After the parade A novel

AT THE BEGINNING of Lori Ostlund's powerful debut novel, "After the Parade," 41-year-old Aaron Englund leaves his older partner, Walter, the language professor who rescued him at 18 from his traumatic small-town Minnesota childhood and helped him "become the person he was meant to be." On the way from their home in Albuquerque to San Francisco, in a motel he has checked into, Aaron prevents an abusive father from killing his son in the next room over by breaking down the door and calling the police. This event will carry intense meaning for Aaron throughout the novel: "It seemed he had been waiting his whole life to save this boy." For until Walter's arrival in his life, Aaron himself was a child in desperate need of rescue. He remembers imagining his bed as a boat tossed by violent weather: "In the midst of the storms, he would throw himself from the bed to the floor, where he pretended that he was swimming, staying afloat and saving his own life because there was nobody else to save him." When he tells Walter he's leaving, Walter says reproachfully, "I saved you, Aaron." Indeed, Aaron leaves partly because he has learned that being saved entails debts he is no longer willing to pay. The question of whether Aaron can save himself and forge a satisfying life on his own forms the bulk of "After the Parade." In San Francisco, Aaron rents a room in the back third of the garage of a Chinese couple and gets a job teaching English to immigrants at a run-down and poorly managed English-language school. Here the novel enters its true subject, beginning the slow work of reaching back into Aaron's childhood as he tries to come to terms with his father's abuse and death, his abandonment by his mother and his utter isolation as a "sissy" in his small town. Ostlund's preoccupations here will ring familiar to anyone who has read her award-winning story collection, "The Bigness of the World" (2009): rural Minnesota, the art of teaching, the breakups of gay and lesbian couples, the father's hatred and the figure of the gendernonconforming small boy. This boy - shy, polite, fastidious, bookish, bullied by his family, teachers and classmates - appears in several stories in "The Bigness of the World." In Aaron Englund, Ostlund has used the capaciousness of the novel form to plumb the depths of his character, and especially the effects of his father's animosity. This animosity is far starker in the novel than it was in the stories, where it was often refracted through eccentricity and playfulness. For example, one of the narrators in Ostlund's collection decides not to question her father when he praises the "broasted chicken" special at a local cafe, because she can anticipate his reaction: "'Broasted chicken,' he would reply automatically, the words so familiar to him that they are their own definition. Then, after the slightest pause, he would say it again, 'Broasted chicken,' asserting the words in a way that means both 'You never visit' and 'What kind of world do you live in?'" The father in "After the Parade," by contrast, is no longer comically quirky and irascible; he is violent and terrifying, and Ostlund stunningly portrays the experience of an abused child in all its merciless, terrible detail. In the car on a family vacation, when Aaron accidentally vomits on his father's arm, his father pulls over and flings open Aaron's door to lean closer to him: "'Eat it,' he said, mashing his arm hard against Aaron's mouth. Aaron clenched his jaw, but the vomit leaked back in between his lips. He tried not to move it about with his tongue, but he could taste it, sour and bitter like a rotten walnut." Later, his father is barely restrained from pouring Drano down Aaron's throat because he can't stand the way Aaron swallows. Even when details recur between the collection and the novel, their tone and import are worlds apart. In the story "All Boy," for instance, the protagonist is locked in a closet by his babysitter so she can watch TV without being pestered by his questions. His parents fire her - but in a mordant twist typical of the stories, not because she locked their child in a closet, but rather because she wears his father's socks, and his father is "completely unhinged" by this, "an intimacy beyond what he could bear." The protagonist himself doesn't really mind being locked in, and when his world becomes more frightening he finds himself "longing for the dark safety of the closet." Aaron is also locked in a closet at one point (a symbolically fraught punishment in relation to gay characters, of course), but Ostlund casts the episodes in an entirely different light. By "After the Parade," the memory is no longer accompanied by compensatory pleasures. Instead, preceded by the rapid and urgent shuttling between the narrative present and Aaron's recovered memory, it has become the traumatic climax of the novel. THE SCENES of abuse, drained of any humor or consolation, are indelible and devastating in their physical brutality. Slightly less successful, to my mind, is the way Ostlund handles the challenge of organizing the entire novel around the consciousness of a solemn and polite boy who has grown into a decorous man who "did not care for vulgarity or meanness" - nor, for that matter, for ice cream, frosting, dogs, phone calls, discussions of bodily functions or gay men who wear chaps. It's risky to center a novel on a character who has excellent boundaries and abjures excess, since the novel thrives on excess. At times Aaron's fastidiousness bleeds into the narrative voice, making me miss the shards of wit of Ostlund's stories. What comes closest to replicating the relief and texture that wit provides is the glinting oddity created by a variety of vividly drawn outsiders to whom Aaron gravitates: a dwarf with tusks who dreams of being in a Diane Arbus photograph, a fat baker at his mother's diner whose attempt to escape the claustrophobia of her smalltown life has failed, and an evangelical aunt who struggles mightily with constipation. It's as though, through their bodily excesses, Ostlund is trying to provide the explosive energy that Aaron's containment wants to rein in. Whether or not one feels that this dynamic succeeds, "After the Parade" provides considerable pleasure and emotional power. The teaching scenes, in which Aaron's adult students ponder the mysteries of American English expressions and American customs, are warm, lively and engrossing. Ostlund richly evokes the rural Minnesota of Aaron's childhood, where fine distinctions are made between Norwegians, Swedes and Finns; and, through Aaron, she casts a sharp eye on the generation of closeted gay men Walter and his friends belong to, men whose campiness both disguises and expresses their shame. Indeed, while we may be tempted to forget their struggles now that the Supreme Court has affirmed the right of gay men and lesbians to live with the same dignity as anybody else, "After the Parade" is a moving testament to those adults who contend with the damaging legacy of shame, and the nonconforming children who live in hostile families, trying to stay afloat and save their own lives. The father in this novel is neither quirky nor irascible; he is violent and terrifying. JUDITH FRANK'S most recent novel is "All I Love and Know."

At the age of 40, ESL teacher Aaron is living alone for the first time. A newcomer to San Francisco, he is teaching his quirky students, listening to his landlords fight, and trying to come to terms with his life. Aaron grew up in Mortonville, MN, and marks his life before and after a significant event: when his abusive police officer father fell off a parade float and died. Even though his mother moved from the town and seemed to start over, she never really moved past these events. And, one day, she just left.with the pastor, no less. After living with friends for a time, Aaron is rescued by Walter, an older man who shepherds him through college and introduces him to what the world has to offer. But, as Aaron matures, this relationship begins to feel controlling, and Aaron strikes out on his own, finally confronting his past. Woven throughout this touching debut is Ostlund's gentle humor. Sean Runnette captures perfectly Aaron's voice in this introspective tale. Verdict Highly recommended. ["A thread of melancholy runs through this affecting novel": LJ 7/15 review of the Scribner hc.]-Judy Murray, -Monroe Cty. Lib. Syst., MI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.