Census

It was my son who prepared me for this work, my son who showed me, not in speech, but in his daily way, that we are by our nature a kind of measure, that we are measuring each other at every moment. This was the census he began at birth, that he continues even now. It was his census that led into ours, into our taking of the census, our travel north.

It was his life, his way of thinking that made the work of the census seem possible, even inevitable.

In the introduction to Census, “fabulist, absurdist” author (so it says on his website) Jesse Ball explains that when he was growing up, he idolised his older brother, Abram, who just so happened to have had Down syndrome. As he got older, Jesse understood that he would eventually be responsible for his brother's care, but health problems piled up for Abram and he died in 1998, aged twenty-four. Lately inspired by this caretaking journey he was never able to take, Jesse Ball decided to write a book about a father and his developmentally challenged son who hit the road – as census takers in an off-kilter world – and have the way that strangers react to and interact with the son illuminate what Abram's own life must have been (or perhaps, might have been). Ball writes:

It is not easy to write a book about someone you know, much less someone long dead, when the memories you have of him are like some often trampled garden. I didn’t see exactly how it could be done, until I realised I would make a book that was hollow. I would place him in the middle of it, and write around him for the most part. He would be there in his effect.

This concept is familiar to me from Rachel Cusk's recent Outline series and its use of annihilated perspective, and is made even more manifest when the father explains that he had read that, “A census taker must above all attempt, even long for, blankness”, in an effort not to mar their impressions of the scenes they enter; this is not a census in the usual sense of gathering names and ages, but an attempt to survey the world and how accepting it is of those who are different. I am glad that Ball put all of this into his introduction – so that I wouldn't have mistakenly thought I was simply reading about a road trip in which not much happens – and after building to a moving ending, I have to conclude that he succeeded in this effort.

We felt lucky to have had him, and lucky to become the ones who were continually with him, caring for him. I have read some books of philosophy in which the freedom of burdens is explained, that somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it, we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live.

As Census opens, an aged surgeon (no one is named in the story), recently widowered, is given a terminal diagnosis concerning his heart condition, and he decides to check his adult son out of the group home he's living at and enlist him as his assistant in conducting a census along the road north from their capital city of A; planning to hit every small town from B to Z, where the son will be able to board a train back home and meet up with the neighbour who has offered to take on his care. In the far-flung communities that they enter, some residents are friendly and accommodating, some are hostile and paranoid, and along the way, the father fills in events from his son's life: the joys he and his wife took in raising the boy, the playground cruelties to which he was subjected. Too, the father relates much of what he sees to the nature writings of an author who has long intrigued him:

Gerhard Mutter, seemingly a man, but in fact, the pen name of Lotta Werter, who led a public life as the mayor of a German town near Stuttgart, wrote compulsively her entire life about cormorants. To her, everything applied to them. Whatever principles she discovered day by day, they seemed mysteriously entwined with those dark nimble eyes, with that whispering, wild ungraspable diving. It must be a terrible thing, she writes, again and again in the same words (she uses the same sentences again and again – to the point where it ceases to be self-plagiarism and must be seen as a refrain), it must be a terrible thing, she writes, to be a fish, and know that a cormorant has observed you. It isn't terrible to die, she thinks. It is simply terrible to be observed, and therefore to be somehow in helpless peril. There is no distance a fish can go, she writes, that will save it. From the moment at which it is noticed, the fish is permitted a sort of grace that will be concluded, excruciatingly, with the bayonet of the beak.

So too, I suppose, has the dying father been “permitted a sort of grace” in being afforded this trip, but I confess to being among those readers who don't quite get the ongoing theme of Mutter and her cormorants. If it is dangerous to be observed, it seems ironic that “observation” is the father's hidden mission; that the dead mother had been a much-celebrated performance artist (called a clown, but she was so much more). And this world is dangerous: children can die from the chemicals their father brings home on his work clothes; young people have their thumbs cut off to save them from the killing floors of the local rope factory; a stage actor playing a piece of food must dodge the impaling cutlery swooping from the theater's rafters. And, of course, our world is dangerous: we're all just journeying blindly through life from A to Z, and the best we can hope for is to be put on a train at the end of the road and eventually be met by someone who loves us; shouldn't we all be kind to one another along the way?

I have to say that I admired this read more than truly loved it, but it's four stars nonetheless.