Leaving Southern California (Cycle 1, 2009)
Train travel is meditative. Long, steady passages of time and motion invite long, steady passages of contemplation, with the passing landscape as inspiration, muse or backdrop. And when you pull your eyes from the window, or your mind from whatever thoughts it may have have mustered, there is hardly better refuge or greater comfort than a book.
More than two years have passed since I read the novel Fall by Geoffrey Young, and its imagery, literary depth and painstaking study of human frailty haunt me still. Its pages pulled my eyes from the sun-drenched canyons of Southern California, the deserts of New Mexico and the open plains of West Texas. The book fed and challenged my thinking as I rode across the Mississippi Delta and into the Smoky Mountains of Eastern Tennessee. When I read its last pages on the approach to Atlanta I felt as though my journey had been doubled.
By way of disclosure I must tell you that Geoffrey Young is more than an admired colleague: he is a personal friend and faithful supporter of the City Love Song project. From the very first performance to my Kickstarter campaign to the Shout for Love on MLK Day 2011, Geoffrey has been there. Anyone attending my run at 59E59 Theaters last May would have seen his name listed in my program.
A church in Texas, somewhere west of San Antonio (Cycle 1, 2009)
I should also note that I read a draft, to which Geoffrey made some changes before seeing the book into print. I say changes and not improvements, for while he may have brought the book more in line with his vision, the novel I read on those long bouts of travel left little to be desired.
Though Geoffrey did ask me to read his draft of Fall in 2009, he did not ask me to write this post. Formal references to his name below are made out of courtesy and professional respect.
Fall is a complex book and very long. Geoffrey’s literary knowledge far exceeds my own, yet his writing is so generous that I rarely felt out of my depth. He communicates complexity in turns of phrase so exacting that the intended sensation, related poetically, is instantly grasped. Besides, the tools he uses are far less important than the effect they produce, which is a near-devotional study on the intrinsic beauty of life in glory and in pain.
And study you will, for the intricacy of the story’s construction and the richness of the author’s writing will compel you to practice good reading. Mr. Young pays honor to certain literary traditions–there is a brief transition of style early in the novel that popped the eyes of my mind–and employs a curiously humorous manner–a humor which, like an unfamiliar odor, tantalizes with its oddity.
What is this book about, you ask. Here is the book description from its page on Amazon:
Fall is the darkly comic story of Paul, a young man recounting how he ended up a fugitive frantically writing his life story on a New York City fire-escape. Paul was Robert, and before that he was Alex, and before that he was Sam, which was the name his mother gave him. It was a dim dawn in suburban Connecticut twelve years ago when Paul committed an act so vile he would be forced to run forever. Now, he is certain his true identity has been discovered. Looking back at his life over the course of three frenzied days, Paul records what happened. Through his figurations and the prismatic lens of his memory, we witness a seemingly normal teenager’s descent into hatred, intolerance, and violence. Fall is his confession, and his final act.
FALL by Geoffrey Young (picture hosted by Amazon)
The limitations of a capsule description do this book a disservice. The story is rife with fascinating characters–Ruth, for instance, a muddled mass, a melted candle oozing upon Sam, her searching son, is the most intriguing matriarch I’ve met in literature since Mary Behan, mother to E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate.
The girlfriend Angie is a canvas upon which buckets of love and lust and emotional turmoil are thrust, bringing wave after wave of cringing self-recognition (this reader’s self, anyway). And Father Joseph, a man who teeters precariously between warm priestly guidance and disquieting, even sinister paternalism.
Día de Muertos street art, Austin (Cycle 1, 2009)
Then there is Sam himself, riding whipsaw through a carnival partly of his own making. His mind is brilliant but his soul is stunted. He is transfixed by the furthest reaches of our deepest questions and sometimes blunders toward them with almost no regard to consequence. He can also calculate, devise and commit acts of both love and cruelty with the precision. He is an anti-protagonist; Sam often repulsed me, but he always drew me in. I begrudgingly came to love him, because in his magnified humanity I find myself. So too in Alex, and Robert, and Paul–each self-made renditions of a man who flees his past. Each, it seemed to me, an attempt by Sam to force total control upon one isolated part of himself, an experience I recognize.
You don’t need to identify with this (cast within the) central character to appreciate how elegantly the arc of a life is constructed, and examined, within Fall. As we move through the chapters of this book, chapters of an urgent life unfurl. Like Sam, who writes this tale from a fire escape above the pavement of Manhattan, we cannot fully understand the sum of this life until its story is told.
That story is labyrinthine, and the book would often exhaust me. Most reading sessions ended with a deep restorative breath and a swearing off of the thing. Yet within days, or sometimes hours, it would pull my eyes back down from those windows to its pages. How could it not, with passages like the one below, in which a young Sam, fatherless, mother miasmatic, visits a church on a whim:
I was nervous, as anyone in a completely foreign environment would be, and as if anticipating a quiz or inquisition, I set about combating nervousness by taking inventory of all the symbols in the sanctuary. I made myself inconspicuous in the rear, receiving a few second glances, and I thought that at any moment I might be tapped on the shoulder by some security detail, church bouncers who would say, Excuse me, we invite you to quietly and prayerfully exit the premises.
Chairs in the attic of a church, Atlanta (Cycle 1, 2009)
With patience and precision, Geoffrey Young crafts an examination of life laced with dark humor and a perpetually looming sense of awe. Fall is a meditation on the maudlin beauty of our wretchedness. Read it, and travel the weird landscapes of the soul.
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Here is a link to the paperback version. Fall will also soon be released in digital form.
