Unsafe at home
In his virtuosic eighth novel, J. Robert Lennon describes Broken River as “a town few people think about or want to go to.” Located in central New York, perhaps not far from Ithaca, where Lennon teaches at Cornell, it is a dismal, dying place that houses a prison but lacks a bookstore or movie theater. Aside from penal retribution, drug-dealing appears to be its leading industry. On the outskirts of Broken River, what one resident calls “a small house in the woods, far from anything” sets the savage plot in motion.
A man and a woman are brutally assaulted and murdered trying to escape from that house in the wee hours of the morning. Their 5-yearold daughter survives. The killers are never caught, nor is a motive for the crime ever determined. For the next 12 years, the house, burdened by its bloody past, lies vacant. It is eventually bought and renovated by an avant-garde sculptor named Karl. He has been given an ultimatum from his wife, a novelist named Eleanor, that they must move far away from Brooklyn, where Karl has been dallying with other women. Accompanying Karl and Eleanor is their precocious 12-year-old daughter, Irina.
Fascinated by the history — and mystery — of their new house, Irina tries to track down the fate of the 5-yearold survivor. She becomes convinced that a young woman named Sam, who has recently come to Broken River to join her brother after his release from prison, is that grown-up child. Renewed attention to the case propels the original perpetrators — Joe, a thuggish psychopath, and Louis, a carpet salesman who is his reluctant accomplice — back into action. Members of the cult of amateur sleuths who have latched on to the unsolved Broken River crime believe that “there are murderous, unprosecuted man-monsters roaming the earth.” Joe and Louis can pass for man-monsters.
A musician and composer as well as a writer, Lennon has always defied categories. Novels such as his 2003 “Mailman” — about a deranged mail carrier, and his 2009 “Castle” — about a man who becomes obsessed with the mysterious structure abutting his own wooded property — have little in common with “Broken River” other than a central New York setting and a pervasive anxiety over the menace of the ordinary. Fearful of litigation, Lennon’s publisher chose not to release “Happyland,” a novel with loose parallels to efforts by Pleasant Rowland, the creator of American Girl dolls, to take over Aurora, N.Y. It was serialized by Harper’s in 2006.
A critical darling who began his career with a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for his debut novel, “The Light of Falling Stars” (1997), Lennon seems always on the cusp of popular success, and his own uncertain status, dangling between literary and commercial fiction, is reflected in the two artists in his latest novel. After leaving Brooklyn, Karl has lost the inspiration to create the innovative assemblages that a trendy gallery expects of him. He is reduced to trying to peddle custommade knives on eBay. Eleanor has been supporting the family by writing formulaic chick lit, but she has now produced a manuscript that her agent considers unmarketable.
Into the world he conjures up for “Broken River,” Lennon inserts a genderless, disembodied spirit he calls “the Observer.” Beginning with the double murder that launches the intricately connected proceedings, the Observer sees everything and marvels at “this skein of cause and effect” that constitutes the novel’s plot. How and why is it that the novel’s disparate characters converge in the way that they do, it wonders. And what to make of the foolish, self-destructive human species? “It is baffling to the Observer, the things they do, the patterns they create that they inhabit and re-create again and again. They find one another so irresistible, even when enmity is the form their affinity takes.”
The metafictional musings of the Observer — a clever rehabilitation of the ancient Omniscient Author — seem to me superfluous. Readers of “Broken River” do not require prompting from an Observer in order to reflect upon the inscrutable lines of human intersection and collision. Or to admire the uncommon cunning behind this dark and brooding thriller.
Steven G. Kellman is the author of “The Translingual Imagination” and “Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com