Head games

LOOK at it this way. Each new novel is a slap in the face, a reminder that we are a pathetic species. We haven’t got it right, not relationships or communities or nation-building or anything. We cling to the same old myths, trying to rewrite these archetypal fairy tales to reflect the great strides we’ve made in understanding our twisted psyches. But the novel is our mirror. Good writing, bad writing -- and it does matter -- we see on the page how little we have changed.

The trouble with all this clinging, at least when it comes to books, is that we are hard-wired to read for meaning. We know the script. Our brains work overtime connecting dots, identifying threads. When we can’t, we get flummoxed and angry, not unlike small children.

Because of that, Ben Ehrenreich is taking some big chances with his first novel, “The Suitors.” Here, he hurls himself against the story of Odysseus, reinventing Penelope, messing with point of view, not spelling out the story, making great linguistic leaps. These are the kinds of risks that can provoke tantrums in readers. But “The Suitors” is not your ordinary first novel. Ehrenreich has not confined himself to writing about what he knows.

For starters, he serves up two disenfranchised teenagers, Payne and Penny. After some resistance, they fall in something (mostly sex). They are so noble, so fine, so alone starting out, and then, 16 pages later, Ehrenreich throws them into the mud of a real relationship.

Ehrenreich has set “The Suitors” amid the trappings of contemporary American life, but the urges and motivations of his characters are so raw (as if the world were new and force of will were still the biggest ingredient of power) that the book feels as if it could be taking place in ancient or medieval times. Payne is a man of action, not communication. He disappears for long periods of time. He and Penny stop talking. He comes home, grabs her and falls asleep. She drinks vodka and complains a lot. With the help of some mysterious workers, people who come out of their hiding places in the hills to work for Payne and become the “we” in the story -- the novel’s chorus, its narrators -- he builds a household, a little nation, with Penny as his unhappy queen. He starts to feel powerful and antsy. He seeks conquest, new lands.

A leader on the outside and a punk on the inside, Payne wants what he doesn’t have; this is his state of being, his beginning and his end. You just know he will fail -- he’s too big for the world, never mind his utter inability to make the one person who truly loves him happy. And yet he is always trying to get back “home.” He is always creating pain. Penny wants “the certainty of his desire.” Being a woman (or so goes the myth), she is doomed to want more from the man she loves. This is her beginning and her end. Payne goes off to war. He does not call, he does not write. Penny is left at home, pregnant, with suitors nipping at her heels. When her son is born, she names him Bobby. He will spend his life looking for his father.

By this point in the novel, we start to feel better. We have a story. We recognize the script. Sure, it’s painful to look all that trouble in the face, especially the trouble of Payne and Penny’s love, but with the roof of story over our heads, we can relax and enjoy the writing here a little more. Ehrenreich blends Tom Robbins’ sly humor with Steve Erickson’s bubbling sense of the subconscious and Voltaire’s irreverent twists of plot.

In addition, there is that beautiful certainty of the young writer’s voice. “Do you understand that love is not only amnesia, but that love is suicide, that all love that falls short of suicide is sham?” Ehrenreich asks at one point. Elsewhere, he exclaims: “What idiot invented moderation? All there is is ecstasy!” His confidence emerges most impressively in his ability to know how a woman might react when it has been so long and a stranger washes up on shore one day and she feels “sadness, and revulsion -- not for this body here in front of her, but for herself and her own desire ... she lifts her hands, moving quickly to his concave stomach and scarred and hillocked ribs.” Such empathy comes from having digested the world’s literature and believing you have something to add to it, something entirely your own.

There’s so much to be insulted by in a novel. Some readers hate the leaps; others, the obvious. Some don’t like to be preached at. Yet just being pushed off the precipice of daily life and into the abyss of the imagination is something to be grateful for. “Maybe you’d be a different person entirely if you could just forget one thing,” Ehrenreich writes toward the end of “The Suitors,” “forget you love her, forget he died or that she lives, forget the curve of her lips, the wrinkles round his eyes. Or if you could regain a memory now gone: how you got here, maybe -- that would surely help. Are our skulls too small for that? It seems they are.” Particularly in the beginning, when he plays with the unraveling of alternative endings, it almost seems as if he’s trying to annoy his audience. But at bottom, this is a writer who believes in the possibility of adding new information to old stories, that we can learn how to be kinder, larger, happier by hurling ourselves against myth, listening for meaning, longing for it, insisting on it, making it up where it might not, after all, exist. *