Bodies in Motion

Broken RiverBy J. Robert LennonGraywolf, 2017The Geary family rushes out of its rural house in the middle of the night. The father starts the Volvo. The mother fumbles with a car seat. The young daughter, Samantha, cries for her stuffed frog. A sadistic double-murder ensues at the hands of unknown assailants, with only Samantha escaping. The crime is never solved. Fourteen years later, a new family of three moves into the since-abandoned house, complete with daughter and Volvo. This is the setup of J. Robert Lennon’s new haunter, Broken River.Broken River is named for the fictional country town in upstate New York where it takes place. Mostly known for its state prison and prison-themed bar, Broken River is home to alcoholic uncles, burnout graybeard guitar teachers, small-time pot slingers, and sugar addicts. Central to the story, its newest homeowners are the thirty-something couple Karl and Eleanor. They’ve moved from Brooklyn to save their marriage from Karl’s extramarital affairs. Karl is a paunchy and hirsute—but not unsexy—avant-garde sculptor, whose new passion is forging long knives. His art is a veneer for childish delights, and his default register is that of an excitable ten-year-old:

His work table is piled high with books, some of them still nested in their shipping vestments, most of them on knives and swords. Japanese shit. Chokuto, katana, kodachi. People were fucking ruthless back in the day. He’s been splitting glass, making blades like a fucking Comanche. Shards of the stuff are everywhere. He’s so done with capital-A art.

The decidedly more grown-up Eleanor is a “literary chick lit” author of budding renown. “The pastel-colored covers of Eleanor’s books are the kind that display shoe-clad disembodied white women’s legs or a fancy warm-weather hat or a signifier of free time such as a beach umbrella or shopping bag.” She keeps not finishing her current novel, finding it despairingly superficial. With them is their cloyingly precocious twelve-year old Irina, busy at work on a novel of her own. Someday a novelist will write a preteen daughter character who isn’t impossibly wise and lexical. But today isn’t that day, and Lennon isn’t our man.Out of boredom and artistic curiosity—and unknown to each other—Eleanor and Irina take to an online message board to investigate the Geary murders. Irina starts to half-believe her fantasy that her new babysitter, Sam, may be Samantha Geary who escaped long ago. She impulsively shares this notion with her fellow online sleuths. Thus do the original killers learn that Samantha may still be in Broken River, and wonder if she may have the drug money that was the motive for their crime. Sam-the-babysitter’s brother is released from prison and begins growing and selling marijuana. Karl and Eleanor continue to mope, leaving their daughter to handle the bad guys mostly by herself.The cast established and the pieces in place, Broken River moves inevitably and predictably to solve its series of mysteries: Who killed the Geary family and why? What became of the survivor Samantha Geary? What’s the deal with these strange townies, and what accounts for their sinister demeanors? The book works well when it sticks to this surface plot, and there are pleasures for the reader in devising and refining theories up through a tense final scene of confrontation and redemption.But to summarize the plot of Broken River is to reveal nothing of its ambition. The book endeavors to overturn the limitations of most crime novels, which ultimately fail because of the narrowing that the genre compels. They’re inverted triangles that open broadly with limitless possibilities, encouraging readers to connect with characters and concoct fantastic theories. Then these possibilities are winnowed one-by-one until the books inevitably settle on a single, often pedestrian, outcome.Broken River avoids that fate by using a spectral point-of-view called “the Observer,” a disembodied consciousness representing cause-and-effect in human affairs. Its field of vision is proportional to the effects of the Geary murders. The Observer emerges at the time of the murders, and sits dormant as they remain unsolved. It lives in the floorboards as the house falls into disrepair, is used as a hideout for bored and horny teenagers, and repeatedly fails to sell. As Eleanor and Irina move in and begin investigating, the effects of the murder rekindle. Accordingly, the Observer gains mobility, then omniscience:

The Observer is increasingly aware that it needn’t choose one time, one place, one group of human beings to attend to. Indeed, it is quite capable of observing anything, all things.

It flits around New York, watching the principals hurtle into each other. But the Observer isn’t a crime-solver. Instead, it finds itself bored by the plot:

The Observer could follow but chooses instead to remain. It is interested, it realizes, in the negative spaces the people leave behind, spaces they fail to occupy in the first place. Objects and events not missed but gone unnoticed, unanticipated, unconceived of. The Observer will catch up to the human beings later. They’re slow, moored to their physical forms, to each other.

The Observer notes that “the humans are logical but unpredictable. They set things in motion. Their lives intersect in unexpected ways,” and is interested in “these wordless events that span mere seconds. Serendipitous encounters, subtle reactions, inscrutable social cues that alter the course of events, nudging the plot—one plot out of infinitude—this way or that.”In this way Lennon subverts the typical crime narrative. Rather than the plot winnowing until its conclusion, the advancement of the plot increases the Observer’s view of, and interest in, the minutiae of everyday events occasioned by the murders. This leads to some great observational prose, and the book’s most satisfying passages are those that describe these quotidian downstream consequences. In one granular scene, the once-and-future murderer, Joe, sits in a coffee shop keeping an eye out for his prey, Samantha. As he abruptly rises to leave, the Observer focuses on a few background characters:

