UNSPEAKABLE HOME

A writer who escaped war-torn Bosnia uneasily resettles in America.

Prcic’s tricky, prismatic, sardonic second novel features a narrator (also named Ismet, aka Izzy) working through past traumas. He’s in Salem, Oregon, recently divorced, in recovery from alcoholism, and recalling his youth in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was ravaged by the early 1990s war. To cope, he writes letters to the comic Bill Burr, whose brash, cynical delivery makes him a kindred spirit. Those letters introduce fuller chapters that are lightly fictionalized efforts by the narrator to address his pain—Prcic’s characters all tend to drink heavily, fall in love hard, and strive to blot out memories of dead friends and family members. The backstories sometimes change slightly, but there are some bedrock elements: Southern California, acting school, writerly ambition, dead-end jobs. In one chapter, the hero, working in a movie theater for an abusive, lackadaisical manager, sublimates his rage by sending messages through the marquee; in another, he does it via his son’s hyperviolent video game. This instability of identity in the story is disorienting, but to a purpose, revealing the chaos within the mind of a war refugee (“I start a page of fiction and it crumples into trauma, the past, and I can’t stop the narrative and comment…”). Though at times the structure and prose threaten to become abstracted, Prcic has an excellent command of the everyday anxieties of the maintenance alcoholic—the deceptions of loved ones, the small preparations. And Prcic can be funny, with a hyperactive comic tone that cuts to the heart of his struggle: “When everyone else was going on and on about ‘narrative coherence’ you were like, ‘Fuck narrative coherence, what about the dude is broken don’t we understand!?’”

An adventurous novel that meshes a fragmented narrative with a broken soul.