San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A test of myths surrounding heroic colonists.
North American mythology is rife with shaky stories of theft and imperial expansionism recast as exemplary heroism.
And then there’s “A Song From Faraway.” Deni Ellis Béchard’s eighth book is a stunning novelinstories that wrestles with the legacy of our continent’s fictions, contending with men who struggle to stand in a morally sound relationship with others.
Like Béchard’s first novel, “Vandal Love,” “Song” delves into the lives of a North American family over generations. How these stories, each a glittering shard, fit together as a novel isn’t immediately apparent, but a jagged mosaic spanning continents and eras gradually, beautifully takes shape.
Set in the time of 9/11 in Vancouver, British Columbia, the first story is told by Andrew Estrada, a bloodless, riskaverse graduate student who is jealous of his passionate, “redneck” halfbrother, Hugh. Hugh possesses an intrusive curiosity about Andrew’s girlfriend as well as their novelist father, a draftdodger whose every book contended with this decision. One of his books, about an itinerant musician, was titled “A Song From Faraway.”
After their father passes, Hugh noses around his library and begins translating a book by a stranger who shares their last name, Rafael Estrada. Later, he enlists and is deployed to Iraq.
This story excavates Andrew’s emotional anemia, hypocrisy and classism, coming to a subtle resolution just before another story, set in Iraqi Kurdistan. Like the first, the second story involves triangulation, absent fathers and myth.
In Section 2, also titled “A Song From Faraway,” we travel back several generations. This time, it’s the thirdperson story of Joseph, a young fiddler in Nova Scotia whose father has abandoned them. He reenacts the drama of his father before him: abandoning the mother of his child when she is pregnant. His restlessness leads him to fight in the Boer War, where he saves a man.
In a later story, Nolan, the character Joseph saved during the war, explains to his son, “Sometimes I feel I was blown apart in the war and put together from the bodies of different men. The parts never wanted to work together, but I had all these pieces. Pieces of a body. Pieces of stories.” The novel’s brilliant innovation is its adoption of a shattered form: its structure mirrors its theme of bodies and stories ruined by wars willingly fought.
By the novel’s conclusion, which hinges on the book by Rafael Estrada, seven disparate stories have been harmonized. Motifs such as books and other forms of storytelling inheritance — or falsely claimed inheritance in the case of a stolen work of art — build connective tissue between the parts. While the novel starts quietly, suggestive of a domestic and insular short story, it builds to a wild, satisfying ending.
Béchard, also a journalist who has reported from all over the world, gifts us with an observant, lyrical and powerful consideration of the violent expansiveness and dangerously flawed stories North American fathers have bequeathed to their sons.
Tough of mind and tender of heart, its beauty is wholly entrancing.
Anita Felicelli’s writing has appeared in the Rumpus, Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her debut collection of stories, “Love Songs for a Lost Continent,” will be published in October. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com