Benjamin Benjamin, the central character of Jonathan Evison’s third novel, knows a pain that surpasses all understanding. A stay-at-home dad, he watches his two kids, daughter Piper and son Jodi, die before his eyes. The tragedy is his fault.
The accident kills more than children. Ben’s marriage fails too—Janet, his type A, veterinarian, working professional wife, can no longer look at Ben, believing he caused the death of their kids. Ben looks in the mirror believing the same thing. Like his body, his soul has no home.
Going through the motions, Ben somehow finds his way into a night class called Fundamentals of Caregiving. It leads to badly needed employment as caretaker to Trev, a smart, horny 19-year-old victim of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Gnarled and wheelchair-bound, Trev faces a certain, fatal decline. He’s as physically messed up as Ben is mentally. Together, they make one imperfect whole.
Paste reader, you might never suspect from this bummer of a set-up just how inspiring and beautiful a tale next unfolds from Jonathan Evison. He gives us a buddy story. And he tells a story of parenting, with all its challenges and savory victories and heartbreaking defeats. He even unspools a road adventure story. In all, writing with sympathy, not sentiment, Evison takes a big swing in this novel at explaining the unexplainable. He embraces the sometimes-miserable, sometimes-joyful human condition…unconditionally.
Clearly, worldly personal experience shaped Evison’s literary vision here. With the usual caveat as to truthiness, I’ll offer Paste readers some author information direct from Wikipedia:
“Evison formerly worked as a laborer, a caregiver, a bartender, a telemarketer, a car salesman and a syndicated radio host. In this latter incarnation, he was the writer, producer, and host of the award winning comedy show, Shaken, Not Stirred. In his teens, Evison was the founding member and frontman of the Seattle punk band March of Crimes, which included future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.”
John Irving, in The World According to Garp, addressed a background menace in life, a thing called “The Undertoad.” (Irving’s term is a child character’s mispronunciation of “the undertow.”) To Irving, the sucking, unsteadying constant pull of the sea on swimmers and waders symbolized the ever-present lurking possibility of misfortune. Think of The Undertoad as the gravity towards the grave that tugs at every human moment.
In The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, the misfortune can come as suddenly as a lightning strike. Evison offers this reflection by Ben:
“Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you’ve ever taken for granted, every plan or possibility you’ve ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you’ve ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant. Sooner or later, it will happen. So prepare yourself. Be ready not to be ready. Be ready to be brought to your knees and beaten to dust. Because no stable foundation, no act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from this fact: nothing is indestructible.”
Maybe.
Evison puts Ben’s fatalism to the test. He serves up the tale of a broken man and a broken boy. He puts them in a van on a week-long road trip, where they have it in mind to visit a number of preposterous natural and man-made wonders—maybe, oh, an actual stuffed jackalope in Wyoming. Or Hitler’s stamp collection, said to be in Redmond, Ore. Or a few of the 400 Muffler Men that stand all over the U.S. Or maybe even the Virgin Mary in a stump in Salt Lake City.
Evison’s road journey also sets out to take Trev circuitously to see his deadbeat dad…possibly a final visit, given the unpredictability of Duchenne. But a different kind of Fate steps in on this travelcade. It’s not The Undertoad, with screams, corpses and palls. Evison’s version of kismet somehow resembles…salvation. Not only for Ben, but for Trev and a number of other characters collected, like snapshots of oddities, along their route.
The writer conjures up a runaway teen who hitches a ride and takes a shine to the gobsmacked Trev. Evison delivers a massively pregnant young woman and her weasel ex-con husband, rescued literally from the roadside. Evison even throws in a mystery novel element—a worrisome car tracks Ben and Trev’s van at every turn through their meandering northeastern and western states adventure.
These characters, blended just right, jackstrawed perfectly into a plausible, if imperfect, plot, create a glimmer in the last pages of this story that hardly resembles destruction at all.
Evison’s story looks a lot more like hope. The thing with feathers may have broken wings, but it still tries to fly.
Go get this terrific book. It will break your heart and build you back a new one.
Charles McNair is Books Editor for Paste. His newest novel, Pickett’s Charge, publishes September 20.