ABC Review

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ABC ReviewI read the review for "ABC" in the Seattle Times book section...and something about the review grabbed hold of my imagination and would not let go until I purchased the book last week. The exact words or impression of the review have slipped from my grasp, and now that I look down at my finished copy of the book, I find myself wondering "Why?"
Which is, of course, the central question of this book. The main character(s) spend most of the book asking the question...while not asking either the correct "Why?" or desiring an answer. Gerard, then Catherine, then David and then Aminat are lost souls, tortured by grief...in the world but no longer of the world.
In the beginning of the novel, there is a crack as a floorboard, as Gerard's knee, as his life and consciousness snap. There was a "before" and now there is only "after". Time and space become amorphous. We start to doubt his reliability as a main character...I found myself wondering again and again if he was actually still alive. His impact on his wife, his world seems so minimal that he is very ghost-like.
Instead of wondering "Why?" about the death of his son, Harry, his closed off grief leads him on a quest to find out why the letters of the alphabet are in that particular order. It's a question without an answer...as is his real question. Because he can't confront what has happened and can't move forward in a world without Harry, Gerard leaves that world almost entirely behind.
Any time, however, his search for order seems to come close to yielding a result, he backs off, or destroys the clue or refuses to see what is in front of him. Because, of course, if he ever gains the answer to the unanswerable question regarding the alphabet, he might be forced to confront reality.
This review seems very jumbled and confusing, even as I create it. This book leaves me with many questions...mostly along the lines of "What did I miss?" Time and reality and space are so fluid in this book that not only did I doubt the characters impressions of what was happening, I found myself doubting mine. A few quotes stand out:
"Grief, he thought. Grief. Grief seemed to have concentrated itself to exist in itself apart from them, though still in their midst, a globe about which they talked and gestured and moved, a small group of lonely people distanced from the world, aware only of another world englobing the world, which was grief."
And yet - Gerard is SO far removed from the death of his son - that I never FELT this grief. Any time he even moved a hair's breadth towards an actual feeling, he backed away. The reader, along with Gerard, is just numb to emotions.
"Leaving this site, he would leave the dead behind, they who denied him his human grief. He would allow in himself what grief did to make him human - in himself and for himself, and too in and for Catherine and David and Aminat, because they needed, all together, to be free of the dead."
By the time Gerard has this thought, I find myself wondering if this shell of a man would be able to exist were he free of the dead, and if so, what life he had left to lead. He has left this world, in spirit if not in body as well.
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