The man in the windbreaker sits in silence for fifteen minutes, blinking, exuding heat. At last he stands up from the tiny table, jostling the patron sitting behind him: a pale, strawberry-bearded man in conversation with a willowy, sleepy-looking young woman. The bearded man’s mouth opens, as though to issue a complaint, but then he swivels around, allowing himself a view of his tormentor. His mouth abruptly shuts. This small series of events appears to catch the young woman’s attention. It rouses her from her torpor. Her gaze follows the man in the windbreaker as he makes his calmly bullying way through the crowd, and when she returns it to the bearded man, it is as though she is seeing him in a new light. Subtly, but not so subtly that the bearded man fails to notice, she wakes her phone—until now lying dormant beside her coffee cup—with a poke of her middle finger. She appears to take note of the time and quickly puts the device back to sleep. The bearded man seems to realize that some spell has been broken. The young woman is no longer interested in him.

And so does a murder fifteen years prior lead to the emasculation of a man on a first date. The book contains several similar sharp and self-contained scenes. They’re connected by the Observer to the murder, a connection unseen by the humans.An expanding crime novel is an undeniable achievement, and Lennon merits praise for it. But, the accomplishment necessarily comes at the cost of a seductive narrative. Mostly this conceit makes a mess. The structure leads to an unmoored reading experience, and the novel lurches from crime procedural to character study to undergraduate philosophy without any unifying theme. Once the plot loses the attention of the narrator, it is hard for the reader to stay engaged. The book pushes its plot forward while insisting that the outcome is both inevitable and immaterial. This dissonance is unpleasant.To be sure, Broken River has interesting ideas. For one, it has much to say about the way online life distorts truths and then amplifies those distortions. It convincingly charts how a wild hypothesis (new friend happens to be escaped murder victim) is laundered through an online community to become truth. It then traces the destructive consequences of living that truth. The secrets of Broken River are revealed in browser histories, unanswered texts, Craigslist postings, and iPhone creepshots. The way characters go online to seek community—only to find isolation—is convincingly contemporary.There are also intriguing passages on the art within the novel. Each of the characters is a creator, and the reader learns about their inner-lives through their creations. Puzzlingly, Lennon abandons the possibilities of layered narrative in favor of meta-criticism. All of the artwork comes to parody Broken River itself. So we learn that Irina’s book “has no real plot—it’s just descriptions of things.” Karl’s favorite sculptures are described:

[T]he lines didn’t connect inside Huck and Jim, not all of them, not in the usual way. They veered off, faked you out. There were dead ends in there, intentional flaws in the glass, quirks and bends in the metal. And there were lines that seemed to terminate that actually connected the two together—vectors through the air between them. Facets of glass that jumped through space.

As the novel nears its end, Eleanor’s novel is contemptuously reviewed by her agent.

“Yes, yes, yes. What I think.” He leans back, makes a cage with his hands, taps his pursed lips with two index fingers. “I think what we have here is a novel that shifts its focus. A novel that changes its identity midway, yes? On the one hand, it’s, as I said, compelling. On the other hand, its confused. It’s uncertain of its aims.”

Lennon’s readers will enthusiastically agree with Eleanor’s. That this criticism is self-aware and clever does nothing to mitigate its devastating accuracy.And like his plot, Lennon’s writing style is often over-engineered and indulgent. He can’t resist the gratuitous metaphor. Watch how this description of a munificent lover is perfect until it disintegrates from overreach:

There is something of the nurse in the way she pulls him back, settles him onto the pillows, interrogates his body with her hands. It’s as though she’s giving him more to conceal the fact that she has less, like a poor mother who has saved up all year for a plentiful Christmas.

There is indeed much of the nurse in the pitying lover, but there’s none of the indigent mother. She loves her children but is unable to provide, the exact opposite of the situation described. And ending this evocation on “Christmas” is atonal.Most egregiously, Lennon wastes the wonderfully inventive promise of the Observer. The first few chapters establish a world of untethered panpsychism, and suggest a meditation on consciousness itself. But Lennon mostly employs the Observer to make banal commentaries on human nature. Contemplating death, it notes:

If the humans know that death is coming, their words and actions must all be profoundly influenced by that fact. They fear making wrong choices, so they avoid making any at all. They keep very still, hoping that death might fail to take notice of them.

Later, it observes:

The humans conceive of their lives as enclosed by a series of discrete packages of time, defined by the turning of the Earth, that offer conceptual division for otherwise persistent events. “Tomorrow is another day,” they say, as though the hours of darkness possess some kind of inherent power to alter factual reality. But the fascinating thing is that they do—that because the humans believe in the potential of the new day, the new day sometimes gives them what they want.

But is this fascinating? If I ever meet a disembodied Observer with first-contact perspective on humanity, I hope it does more than deconstruct the expression “tomorrow is another day.” I get that one already.Broken River’s ambition is creditable, and it contains intriguing ideas and a few electric sequences. But it ultimately wastes its solid plot and marvelously campy and postmodern premise. I was left with both admiration for Lennon’s audacity, and annoyance with his novel’s tedium. A perfectly good thriller is lost to the pursuit of capital-A art.____David Culberg is a lawyer in Chicago. He reads books on the train.