Author: Adam Schwartzman
2010, Pantheon
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of | 10 |
|---|---|
| Language..... | 8 |
| Entertainment..... | 6 |
| Depth..... | 6 |
Eddie Signwriter is one of those books you might read for the journey, not the destination. With 293 very tall, very texty pages, it’s quite a bit longer than the page count suggests, and the final payoff, I’m afraid, isn’t quite worth the effort. But much of the language here is lovely. Schwartzman is a poet taking his first turn at a novel, and if you’re able to look past his issues with pacing and theme, you’ll find plenty of passages worth rereading.
Ghanaian teenager Kwasi Edward Michael Dankwa begins an innocent affair with a classmate that, for reasons mostly beyond his control, leads to the death of his girlfriend’s aunt, a respected businesswoman. Eddie is kicked out of school and more or less banished from the town. He wanders for a bit, moves in with an uncle, becomes a signwriter (he paints signs and storefronts for local businesses), then disappears himself from Ghana without a word. The narrative takes us from Ghana to Botswana and back, through Senegal and finally into France.
Sounds like a flurry of activity, right? It is not. The narrative moves along at a snail’s pace. Eddie just kinda bobs along from place to place, and we bob next to him. Worse yet, the big picture never really comes together. The book is intended to be part “ripple effect” study and part identity exploration, with a smattering of sin and redemption and a bit of “man without a country”—yet none of these themes solidify into a cogent whole, creating a novel that is less than the sum of its parts.
Early passages that are meant to be pithy never fully resound, like the following, which is on page 30:
He remembers the insects floating in the field behind the house where he played with his friends and his siblings.
He tries to remember it all.
Throw up a handful of stones and you catch only the largest stone.
Step outside and it becomes a mythology. Try to step back in and it disappears.
Schwartzman also has problems sometimes with little details. The following occur chronologically:
At night his father would come into the children’s room … sit beside him and his sister [Leah] on their bed (31)
He slept in Leah’s room on the night before (34)
They were sitting on the bed in the room he shared with his sister (36)
These things are seemingly minor, but add them up and you begin to lose faith in the writer’s grip on the story.
Most frustrating of all, Schwartzman refers to Eddie by pronoun much more often than by name, sometimes doing so for dozens of pages at a time. It gets out of control:
It seemed to him then that what he had said to the teacher had saddened and exhausted him. First the teacher looked at him and then he looked away again. The teacher was very still. He could see his breathing. He sensed at first that the teacher was making up his mind. That he had decided something important about him, or possibly himself.
Or this one:
Leah was born the next year, but it was already too late. “This will be the naughty one,” his mother said as his father handed him to her in his blanket.
The “This,” against logic, refers to Eddie instead of Leah. Whose blanket it is, I cannot promise.
Schwartzman’s saving grace is in the small scenes, in the descriptions of settings and the inner thoughts of his characters. Like the following:
Though even as he began to feel his command return, he remained mindful of his weakness. Mindful that if he stayed whole it was still by the flimsiest of means, as if his life were held together with glue and cotton. But with time he grew steadier, more confident. He began again to trust in the shape of what he saw around him, that things would be tomorrow where he’d left them today.
Schwartzman is excellent with settings, painting the scenery with words as well as we imagine Eddie does with paint, bringing alive Ghana and Botswana and Senegal and France. I haven’t read any of Schwartzman’s poetry, but I’m confident that it’s damn good.
In Eddie Signwriter, he would’ve done well to better use his poet’s sense of word economy. And a novelist’s sense of story and detail.
Similar books: The Road Home, by Rose Tremain; Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
