A Stylistically Daring Novel Considers Fundamental Questions

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/books/review/solar-bones-mike-mccormack.html

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SOLAR BONES By Mike McCormack 217 pp. Soho Press. $25.

Modernism was about many things, but largely it was about fragmentation. The world had cracked, and artists had noticed. Virginia Woolf showed what a mess our minds are, Gertrude Stein wrote portraits through a Cubist kaleidoscope, and T. S. Eliot shored fragments against his ruins. Perhaps most famous of all was a certain Irishman with the chutzpah to rewrite the “Odyssey,” turning Odysseus into a middle-aged Jewish cuckold roaming all day through the linguistic detritus of Dublin, his mind a patchwork of scraps. He doesn’t even finish his own story, but is cut off by his wife Molly’s torrential interior monologue, surely literature’s defining instance of “stream of consciousness” and a gloriously fragmented finale to a novel so mashed up and wonderful and horrifying it would be loved and loathed all the way down to the present moment, modernism’s most infamous book.

So when I tell you that a contemporary Irishman has just written a novel with minimal punctuation, recording the stream of consciousness of a man sitting for a few hours at his kitchen table in western Ireland, you might be forgiven for assuming that we are back at the feet of James Joyce, brought here by a modernist apostle, and that you’d do well to wait for the annotated edition. But Mike McCormack’s “Solar Bones” (winner of the Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker) is a wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary book, with a debt to modernism but up to something all its own.

On Nov. 2, All Souls’ Day (when Catholics pray for the souls in purgatory), the civil engineer Marcus Conway finds himself in his kitchen feeling inexplicably disoriented, as if suddenly untethered from the world. In fact he is dead, a ghost, but he does not realize it. He hears the noontime Angelus bell from across the parish, remembers that his children have grown and moved on, and wonders how he is going to pass the four hours until his wife, Mairead, gets home from work. Finding newspapers on the table, he falls into a pedantic reverie on current events (he is not really a pedant, more a perennial worrier) that spills into thoughts of his life, then stories from his past, one cascading into another. The roughly 200 pages that follow draw together memories of family and work struggles, local and national politics, public works projects, medical crises, art, travel — in short, a life — all of it delivered in lucid, lyrical prose, with line breaks that rarely disrupt but act more like breaths, as if spoken by a friend across the table.

A memory of Marcus’s father disassembling a tractor might turn existential: “as I recoiled at the thought that something so complex and highly achieved as this tractor engine could prove so vulnerable, so easily collapsed and taken apart by this single tool and so frightened was I by this fact it would be years afterwards before I could acknowledge the engineering elegance of it … and

“this may have been my first moment of anxious worry about the world, the first instance of my mind spiraling beyond the immediate environs of

“hearth, home and parish, towards

“the wider world beyond

“way beyond.”

Or a memory of existential awareness (upon receiving his daughter’s birth certificate) might suddenly turn mundane: “there was a metaphysical reality to her now — she had stepped into that political index which held a space for her in the state’s mindfulness … this document which did not tag or enumerate her but freed her into her own political space, our citizen daughter who

“are we ever going to leave this car park or are you going to sit all day gawping at that certificate

“Mairead called from the back seat.”

McCormack is a pleasure to read on everything from King Crimson — “music for engineers, all those dissonant chords laid down at right angles” — to picking out eyeglasses — “each made me look foolish in one way or another, too comic or too odd or too obviously chasing something I no longer possessed” — but it’s the connections that the book keeps coming back to, the way one story relates to another, the whole greater than its parts.

Sticklers for verisimilitude might rightly point out that nobody really “thinks” in such articulate well-cadenced paragraphs (Molly Bloom’s mind is a rat’s nest by comparison), but the coherence McCormack has opted for is more than stylistic. In some ways, it’s what the whole book is about. More than once Marcus counts himself “one of those men who had always structured his days around radio news bulletins,” and his struggle against a fractured worldview fed by media saturation is the novel’s most compelling and recurring theme. The stories he dwells on longest involve a water contamination catastrophe that makes Mairead very ill (“history and politics were now a severe intestinal disorder, spliced into the figure of my wife who sweated along the pale length of her body”) and a case of political graft sabotaging a public construction project he’d overseen as an engineer. Meanwhile, his own “childhood ability to get ahead of myself and reason to apocalyptic ends” he sees reinvented in his son, Darragh, as a “kind of apocalyptic riffing,” the media-age glibness of the young. It’s in this context that a memory of something as innocuous as a video chat with Darragh (who was bumming around Australia, calling intermittently in the middle of the night) leads Marcus to imagine the world’s end: “standing hollow-eyed in the middle of some desolation with the wind whistling through your skull, just before the world collapses

“mountains, rivers and lakes

“acres, roods and perches

“into oblivion, drawn down into that fissure in creation where everything is consumed in the raging tides and swells of non-being, the physical world gone down in flames

“mountains, rivers and lakes

“and pulling with it also all those human rhythms that bind us together and draw the world into a community, those daily

“rites, rhythms and rituals.”

McCormack’s sense of Armageddon is at once familiarly contemporary and blessedly contentious. Marcus’s gloominess is tempered by his own self-skepticism and struggle, but the true counterpoint is an agnostic sort of spirituality that accumulates over the course of the novel, a sense of the connectedness of humanity, the world in all its parts, “that harmonic order,” as Marcus imagines, “which underlay everyone and everything.” It is this same sense of order he identifies earlier, “upholding the world like solar bones, that rarefied amalgam of time and light whose extension through every minute of the day is visible from the moment I get up in the morning and stand at the kitchen window with a mug of tea in my hand, watching the first cars of the day passing on the road.”

For all its apparent stylistic complexity, “Solar Bones” is a beautifully simple book. Death has not solved Marcus’s worldly problems, only offered a shift of scope, and this is what McCormack’s novel offers as well. Where modernism took a world that appeared to be whole and showed it to be broken, “Solar Bones” takes a world that can’t stop talking about how broken it is, and suggests it might possibly be whole.