The End of Youth
by Rebecca Brown
(City Lights) $11.95
For the past year or so, my father has been ill. I visited him in his hospital room this fall, with the skyscrapers of downtown brooding beyond his narrow bed, stood over him and looked at his legs, which had withered to where they reminded me of Jesus' on the cross, or Saint Jerome as the Renaissance painters represented him. Standing there I thought not about whether he would pull through this okay or not, or about who would do the family's taxes, or how I would comfort my mother later in the car; no, my thoughts were much more self-absorbed and immediate. Oh, I thought, so someday I too will die.
It's a feeling echoed in the pages of Rebecca Brown's latest book, The End of Youth, which is part collection of linked stories, part essay, part bildungsroman; but all mettle, all heart. Following one central consciousness, each piece progresses chronologically through the narrator's life in a composition that puts me in mind of one of Joseph Cornell's boxes: While each element may be read and savored individually, at the same time they compose part of a greater harmonious whole, exciting a visceral reaction in the reader as, like an Amish barn raising, the structure begins to pull itself together.
The first piece, "Heaven," is a meditation on two different visions of heaven, with the narrator ascribing one, a garden, to her mother, and one, a lakeside retreat, to her father; yet just as the tender idyll runs the risk of becoming precious or belabored, the narrator foreshadows the darker themes of the book yet to come, ending with, "I've been thinking about heaven because ever since my parents died I've wished I believed in some place I could imagine them. I wish I could see the way I did when I was young." At the outset of the book, Brown's stripped-down prose works well to convey a voice that is childlike without being childish. Things are rendered without being excessively commented upon or overwrought, but simply presented in the painfully acute vision of the child charged with growing up in an imperfect world.
As well as the simple prose at the beginning of the book works to evoke a child narrator, the equally quiet prose at the end of the book works even more powerfully as the narrator grapples with the death of her parents. The scenes are given exact details--the placement of the father's ashtray, the smells of the mother's body--which make the events feel personal, not mawkish or engineered for greatest effect. The purity of Brown's description is breathtaking, mostly because it does not try to take your breath, and in its simple beauty it is both wholly of this world and somehow above it--something like seeing the dead body of a loved one.
The End of Youth is written instinctually, without verbal acrobatics, in a voice that feels relevant and trustworthy, even when the narrator reminds us that this book, like anything else, is a fictive conceit. In "A Vision," the narrator admits: "I believe what I remember." Questions of appearance vs. reality notwithstanding, this book has a lesson to teach. In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale claims that postmodern novels have given us a great gift in teaching us how to die well, and this too is the gift of The End of Youth: the contemplation of the ill parent, the Other that is also the Same, and the eventual understanding that this, too, shall pass.
