At about page 192, the reluctant wife asked if I liked this
book. I had to respond that I didn’t
know. Now you have to understand that
she would have discarded this book long before page 50 if she didn’t already
like it. I almost never stop a book
without finishing it – but in this case I really wasn’t just along for the
ride; the stuckness seemed to be an essential part of the book – it had
promise, but I just wasn’t sure that I trusted the author to deliver on
it. The characters were intriguing and
varied; black and white, gay and straight, Latino and Latina, Lebanese, Greek
and Puerto Rican – they all had in common that they are stuck in a corner of
Brooklyn that has gone from bad to uncared for and uncared about – but stands
on the verge of being yuppified – of being turned into something that it never
was that will make it into a place where people who don’t belong there will
fill it with things that will be safe and recognizable and completely unrelated
to a place named Red Hook.
Each of the main characters in this book, and there are
several, are revealed, over time and in interesting ways, to be grieving – or,
more precisely, to be avoiding grieving.
To be stuck in a life that has lost its meaning because they have lost
the person or the role that gave their lives meaning. I feel like this paragraph should have come
with a spoiler alert label. If you haven’t
read the book, please forget about that last bit. It will lead you to look for things that are
artfully hidden. Let them stay hidden
and be surprised by them when they are revealed, because the surprise of the
revelation is what makes this book worth reading. The seemingly disconnected and random people
turn out to be deeply and precisely connected in a wide variety of ways. Some of the connections are historical,
others are metaphysical, but they all move together to both recognize and work
on undoing their stuckness as one domino cascades into the next and each of
them both sees their stuckness and sees a way out of it. The resolution of this book, while not quite
perfect, is pretty damn good and feels musical – each of the elements occurs at
a similar time, each with its own pitch – each is a very liberal variation on
the other – and together they form a chord – a beautiful, final chord that
brings closure to this book. My
experience, on finishing, was that I was done with it – I felt satisfied – and I
really didn’t want to linger any longer in this world. Not that I wanted to get out of it, but all
the loose ends were tied up and, much to my surprise, I felt like the yuppies
could have the place – it has been cleansed of all that was holding it in
place.
OK, maybe I have gotten a bit grand and gone beyond the
scope of the book, but perhaps not. Ivy
Pochoda, the author, is credited with having grown up in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn which
is a world away from Red Hook. She,
after graduating from Harvard and becoming a squash champion, lived in Red Hook
as one of the seedier – or perhaps she was just slumming - gentrifiers depicted
in the book. She apparently frequented
the 24 hour bar that plays a central role for the truly down and out member of
the gentry who is a central character in the book. Nowhere in the book does a pure yuppie character appear. But when you go to Google
maps, the worst, most decrepit spot in the book – the place where the homeless
live and some near rape scenes take place – is now an Ikea. The Gentry have taken over and while the
projects may still rise in the middle of the neighborhood, the fringes have
moved in new directions. The yuppies
here may live on and near the fringe, but they are yuppies all the same.
The book includes a map of the neighborhood. Missing from the map, and from Google maps,
is Visitation Street. Central to the
story, this street binds the neighborhood together, but it is clearly an
allegory. Each of the major characters
in visited by their past. In the case of
one family, they have the “gift” of being able to hear the voices of the dead –
something that can lead to incapacitation – and something that each of those
with the gift has a different relationship with – some immersing themselves in
it, others resenting and denying it.
Other characters' relationships with people from their past is revealed
seemingly by accident. We see the impact of
the past long before we discover what has caused these people to become
stuck. An intimate part of the
visitation is the experience of guilt – the feeling that the living person has
contributed to the death of the person that is visiting them. Part of the domino effect of the release from
the stuckness has to do with the release that each of them feels from the guilt
– and part of that comes from acknowledging the guilt and recognizing it –
sometimes as much in the mind of the reader as the character confesses their
guilt. Aha, we seem to say, this is why
they have been doing that. And, in hearing our saying that, the character seems to be released from what was holding them
there.
So, in so far as this is a mystery, the answer to each of
the mysteries posed in the book is that the person responsible for holding each
character in a particular prison is that person him or herself and their
relationship with the person who is visiting them. And at the very center of the book, in the
biggest mystery of all, is the individual who is holding onto his culpability
in robbing others of their freedom – and he uses his knowledge of how this has
enslaved him (and them) to prevent the incident with the pink raft from
becoming yet another intractable loss, and the solution to the pink raft
situation cascades into the solution of all the others.
My friend Armando would have hated this book. He hated it when outsiders passed judgement
on locals. He hated it when people let
loose of ties that bound them – even if that led them to certain kinds of freedom. He hung onto his own visitations – his own
ghosts – in ways that did him huge harm.
And people loved him for it. I
feel, as I often felt when he was alive, guilty in my relation to him – in this
case for liking this book. I feel as if
I am killing him, as if he weren’t already dead, by connecting with what I
think is a central thesis of this book – that a place like Red Hook is a place
that can be left behind – the bloody legacy of a dead end world is one that we
should transcend. Armando – in ways that
were painful to him and to me – would object to that. He believed that the dead had much to teach
us. He believed that the struggles of
the dead were noble, and that our wish to distance ourselves from them was self-serving
and hollow. Pochoda’s resolution is
elegant and beautiful and feels beautifully freeing. Armando’s discordant din is not pretty, but
it is hard to ignore as I struggle to reconcile the dead with the living.
Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia, would have us, like
Pochoda, leave the dead behind. When we
are visited by the dead, he believed, we are mired in the past and in
attachments that weigh us down. And we
are. Yet our attachment to the
past, the sense that what others have done is valuable, is at the core of
our moral and ethical systems. We don’t
harm others, I think, because those others could be our mothers and fathers –
or are mothers and fathers of the next generation. Balancing reverence for the past – bloody and
pointless as it may have been – with excitement about the future – the Ikea
stores just waiting to be built – is a difficult and complex process – more complicated
in life than in a novel, even though the solution offered here is beyond
elegant – it is beautiful.
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