Light Fantastic

Book Quarterly Reviews

by Justin Bauer

Kevin Brockmeier's got a talent for a sucker punch, working quickly and carefully with a well-sketched character or a chance encounter before opening up and drawing blood. That ability to deliver an emotional wallop gets shown off throughout The Illumination, with the understated clarity of Brockmeier's images and diction allowing just enough daylight for the full force of their damaged need and loss to connect firmly. "Shortly after midnight, he reached out to press his hand against his wife's back, feeling, as he always did, for the shallow rain-draw of her spinal crease," Brockmeier narrates. "Then he remembered what had happened."

What had happened was an auto accident that seriously injured the devoted husband, and killed his wife. This particular story, about coming to terms with loss, is beautifully sad, with an artful turn to the plot and a raw conclusion. But this story is also just the second of six, each with its own isolated central character, each delivering their stories in succession. All of these central characters possess distinct voices, and all show a distinct variation on the pain and isolation of this young injured husband. They range from a bullied autistic-spectrum child (whose chapter is rendered compulsively in 10-word sentences) to a writer on a book tour, unable to speak through ulcerated lips. All of these characters live in a world altered by "the Illumination" — an unexplained, maybe inexplicable phenomenon that causes pain to register visibly, as shining light — which Brockmeier resists defining. Instead, he satisfies himself with describing its effects — "skin-cancer pocks like small clusters of stars, sprained knees like forks of lightning, dislocated shoulders like the torch-lit rooms of ancient houses."

These characters are also united — or, more properly, strung together like a chain — by the journal the dead wife kept of her husband's declarations of love, passed from one chapter to the next through a series of circumstances and small thefts. These devices, the conceit of the Illumination and the MacGuffin of the journal, don't always work smoothly, and by the end of the novel Brockmeier clearly strains to include them, as if he was reluctant to leave his six jewel-box stories without a scaffold. But when the focus is on the characters, their injuries and insecurities and lacerations shine, covering them in a halo of their own beautiful suffering.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

Pantheon, 272 pp., $24.95, Feb. 1.