ABC: A Novel
 
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From Publishers Weekly
Two mysteries obsess Gerard Chauvin, protagonist of this overwrought novel. The first is the mystery of his six-year-old son Harry's tragic death. The second, onto which he deflects his grief, is the obscure question of why the alphabet came to be ordered in its familiar sequence of letters. A series of unsettling coincidences leads him to Syrian ruins and to other lost souls--a Chinese woman whose daughter overdosed on heroin, a Greek Jew whose wife was murdered by terrorists--seeking enlightenment in the alphabet. Assisted by a dotty Cambridge scholar, they plunge into the ancient arcana of writing, as if in the origins of letters they could find both a way to communicate their sorrow and a hidden meaning behind the seemingly arbitrary happenstances of life and death. Plante (The Family) imparts an eeriness to his prose--Gerard feels the shades of the dead crowding about him--but often lapses into inchoate mysticism: we can only have an impression of everything all together and can never understand everything all together, because everything all together, everything in the world all together, is an impossibility. From the abstruse intellectual quest his characters embark upon, the reader doesn't get a firm sense of the emotional burden they are carrying. (Aug.)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand

David Plante's beautiful, otherworldly new novel is that improbable creation, a metaphysical page-turner reminiscent of other books around which literary cults have arisen: A.S. Byatt's Possession and John Fowles's The Magus both come to mind. Plante is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, among them the "Francoeur" trilogy, and two volumes of memoirs, American Ghosts and Difficult Women, an account of his friendships with Jean Rhys, Germaine Greer and Sonia Orwell.

ABC might have been subtitled "Difficult Letters," dealing as it does with Gerard Chauvin's sudden obsession with the origins of the alphabet. The novel opens with a terrifying, heartrending scene in which Gerard and his wife, Peggy, witness the death of their 6-year-old son, Harry, when the child plunges through the floor of an abandoned house during a sunlit summer outing. Moments before Harry's fall, Gerard notices a scrap of paper in the fireplace of the ruined building.

"On the top of the heap, not crumpled, was a sheet of writing, and Gerard leaned closer to try to decipher the meaning. He couldn't, and he reached down to pick it up. Frowning, he saw what he assumed must be letters, but he had no idea in what script, because it was not any he was familiar with. The letters were drawn very carefully, maybe by a child."

In the months that follow, Gerard grows increasingly estranged from Peggy. He is compelled to ask again and again the unanswerable question that surrounds his son's death: Why?

But that question gradually becomes subsumed into one he asks his wife as he broods about the scrap of paper with its indecipherable writing: "Have you ever wondered why the alphabet is set up the way it is? . . . Why does it start with A B C and not F D Q? Who arranged it the way it is, and when?" Gerard's obsession leads him back to the abandoned house where his son died. There he discovers that Harry's death was the result of a malicious act, no less terrible for being random. In the wake of this knowledge, Gerard's grief-driven detachment begins to resemble a sort of madness. He remains aware of his past and his identity, but neither bears any meaning for him now: He sheds them as though they were ruined clothing. His actions become dictated by impulse, by a sense of predestination that propels the novel more, and far more affectingly, than any conventional plot does.

Gerard purchases a battered volume, Histoire de L'Écriture (The History of Writing), in a used bookstore in Manchester, N.H. A few months later, in a Boston cemetery, he meets an Asian woman named Catherine Whipple

Submitted On:

27 Jun 2008

File Author:

Plante, David

File Size:

8.17 MB