The View From a Treehouse of the Mind
NOW YOU SEE HIM: A Novel, by Eli Gottlieb.
Harper Collins. 272 pages. $22.95
By Beth Schwartzapfel
Fathers and sons, friends and brothers. The fractured and imperfect love we share is supposed to be the foundation upon which we weather life’s surprises; as it turns out, the love itself might provide the biggest surprise of all: Now you see it. Now you don’t.These are the issues that Eli Gottleib continues to piece apart with his striking sophomore novel, Now You See Him. Set in a small town in upstate New York, the book is narrated by Nick Framingham, a loving if ineffectual father of two in a crumbling marriage. Nick can’t get past the recent death of his childhood best friend. The larger-than-life way in which Rob died both comforts--it somehow seems a natural end to such an oversized life--and nags.
“His name was Rob Castor,” Nick says, in the book’s opening pages. “Quite possibly, you’ve heard of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his mid-twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories...Several years later, he murdered Kate Pierce, his writer girlfriend, and then committed suicide...” To Nick, Rob’s death is a question with no answer, and even as the rest of his community moves on, Nick continues to unravel. The loss infects his work, his marriage, his relationship with his parents, and ultimately, his sense of self.
Unexpectedly, Now You See Him turns out to be a mystery novel. Startling revelations late in the story shed new light on each early scene, each character and conversation gaining a weight in retrospect that we couldn’t have anticipated on the first go-round. And while watching Nick plod through his own self-destruction makes the book drag a bit at the outset, everything clicks masterfully into place as the narrative quickens.
It also reveals itself as a book about writing. In the world of "Now You See Him," more often than not, putting words to the page is ultimately destructive, whether for the writer or the subject. It’s not lost on Nick that both the rise and the dramatic fall of Rob Castor’s star are closely tied to his fiction; a writer’s block, which eventually spells Rob’s demise, afflicts him after his debut book is widely acclaimed. The critics and literati, with their pressure and puffery, are partly to blame, and come in for some ribbing: “Rob became well known for writing a book that, for at least one whole season, was the must-have fashion accessory on trains and planes for its ‘lyric anatomizing of the human heart,’” Nick tells us. The book’s villain, if there is one, is an opportunistic “grasping phony” named Mac Sterling, a childhood friend who now writes celebrity profiles for glossy magazines and who lands a “‘juicy contract’ to write the ‘definitive’ book on Rob.” In the aftermath of Rob’s death, the media are relentless, and their presence in the tiny town has a vulgar effect on its usually unassuming residents, who casually conspire to look news-worthy when the camera crews come around: “We were collectively like a hooker angry with the life she leads who is nonetheless rouged and waiting and open for business,” says Nick of his fellow townspeople.
And yet, the language in Now You See Him is painstakingly crafted. Gottlieb was a poet before he was a novelist, and it shows in Nick’s delicate turns of phrase and unexpected metaphor. Rather than seeming overwrought, as it might in the hands of a different narrator, the language with which Nick carefully dismantles his own thoughts is consistent with his character, who is “living in some little treehouse of the mind, spying out on the world and the world can’t see you back.” Where this lyrical self-analysis is ultimately ruinous for Nick, however, it is redemptive and beautiful for us, who can revel in, and learn from, Gottlieb’s wordsmithing and Nick’s uncanny insight into himself and his family, in a way that Nick can’t.
The narrator of Gottlieb’s celebrated first novel, The Boy Who Went Away, was a similarly self-conscious--if less polished--scribe. Although several decades separate Nick from Denny Graubert, the teenage protagonist of The Boy Who Went Away, the two are equally preoccupied with questions of fatherhood, families, love and lust. But where The Boy Who Went Away felt rough around the edges, like an unfinished treatment of these themes, Now You See Him gleams with poise and confidence.
Whether Nick will be redeemed from his downward spiral, whether he will be able to forgive and move on and reopen his long-closed heart to those who love him, remains an open question. But it’s never a question whether telling Nick’s story was an act of love on Gottlieb’s part. The answer is clearly yes.
