Dyad by Michael Brodsky

 

Martin Amis relates how opening a novel by Anthony Trollope is like being warmly invited into the living room of an English manor house and offered a cup of tea. Reading Dyad by Michael Brodsky is quite different. The reader is dragged along a crowded New York City street without even slowing down for a cup of coffee.

Amis also alludes to the way chapters in a novel establish rhythm and orient the reader. Additionally, chapter breaks provide a sense of accomplishment and a degree of incremental mastery. By contrast, Dyad has no chapter breaks; rather, it is as if Brodsky pushes the reader’s head down on the first page, forcing them to take in his long, convoluted sentences and paragraphs without oxygen—no pause, not even space for standard dialogue—right up to the final sentence, complete with obscure vocabulary, on page 300.

Dyad is written in the first person, with a young man called X serving as the narrator. It’s not a monologue, but it’s a close cousin, since reading X’s words feels like an overflow, at times even a leakage—a combination of what X says, thinks, and suppresses: a mind that gushes without even a hint of a filter.

Dyad does, in fact, have a plot—playing off the traditional detective novel. X is hired by a wealthy businessman, recently informed by doctors that he will soon die, to find and bring home his nonconformist, artsy son for something like a reconciliation before he’s pushing up daisies. But, in signature Brodsky style, this storyline is buried beneath the aforementioned gush of X’s mind—overfull, stuffed with detritus of every kind, from trash left in back alleys to theories left in unread volumes.

I can almost hear anyone reading my review ask: “Why would an author write a novel in this way? A 300-page novel without chapter breaks, featuring a not-too-appealing, verbose, overly pretentious narrator, sounds like a formula for alienating readers.”

This is a legitimate question. In interviews, Brodsky acknowledges that his writing will have a very limited audience. And Dyad doesn’t just render the gush of X’s cluttered stream of consciousness; it’s almost as if Brodsky has weaponized the English language itself against the reader.

Yet Brodsky writes as Brodsky, maintaining his authorial voice and vision no matter how slight the odds that a reader will acclimate and click into his writing. As it happens, I did—and even enjoyed (well, “enjoyed” might be too strong a word) turning the pages of Dyad. Incidentally, a dyad refers to two beings joined together—for example: X and that nonconformist son, a college-aged gent by the name of Jim.

One prime reason for book reviews: To provide a reader with an answer to the question: Does this sound like the type of book I want to read? To share a more complete answer to this question, below are a few quotes taken from the opening pages along with my comments.

"Swinging vigilantly above the patient's imminent corpse like a hammock woven of elytra is the rescript delivered, say, one calm--summer morning by some little quack in some little quack's cell on the margin of a teaching hospital--oxymoron if ever there was one--such as I have received today. No, I recognize even this early that the prognosis--the true prognosis--has nothing to do with its slimy little instantiation such as I have lived through today."

These are the words of the dying tycoon, an example of the verbal gymnastics Brodsky uses no matter who is doing the talking.

"What impertinence to begin to feel the stirrings of a craving to challenge the impertinence derived from the very deepest nature of things as they are when those stirrings could never be anything but belated, farcical, superfetatory. Yet I could still smell her loathing me for belonging to that particular class which loathing was of course nothing more than her way of insisting I do my utmost to go on belonging in order that my grievances by instantly reducible to some mite gerrymandering for its own aggrandizement."

Wow! That's a mouthful. One senses Michael Brodsky writing with his tongue deep in his cheek, inserting a dollop of irony mixed with humor to spice up what could otherwise amount to a narrative that's a bit on the drool side.

"In my hotel room I remembered the remark, overheard, about the prize haddock. So they thought of me, this trio, as a flunkey. But perceiving I was about to be straightjacketed as a flunkey hadn't I left with an exemplary brusqueness unknown to flunkeys, who non grata tend to linger indefinitely whether or not it is all in the line of appraising another, well-paying or paying ill, of the whereabouts of some exploitable third. No. Whatever I did was in the domain of flunkeydom."

In addition to all the high-octane vocabulary, X doesn't hesitate to sprinkle in his hip lingo. One of the tantalizing tangs that kept me turning those pages.

In the end, Dyad offers no chapter breaks, no rest stops—only the uneasy realization that X’s voice may not be as foreign as we would like to think.