The comedown A novel

IN THE OPENING PAGES of Rebekah Frumkin's debut novel, "The Comedown," we meet Leland Bloom-Mittwoch - middle-aged, manic, full of regret and cocaine, clutching a Torah to his chest as he takes a big running jump off the roof of a Tampa hotel. In the pages that follow, we slowly get a sense of who Leland was as a younger man: a spirited political activist at Kent State in 1967, then, shortly thereafter, a self-absorbed addict in Cleveland, where one night he and his dealer friend Reggie Marshall find themselves in the middle of a double-cross gone dramatically wrong (gunshots, car bombs). Reggie disappears, presumably dead, while Leland emerges both alive and in possession of a yellow briefcase stuffed with cash. Sixteen years later, he's in Tampa jumping off that hotel. What has happened in between - to Leland, to Reggie, to the briefcase - are the mysteries that serve as the novel's ostensible plot. It's probably safe to say that Leland is the main character here, but I'd be less confident calling him the protagonist; after he drops out of sight in the prologue, all but one of the following chapters are told from somebody else's point of view. We experience the story through the eyes of just about every member of two connected, but very different, multigenerational clans: the Bloom-Mittwochs, a white family from the Cleveland suburbs, and the Marshalls, a black family from the city's center. The novel is narrated from a total of 15 different perspectives, including those of Leland, his wife, his son, his other son; Reggie, his wife and sons; and so on. They are white and black, male and female, Jewish and gentile, gay and straight, cis and trans - all of them coming into contact with one another like Venn diagrams that partly, but never neatly, overlap. It's a lot to keep track of, which is why the novel is preceded by two full family trees, all the various relationships helpfully mapped out (although I'd recommend not studying these diagrams too carefully, as certain spoilers become obvious under scrutiny). Leland makes brief cameos in these other chapters, floating in and out of the text just as he floats in and out of people's lives. But these chapters are never really about him. Nor are they really about Reggie, nor the briefcase. Rather, the book is a study in narrative democracy: Everybody gets a turn being the protagonist. Each chapter painstakingly constructs its central character's whole life's journey, beginning, usually, in childhood, then fast-forwarding to an older and wiser version of that character, while also inscribing other important life moments in various flashbacks and flash-forwards. So not only does the book take 15 different points of view, but each single point of view itself also has multiple points of view. It goes without saying that this is extraordinarily hard to pull off. This is like three-dimensional chess. This is novel writing with the difficulty level set to godly. The danger here is that in committing so fully to each character under the spotlight, Frumkin sometimes loses sight of the larger story. By the time we reach a flashback about Leland's second wife's son's exgirlfriend's mother's high school's gymnastics team (truly), it seems as if we've gone a little far afield. Is this still a novel about a yellow briefcase? Well, no it's not, actually. Not really. The book isn't necessarily interested in solving its central mystery; what it wants to do instead is emphatically contextualize it. Frumkin doesn't simply explain a crime; she examines every life the crime touched. Which means a lot of digression. And this might be tiresome if the digressions weren't so good, so fully realized and meticulously, skillfully rendered. A weird feature of this book's structure is that sometimes the new protagonist is someone you've never heard of, which creates a moment of disorientation that Frumkin bravely, confidently allows to remain; she trusts her readers. One such moment comes late in the book and features a character named "Tarzan/Tweety/New Person," to whose introduction I was like, Who the hell is that! ? But then I read the chapter, and it made me cry (twice), and if there's ever a stand-alone novel about Tarzan/Tweety/New Person, I'll be buying it on publication day for sure. Rebekah Frumkin can write. Of course, readers hoping for a quickplotted crime drama might feel a little angry as each chapter backtracks to chronicle some new origin story, but they'll be missing the real brilliance of this book: In its rejection of any fixed perspective, "The Comedown" is able to examine the reflexive and sometimes sloppy ways people construct an identity, how that identity changes over time and how that identity is often dramatically different from the way people are perceived from the outside. Take Leland, for example: Reggie thinks he's as pitiful as a stray dog, whereas Leland's second wife describes him as "anarchy with a Jew's sense of purpose," and his rabbi says he's "an inconsequential person with a wild brain." Leland, meanwhile, fancies himself a kind of Holden Caulfield type, too smart for this life, able to see the phonies in a world of hypocrisy. And the thing is, all of these descriptions are true. Leland really is a different person depending on 1) whom he's with, and 2) what darknesses he's lived through up to that point. We tend to think of our "selves" as consistent and solid things, but this book reminds us that who we are is incredibly malleable and fluid, subject to the influence of, say, passive-aggressive mothers, fascist fathers, absent husbands, objects of crushes or even the slightest tweaks to our brain chemistry. Many of the novel's characters are fighting battles against their own minds, using food or certain drugs - cocaine, marijuana, pills, meth - as medicine, getting high to calm the suffering in their brains, the abstract anxieties that they've named the Thought, or the glitch, or the Nervousness. But after the high, there's always a comedown, and this is true both in the short term (as in, the next day's hangover) and in the long. Ttirns out the book's seemingly diffuse structure, while unsuitable for carrying a quick plot, is actually essential to accomplish this other greater goal: understanding how people change over a lifetime, how a self is built, how the past is revised to suit the present, how adults come to epitomize exactly what they hated most as children, how secrets and pain and trauma play out in a mind and a body over the decades. As one mother explains to her anxious young son, life is a series of waves that batter you unstoppably. The challenge, she says, is to not be crushed by so many waves that you can't stand up to crest the next one. Which is a pretty great way to describe this novel's real subject. This is not a book about a drug deal gone wrong, or a briefcase full of cash. Rather, it's a book about crests and troughs, highs and comedowns, joys and brutalities - about how easily our lives are wrecked, but also how powerfully we're able to survive and rebuild. ? The book's diffuse structure is essentiell to understanding how people change, how a self is built. NATHAN hill is the author of "The Nix."

DEBUT When a book opens with two pages of family trees, readers know to expect a multilayered, intergenerational, family epic. Frumkin's debut novel does not disappoint, following three generations of two intertwined families, one black, one white, from their roots in midcentury Cleveland to 2009, when their descendants are spread throughout the country. The story is told from multiple viewpoints, but all of the connections hinge on an explosive 1973 encounter between the fathers of both families, a drug deal gone bad. This violent episode reverberates for decades, as all cope with the fallout, obfuscated by secrets and misunderstandings on both sides. Frumkin thoughtfully delves into issues of mental illness, addiction, poverty, and racism in a story filled with penetrating insights into the human character, sensitively portraying flawed individuals from disparate walks of life. The author is particularly skilled at depicting the inadvertent harm that can be perpetrated by those trying to do good, characters who are blind to their own prejudices, and the consequences of their actions. -VERDICT This ambitious saga features vivid and compassionately drawn characters, each of whom provides another piece of an interconnected puzzle. As in real life, there is no tidy outcome.-Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.