Many readers will argue that this work is not a novel at all. Certainly it does not adhere to the traditional expectations of a novel, no matter how flexible the reader is with definitions. Begun at the end of the 1980s and still unfinished at the time of author Roberto Bolano’s death in 2003, at the age of fifty, The Woes of the True Policeman was always a work in progress, one on which the author continued to work for fifteen years. Many parts of it, including some of the characters, eventually found their way into other works by Bolano, specifically, The Savage Detectives and his monumental 2666. But though it is “an unfinished novel, [it is] not an incomplete one,” according to the author of the Prologue, “because what mattered to its author was working on it, not completing it…Reality as it was understood until the nineteenth century has been replaced as reference point [here] by a visionary, oneiric, fevered, fragmentary, and even provisional form of writing.” As one character discovers, “The Whole is impossible…Knowledge is the classification of fragments,” and Bolano leaves it to the reader – his “true policeman” of the title – to figure it all out.
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Using the point of view of a female victim for the first time, and setting the story in a chaotic near future, James Sallis introduces the back story for Jenny Rowan, a name she assumed after she was held prisoner from the age of seven to the age of nine, confined to a wooden box under the bed of her kidnapper, who viciously assaulted her sexually for two years. When she eventually managed to escape, she hid in the Westwood Mall for two years, scrounging for food and discarded clothing, until she was discovered by social services and assigned to a juvenile facility until her sixteenth birthday. Aid from an elderly woman after she was freed led to a job at a café for five years, while she also went on to school and received a degree. Throughout, she recognizes the help she has received from good people who allow her to make her own decisions, and eventually she finds the perfect job, working for a TV station where she spends all day alone in a dark office finding snippets of stories on the internet and then combining them into features for the evening news. It is in this job that Jenny is working when this novel opens, and she quickly becomes real for the reader, who grows to care deeply about her. Sallis, in writing this, has seized life here and twisted it way beyond all norms, establishing easily identifiable themes about a victim’s emotional survival and strength, her tenuous steps into society, her need to progress at her own pace, and eventually her ability to reach out and help “others of [her] kind.” The focus is allegorical and experimental, and Jenny’s early life more closely resembles fantasy, however dark, than it realism.
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In Tumbledown, Boswell uses his experience as a psychological counselor to create realistic but damaged characters who try and fail every day to accommodate the impossible. The theme -that every day a sane person must figure out ways to deal with the impossible – permeates every aspect of this novel by the prize-winning author. In his dedication to the book, in fact, Boswell honors “all the clients who survived my tenure as a counselor and to the one who didn’t,” an ominous introduction to this novel set in a residential facility, where main character therapist James Candler is responsible for six young clients, most of them under the age of twenty-five. For the first third of the novel, author Boswell introduces his dysfunctional characters, their past histories, and their problems, not just for the clients but the staff, too. The “plot,” a collection of vignettes involving the characters and their interactions with each other and with life in general, unwinds on several levels at once. The often grotesque ironies in the characters’ lives and their sometimes bizarre interactions, do, at times, lead to scenes bordering on farce, but the overlay of the clients’ dysfunctions and the sympathy these people engender in the reader keep the novel grounded, even when the characters are not.
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Dr. Raj Kumar, the speaker of this ambitious and often exhilarating novel, decides, ultimately, that “What holds things together is more important than what separates them,” but by the time he discovers this, he has explored the world on more levels and examined life in more detail than many other authors do in ten novels. I cannot recall a novel which has kept me reading so slowly and so happily for so long as this one did. Brimming with unusual insights, the novel remains firmly focused on life itself, not just on the speaker’s life, but on the grandest and sometimes most horrific aspects of life—socially, historically, artistically, scientifically, and even cosmically. As I read this, I was breathless, in awe of author Jaspreet Singh’s creativity, vision, and his literary execution. The speaker, Dr. Raj Kumar, has just returned to Delhi for the first time in twenty-five years. He has been a professor at Cornell, but he is now trying to understand himself and his own search for information about an event which has left him traumatized for more than two decades. Married and the father of two American children, Raj is essentially a loner, preferring isolation and solitude as he returns to India. Here he sorts through the flow of his own memories and tries to understand them and their significance in the context in which they have occurred. In the process, he also discovers that events that he knows nothing about have affected those around him in extraordinary ways. Ultimately, he must uncover the whole past if he is to understand who he really is and what his obligations are, if any, as a human being.
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As the novel opens, an unnamed forty-year-old man meets a pretty girl at a hotel bar at four o’clock one afternoon in the 1950s, and lonely and cynical, and looking to connect with her, he promises to tell her a story. He confesses, however, that “I don’t know anymore, what things signify; I have difficulty now identifying them; a sort of woodenness has come over me,” a “woodenness” which leads him to use her as a passive sounding board while he relives his previous relationship with another woman whom he believes he loved. What follows are the random maunderings of an insensitive man who has no idea who he is or what he is doing, and since he is the only speaker in the novel, the primary listener to his story becomes, in effect, the reader, rather than the pretty listener at the bar. Alfred Hayes’s brilliance as a writer and careful observer of human nature is challenged to its limits with this novel with only one speaker. Despite the flawed and uninteresting main character, however, Hayes succeeds in making the speaker’s situation intriguing enough that the reader wants to know whether he gets his well-deserved comeuppance, whether he learns anything, or whether he simply moves on to another lover. Outstanding novel.
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