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review: fiction

Sina Queyras

"How random the state of childhood, how the value of a childhood fluctuates."

We can't escape childhood. It's not really an option. Every day, we are confronted with reminders and ghosts, and memory relaunches abound. One night after dinner this summer, while we were having coffee in my sister's living room, my five-year-old niece, Sara, sidled up to me and said, "Nathaniel, some day I will get very old and die," and then shyly left the room.

It was the same day I read the opening scene of Sina Queyras's debut novel, Autobiography of Childhood, in which a bold and telling recollection is declared from the onset: "She became aware of her own childhood one night in the middle of a very steep stairwell," as if Therese is sifting through exhumed memories to determine that exact moment of initiation.

Mildly shocked from my niece's revelation, I was reminded of a short, ghastly fable called Mr. Nobody from The Book of Knowledge, in which an unnamed child meets a spectral figure on the stairs and throughout the house. To me, the fable is about understanding one's mortality, and seeing its scope and finality.

Autobiography does initially appear to encompass quotidian structure, telling its story from the point of view of each family member (siblings and a father) who must face the fact that Therese will die of a terminal illness in a matter of hours.

From the beginning, Queyras reveals distinct portents with authorial panache: the past and its intricate seeds of pain and the power of this recognition, and the impossibility of distancing oneself from the present tense's acceleration.

Queyras's prose is lyrically lucid, and as a storyteller she avoids the clutter of pedestrian minutiae and swelling her characters with heavy-hearted parlance. The choice for directness is evident with pared-down, kitchen-sink realities: "They aren't a family that has much to celebrate."

The individual portraits are reflective and connect to the book's entire emotional turbulence, allowing readers to form their own attachments from all sides, as if a day-pass visit to the family saga's morbid trajectory has been issued.

Take the absent father, Jean, insomniac, loner, armchair philosopher. "Life is so fleeting he thinks. Everything is loss. Even an apple. It has to be picked. It's useless if whole."

The nexus of Jean's comprehension that he'll outlive his daughter comes from his recollection of his own childhood visit to his mother on her deathbed. Despite the ease of his recollection, he feels crowded by the familial voices who seek him out, voices "he no longer wants to hear."

The looming tragedy of Autobiography – moreover, the way in which the time restraint adds to the drama's quick-burning wick – gives the book its punchy suspense, a passionate, post-gritty glimpse into the human side of a dysfunctional family outgrowing its own familiarity. This is a family haunting its own identity and redefinition: "They are a family that once owned a house. They are a family that once stood at the kitchen table while their father inspected their newly washed hands. Or perhaps that was just once? Didn't he appear in a crisp white shirt, his hair freshly washed, face shaved, smelling of soap?"

Autobiography of Childhood is a sharp, post-millennial family novel with a purpose, a kinetic, shared trauma that investigates the parts and the whole, creating an uneasy tableau of life's arbitrary cruelties.

The novel is a striking comment on tragedy and its place in the human jigsaw puzzle as the Combal family tries to cope with what everyone's family must some day face, collectively and alone.

Nathaniel G. Moore's Wrong Bar was a finalist for the 2010 ReLit Award. His next book, due next year, is The Chelsea Papers.

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