BOOKS
317
Interwoven as they are with one another and, as personal, fictional
and social history, with the two earlier books, these stories fabricate
a rich, surprising, teeming, enlightening, devastating and uplifting
fictional universe.
Elsewhere,
Jonathan Strong's new novel (his previous books are
Tike
and
Ourselves),
occupies the same fictional space, where sophisti–
cated, self-conscious, stylized form, intense emotion, and engaged
reflection on/of contemporary life, fully cognizant of the complexities
of mimesis in our time, manage, defying faction and false historical
inevitability, to accommodate one another. Paley's world is Jewish
radical New York, in its various, often troubled allegiances with im–
migrant parents and the contemporary oppressed . Strong's is Catho–
lic working-class Somerville, Massachusetts, the unnamed setting so
powerfully evoked in this novel, and its mutually devastating in–
volvement with alienated, deracinated middle-American WASPdom
in the person of the narrator, Burt. Passive but somehow far too in–
fluential, Burt was everyone's best high school teacher, who "had" all
the working-class teenage characters in his English classes . As Burt
himself mysteriously tells us in the novel's third paragraph: "I had all
of them in high school, him and his sister, and the baby thief, and
Nell too."
"Him" turns out to be Anthony Ognissanti, orphan and gifted
writer, around whom the other lives of the novel, and the novel
itself, revolve (the four sections of
Elsewhere
have the same titles as
the four works by Anthony written within the time covered by each
section). The novel explores the mixed, ambiguous consequences of
Burt's excessive, selfish/selfless involvement with Anthony and the
other former students . It does so with a masterful fusion of em–
pathy- passion, really- and scrupulous detachment: the narrative
voice, particularly, is cool, self-contained, understated . The struc–
ture draws our attention with its self-reflexive, Nabokovian com–
plexity . Like Paley's, Strong's writing distracts us from its emotional
dynamite with its highly satisfying formal sophistication and self–
consciousness, its "craftedness," all the better to ignite the fuse when
we least expect it.
I won't go into detail about the plot, beyond affirming that, as
hinted in the sentence quoted, the theft of a baby is one of its central
mysteries, because to do so is to mislead about the overall impact of
the novel (there is additional mysterious disappearance, as well as
untimely death, and a great deal of multidirectional sexual entangle-
