Ivy Pochoda’s Visitation Street – Mourning Can Be Beautiful

Brooklyn’s Red Hook district has long held a colorful place in my imagination.  Named for the hooks stevedores used to pull crates out of the bellies of cargo ships and then sank into each other’s bellies after they got off work, this is one of those corners of New York that has never been savory.  Visitation Street starts off with a late night walk by two teenage girls teetering on the edge of womanhood to a pier in Red Hook.  They are carrying a pink plastic raft and the author might as well scream at you that this is not going to end well.  And it doesn’t.  And it feels like it is headed into thriller/mystery land, but, thankfully, it doesn’t go there.  Where it does go, after a number of fits and starts and introducing a number of characters that seem to have something to do with each other, but the connections seem tenuous and even random - even many of the blood relations seem barely held to each other by twine – the characters seem mostly to have in common that they are floating in space – not making headway with their lives - where the book goes is straight into a morass of stuckness.

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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