I’ve never been particularly touched by Holocaust narratives, and though strictly speaking this isn’t a Holocaust narrative, I was finally able to emotionally connect with the event. Nathan Gelder is a half-Jewish Dutchman (his mother is Dutch, and I thought that Jewish ancestry was matrilineal, but I could be wrong) who loses his family in the Nazi invasion of Holland, while he is sent to live with his rich uncle in Canada. My mother’s family comes from Holland as well, and we lost a great deal of family as a result of the Nazi regime, although we’re gypsies and not Jews. I’m too young—far too young—to have felt the impact on a personal level, but still I think there’s a movement, not in an organized sense or anything, but more like a general feeling, among people of my generation to want to feel involved and connected somehow to events of the war. To feel in a way like we too were changed by the atrocities, even though for many of us they are pretty abstract. We don’t want for it to be so abstract, so we reach for connections. Dead Man’s Float made me feel like my connection was valid. It made me feel as opposed to just think about the effects of the war, and I think that it’s Nathan’s survivor’s guilt that finally made the connection for me.
The premise of the novel is straightforward and original: Nathan Gelder, an aging translator, has a stroke after (maybe?) killing a rock star called Leonard Barvis, and the entire action of the novel takes place inside his head, alternating between his memories from childhood until the time of the stroke, and his perception of what’s going on around him in his hospital room. Nathan’s story is different from others I’ve read of survivors, partly because he’s caught between two worlds, having a gentile father, but most notably because once he leaves Holland, he doesn’t really have to struggle with most of the woes that typically confront refugees. His rich uncle supports him, and though the rest of his family swings between hostile and indifferent, Nathan’s biggest concern is finding a way to cope with his guilt, his crisis of identity (is he a Jew? is he a gentile? is he neither?) and becoming adjusted to his life in a new and different world.
Nathan’s biggest issues seems to be finding an outlet for his rage, which stems, as I’ve mentioned more than once, from his survivor’s guilt (although I’m not entirely certain Nathan would phrase it like that). As he gets older he seems to be more at peace with his uncertain identity, but determines that he must in some way act out his anger in order to avenge his parents and cleanse himself of what he feels as his guilt and his betrayal of his parents. He sees contemporary mass culture as being a force for consuming individual identities similar to the Nazi movement had been. He targets Leonard Barvis as being an individual who fully embodies the evils of mass culture in the same way that the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg embodied their particular brand of evil.
I only have three complaints with Maes’ choice of Barvis as an outlet for Nathan’s rage, and coincidentally they are the only complaints that I have with the book. First, though Barvis has a presence throughout the book because of what Nathan can glean about what’s going on in his hospital room, he’s not introduced early enough in the novel as a cultural force for me to take him seriously as a nemesis for Nathan. In fact, were it not for his fans’ riotous reaction to his death, he would be a joke his persona is so over the top and ridiculous. While he is certainly a strong character, the last hundred pages of a 438 page novel is too late to introduce someone so pivotal to the narrative. Second, given how realistic the novel and its narrator are, I was surprised to find that Leonard Barvis was such a parodic character that he’d be at home in a Robert Coover novel. In fact, he strikes me specifically as a parody of Marylin Manson, the bizarre late ’90s rock star loved by the superficially disaffected. He didn’t fit so well into the entirely convincing world Maes had created. Looking at an approximate timeline for the novel, Barvis’ major fan base should be folks about my age (or rather, I was the right age for when those scenes in the novel take place), but I can’t imagine a person of my age finding Barvis’ ridiculous nonsense appealing, by which I mean his off-stage persona, not his music or lyrics. One of the appealing things about Marilyn Manson was that in interviews and public appearances he came across as educated and intelligent, as well as polite and well-spoken. Barvis just speaks in nonsense phrases and cuss words. I can, however, imagine a person my parents’ age (and Maes is of approximately that age, from what I can tell) seeing Barvis as a dead ringer for my generation’s superstars, particularly if their focus has been literary or academic rather than on the pulse of youth culture (not that I think such a thing is a deficiency, it’s just the sort of thing I’ve noticed from literary types of a certain age). Which leads me to my third and final complaint: the age of pop stars like Elvis Presley and the Beatles is long over, and had already been through its final throws by the time Barvis is said to be active. Popular music began to fracture in the 1970s, by the ’90s becoming a collection of micro-genres with only a handful large acts still commanding major public attention. Even artists breaking sales records is misleading, because the market for popular music expanded exponentially, with sales expanding only mathematically. There will never be another Elvis, and never another Cosby Show. My generation has very few shared cultural touchstones, especially where music in concerned, and it’s virtually inconceivable for me to imagine an artist commanding a following as large and loyal as Barvis in the 1990s.
I don’t mean to exaggerate my complaints, however. I found this book very difficult to put down, and I am quite disappointed that it was not noticed by any of our many award committees. The book is bold, emotionally sophisticated and finely crafted, exactly the sort of thing Canadian letters needs more of, and exactly the sort of thing that publishers and media outlets need to recognize.
Dead Man’s Float was my fifth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Love of a Good Woman, by Alice Munro.
