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September 21, 2005
A Reader’s Response to Ed Falco
Finding some reading time on my hands this summer, I polished off Unbridled Books’ two Ed Falco titles in succession – Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha, followed by Wolf Point. From time to time, I found myself brushing this pesky fly from in front of my face: “Good grief—this guy is Carmella Soprano’s [Edie Falco’s] Uncle!”
If you think about it, the association doesn’t seem entirely frivolous. There is a dark necessity that drives the lives of the compromised characters in The Sopranos, the ones I find the most interesting, like Carmella. In order to survive, she is compelled to live in a delusional universe – to maintain a basic disconnect from reality. And woe to Carmella when she confuses the two and tries to divorce Tony, for instance, as she did this past season. Reality will out.
On the way back to Ed Falco and my response to Wolf Point, please do let me warn you. Last semester I got talked into teaching a lit class at a community college. One of my students accused me of “reading way to [sic] much into literature.” Busted. So if that kind of book talk annoys you, better stop here. Otherwise, read on:
Falco’s work is Dark. It is dark with an Atlantic seaboard Sopranos-like flavor, but the voice strikes me as singular, particular to him. Pertinent here is this: There is a dark necessity comparable to Carmella Soprano’s that drives the life of T Aloysius Walker, the protagonist of Wolf Point. The obvious difference however is that Carmella is essentially doomed. Sometimes at least, Ed Falco’s characters find their way through to the light, or at least get a glimpse of it.
Wolf Point is billed as a “page turner,” a “literary thriller,” and on that level it does not disappoint. But for this reader, it’s the underlying subject of seduction and betrayal, seduction and abandonment, and the damage they do that makes the book so interesting. In the guise of a psychological thriller, Ed Falco explores the landscape of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, and tells a classic tale of death and rebirth, of “transgression” and redemption.
Specifically, much of Wolf Point is about what happens to abused children when they grow up. They retreat into a kind of out of body state of being. They disconnect. In order to avoid feeling and dealing with the pain of what happened to them, they stuff most all of their feelings, which slip out the side door in various disguises. Some of them fall into lives of promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse, criminality, abusive relationships, real grim stuff. Others hide behind overly neat, extremely successful, perfectionist life paths but are nonetheless vulnerable to exploitation, sexual or otherwise, in their relations with others. All suffer from pathologically low self-esteem and are disconnected from reality in some profound way. Put another way, they are “owned” by what happened to them early on, as are many of Ed Falco’s characters in the short stories I have read.
That’s how we find T when the novel opens. At 57, he is a physically fit, perfectly groomed and dressed, devastated, clinically depressed, possibly suicidal lost soul when we meet him in his new SUV on a highway bound for the Thousand Islands in upstate New York, for what reason he is not quite sure, except that he’s been getting into photography lately and thinking about Carolyn, an old (secret) lover from his student days – a much older scholar/poet professor long since dead of cancer. They used to camp and fish there on weekend getaways.
What he is actually headed into is a life altering inner journey from Disconnection into Connection, as in E.M. Forster’s admonition: “Only Connect.” He is guided into and through his personal underworld where lies the source of his Disconnect by a rather unlikely pair—a couple of young hitch hikers with rob, rape and kill written all over them. Like some teenager who is so numbed that he pierces holes all over his body and maybe gets himself branded while he’s at it so that he can feel something—T picks the two of them up just for the possibility of some kind, any kind, of human interaction. Their names are Jenny and Lester. They are broke and on the run from a drug deal gone bad. That part’s true. Most everything else they tell T throughout their nightmare weekend together isn’t, or at least not exactly. Complications ensue, and that’s the page-turner part.
On the other hand, the pondering part for me, as I said earlier, includes unraveling the complexities of character, trying to connect the unsettling partial insights that sneak up on you from turns in the narrative, and savoring the ironies that accrue as core truths reveal themselves by means of trickery and falsehood – all the psychic “whose on first” back and forth between this progressively weird ménage a trois Falco leads us through until reality finally starts to out.
But for a novel to really take off, to sing, if you will, all the parts have to converge and rise to the level of metaphor. Falco succeeds on this level, too The way he gets there in Wolf Point is by way of a central act and image – T’s “transgression"—that is remarkable both for its essential riskiness and for the courage it must have taken Falco to choose it as the centerpiece of his tale. The marvel is not just that he gets by with it, but that we come to see how appropriate, even how necessary a vehicle it is for T. We come to understand what has been driving him so that he can, literally and figuratively, live. And, correspondingly, for the reader to apprehend the core meaning of the novel, borne on the wings of myth, or metaphor.
