For a time at the end of the 19th century, some European men succumbed to a newly identified psychological syndrome, dromomania. The dromomaniac typically left his home in France and wandered across Europe in a fugue state, only to awaken days or weeks later in some Eastern European city, completely in the dark about how he got to the end of his unconscious travels.
Ben Allan, the protagonist of Montreal writer, translator, journalist and filmmaker David Homel’s new novel, Midway¸ is a middle-aged college instructor who has received a modest prize for an essay on this obscure condition, sometimes referred to as a form of male hysteria. The prize acts as a catalyst for the bemused academic’s midlife crisis, which in part takes the relatively mild-mannered and perhaps quintessentially Canadian form of an odd, platonic passion for Carla, the college communications officer who is assigned to produce a short collegiate press release about “the man and his work.”
In addition to his ambivalent, anxious lust for Carla, Ben’s midlife encounters include a ward full of male hysterics and a mysterious psychiatrist whose disturbing artworks, grotesquely distorted rag dolls, appear and reappear as Midway’s plot weaves together the lives and obsessions of Ben, Carla, Carla’s enigmatic lover, Herbie, Ben’s father, Morris, his wife, Laura, and his son, Tony, and the disturbing and disturbed Dr. Albanna.
Allan is “midway” between his art therapist wife and Carla, who has connections of her own to the worlds of art and madness. He is midway between his energetically crusty and intransigent father (the book’s great comic creation and homage to the libidinous old men that enliven the later works of Philip Roth) and his torpid teenaged son. He is midway between his American past and his Canadian present. He is a modern instance of Dante’s dilemma in the opening lines of the Divine Comedy:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Despite his elegant and unobtrusive homage to an earlier classic, it would be tempting to dismiss Homel’s latest work as yet another in the seemingly endless (and often endlessly tedious) fictional chronicles of adultery and angst among the intelligentsia. But that would be to miss much of the point of this finely crafted, intelligent and moving novel. Homel, who has published five earlier novels and many award-winning translations, as well as two children’s books co-written with his wife, Marie-Louise Gay, is working out a set of far more interesting themes than faculty-lounge lechery.
As Ben Allan jokes and jousts with his irrepressible father at the old folks home, and his lethargic son in front of the television set, or conducts his deeply felt if technically chaste affair with Carla, Homel is reflecting in narrative about death and loss, desire, art and madness.
This is an impressive book that rewards close reading, ornamented with memorable set pieces like Ben’s father, the programmatically secular Morris, furiously confronting a group of devout Hasidim on the street, and an eerie post-suicide scene in Dr. Albanna’s office, with the remains of the suicidal psychiatrist swaying in midair along with his disturbing rag-doll creations.
Midway adds yet another impressive volume to the honour roll of first-rate works by English-language Montreal writers from Jewish backgrounds. (One thinks of A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen.) Doubly marginalized as anglophones in Quebec and Jews in a nominally Christian culture, these writers have nonetheless woven their resonant, abiding voices deep into the chorus of Canadian literature, as Homel is in the process of doing with his own remarkable work.
No matter where you are in your life journey, Midway is a fiction that will provide aesthetic and intellectual sustenance and emotional comfort on the road.
Tom Sandborn is a Vancouver-based journalist, poet and social critic who is well past midway on his own life journey.
