This is indeed an accomplished novel by a poet. The complex and poetic plot structure is as intricate and multi-layered as the innards of clocks that populate the story. The startling language, precise and profuse metaphors and breath-taking lists that kaleidoscope our attention are the magic of poetry. The philosophical underpinning of interconnection is accomplished with delicate, pervasive persistence.
Spaar’s word choices attend to more than the mere communication of information: Take this very early description of the day Marlise, an anorexic orphan, leaves the Institute where she’d been temporarily placed.
“Snow blushed in patches around the station columns, and high over the Rancocas River, showing some skin through a slit of dark, opposite storefronts, the winter sky paled to emerald and glinted in the paisley swirls of parking lot potholes.”
That the snow blushes and the sky shows some skin through slits puts us in an environment where sexuality is lambent even here in the depressing urban scene. Forces animate the landscape. This is mystery, not flat “reality”.
Indeed, the landscape that each character inhabits is described in the condensed sensual language of poetry – for instance this passage – chosen at random – about her mother, Beatrice’s, girlhood home:
“In corn season, huge wings of irrigated water pumped in from the river wheeled over a sea of tassels, the heavy horses, heads festooned with oak-leaf sprags to keep off the flies, ready at the market wagons in the yard, men with blades and balsa baskets for packing.”
Spaar chooses particularly striking verbs – to have the water “wheel” over the corn tassels elicits that waving circular motion vividly. And of course, there’s also the delight of the alliterated blades and balsa baskets, and the echoed “a” of “baskets” and “packing.” The whole description is sun-filled. Bea’s early life is thus differentiated from the vine-entangled decay, barely breathing atmosphere of the various abandoned houses that come after.
The experience of reading this novel is that one is plunged into the worlds of an impressive multiplicity of characters who, it turns out, are “inextricably connected”, as one reader put it. There seems no limit to the number of characters Spaar evokes, quickly, sympathetically with evocative language. This reader, reluctant to entertain yet another personage, was won over instantly by Spaar’s first sentence about the wonderfully named “Zeno”, a brand-new character.
“Zeno Mastrogiovanni loved a blizzard. The chaos drew him...”
That swift, informative introduction turns out also to be pivotal to the plot – as does the blizzard itself which affects many of the characters who experience it in unaware proximity.
Many readers have noted the fairy tale quality of Paradise Close – it’s there! How is it accomplished?
– There are stunning comma-connected lists that quickly defy the strict limitations of time – e.g.
About the anorexic Marlise
“...she felt most herself, skeletal downy limbs, a hidden insulation inside one heavy veil or another, the beaver coat, or childhood snowsuit, or head wrapped in wool scarves that the OT techs knitted for her, air burnt with dinners being delivered, dinners she would not eat as she tramped along, sometimes running, sometimes carrying her dead mother like a baby in her arms…so wet and cold, so heavy!, the sparkle of little lit Christmas trees...”
–A fairytale-like collection of talismanic references that appear and reappear, including the many decayed houses, starting and ending with Paradise Close itself, Handel Hall and Otto’s house. That different characters have inhabited each of the homes at different times and that they are all interconnected – whether they know it or not – enfolds us in a magic spell of astonished realization of which the characters themselves are unaware. We have a privileged view.
– In the spirit of incantation, names are invoked, made up, shared, changed. Marlise herself renames herself Emma and is called by a lover, Em and Mbomb. In a late scene in the book, full of drugs and urgency, Silas Newman, erstwhile intense companion of Marlise at the asylum, high on drugs and in a manic state, is picked up in the snowstorm by a line cook who seems to reek of fish. Silas names him “Sir Tuna, Finest of Fish.” Even our narrator then refers to the cook as “Tuna.” It’s an amusing and bizarre gesture of complicity. The houses themselves are named and renamed – Handel Hall becomes Handel Hell then The Hole. One’s subjective state becomes the arbiter of reality, as in fairy tales.
– Silas is the essential magic man in Marlise’s life. We meet him as a 20-year-old housed in an adolescent body but with sparkling (messianic) qualities that seem to animate everyone around him – an artistic prodigy on the edge of fame and disaster. Here’s the first description of Silas:
Silas Newman blew into the ward, a dervish of cannabis and autumn’s shiver, an easel under one arm and a paint spackled duffel bag stuffed with brushes, solvents, and tubes of oil colors in the other hand......his classic features, long, lustrous hair, the braided silver toggles of his pea coat bristling with leaf-smoke and the sharp season...Hair a smoky tousle, mouth dank and sweet. Lit.
A phrase that recurs in the book starts with Silas. He experiences Marlise at all ages: her child self, her emerging self and the aging version of her. Turns out he sees her thus in simultaneity, literally. (But you need to read this wonderful novel to see how that is enacted.) My point here is that time is elastic here as in fairy tales – stretching thin, rebounding, wrapping around itself.
Only late in the novel, in an almost casual comment, do we experience what I take to be a defining philosophical theme of the book:
“What is a miracle if not the intrusion of one world into another” – (Spaar’s more eloquent restatement of a comment by Pychon.) We readers are in on the histories, the atmospheres, the tragedies of characters who don’t necessarily know that they are existing in continuity with one another or in situations that have existed before – “intrusions of one world into another.” The intricate workings of these interconnected parts is never labored. Spaar’s dexterity and precision keep the reader entranced on every page.
Rebecca Kaiser Gibson’s debut novel is The Promise of a Normal Life, (Arcade Publishing, 2023.) Her poetry collections are Girl as Birch (Bauhan Publishing, 2022), and Opinel (Bauhan Publishing, 2015). Gibson’s poetry appears in Agni; Barrow Street, Field; Green Mountains; Greensboro; Interim, Harvard; Massachusetts; Ocean State; Passengers; Pleiades; Salamander; Slate; Tupelo; and VerseDaily among others. Her prose has been published in The Harvard Review; Northwest Review; and reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pleiades and the Tupelo Quarterly. She’s received fellowships from MacDowell, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Moulin á Nef in France. As Fulbright Scholar she taught in India. She taught poetry at Tufts University for 23 years, then founded, and runs The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series. www.rebeccakaisergibson.com