Mirror men

Novels are best opened carefully, like Pandora’s box. Sometimes the thought of another human story -- more people, more problems -- is more than one can bear.

This is especially true when a writer -- in this case, Ehud Havazelet -- knows how to make his fiction a true mirror. There is a thoroughness to the descriptions of his characters’ thoughts, actions and conversations that mimics real time. Their voices seem to echo, as if they were being watched not just by their omniscient narrator but also by wise men and women down through generations, gods and goddesses, pillars of civilization.

In “Bearing the Body,” the short-story writer’s first novel, a reader also is forced to notice, with particular acuity, the heavy inadequacy of human relationships: “They moved through the rooms like strangers, unsure what to do. But not quite like strangers, Nathan thought. Strangers can make small talk, or ignore each other. So much was unspoken between them it weighted, like an awkward pause in an unbearable conversation.”

A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon, Havazelet has written two previous collections of short stories, “Like Never Before” (1998) and “What Is It Then Between Us?” (1988).

His newest work is the story of two brothers and their father. Nathan Mirsky, 38, is a doctor completing his residency. He behaves badly toward his long-suffering girlfriend. He sees a psychiatrist whom he despises. He has long since given up on Daniel, his 43-year-old brother, a hippie activist with a drug problem. But when Daniel dies, supposedly killed by gang members on the streets of San Francisco, Nathan and his elderly father, Sol, fly from New York to collect his remains.

Sol, who came to America in 1946 from a village in the Soviet republic of Moldova, lives alone with his Holocaust memories. His thoughts swirl around these memories -- including the death of his brother -- creating a cyclone of angry energy at the novel’s heart. It’s easy to see where Nathan and Daniel got their scripts. When Nathan first tells his father about Daniel’s death, reminding him that Daniel had many problems, including drugs, Sol practically spits: “ ‘He was weak . . . . Weak. Irresponsible . . . . Burned up, a pile of ashes. I hope he meets his mother and has to explain . . . . Problems,’ Sol said. He turned toward his son now. ‘You don’t die from problems. Problems you look in the face.’ ”

The novel is beautifully, meticulously structured, weaving Sol’s past with his sons’ childhoods. New characters, like Daniel’s girlfriend Abby, an ex-drug addict single mom, and Ben, her 6-year-old son, enter their orbit. Others, like Nathan and Daniel’s mother, Freda, and various characters from the 1960s, spin off, Tolstoy-style, into the ether. Pat Lesko, a fellow student of Daniel’s at Columbia University, reminds a reader of Levin in “Anna Karenina.” Lesko is a wormy idealist who judges everyone and who single-handedly burdens Daniel with permanent guilt. “[T]heater pervaded it all,” Nathan thinks of the ‘60s. “The rallies, the uniforms, the postures of cynical defiance and knowing better, as if they were seasoned veterans of revolution, not nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who would disperse come summer to their country houses or lousy jobs or happy or miserable lives at home.”

Some of the best novels are sculpted from similar crevasses in their characters’ lives -- a point where everything must stop so the protagonist can get off the carousel that his or her life has become. When Nathan hears about his brother’s death, he simply walks away from his residency and his girlfriend. Sol is forced to leave his own ruts. These are often the times when we face our own humanity or lack thereof, when there is enough elbow room for epiphanies to squeeze out into the light.

So much of life, Havazelet reminds us, is a fight against the lack of meaning, against emptiness. “He carried it on him, all of it,” Abby thinks of Daniel’s sense of guilt, “but it told him, unmercifully, by its crushing weight, who he was. While she, who probably should have married Dale, was weightless. Like Dale, she could end up anywhere, doing, or not doing, anything. What was her past, when she allowed herself to think about it? A dazzling emptiness, each day coming into place by erasing the one before it.”

There is some fine and carefully researched writing about addiction in “Bearing the Body,” sympathetic and stern at the same time. Havazelet seems to say that life is a cycle of suffering passed down through generations. Nathan, Daniel and Sol are lost boys in a world that prizes integrity, doing the right thing and burying pain.

In the novel’s final scene, Sol, disoriented, has walked away from his hospital bed (he’s a diabetic with an acute case of cellulitis), carrying a box holding Daniel’s ashes. And while Abby is passed out after a night of drug use, little Ben also runs away and wanders the streets of San Francisco, lost and afraid, forcing Nathan to search for both, the man and the boy.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com

Susan Salter Reynolds is a Times staff writer.