What’s your excuse?

Ethan Aspern is a new iteration of a character who has become as familiar to the fictional New York of the early twenty-first century as the yuppie was to that of the late twentieth. The Brookhattanite indie man-boy wears messenger bags and sunglasses, then faces some individualizing choices: denim or leather, Vans or Chuck Taylors. Though he presumably took coke at gigs in the early 2000s, he is domiciled narcotically among the downers. He is a postlapsarian figure, fallen from the paradises of DIY guitar music (see Daniel Svoboda in Nell Zink’s Doxology, 2019), tenure-track academia (see Chip Lambert in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, 2001) or Web 1.0 (see several characters in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, 2013). An important relationship stands flaming in his middle distance, and for this loss he can’t blame anyone but himself, though he’ll try to.

At the beginning of The Second Coming Garth Risk Hallberg’s man-boy has suffered his ultimate expulsion – from New York. Seeking refuge from addiction and family breakdown, he is living in a “halfway-halfway house” on Santa Catalina Island, California, and therefore inhabiting a joke about both rehab and westerliness. At its Hebraic root, Ethan’s first name means “steadfast”, and his surname is homophonous with a tree, the aspen, whose variety name is “quivering”. Hallberg’s second novel is less socioeconomically ranging than his first, City on Fire (2015), and will thus prompt fewer comparisons with Charles Dickens, but with names as comic-instructive as this, he won’t shake the association altogether. Ethan Aspern: firm and flaky, decent and suspect. And therein lies the question that engages us in the man-boy, or that Hallberg hopes will: can you trust him?

Ethan is drawn back to New York by an incident involving his teenage daughter, Jolie, who has narrowly escaped being hit by a subway train. She climbed onto the tracks to retrieve her phone – under the influence of a “grenade-sized Poland Spring bottle full of vodka”. Some kind of self-annihilative instinct is wriggling to life inside her; she may have inherited it from Ethan, along with an appreciation of Prince. His history of addiction stretches back to his teens, when his mother’s terminal illness provided him with an urge to self-obliteration and her prescription analgesics with the means to achieve it. Jolie’s mother, Sarah Kupferberg, is an intellectual who issues “Frankfurt School sighs” when forced by her daughter to watch Jersey Shore. She is frightened of confronting Jolie’s sadness.

While Sarah’s dismay at seeing Ethan reappear in New York is unmitigated, Jolie’s is complicated by a dawning realization that she and her father are bound in their suffering. From early on it is evident that the dominant third-person narration has in fact been composed by Jolie; Ethan’s backstory comes in full first person, via long and self-revelatory letters sent to his daughter. The combination of voices provides a lovely sub-bass to the novel: whatever else is happening up in the busy treble of the narrative, beneath it all, at the lower threshold of audibility, father is always speaking to daughter, or daughter to father.

Ethan’s initial plan is to stay in New York only for a little while, but if there’s one thing we know about the Brookhattanite indie man-boy, it’s that his plans mean nothing: they’re rotten with self-deception from the get-go. And he exists to be douched in nasty, character-testing surprises by whoever is writing him. Via his ex-probation officer, Ethan ends up getting a job looking after other people’s dogs. Meanwhile, incapable of living with Sarah any longer, Jolie moves in with her maternal grandparents. Albert Kupferberg is an emeritus professor of literature and does what literary professors do best in works of realism, which is to mule the author’s preferred literary allusions into the text; Eleanor Kupferberg provides a good opportunity for one of Hallberg’s giddiest prose habits, which is the rendering of proper nouns into other parts of speech: “Back in June, he’d noticed the white blaze at her temple starting to range Warholically through her slate-coloured hair, but now she’d pulled it back into a tight demi-Sontag”. When the opportunity arises to exploit Albert and Eleanor’s grandparental cluelessness, Ethan retrieves Jolie from them and drives her down to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he grew up.

The pretext for this trip is a memorial service that is being held for Jolie’s paternal grandfather, but really Ethan considers himself to be on the verge of a breakthrough with her and is playing for quality time. Sarah considers him to have abducted their daughter. Jolie stops speaking. Undeterred, Ethan commences a journey through the “stations of his youth”, confronting at each of them some revenant figure: the sister he abandoned, the friend he left mouldering in jail. And his daughter tails him, at the same time sphinx-like and not silent at all, because she is writing all this into being. Their odyssey plays out over one day and hundreds of pages. In case the references to metempsychosis and the Cyclops are overlooked, there is a multi-CD recording of Ulysses kicking about in the Kupferberg Volvo, and it doesn’t go unplayed. To propose an intertextuality with that book is brazen, but the same might be said of calling your second novel The Second Coming, an act of braggadocio more at home in hip-hop or Madchester than in literary fiction. More surprising is that the Joycean comparison just about flies. This, too, is a big-small novel of unconventional parenthood. I’m not sure if you could rebuild a disappeared Eastern Shore from it in the way Joyce claimed you could reconstruct Dublin from Ulysses, but you could definitely get under way with many motels, amusement parks, gas stations, surf beaches and dealing spots.

Dealing is of great significance to The Second Coming, as is its institutionalized twin, medical prescription. There are many epochal phenomena written into this novel – 9/11, Occupy Wall Street, visits to Ikea – but the greatest is glimpsed only fleetingly, as Ethan rummages for drugs in a medicine cupboard and finds one that was, “in the America of 2011, something like an inevitability: an amber cylinder of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin”. Over recent years, as the scale of the American opioid crisis has become apparent – millions dependent or addicted or criminalized, more than half a million dead – the subject of substance addiction has migrated from the memoir, where it figured largely as a personal ordeal, to the novel, where it is acknowledged as a national one. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) wrote contemporary addiction for the auto-satirically rich, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022) wrote it for the economically oppressed. The Second Coming is a novel of the addicted middle. As Ethan’s ex-probation officer puts it: “a white guy with a good face and a high school diploma … I mean, what’s your excuse?” There are passages in which Hallberg digs up excuses, and others in which he seems to suggest none is needed. Drug names throb through the text as part of a homely national verbiage, the way those of sports teams or small towns might do: this is America. Addiction becomes less a subject than a presumed condition, and a medium in which the book’s other concerns – the experience of pain, the urge to escape, the possibility (or not) of change and of choice – can grow.

Many things about this novel are wrong and should not work. The plot sometimes feels rickety and hand-cranked; sassy TV-style dialogue is liable to break out, regardless of who is speaking; it’s really long. The action (troubled father reunites with troubled daughter; they change each other) could be dispatched in many fewer pages, or in less than 100 minutes of film, as Sofia Coppola proved in Somewhere (2010). While Garth Risk Hallberg’s first novel was long because there were many characters and events in it, his second is long because there are many words in it. Words are not just a means to the story, but an end in themselves, ignited for the sake of seeing how they burn. And over 600 pages they burn wondrously, banishing irritation at the book’s faults and casting a light that makes even our man-boy seem fresh and engaging. Before she died Ethan took his mother to see Tommy on Broadway. His description brings to mind The Second Coming: “The show was a mess, probably, had narrative holes you could drive a truck through, and even so, it had blown me away: light and sound and color all bleeding out across their own borders”.

Tom Seymour Evans is a writer and researcher based in London

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post What’s your excuse? appeared first on TLS.