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Lighting up human suffering
By Scott Hutchins |
February 27, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IN the first pages of "The Illumination," Kevin Brockmeier's elegantly written new novel, a lonely character named Carol Ann Page receives a spite package from her ex-husband. The box is covered in tape, "the kind fretted with hundreds of white threads," and as Carol Ann attempts to cut through it, she slips and nearly lops off her thumb. Hours later, she wakes from re-attachment surgery to find her sutures blazing with a bright white light.
This is the Illumination, with a capital "I," and it's not particular to Carol Ann Page. All across the world, human pain - physical, and maybe spiritual - has been made visible. Brockmeier devotes his considerable gifts of description to the illuminated wounds of his characters, using lush, quiet prose to detail their cancer, abuse, self-mutilation and just plain old age. A woman is crushed in a stadium collapse, revealing "the strangely shaped elephant's ears of her pelvis." A cigarette burn resembles "the great fanning loop of a solar flare."
The novel is divided into six sections, each with a separate protagonist: a divorced researcher (Carol Ann), a widowed photographer, a mute boy, a solitary missionary, a writer with a gruesome mouth ailment, and a mentally ill homeless man. These are united by a prop - a slightly sappy diary - that gives the book an overall shape, though the individual narratives are not revisited.
Readers of Brockmeier's previous novels and stories - particularly "The Brief History of the Dead," from 2006 - will be familiar with his talent for dramatizing the struggles of an isolated character. In "The Illumination," however, solitude sometimes coagulates into stasis. The main characters soldier on for pages without encountering anyone else. There's a sameness to their predicaments as well.
But what "The Illumination" neglects isn't action - there's a horrific car wreck, a deadly explosion and two mafia beatings - it's interaction.
As for the speculative aspects of the novel, Brockmeier relies on his usual poise to make the Illumination real. The reader never doubts that, on a certain day at a certain time, light begins to pour from our wounds. The strange transformation is wonderfully human, down to the social awkwardness it engenders - do you mention your colleague's now visible heart ailment?
And, in a touch that's at once dark and profound, Brockmeier suggests that the Illumination makes our suffering not just visible but beautiful. "The Illumination" is a hymn to suffering, and though the novel isn't always as dynamic as it might be, on this point it never fails to be deeply felt and precisely observed.
This is the Illumination, with a capital "I," and it's not particular to Carol Ann Page. All across the world, human pain - physical, and maybe spiritual - has been made visible. Brockmeier devotes his considerable gifts of description to the illuminated wounds of his characters, using lush, quiet prose to detail their cancer, abuse, self-mutilation and just plain old age. A woman is crushed in a stadium collapse, revealing "the strangely shaped elephant's ears of her pelvis." A cigarette burn resembles "the great fanning loop of a solar flare."
The novel is divided into six sections, each with a separate protagonist: a divorced researcher (Carol Ann), a widowed photographer, a mute boy, a solitary missionary, a writer with a gruesome mouth ailment, and a mentally ill homeless man. These are united by a prop - a slightly sappy diary - that gives the book an overall shape, though the individual narratives are not revisited.
Readers of Brockmeier's previous novels and stories - particularly "The Brief History of the Dead," from 2006 - will be familiar with his talent for dramatizing the struggles of an isolated character. In "The Illumination," however, solitude sometimes coagulates into stasis. The main characters soldier on for pages without encountering anyone else. There's a sameness to their predicaments as well.
But what "The Illumination" neglects isn't action - there's a horrific car wreck, a deadly explosion and two mafia beatings - it's interaction.
As for the speculative aspects of the novel, Brockmeier relies on his usual poise to make the Illumination real. The reader never doubts that, on a certain day at a certain time, light begins to pour from our wounds. The strange transformation is wonderfully human, down to the social awkwardness it engenders - do you mention your colleague's now visible heart ailment?
And, in a touch that's at once dark and profound, Brockmeier suggests that the Illumination makes our suffering not just visible but beautiful. "The Illumination" is a hymn to suffering, and though the novel isn't always as dynamic as it might be, on this point it never fails to be deeply felt and precisely observed.
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