A shipwrecked life

THE curse of memory is that it recreates trauma so exactly. We require only the smallest bit of stimuli -- the smell of wet pavement, the way sunlight cuts through a room, the snippet of a forgotten nursery rhyme -- to be transported back to a frozen point of conflict, the wounds as sharp and as tactile as they were the moment the skin was broken. Except that the pain now seems more elliptical, circling back to color your past, your present, your future. It is this very curse that “This American Life” contributor Jonathan Goldstein explores in his alternately mystifying and brilliant debut, “Lenny Bruce Is Dead.”

Originally published in Canada in 2001, Goldstein’s novel begins as an exercise in patience: Each page is filled with unconnected flashes of life -- precisely whose life isn’t always clear -- as the prose dips in and out of perspective, vacillating among first, second and third person. The goal of this device seems clear enough as the fuzzy picture of Josh, the tortured protagonist, begins to form around the edges of the narrative. Josh is a child in a house filled with illness. Josh is a teen obsessed with masturbation. Josh is an adult gripped by broken women, the memory of his dead mother, the spectral presence of his living-dead father and the oddity of messianic Judaism. And in the subtext of it all, Josh stands above the prose and ruminates on each version of himself, casting stones at his own fallibility, pointing out how monstrous, how devious, how blemished the suburban dream has become.

If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is. The effect is not unlike flipping through a scrapbook belonging to someone else, only to discover that the photos fell out at some point and were reinserted without regard to order. Goldstein’s process is not simple, unfortunately; each page of the novel is filled with unrelated snapshots that beg for some sort of cohesion, both to the page and to the story itself.

The forward action of the plot, when spread out flat, is quite straightforward: After the death of his mother, Frieda, twentysomething Josh moves back into his parents’ shag-carpeted home to both mourn with and watch over his father, Chick. In time, Josh reconnects with his intensely troubled childhood friend Kaliotzakis, befriends a rabbi who’s selling his own form of Emotion Lotion and eventually meets a woman named Honey who wins his heart. Everyone lives happily ever after ... sort of. Because in a novel like “Lenny Bruce Is Dead,” it’s not entirely clear whether there is an ever after, or whether all the things that seem like they are concrete -- the relationship with Honey, for instance -- are in fact some form of future-tense liquefaction.

Josh is an unreliable narrator; because Goldstein doesn’t provide the reader with a control, all things seem both possible and impossible. Or, as Goldstein writes, “He wanted to be the man who entered strangely into people’s lives, parking a car with foreign plates in their driveways. In their kitchens, he would sit and wait for them to pour him a whiskey.” Is this the same man, the same consciousness, who later declares, after a rather poignant scene with a stranger who knew Josh’s mother, that he’d “like a girlfriend with a limp”? Unreliable narrators need not be untethered for the reader to understand that their logic and facility for suffering are in inverse proportion.

The brilliant aspect of Goldstein’s novel, then, is that despite all these shortcomings and issues of basic clarity, the end experience is still something close to breathtaking. Josh is a living creature, one possessed by a mind that has borne witness to heartbreak, sexual trauma and the dwindling existence, if not the actual life, of his parents. In these moments of clarity, Goldstein is able to show how mundane moments are often the most tragic:

“When she began to feel like there wasn’t much time, Frieda started taking Chick on tours of the kitchen.

“Chick used to go into the fridge whenever he needed sandwich bags. He would eat whatever was inside the bags and then use them to store cuff links.

“Frieda was smiling.

“ ‘This is the cutlery drawer,’ she said, and Chick began to cry.”

The poignancy of this scene (and in the space of this novel, this is as full as they come) underscores how little Goldstein needs the machinery of narrative to connect with his readers. Page after page of free association creates the connective tissue, a kind of filament for a book that doesn’t quite coalesce.

In that regard, Goldstein’s prose is often reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’ in “The Virgin Suicides,” as both explore the great Middle Class Malaise from eye level. But though both authors are able to distill the smell of cooking macaroni and cheese, Goldstein lacks Eugenides’ ability to explore the root causes of dysfunction and the oddity of childhood sexuality in a way that doesn’t feel forced or sordid.

As impressive as much of the work is, the success of “Lenny Bruce Is Dead” is balanced by its failures: There is so much energy in Goldstein’s writing, so much verve and humor and oddity, that the ultimate shame is that the novel tends to wallow in obfuscation when it should be rising into lucidity. Still, Jonathan Goldstein captures a shipwrecked life, and if his narration fails in its quest for profundity, it succeeds in exposing the raw nerve needed for the journey. *