True Character Fails to Rise in Thoughtful ‘The Baker’

“The Baker” is Paul Hond’s first novel, and it reminds us of how difficult the art of the novel is. The baker himself, Mickey Lerner, is middle-aged and comfortable, though not particularly happy; he lacks, we are told again and again, passion, obsession, enthusiasm, gusto. Mickey is a cautious man who doesn’t so much lead a life as obediently follow one, and it is, ironically, this finely drawn portrait that is the book’s greatest failing.

Mickey, who inherited a Baltimore bakery from his father, is married to Emilie, a fiercely independent, talented, intense French violinist who is wholly committed to her art. How did these two ever get together? Although Hond painstakingly recounts the story of their courtship (abetted by that age-old device, the unintentional pregnancy), nothing in their relationship is even remotely believable. Though they live together for decades, Emi remains an exotic, fetishized enigma to Mickey: “[T]here was nothing about her that he could have invented, and herein lay the terrible truth that he had yet to completely face: He would never possess her the way a man was supposed to possess a woman.” Yet this seems less a terrible truth than a terrible cliche, a lazy construct of bewildered male writers that should, perhaps, be retired.

Mickey and Emi have a son, a sullen 18-year-old named Ben. To call the Lerners disconnected would be a vast understatement; in this triangle, the three lines never even seem to touch, much less intersect in profound or moving ways. So when Emi is killed by a young black mugger--as Mickey stands by--it is hard to feel much grief, or to believe that we are watching a family unravel.

Mickey, albeit with much guilt, views Emi’s murder as an opportunity--to become “a man of substance”--although this promise remains unfulfilled. Far more interesting is Ben’s reaction to her death: “Emi had failed him since the day he was born. . . . [F]or her neglect, her selfishness, she’d gotten what she’d deserved, and . . . he himself, in a way unleashed by his own secret wishes, had been unspeakably avenged.” The fact that Ben is horrified by these feelings does not in any way lessen them.

Race--with its guilts, resentments and fears--weaves its way through “The Baker.” One of the novel’s most interesting characters is Nelson Childs, the black teenager who works for Mickey’s bakery and is a sometime-friend of Ben’s (although, in a telling detail, Nelson is never invited into the Lerner home). Hond’s gaze is not as unflinching as novelist Richard Price’s , but Hond can be an astute observer of this explosive racial territory:

Here is Mickey, who lusts for Nelson’s mother: “He was shocked, even angered, at how violently he craved her respect, her adulation. He wanted, in light of her experiences with corrupt, dissolute men, to be seen as the perfect husband and father. . . . [H]e wanted to . . . crush her with the goodness of his life.”

And here is Nelson, driving to his home in the ghetto with Ben at his side, “painfully aware of the changing landscape, as though the abrupt switch from trees and lawns to row houses and liquor stores was symbolic of some personal failure on his part.” And here is Ben, watching a purposely, grotesquely obsequious Nelson serve the bakery’s customers and noting “that warm humanitarian feeling [white] people get when they have a pleasant exchange with a black person.”

Emi’s murder eventually sends Mickey overseas, where he becomes the penitent employee of a Parisian baker named Dulac. For Mickey, baking has always been a job, a business, a road to middle-class prosperity; for Dulac, it is an art, a science, a philosophy, the stuff of love and revolution. Mickey’s monastic, almost zenlike obeisance to Dulac and his baking methods is meant to be the linchpin of the book, the transformative, illuminating experience of Mickey’s life. And it is true that, upon his return from France, Mickey does experience a moment of simple bliss.

Still, he undergoes no real change: “Mickey knew it was too late for him to become something else. He had to make sense of what he already was.” And for this reader, at least, that is not enough. It is hard to remain--or even become--deeply engaged by a character as muffled and affectless as Mickey Lerner.

“The Baker” contains some evocative writing and some wise ideas, and it bravely attempts to deal with racial conflict--the last great taboo of American life. But there is a flatness, an emotional void, something deeply--or, more accurately, superficially--unsatisfying about this book. Characters fail to compel, scenes fail to cohere, structures fail to solidify. Hond is a talented writer, but it is never entirely clear why we should care about the characters he has created or the story he tells.