THE DELICATE BEAST

A man reckons with 20th-century tragedies.

What does a life reveal when explored from different angles? This sprawling book begins in 1995 at an informal gathering of artists and academics in a Brooklyn brownstone. They’re discussing the ongoing civil war in Yugoslavia, and one of the attendees, a man from Sarajevo, says he’s going back next week. Robert Carpentier, another guest, asks why he’s returning to a place where people are being killed every day. The next step the novel takes is to jump back several decades and adopt a very different register. Here we meet a boy who’s studying for his First Communion—presumably the younger Carpentier, though the section that follows mostly avoids using names. He lives in the Tropical Republic, a country run by a politician known here as The Mortician. (Think Haiti under the rule of François Duvalier.) The political situation forces the boy’s parents to leave the country, with the rest of the family eventually following. Once they’re settled in New York City, the novel skips ahead to Carpentier in the 1970s, when he’s studying art history in Europe—mainly the paintings of Jean Siméon Chardin. After some time in Europe, he returns to the U.S., where he finds a job and embarks on a series of relationships before marrying. Civil war in the Balkans isn’t the only crisis referenced here; Carpentier and his wife also watch as friends die from AIDS. Eventually the novel returns to the Brooklyn apartment where it began, and we see how the Sarajevo man caused tensions in Carpentier’s marriage. It’s a stylistically bold look at one man weaving in and out of history, and the subtle effects on his psyche.

An investigation of the ways history does and doesn’t shape us.