Edgar and Lucy

What terrible luck the Finis had. It was like a curse from a fairy tale; it never ended. Suicides and bridges and a child with marble skin. And though Netty never liked to think that anyone had worse luck than she and Henry, the truth was, the Finis did. They had very peculiar stars.

I didn't know what to expect from Edgar and Lucy (and I totally recommend going into this read cold; the less you know beforehand, the better), and still, it was a constant surprise to me: the plot, the characters, the sentences. It's immediately apparent that author Victor Lodato is primarily a poet, and in addition to satisfying turns of phrase, the overall structure and themes are complex and literary; like a myth or epic poem. Yet in the end, I wasn't 100% on board with the plot – it had the feel of scaffolding: the (normally hidden) framework upon which the pretty stuff gets hung. And when the plot itself began to drag and refuse to resolve its crisis at about the two-thirds mark (of this longish book), I grew impatient. I'm considering four stars a rounding up – a nod to Lodato's tremendous skillfulness – and I'm only going to talk about the writing itself in general terms here; no spoilers. The following is an example of the poetical:

What were they, these thoughts that had made her son's hands tremble? Even his eyes had trembled, like compass needles turning in dread towards some dark and unimpeachable north.

That passage wowed me on page seventeen, and made me think that I was in store for some very special writing – but I have to admit that there weren't nearly as many lovely bits as this set me up to hope for. Instead, Lodato's focus seemed to be more on the big picture, and as with any mythologist, he was heavy on the iconography: there are frequent bridges and tunnels; witches and widows; mirrors and timepieces; bodies of water and a sky full of stars. The past is always intruding on the present – ghosts walk the earth both literally and in relentless memory – and actions replay themselves throughout time; sometimes literally and sometimes flipped, so that madness leads to grief in one family, and grief to madness in another. Time itself is forever fluid and multi-streamed; a fact Lucy learned young:

New Jersey was a terrible place, the worst place in the world—and a teenaged Lucy knew that it would only get worse. She could see every part of the Garden State growing fatter and fatter – the people, the buildings, the cars, the hair, until, finally, there was no space between any two things and a mass suffocation ensued. As Lucy stared at her seventeen-year-old self in the window of the butcher shop, it suddenly made sense where the real pain was coming from. It was coming from the future.

(It's no coincidence that Lucy has this revelation as she is mirrored by a butcher shop window.) And Edgar learned this lesson at an even younger age:

Something was wrong with time.
It had been wrong for years; maybe since the day he was born. His life was unfolding too slowly – more like a book when obviously life was a movie. He could see how his grandmother lay at the root of the problem. The way she'd made weeks out of minutes, and years out of days. His mother did it, too – falling into silences that had the bleak ardor of black-and-white photographs. The error with time was something he'd learned from them. And it seemed that today, the saddest day of the boy's life, time might stop completely.

Lodato creates a lot of tension in the way that he makes his characters refuse to accept what they need – Lucy responds to affection with aggression, and Edgar doesn't take the simple steps that might improve his situation – and while this repeatedly frustrated me, as always, I need to admire a book that pulls so much emotion out of me as I'm reading; even negative emotions. I understand that Lodato is trying to capture a time and place with his writing about others: Edgar's bully is a cruel “fatty”; the neighbour girl is repeatedly called a “retard”; “Guineas” and “Pollacks” abound (conversely, the only two Black characters are noble and righteous). Less intentional, I'd imagine, is the way that Lodato turned me off with his writing about the women – Lucy's life would be better if she didn't sleep around (one reviewer said that she stopped reading this book when Lodato “rewarded” Lucy for changing her mind about an abortion; as though a male writer must have a religious agenda [and therefore, no right] to use this plot point; I'll need to think about that); the older generation of women are all selfless caretakers (and accept infidelity and abuse from their husbands); a “granny-bunned” woman detective is incompetent because she is a “novice female” and “neurotically prideful”. This repeatedly rubbed me the wrong way, but perhaps Lodato was trying to capture an archetype of femininity to satisfy his epic themes. In the end, I think this was the point:

Learning kindness late in life was a kind of torture. The pain often came from the past, from kindnesses withheld. The knife was particularly sharp when those who most deserved your kindness were long gone. And unless you wanted to die of sorrow, you had to give this unspent kindness to those you loved less.

Ultimately, I'm a little ambivalent about his book – I didn't completely enjoy it, and it did feel unnecessarily long – but I can't deny that Lodato is a skilled writer; Edgar and Lucy might well win some awards.