Andrew Lewis Conn’s new novel, O, Africa!, explores the fictional exploits of two Jewish brothers whose commercial partnership propels them to the forefront of the silent film industry in the years between the World Wars.
Conn’s book puts a marvelous spin on a celebrated time when many American Jews’ outsized sense of what it meant to become American—without hyphen or modifier—drove them to outsized achievement.
I doubt that a writer as imaginative as Conn pitched O, Africa! as “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay of the silent film industry,” or anything so derivative. Still, a number of similarities situate O, Africa! in the long shadow cast by Michael Chabon’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winner. Fortunately, Conn does plenty to wriggle free of such confining comparisons.
O, Africa! chronicles the fortunes of twin Jewish brothers Micah and Isidor (Izzy) Grand, two halves of a successful silent-era filmmaking team. We meet the Grand brothers in 1927 at both peak and precipice, riding a winning streak of popular (if forgettable) comedies while facing the artistic limitations and limited lifespan of their practiced craft. Synchronized-sound pictures like The Jazz Singer threaten to render them obsolete.
Like Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, the Grands offer a study in opposites: Micah is gregarious, arrogant, dissolute and profligate, in it for the women and the fame as much as his love of movies; Izzy is a self-abnegating gay man, emotionally stunted, cripplingly introverted and obsessed with the technical side of filmmaking. The novel spans continents, captures an industry at an explosive historical moment and portrays two talented Jewish men making marketable art and finding a way in. Conn indisputably loves the movies as much as Chabon loves superhero comics, and he sees in them the birth of a nation, the birth of a century and an apt metaphor in the 30-foot screen for all stories rendered bigger than life.
Conn establishes his intentions to trade in era-defining American iconography from O, Africa!’s whizbang opening scene. It features Babe Ruth at a Coney Island location shoot with an impromptu Nathan’s hot dog eating contest pitting Micah against the Babe. It culminates in Izzy’s nerve-jangling Ferris wheel ride with the Grand brothers’ ailing studio head, messily establishing the quieter twin’s persistent state of suspended decisiveness.
Like Chabon, Conn mostly eschews the impulse to chew all this wonderfully iconic last-century scenery, striking a healthy balance between storytelling that’s epic by implication and epic by insistence. The trick with such a book is to suggest how much the story means in the fictional world it inhabits without ever stating it outright—letting legend subsume real life.
Conn appears committed, at the outset, to such a measured approach to large-canvas storytelling, but he doesn’t hew to it consistently. He often indulges in mythmaking at moments that seem undisciplined, but may simply indicate that he’s rack-focusing into a more irreverent narrative mode, or resisting imposed expectations of narrative modesty. Conn’s one previous novel, P., self-consciously (and on virtually every shape-shifting structural level) styles itself a Ulysses of the mid-90s New York porn-film industry. One might reasonably expect Conn to play faster and looser with subject and storytelling modes than the Chabon of Kavalier & Clay.
That said, Conn frequently succumbs to Sister Carrie-esque flights of portentous, over-the-top exposition when he tries to situate O, Africa! in the historical moment and connect it to broader themes. Those slips come at a cost. Take, for example, an episode early in the book where Conn describes Micah Grand’s contentious relationship with his physician father:
Yet here in the figure of his son Micah, with his ease and fluency, was an exemplar of the adopted nation’s addiction to speed, surface, and sensation. The usual patrimonial competition was heightened for having as its backdrop a new country with shifting modes that challenged a father’s mastery.
Conn writes beautifully enough, but the didactic tone oversells the point. The father-son dynamic recalls James T. Farrell’s brilliant story “The Oratory Contest” (1935), in which Farrell documents—with more restraint, and much greater impact—the moment when his own educated, fast-assimilating, post-immigrant generation left the previous one behind. In Farrell’s story, teenage Gerry O’Dell delivers a prize-winning speech, and then dashes his father George’s dream of sharing his son’s triumph by leaving the auditorium unannounced to celebrate with his friends. Farrell separates Irish-extraction past from American future in a single sentence of plainspoken heartbreak: “George asked himself why Gerry hadn’t waited, and he knew the answer to the question.”