But in book after book, if you do push on through one chapter break, and then on through the chapter break after that, something amazing happens. Subplots that would once have been murky to the point of incomprehensibility (what was the deal with that dead sea captain again?) step into the light. Little jokes and echoes, separated by dozens or even hundreds of pages, come rustling out of the text forest. A writer’s voice — Grace Paley at her slangy best, Nicholson Baker at his hypomanic craziest — starts to seep into and color the voice of your innermost thoughts.
This year’s anniversary, marked by a trio of new documentary and historical projects, feels different, and perhaps somewhat darker, than many of those that have come before. These new accounts of Chernobyl disabuse their audiences of the notion that the earth can ever “naturally rewind.” They uncover its hidden history and its lingering effects, and though they take very different approaches to telling its story, each portrays Chernobyl as a harbinger of environmental catastrophes to come. Moreover, these three new accounts of Chernobyl each offer their own answer to a literary question that may very well determine how long our planet remains hospitable to human life: What narrative form can adequately capture the planetary stakes of an invisible, climatic disaster, one that threatens everything and everyone and will never burn itself out?
“Revolutionaries” inverts the structure of “American Pastoral,” telling the story of a radical from a son’s rather than a father’s perspective. One hears the influence of Philip Roth in these pages; elsewhere, echoes of Harold Brodkey. The novel’s great irony is that Lenny — ur-jokester, irreverence personified — may care most of all. Ochs, the real-life protest singer, plays an important role in its second half as an alter ego to Lenny and surrogate father to Fred — a glimpse of earnest longing unarmored by sarcasm or impiety. Ochs tells Fred that the movement has lost its direction, veered off course. “Who’s going to remember the place we were trying to get to?” he wonders, concluding that it will fall to the singers, the troubadours, to keep this memory alive. In a deeply felt and often beautiful book, Furst has done his part to continue this song.