EPILEPTIC
It starts out as standard fare, a childhood terrorizing his small French town, banding together with other children to create maximum mischief. David tries to have a normal life despite his brother’s illness, and at times, when a treatment seems to work, he does. But as Jean-Christophe’s condition worsens he becomes violent and tyrannical, demanding more and more attention, until David is driven to fight him to protect the family.
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What lifts Epileptic above a standard illness narrative is the author’s curiosity. With every strange turn–the family moving to a macrobiotic commune, his father’s tinkering with alchemy in the garage–he delves fully into the tangent. He researches war to explain his childish bloodlust and penchant for drawing elaborate battle scenes. He presents the history of macrobiotics, the philosophies of the religions and “great thinkers” his mother consults, and, after his grandfather’s death, he digs into his family’s history as well. Throughout, David’s belief system develops, more Of Human Bondage than A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
“The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto With One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton,” in which a young Canadian tourist explores D.C. and stumbles across a semiprivate concert given by a group of Vietnam vets, doesn’t fare much better. Too contrived, it seems like something tossed together to support its exposition-heavy title. The next, “Manners of Dying,” also comes off smelling like a writing exercise, but it’s at least an interesting piece. Consisting of nine variations on a letter written by a prison warden to a mother relating her condemned son’s last evening, it humanizes the doomed.
It must have been rough for Sam Lipsyte to have his feisty and satirical second novel rejected by umpteen U.S. publishers. His first, The Subject Steve, came out in 2002 to generally hot reviews. But things seem to have worked out well enough in the end: Picador picked it up it in the UK last year, and there’s nothing like being forced to publish abroad to lend a work a whiff of persecuted genius.
