In ‘Stone World,’ a boy tries to understand life
Fans of novelist, memoirist, essayist, and translator Joel Agee, rejoice. (Those unfamiliar, buckle up.) Following his last, admired memoir, “In the House of My Fear,” comes a supremely beautiful new novel, “The Stone World.”
Agee is perfunctorily recognized as the son of the late, Pulitzer-winning James Agee (“A Death in the Family”). But the caliber and range of the surviving Agee’s oeuvre have long distinguished him. While his translation work has won many awards, he may still be best known for his first memoir “Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany,” an account of late childhood (1948-1960) with his American mother, German
stepfather and younger brother after the family migrated to East Germany from Mexico. “Twelve Years” remains a classic among cognoscenti.
“Stone World” may provide “Twelve Years” a sort of fictional prequel. It opens in an unnamed, 1940s Mexican town where Peter, a quiet, sensitive boy of about 6, lives with his American mother, Martha, a violinist, and German stepfather, Bruno, an exiled communist writer: “When [Bruno] went into his room to write, he said he had to work. The room where he worked was always full of smoke, and he always looked worried when he wrote … On one wall near his desk was a bright red picture of a man’s arm making a fist above some German words.”
Peter’s Spanish-speaking
friends pronounce his name “Pira,” which pleases him for sounding “more Mexican even than Pedro did. … It wasn’t good being a gringo … always the word sounded mean. … Sometimes Pira prayed to be allowed to be Mexican.” The live-in maid, Zita, a warm, spirited presence, cares tenderly for Pira, as does her boyfriend, Federico, whose struggles as a laborer in another town worry Pira’s justiceminded family. In the background dwells Pira’s biological father, David, who lives in New York and rarely sees Pira, but writes him. “One day you will meet [David] again,” Martha assures him, “and you’ll see that he loves you.”
These adults form a sheltering circle around the child. They do not marginalize or condescend to him; Pira loves them unstintingly.
When David signs a letter “With all my love”:
“Pira had never heard those four words put together like that. He repeated them in his mind. … The ‘all’ was so big. … How much love would that be? It was almost scary.”
Bruno belongs to a group of Eastern European emigres who’ve fled the Nazis and fascists for Mexico. Many, including Bruno, long to return to their homelands but fear what awaits them there; they argue about it. This pressing focus tightens a subtle tension beneath the story’s surface, as “The Stone World” tracks Pira’s careful, often pained absorption of the baffling world at hand — and unknown worlds to come.
What sets this novel apart — what marks its entrancing power — is a voice and vision (told in very close third person) that are solely the child’s. Adult perception never takes over, except as reported by Pira. I cannot remember anything like it. Instantly, it pulls a reader deeply into her own childhood — via prose so simple and direct it almost disappears. “Clear as light,” were my first notes.
Pira’s mind, like most children’s, is a kind of unexposed film, imprinted by everything in vibrant dimension: the town’s cathedral and marketplace, poverty and wealth, ethics, war, drunkenness, racism, friendship, fear, death’s mystery, and in fact, a certain recurring grace. Pira questions Bruno about having to put down a beloved but rabid pet:
“‘Did you cry?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Poor Tonta.’
“‘Yes, poor Tonta.’ “There was a big silence then … bigger than the room they were in.”
Such moments — with so many like them, wondrous for their simplicity and depth — stand as small miracles. Readers inhabit the adult recognizing the predicament and the child desperately trying to understand. A great tenderness infuses this telling. The narrative’s lush scope — from Pira’s deep dream life to the sight of the mighty volcano whose ancient creation stories he’s memorized to assorted crises — reveals the boy’s gentle, undefended awakening to his own and others’ flawed, earnest love. An exquisite meditation upon language, meaning, human longing and consciousness itself, “Stone World” will fill readers with wonder.