Nom de Plume

Marcy Merrill is a photographer who makes cameras out of old Altoids tins and comes up with the most amazing shots. I love them.

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I leafed through the pages of this at the library — should I? shouldn’t I? Ultimately, I was hooked by the diagrams and long footnotes, thinking WOOWIE! This is going to be a great novel like Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, wonderfully bizarre and from a completely unique viewpoint.

It wasn’t. Or rather, it was — but only kind of.

The Family Tree is told through two intertwining narratives, past and present. In the past, Rebecca recounts her childhood, leading up to her bipolar mother’s suicide. In the present, she is married to a humorless, controlling biologist who likes to explain away every human impulse with genetics. There are also forays into her mother’s past and the somewhat labored tale of her grandmother’s thwarted love and subsequent marriage to her cousin. Eventually, all the stories converge and we learn the real (if somewhat forced and perhaps even implausible) issue at the heart of her unhappy marriage: her husband doesn’t want to have children with her because depression is hereditary.

For me, the problem with this novel is that it simply doesn’t know what it wants to be. Most of the scenes recounting childhood are hysterically funny. Yet the descriptions of her married life feel narrow and dark — and when she talks about the grandparents, she is deeply contemplative. It leads to a jumble, made even worse by the diagrams and footnotes that hooked me in the first place. The diagrams simply illustrate scientific principles put forth by the dour scientist husband; the footnotes describe elements of pop culture, particularly TV, as a way to underscore the fact that Rebecca is doing her doctorate in sociology. At first, these were interesting, but as the novel wound to its inevitable close, they became irritating devices used for effect rather than purpose.

Don’t get me wrong: The Family Tree is far from being bad. It’s well-written and draws one in. But when I finally put it down, I had the sense that by choosing to be so many things, the novel ended up being less than it could have been.

One day, Vincent Nolan, who is a neo-Nazi, walks into the human rights foundation World Brotherhood Watch. He claims he wants to stop other men from doing what he has done. Vincent is sincere, but matters are complicated by the fact that he also needs refuge from his cousin, the man who took him in when he had nowhere else to go, indoctrinated him into neo-Nazism and whose truck and cash he stole. Still, Meyer Maslow, the Holocaust-survivor director of the organization, recognizes the opportunity for what it is — and asks his fundraiser Bonnie to take him in.

Bonnie is a single mother of two boys. She is eager to please and has a hard time saying no. Reluctantly, she takes Vincent in. Over time, a strange sort of relationship develops — both she and Vincent are like injured animals licking each other’s wounds. Similarly, Vincent has an electric effect on Meyer, who starts to see that his life’s work has become stale — instead of being out in the world doing, he stays in the office organizing. As Vincent starts speaking publicly, the characters all start to evolve. Ultimately, however, Vincent is terrified his cousin will find him. And of course, he does.

I started A Changed Man with high expectations — which weren’t so much disappointed as they were withered. Prose does an excellent job characterizing each of her protaganists; they all display a compelling and thoughtful internal landscape. But while the plot has promise, somehow it was a bit disappointing — especially the end, which seemed tacked on.