Fiction
Mr. Ives' Christmas
By Oscar Hijuelos. HarperCollins. 248 pp. $23.00
The spirit of Charles Dickens seems to hover over the pages of Oscar Hijuelos' fourth novel. A Christmas Carol comes to mind frequently, for most of the transformations in Edward Ives' life occur during the holiday season. As a very young child of unknown parentage and uncertain ethnicity he is admitted to a Catholic orphanage. His years there permanently fuse in his imagination his love of the season with a belief in the redemptive power of faith. He is adopted by a sweet-tempered widower at Christmas. He meets his wife Anne at Christmas. And, in the tragic event at the heart of the novel, he loses his 17-year-old son to an act of random violence during the holiday.
Much of the novel's action is taken up with Ives' long struggle to retain his faith in the face of loss, and to reaffirm it by reaching out to his son's imprisoned murderer. As he demonstrated in his exuberant earlier novels (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien), Hijuelos shares with Dickens a deep conviction that often serves to preserve or redeem us. He's also fascinated with the way in which place shapes our lives, recording here an exact, gritty portrait of Mr. Ives' New York City neighborhood from the 1920s to the present.
Hijuelos is one of our most restless novelists, always willing to try something new. He has pared down the language of his earlier works to better match the Ives' quiet lives and understated anguish. And in a climax that is both audacious and deeply convincing, he has invented a way for Mr. Ives, as Christmas draws near, to reaffirm his faith. Dickens would, I suspect, be envious.
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Morality Play
By Barry Unsworth. 206 pp. $22.50
Nicholas Barber, a young priest in flight from his tedious labors as a copyist at a cathedral library, and from the husband of the latest "hot and hasty" woman he has taken solace with, falls in with a ragged band of traveling players. The lot of such a troupe, in 14th century England, a time of plague, is hard, but it offers Nicholas both a rough sense of freedom and a chance to indulge his pressing curiosity about life. ("Always," an exasperated judge will later say to Stephen, "you ask the why of things.")
The troupe comes to a town where a murder has recently been committed and a deaf-and-mute girl condemned for it. The lack of interest in their plays (although Nicholas gets a laugh for his part in a sketch about Adam), prompts their leader -- a man in whom Nicholas sense "a willingness to transgress" -- to create a play about the murder. The actors spread out through the town, asking questions, piecing together a drama based on the events. But the more they investigate, the more apparent it becomes that the young woman sentenced to death is innocent of the crime. Then the local nobleman, Lord de Guise, a mysterious and quite possibly lethal figure, summons them to his castle for a command performance. This is an ingenious idea, and Unsworth, who writes with force and wit, works a number of surprises into what might at first seem simply a murder mystery. Many of his previous novels, set in other periods, have used exotic settings to probe the ways in which we either flee from or stubbornly pursue the truth. Nicholas, who discovers that the hankering to know the truth, and to tell it, can drive one to exceptional struggles, is one of his most winning characters. This deceptively simple work is a resonant, sophisticated, moving meditation on evil and redemption.
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