This is strong stuff. We learn early on that about 3 years back, T – who by the way had gotten quite wealthy over the years from service industry businesses—downloaded an image of child pornography off the Internet onto his desktop. We learn later that his then wife and her lover set him up to be busted for same, cleaned him out, financially, and alienated him from his children and grandchildren in so doing. They got the gold mine, he got the shaft. To avoid prison, he agreed to liquidate all his assets, leave New York for good and go live in a backwater town in Virginia, where he has been existing since in a neat and tidy haze of good wine, jazz, computer games and working out with weights.
Now how sleazy is that. And why did I keep right on reading and moreover not waste one minute (beyond my immediate “eeww gross” reaction) condemning or judging T for the act that started him on his road to ruin and perdition.
Although I did wonder just what on earth T was thinking browsing pornographic websites in the first place, Falco has already let us in on enough about T to recognize that he had absolutely no prurient interest in this photograph, which is borne out in the course of the narrative. But what really got my attention and quickly moved me beyond any “judgment issues” is two things: T’s statement that he found the image “interesting,” as image, and why: “There’s a difference, he wanted to say. There’s an important difference. In the real world, it’s terrible, it’s a crime; but this is an image, a powerful, troubling, resonant image that reaches someplace deep and disturbing. I was interested in the image; I wasn’t sanctioning the act.”
And what an image it is. As described by T in exquisite detail, the photograph sounds more like one of those classical paintings of Zeus raping some poor girl, facilitated by that wife of his, Hera, than it does a crude porno shot taken in a house trailer. That alone puts some much-needed distance on the image for the reader. More important, it points to the troubled mind and heart of T, to his disconnection. Despite the emphasis T places on the composition, the aesthetics of the photo, the “someplace” that is “deep and disturbing” is surely located within, not in a trailer park in New Jersey, or West Virginia. Most important, T’s treatment of the image prefigures the mythic quality of T’s weekend journey. And perhaps this is a good place to remind ourselves that myths, after all, are not “artificial,” except in the highest sense of the word. Myths are metaphors of “deep and disturbing” places in the human heart that drive our relations with one another. They also connect us with one another.
Falco returns to this image at key points in the narrative, using T’s evolving response to and interpretation of it as a marker of the stations of his journey from darkness, delusion, and disconnect into the light, into clarity and connection.
It is from what T comes to learn of Jenny’s past that he comes to figure his own life out. We learn that he was the child of an absent father and a mean drunk mother. He recognizes that he had been deeply in love with Carolyn. And that she had in fact exploited him, emptied him out, and cast him out once he graduated college to drift through two marriages and fatherhood with women who had likewise abandoned and exploited him. Just as Jenny “was seduced and betrayed while she was still a child,” so had he been.
T returns to the photograph, using it as the starting point to chart his account of his life, the mistake from which all else since has happened. By the time T can see through Jenny’s suffering the “rest of the story” that resides in that photograph, the image has morphed into a perversion of the legend of Persephone, Demeter and Pluto. Pluto — god of the Underworld — kidnaps Persephone while she is picking flowers and makes her his Queen. Finally – at great risk to herself – her mother Demeter persuades Pluto to let Persephone come back and spend one half of every year with her. Demeter, the goddess of harvest, grieves all the months that Persephone is away, and that is why we have the four seasons. On a metaphysical level, however, this is a story about the pure love of a mother for her daughter, a love so profound and powerful that, metaphorically speaking, it generates the seasons of the earth. Mothers protect their children. They don’t seduce them, much less serve them up to the God of the Underworld. But they do in T’s photograph—“Demeter” has seduced her daughter and is making a sexual gift of her.
When T finally sees what has happened to Jenny in that image, all the mythic trappings of the photograph, both for T and for the reader, fall away and the raw horror of the rape of a child is positively palpable. And if you reverse the gender of the players, the girl could be T. That was the “someplace dark and disturbing” that drew T to that photograph when he stumbled upon it, surfing the Net. And just as T is led to truth, to reality, by way of Jenny and Lester’s trickery and falsehood, T’s “transgression” becomes the instrument of his redemption. Just as in myth, things are not always what they appear.
What Falco has accomplished in Wolf Point is quite remarkable, and well worth the read. Most of all, it deserves the right kind of reader – the kind who tends to “read way to much into literature.”
Kay Callison is Director of the American Audio Prose Library.
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Comments
Unbridled invited me to write a reader’s response when I was done with WOLF POINT. The book was excellent, but Kay Callison’s response was so good, however, that there is very little I might add. I’m going to have to pass on responding to the book.
I look forward to writing a positive review at Amazon, when I get some time.
Howard Goldowsky
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