As a trilogy ends, explanations are left up to the reader
A Curious Earth
By Gerard Woodward
Norton, 290 pp., $14.95
"Curiouser and curiouser," says Lewis Carroll's Alice of her adventures in Wonderland. She grows, she shrinks, a playing-card queen wants to chop off her head; and Alice goes through it all with game bemusement. The title of Gerard Woodward's "A Curious Earth" comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, but Woodward's protagonist, Aldous Jones, is a kind of Alice, navigating a series of poignant late-life adventures with poise, recklessness, and an appealing indifference to whether or not he appears ridiculous.
The book is the final installment in Woodward's fictional trilogy about the messy, erudite, alcohol-soaked Jones family of North London. The second volume, "I'll Go to Bed at Noon," was nominated for England's Booker Prize and focused on the alcoholic decline of the family's eldest son, Janus, whose mother, Colette, was also quietly using liquor to cushion the pain of watching her son drink himself to death.
By the time this book opens, Janus and Colette have died, and Aldous, Colette's husband, is drinking and developing an affectionate fixation on the forest of sprouting potatoes behind his kitchen cupboard doors. Also jumbled together in the cupboard are Colette's artifacts, described by Woodward with macabre and beautiful precision: her severed ponytail, still smelling of hairspray and cigarette smoke; her false teeth; her needlework. "There seemed almost enough raw components to reconstruct her. If he could have . . . recited some miraculous incantation over the mix, his wife might materialise as a wobbling tower of possessions and activities."
Gradually Aldous begins to venture out, first to a performance of "The Winter's Tale," and then to the National Gallery, where he is bewitched by Rembrandt's portrait of his mistress, Hendrickje Stoffels. Aldous, a retired art teacher, decides to take up painting again. Missing Colette, drinking, and not eating, he collapses from malnutrition and undergoes a surreal hospitalization. (During his semi-coma, in a wistful image sparked by the Shakespeare play, Aldous hallucinates Colette as a snowwoman in the back garden, "rendered perfectly in fresh snow, even with her snowglasses on, slightly crooked, and a snow cigarette hanging from between her fingers.") He travels to Ostend to visit his son, who is not welcoming since he has a paraplegic celebrity sexologist camping out in his living room. Aldous meets Agnès, an attractive artist; she offers to take him to Amsterdam's Rembrandt museum, but brings her husband along, so Aldous ditches them at the train station. Back in London, he enrolls in a beginning Flemish class and becomes smitten with Maria, a young woman with a mysterious illness and a tendency to disappear without explanation.
A curious earth, indeed. Things happen. Sometimes they lead to other things, but often they don't.
In a recent BBC Radio interview, Woodward acknowledged that his trilogy is autobiographical. The book's lack of conventional narrative structure - there is very little overt cause-and-effect - stems from his own mystification at his family's self-destructive alcoholism. "Because I couldn't explain it, I thought the best way to deal with it was just to present it," he said. "And let readers work out for themselves, as I've had to work out for myself (and failed) the motivations behind the characters."
Too much explanation, too much logic, is hubris, Woodward seems to believe. Here's what happened, and I can't presume to tell you why.
This refusal to impose an authorial structure on unexplainable events is what gives his book its power, and of course it is a deliberate and highly confident authorial choice. Woodward sets you down in a world rich in detail but bare of explanation, a world that jumbles together drab realism, slapstick comedy, and compassionate observation of a character's grand and trivial humanity.
The book's only real misstep is a sequence about the return of Aldous's other son from a stint in the
If there is any narrative suspense driving this episodic novel along, it hangs on the question of which woman the amorous, lonely Aldous will end up with. The answer, when it comes in the book's last pages, is both startling and inevitable: in fact, exactly right.
Toward the end of the book, Aldous reacts to Agnès's photographs - X-ray images of a couple having sex - by saying, "I thought they were absolutely beautiful. At the same time they were ridiculous and absurd, and they were also slightly sick and disgusting. They were also intelligent and perceptive, philosophically provocative . . . just amazing."
The same could be said of Aldous's life, and of Woodward's strange and ultimately gorgeous novel.
Joan Wickersham's memoir "The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order" will be published by Harcourt this summer. 