In fiction and memoir, blood will tell
Blood. It's there at our birth, and its last pulse is our own red exit sign. Blood ties bind us to those we love and those we ache to escape. Is it any wonder that in two fine new books, our most vital fluid takes on shimmering new importance?
Myth and blood ties are no strangers to modern fiction, and they permeate one of the most hauntingly original debuts I've read in the last year, "Please Don't Come Back From the Moon," by Dean Bakopoulos (Harcourt, $23). Bakopoulos creates a living, breathing blue-collar Detroit suburb of the 1950s that's both elegiac and grittily real. Seen through the eyes of 17-year-old Michael Smolij, this is a world where the wives stay at home and tend their families, and the husbands get slowly worn down by their dead-end jobs and lost dreams, becoming a "collective drone" in their sons' lives. Until, suddenly, one by one, the men begin to vanish, a single cryptic note their only explanation: "I've gone to the moon."
Left behind, the women at first sleep away their days, marinate themselves in alcohol, and find love where they can, but any sense of the American dream has long faded for them. With all the men gone, Michael and his friends grow up fast, taking their fathers' places by drinking at the local bar, fighting, and working minimum-wage jobs at the mall.
But gradually, in their own way, even the wives vanish. They get jobs, find new husbands, and move away to better lives. Only the sons stay, struggling for some semblance of permanence even as their fathers' siren song of disappearance keeps singing in their blood. Bakopoulos zooms in on his characters, creating finely etched portraits of myriad lives, from a woman whose asthmatic son dies at a pool where Michael is lifeguarding -- and who later becomes his lover -- to Michael's aging boss at the radio station, whose forced retirement becomes her undoing. Michael and his friends hang on, going to community college because that's all they can afford, getting better jobs, finding wives, settling into homes and families. But even with these satisfactions, the pull of the moon is still in their genes, the sins of the fathers haunting and beckoning the sons. Resistance isn't easy, because, as Michael says, "you could have someone beautiful waiting for you at the end of the night and it still might not be enough." Gorgeous, painful, and exquisitely written, "Please Don't Come Back From the Moon" is about the impossible things we believe because the truth may simply be too hard.
To me, the science of blood, the platelets and the plasma, is just as fascinating as the family connections a bloodline supplies. It's no wonder I was instantly hooked by "Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood" (Ballantine, $23.95), by Bill Hayes. Five quarts is the amount of blood coursing along each person's 60,000 miles or so of arteries, veins, and capillaries, but that fact is just a starting point for Hayes's playful and powerful meditation on all things hematological. Lavishly illustrated, "Five Quarts" is part scientific journey and part memoir, and in its richest vein it's also a profoundly moving love story of Hayes and his HIV-positive partner.
Hayes's guided tour of blood is filled with societal ignorance, brilliant discovery, and terrible tragedy. Ancient Romans believed blood was the essence of a person's soul, and gladiators routinely quenched their thirst with the blood of those they vanquished. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek brought blood cells to light with early microscopes, and Jay Levy's codiscovery of the virus that causes AIDS led to treatments. A lot of the history here is tragic, including the overzealous medical practice of bloodletting, which unnecessarily killed George Washington. Queen Victoria refused to believe she was responsible for introducing hemophilia into the royal bloodline, and her progeny suffered for her ignorance. Blood stains our history and seeps into our popular culture. Alfred Hitchcock shot "Psycho" in black-and-white because he feared the red of the blood would have been too shocking. The legend of Dracula cut its teeth on a real-life blood disease called porphyria. Victims' skin turned pasty from the severe anemia the disease caused, and the gums receded over brown teeth, revealing them like fangs. If there was relief to be had, early sufferers found it in hiding from the light, chewing garlic, and -- ah yes -- drinking blood.
Hayes writes with so much panache that reading this book is thrilling. And when he muses about his personal histories, the book turns lyrical and profound. We meet Hayes's sister Shannon, shattered after giving up her baby for adoption, who vows to go out on the town and find someone she "would never give away" -- and that night she meets her husband-to-be. Blood "marks the divide" between Hayes's partner, Steve, and himself. Blood for them is something terrifying and dangerous and hopeful. They go to doctors together, and they go to court as well, when they find out that Elaine Giorgi, a phlebotomist at the lab where Steve got his blood tested, had been routinely using dirty needles. And as Hayes delves into the science and politics of the AIDS epidemic, the new drugs, the dangers, his partner turns to myth for relief that's downright comic -- specifically tales of Spiderman, an everyday guy whose radioactive blood turned him into a hero.
Blood is a call and response, a desire to know and understand the people who share it with us. Blood fluid may mark important events, heal us, kill us, and define us, but as these two extraordinary books show, we might very well say the same thing about our blood ties.
Caroline Leavitt's novel "Girls in Trouble" will be out in paperback in April. She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.
