Fallen Land
Patrick Flanery
Atlantic Books, 432pp, £12.99
Patrick Flanery’s second novel, in which the dead hold sway over the living, is itself haunted by ancestors, two of which are united in the name of a character who starts out on the periphery and moves steadily to the centre, Nathaniel Noailles. The first name points in the direction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, from whose novel The House of the Seven Gables Flanery has taken his epigraph and much else besides. The other allusion – so recondite as to be a private joke – is to Bullet Park, John Cheever’s high-fevered portrait of violence in the suburbs, in which a man called Nailles becomes convinced that a man named Hammer is out to harm his vulnerable, bedridden son. Flanery wants his novel to tremor with the same Massachusetts indignation – Noailles is himself a Bostonian – but the result, sprawling, portentous and creaking with symbolism, has more in common with another work by yet another New Englander, Stephen King’s The Shining, in which, as here, an East Coast family disintegrates in the Midwest, and the only sane characters are a troubled young boy and the middle-aged black eccentric whom he befriends.
The boy is Nathaniel’s son Copley, an apparently affectless schoolchild who believes that a stranger is invading their house at night – accurately, though he has a hard time persuading his parents. The eccentric is the Noailles’s neighbour Louise Washington, a former schoolteacher who is passing a busy retirement as the keeper of secrets and flames. Louise knows that the Noailles’s newly purchased house is built on the site of an unmarked grave, where a liberal mayor and his black tenant – Louise’s grandfather – were lynched and dumped during the Red Summer of 1919.
Louise inherited the land, but sold it, after the death of her husband, to an ambitious architect, Paul Krovik, whose plan to build a large development – “a rational utopia where neighbors look after each other without recourse to the state” – was scuppered first by subsidence and then by the economy. Paul ended up losing everything: his family, his mind and, most painful of all, the prototype house he built from the ground up. The Noailles, who bought the house at a foreclosure auction, are the beneficiaries of his bad luck.
But land and luck aren’t the only things that people hand down or pass on; the burden of the past takes many forms – guilt, pain, genes – as Flanery is eager to acknowledge. Paul has disappointed his father by failing to go into the military; Louise has betrayed her forebears by selling the land. Nathaniel, the most beleaguered, is a victim of abuse twice over, the guinea pig for his mother’s psychology experiments and the subject of his father’s sexual attentions. There are times when he “wonders, noticing his wife’s occasional tendency towards compulsive behavior, whether Julia might have inherited some aspect of her mother’s mental illness”– suggesting that he hasn’t inherited his own mother’s command of diagnostic vocabulary.
As in Flanery’s slick first novel, Absolution, every character is given the chance to play protagonist. After a prologue – a fauxhistorical account of the events of the Red Summer – and a flash-forward that shows Paul in a high-security prison, the narrative unfolds chronologically. It’s an odd choice on Flanery’s part to deviate from the initial pattern (alternating between Paul and Nathaniel in third person, and Louise in first) whereby the story of Poplar Farm is told through its three most recent owners. The chapters about Copley and Julia, which do little to modify our sense of them, only increase the novel’s complement of dramatic irony; we spend much of the novel watching characters suspect each other and – in more psychologically fragile moments – themselves of doing things forwhich it’s clear that Paul is responsible.
It’s one of many ways in which Flanery’s tendencies run to excess. As Paul recalls his original scheme for Dolores Woods – or as Louise calls it, “the dolorous forest of infinite sorrow” – he thinks of the house as Gothic revival but “adapted to modern needs and materials”. The detail, together with the nearby reference to a “gable”, reinforces the Hawthorne connection; but the Gothicpastiche structure is merely a Trojan horse in which Flanery smuggles an improbable range of themes and modes. Like many an American novelist before him, he tries to keep the mixture under control by drawing connections – between sexual abuse and property developing, for example – but his efforts are strained, as when Louise compares the Bush-Murdoch axis to both medieval Catholicism and pathogenic fungi: “the language of the Crusades comes thrusting up into the talk of newsmen and politicians, soil-borne disease like Macrophomina phaesolina and its charcoal rot, turning language gray, spreading fungus in the drought of our time, through the dryness of speech, conditions inhospitable to growth, to the flourishing of debate”.
It’s as a portrait of the age that the novel feels most overdone. Flanery’s American city – Omaha, Nebraska, in all but name – is a grim, featureless place, and on the way to becoming fully privatised. Nathaniel, who works for an outsourcing company, aspires to move into the public sector: “if the state has not, at that point, ceded all responsibility to civic life and public wellbeing to private corporations”. We are being invited to scoff at Paul’s naivety when, having realised that malls, “with their private security guards”, are not a safe place to linger, he reflects gratefully that “a street is a place where anyone can stand”.
Towards the end, Flanery adopts a longer view and tries to mount an attack on not just the American but the human taste for ownership. In weighing the pleasures of hand-wringing against the costs, he might have remembered the example of Haw – thorne, who, in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, said that though he chose to give his story a moral (“the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones”) he refrained no less consciously from impaling the story with the moral, an approach that could only deprive it of life or cause it to stiffen in “an ungainly and unnatural attitude”.
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