he tells his traveling story.
Our storyteller was a doctor who, upon learning of his failing heart, became a census taker. He was a husband whose wife, now dead, was a clown, but hardly an ordinary clown. The son with whom he has traveled across a landscape of towns named A and B and C (all the way through Z) is not an ordinary son. Instead, he is the kind who showed, “not in speech, but in his daily way, that we are by our nature a kind of measure, that we are measuring each other at every moment.” The kind of son who learns slowly, does differently, attracts the cruelty of cruel people and has a life “such that he is assured of nothing that continues. He needs a champion.”
You could say this is the story of “Census,” but “Census” is a fiction of shattering impact in part because its fabulist tendrils erupt from the author’s own love for a brother: Abram Ball was born with Down syndrome and died, in 1998, after becoming quadriplegic and requiring a ventilator. As a child, Jesse Ball had hoped to care for his brother as the two of them grew old. As an author, a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he had wanted to write a book in his honor. “Census” exists, Ball writes in an introduction, because he built a “hollow” book and placed his brother at its center.
In Ball’s story, the father and son drive the hills, the roads, the bridges. They encounter resistors and embracers — people who do and do not want the census tattoo the doctor must needle into the skin above their rib. When the father and son talk to each other, they tell the stories they’ve always told about missing hats and funny people. When they travel in silence, the father remembers the “trifecta” of his life — himself, his wife, their son — and how, for example, “The main thing was for (the son) to feel that we were all together taking part in a joined project — the project of our life.” Sometimes the father reads about cormorants, strange and lovely birds. Sometimes, as he weakens, he allows others to care for him. Always the son is near: We started keeping to the car more and more and so I would wake in the car, we would wake in the car and the windshield would be right there in front of me, opaque, like the cover on a coffin, and I would feel that surely, implacably, I was in a coffin, but then I would hear my son’s breath beside me. I would hear him; sometimes, even he would wake, and reach out his hand to me and we would hold hands. Then I could breathe and breathe and the day would begin.
The beauty in that passage, in nearly every “Census” passage, is devastating. On one hand, this is a pure love story embedded within an ancient travel narrative. On the other, it is an artistic undertaking of the most sophisticated sort — richly imagined, cleverly sequenced, even typographically propulsive as the census towns stamp themselves upon Ball’s literary map. One thinks of W.G. Sebald and Italo Calvino, but the comparators fade. This is Ball. This is his story. This is his memory and however he wishes to elaborate it, in passages such as these:
How could it be, we asked ourselves again and again, that they are all so cruel to him? How can this enormous conspiracy exist — where everyone has agreed ahead of time that it is completely all right to be hurtful to these harmless people who hurt no one?
But do not think that the hurt is all there is, or even mostly what there is. For Ball’s greatest genius in “Census” is given over to the supreme humanity that outlasts the ugly things that people do and say. Goodness prevails: It prevails in Ball’s imagination, it outlasts words. Don’t turn to the final pages until you have arrived at this journey’s end. And then stay right there and dwell.
Beth Kephart, the author of 22 books, will publish a middle-grade novel, “Wild Blues,” in June.