Throughout her literary career, Joanne Greenberg has tended to go for the thematic jugular. She has navigated the intricacies of our psyches, the bonds within families and the difficulties of confronting reality, with grace. Sadly, her new novel, “Appearances,” although smattered with pieces of honest prose and complex psychological insight, falls short.
A Denver-based ski lawyer without much capacity for fun or daring, Steven Howe is the type of father and husband who likes to have all loose ends resolved. As such, when his Italian mother dies and he cannot locate his father’s death certificate among her belongings, his mind begins to churn. The nagging turns to compulsion when his only daughter and middle child, Jennifer, develops a rare genetic disease that threatens to leave her blind as she ages. When a friend’s skip-tracing software reveals that his father is not only alive, but incarcerated in Cañon City, Steven makes the drive to see if he can trace this disease – and reclaim a father he barely knew.
Entering the prison opens a whole world of memories for Steven but also restructures for him the colorful portraits of his father that he had painted in his mind. Forced to come to terms with his father’s history, Steven and his family question what it means for them to be related to a criminal. Steven’s wife, Connie, takes the news the hardest, her own family a pristine image of perfection.
The history unfolds along with the realities of the Howes’ daily dramas, begging to ask how and to what extent our past plays a role in our present lives.
Greenberg also tackles the nature of compulsion: Why is it we are driven toward what we are, what is in our power to control, and what, if any, acts are forgivable should compulsion be too overwhelming to restrain?
Steven spends his life warding off vices for fear of being taken over by them – his existence is one of fervent discipline and order. Greenberg clearly empathizes with those unable to control themselves, and therefore paints Steven as inherently lacking something as a result of his discipline, and his father as oddly sympathetic.
As a result, however, Steven’s character becomes relatively tedious by the end of the novel – constantly assessing situations with his “lawyer’s mind” (a phrase used a few times too many) – and we wish for more of his father. Greenberg has created Alonzo Howe artfully. Within his prison’s narrow walls we see a relatively complex character, one clearly guilty of his “young man’s crime,” and yet endearing without being cutesy or even lovable. The novel could have used more and longer scenes with Alonzo, and fewer pages of his son waxing philosophic on his behalf.
We have seen in her earlier novels that Greenberg has great dexterity with the workings of the human mind. Sporadically throughout “Appearances,” there is evidence of that facility. At certain key moments, Steven is capable of great and raw honesty, and his wife of sincere hurt and anger. Yet the prose is structured such that we get bogged in unnecessary detail, detail that often already has been stated in one fashion or another, and consequently lose the force of these moments.
We see this explicitly as Greenberg navigates the (apt) theme of appearance versus reality. This is certainly a worthy point of inquiry, yet somehow she does not handle it with her usual stealth. Instead the topic feels belabored, her words contrived. An example: Young Jennifer is a costume designer in Chicago, a position written, I imagine, so Greenberg could interweave theatrics and daily existence. Yet the parallels are clunky, and by the time Jennifer announces that her need to be onstage corresponds to her “need to be in the mix, in life,” I was ready for Jacques in “As You Like It” to jump out and announce that “all the world’s a stage.”
This particular tactic seems used to remind us that our reality is only what we make of it – a stage set is real to the players, or, as Connie tells Steven, his “fear … was making him poor in the outlook.” Yet this message gets convoluted when, at other times, Greenberg seems to want to tell us that our mental constructions can take us only so far, and that devastation strikes when reality rears its ugly head. Steven’s image of his Harley-
riding, benevolent father is torn from him when he discovers that even his pop’s uber-manly biker outfit was “off no cow on this earth, and the boots, leatherette.”
The discrepancy is difficult to reconcile here, as is the disconnect between Greenberg’s message and her delivery.
Miriam Robinson is a Denver-based freelance writer.
Appearances
By Joanne Greenberg
Montemayor Press, 268 pages, $15.95, paperback
