Things Fall Apart

Pace Oprah Winfrey, our country’s most (and perhaps only) powerful book critic, the best thing you can say about a novel is not that it made you laugh or cry, helped you endure life’s travails, gave you hope or empowered you. These days, emotions come fast and furious, cheap and easy, and, if the advertisers are right, we no longer need literature--just a Visa card--to activate them. In such a culture, the highest possible praise for a novel may be that it forced you to engage it, to argue, to confront it as you would a challenging but sometimes misguided lover. Robert Hellenga’s “The Fall of a Sparrow” is such a novel.

It opens seven years after Alan “Woody” Woodhull’s 22-year-old daughter, Cookie, was killed by a neo-fascist bomb in Bologna, Italy, where she had been studying. Woody, a classics professor at a small Midwestern college, is not tormented so much as affectless; he thinks he’s OK, and he finds strength in what remains behind, which in this case means his work and the raising of his two younger daughters. (His wife, Hannah, whom he loves deeply, has left him to join a convent.) When we meet Woody, he is 52 and “lying low, treading water. . . . He wasn’t taking any risks. . . . They had him pegged as a nonstarter, and they were right. He didn’t want to start anything.” But Woody starts many things--a whole new life, in fact, that includes a new love and new work in a new country--by the novel’s end.

To the extent that “Sparrow” is a character study, it fails, for Hellenga simply negates the terms of Woody’s essential qualities too often and too radically (even considering that this is a story of crisis and change). Would a man as cautious as Woody risk (and lose) his tenured job for an affair with a student he doesn’t even love? Would a man as devoted as Woody allow his wife to walk away so easily? Would a man so steeped in the tragedies, and the lessons, of the ancient Greeks (and in the works of that great modern tragedian, Freud) sleep with a married woman, and then with her daughter, so casually, so unthinkingly--and suffer no retribution at all for such transgressions? The answer in each case is no.

But as a novel of ideas, “The Fall of a Sparrow” resonates deeply. Woody has “inscribed . . . on the tablets of his heart” Socrates’ plea to the gods: “Grant that the inner and the outer man be as one”--a plea that so presciently foretells modern ideas about fragmented identity, false selves and neurotic conflict. But the inner and the outer are far apart, sometimes terrifyingly so, for Woody. He is, for instance, a nice and peaceful man (a member of Amnesty International, no less) who indulges in precise fantasies about the precise ways in which he will slowly torture Angela Strappafelci, the girl who killed his daughter. He likens a conversation between Angela’s father and himself to “Hitler’s dad, apologizing to a Jew”--and then engages in a bizarrely polite chat with that very dad. He considers himself a reasonable man, an “Aristotelian by trade” who believes “it’s better to choose reality over fantasy.” But his dirty little secret is that, unlike his hero, Odysseus, he prefers--or would prefer, if only he could!--”formless immortality over a well-wrought life.”

In public, though, Woody is awfully good at lecturing his students on the existential value of death, on the ways in which it gives life meaning and structure and protects us from the chaos of eternity. He’s learned about death from books, just as he learned about love--or at least sex--from books, too. “Death, in fact, is a condition of meaning,” Woody believes. “Without it human beings, like the Greek gods, would make no significant choices.” But that bomb in Bologna shattered those snug truisms, and now Woody has a little problem with death, a problem that books won’t solve. “No, it wasn’t death in general that he couldn’t grasp, it was Cookie’s death in particular. . . . Death had given her life a shape. But it wasn’t the shape he’d wanted. It was an ugly shape, brutal, violent. . . . Death was fine with him. But not this death.”

How, Hellenga seems to ask, do we “shape”--understand, formalize, comprehend--unjustified and therefore inexplicable disaster? Language ultimately fails: “Death fans the flames of metaphor, but all our analogies burn out in the end without consuming the awful reality,” Woody reflects. “Dead is dead.”

The trouble with death--at least Cookie’s type of death--is that it negates human agency and affirms “the terror of coincidence.” And how to survive in the face of this negated agency is the question that destroys Woody’s marriage, a wonderful marriage of almost three decades that combined eros, friendship and intellect. Much to the dismay and horror of their two remaining daughters, Woody and Hannah divorce over the seemingly trivial question of Cookie’s tombstone. Hannah insists that it should read “His will is our peace.” To Woody, this is a craven capitulation to fate (or God), a desecration of sorts, and he is willing to lose his beloved Hannah rather than give in.

Yet he has no better explanation at all for Cookie’s fate. Death destroys not just one life but the form of the lives of those who survive or, rather, the illusion that life itself has a form. Woody searches--quietly, but perhaps heroically too--to find that new form, somewhere between the poles of Hannah’s grace-through-acceptance and Angela’s ultra-Nietzschean force.

Cookie’s death destroys the form of the Woodhull family itself. “I was starting to think of it as a test, a test that we had failed,” says Sara Woodhull, whom death has promoted to eldest daughter and who narrates portions of “Sparrow.” “I don’t mean that I thought that God was testing us, the way he tested Job. Just that it was a challenge, and that instead of . . . loving each other more, we’d allowed ourselves to be pulled apart.” At the end of the book, though--in a soliloquy addressed to her dead sister--Sara revises this paradigm of inadequacy, collapse and failure: “Mama and Daddy didn’t just let things happen; they didn’t just drift with the current; they rowed upstream; they gave their lives a shape; they chose more intense lives, Cookie; they looked your death in the face.” This is not the language of rosy self-help or Panglossian optimism. It is, rather, the braver language of a character struggling to create a new center when the old one has not held--brave precisely because she now knows that the new one might not either.

There are times when Hellenga descends into sentimentality, especially in the crucial prison scene when Woody confronts his daughter’s assassin. And the argument can certainly be made that Hellenga’s characters--unlike, say, Shakespeare’s--are not really full enough, wide enough, deep enough to encompass the ideas they grapple with. But it is to Hellenga’s credit that he never seduces us with the promise that our inner and outer selves can truly “be as one,” or that the dialectic between fate and agency can ever be resolved. He only suggests that the ways in which you live these conflicts constitute the story of your life.

Not until the very end of the novel is Woody’s inscription for Cookie’s tombstone--an inscription for which he has suffered--revealed. It is a sign of Hellenga’s rare and shimmering intelligence that I have thought about that inscription for days, and argue with it still.