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Every Man Must Build a Home
by L.A. Heberlein
Livingston Press, at the University of West
Alabama,
2002, 174 pages, $14 paperback
Reviewed by Kat Meads
True enough, every man (and woman) must build a home of some sort (mental or physical), but Seattle-based L.A. Heberlein also knows how to build a sentence, and with those sentences construct able paragraphs such as this:
I will tell you what meeting her is like. You will come, eventually, to a place and time when the liberation and surrender of accepting one more is neither so attractive nor so damned necessary as is the liberation and surrender of leaving, and going home, alone, to your own bed, to lie in darkness, dehydrate, roll, and sleep. You stand. You discover man was never intended to stand. He was designed for mud, not to sway like trees and gods. Having discovered that, you discover you are standing.
In this brainy, jittery, post-modernist romp of a novel, Heberlein employs interior fairy tales, space fantasies and various in-your-face author challenges to serve his purpose. In a section that begins: Heberlein take-home exam, the author poses the question: Does thinking about Huck (as in Finn) help us understand Swallow (as in the novel’s protagonist)? Another chapter analyzes the work in sub-sections titled “structure,” “plot,” “concerns,” and what the profits from said novel will fund.
The novel’s plot, as described by its author:
An American male, aged twenty-three, travels from Colorado to New York, North Carolina, and a small beach town in Mexico, then returns to his ancestral home when informed that his Uncle Sam has died. After a family dinner, he drives up a nearby mountain and decides not to kill himself.
Well, yes, but not entirely since Swallow’s quest is, as all literary quests are at their core, the attempt to reconcile a character’s day to day reality with the hopefulness and ambition of his/her dreams—or if not to reconcile, at least to better understand the cracks between.
Heberlein is an adventurer in structure, stretching the traditional definition of that term, forcing the reader to contemplate how a piece of fiction is put together—not exactly the same operation as constructing a home, perhaps, but with appreciable overlap.
In this his second novel, Heberlein improves on strengths already in evidence in his first work of fiction: Sixteen Reasons Why I Killed Richard M. Nixon (Livingston Press, 1996). In that earlier novel, a character named Valentine is the sometimes willing, sometimes unwilling, recipient of plans to off Tricky Dick. Sixteen Reasons incorporates poems, plays, sci fi riffs and horror tropes. Neither novel qualifies as an “easy read.” Heberlein’s tactic is to entice and (sometimes) bully the reader into accepting a narrative that is neither straight-forward nor quick to reveal its grand design. Very cleverly, given his writing proclivities, he has written a second novel that uses construction/deconstruction motifs to deliver the sober but ultimately optimistic message: what is built can be destroyed, but also rebuilt.
is the author of eight books, including four
volumes of poetry, three of short fiction and a
collection of literary essays, Born Southern and
Restless. She is the recipient of a 2002-2003
California Artist Fellowship.