Lodato’s wide-ranging novel pushes beauty’s boundaries
A poet, a playwright and a novelist, not to mention the winner of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, writer Victor Lodato seems to be something of a polymath.
His second novel, the wonder-filled and magisterial “Edgar and Lucy,” certainly feels as though it was written by one, so wide-ranging is it in its concerns and themes, and so ardent is it in its desire to bring everything — life, love, family, loneliness, magic, spiritualism and death — together in its pages.
The first section of the epic book’s seven in total, “The Age of Florence,” brings the reader into 21 Cressida Drive, Ferryfield, N.J., the still point at the center of Lodato’s swirling plot. The epigraph for the whole book comes from Sappho: “There is no place for grief in a house that serves the muse,” and the narrative has a carefully built, architectural quality that lends it pleasing immensity and gravitas.
The home at 21 Cressida Drive is presided over by one of the novel’s three main characters, the working-class and barely literate widowed Italian grandmother, Florence. She lives there with her angry and damaged red-haired daughter-in-law, Lucy, also a widow following the mysterious death of her husband, Florence’s son, Frank. Together, they’re raising Lucy’s son, the preternaturally intelligent and introspective 8-yearold albino, Edgar. In the face of various betrayals and losses, the three struggle to figure out, in Lodato’s astute distinction, how to “Not start over — but continue.”
Lodato’s skill as a poet manifests itself on every page, delighting with such elegant similes as “Between the trees, strands of spider silk flickered like glitches in reality” and such incisive descriptions as “the miraculous horror of a child growing up.”
His skill as a playwright shines in every piece of dialogue. Even minor characters like the brassy old lady, Honey Fasinga, get such golden lines as, “A person of style does not use his sleeve. Here’s a tissue. Goodness gracious. Are you generally a crier? It doesn’t do any good you know. You won’t get far on an ocean of tears.”
And his skill as a fiction writer displays itself in his virtuoso command of point of view. He makes omniscience look absurdly easy, leaping in and out of the perspectives not just of the main characters, but also a host of others, including the schizophrenic Frank; the mentally disabled neighbor girl, Toni-Ann; the depressive kidnapper, Conrad; and even, at one point, a dog named Jackie.
Equally impressive is that he does so in a way that encourages the reader to feel sympathy for each and every one of them. Even as they frequently commit foolish or terrible acts, as rendered by Lodato, they remain indelibly human.
As much as it concerns itself with tragedy and the inevitable loss of innocence attendant upon coming of age, so, too, is the book by turns light and whimsical with elements of humor, as when a young Lucy thinks, in flashback, “All of New Jersey appeared to be one giant cliche — an ugly sprawl of pizza and traffic and sleazeballs; green lawns lorded over by Marys on the half shell, and women who forced their hair into unnatural acts of aggression.”
Without giving too much away, the novel’s drama borders, at times, on melodrama — fires and drownings, vomiting and maiming, abortions and psychics — but such deliberate excess seems appropriate given the story’s focus on the barely fathomable dimensions of grief.
The book pushes the boundaries of beauty, inviting the reader to be like Edgar, who, even when staring at litter on the ground, “knew that these things were garbage, but at the same time he could feel their tiny breathless souls.”