{"id":1166,"date":"2016-06-20T17:06:33","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T17:06:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/?p=1166"},"modified":"2020-10-09T23:45:08","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T23:45:08","slug":"review-of-einsteins-beach-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/2016\/06\/20\/review-of-einsteins-beach-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Einstein’s Beach House"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Hillary Le<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Dysfunction is the vehicle Appel uses to draw out the consequences of our failure to face reality \u2013 our unwillingness to compromise.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

By Hillary Le<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slices of very human life are the building blocks of the short story collection, Einstein\u2019s Beach House<\/a><\/em>, by Jacob M. Appel \u2013 and dysfunction is the glue and gloss that keeps it all together. The pieces sometimes move at break neck pace \u2013 specifics of place and time and character are often frontloaded in the collection, sometimes at the expense of narrative flow and fluid characterization, and in a few stories Appel\u2019s story-telling becomes formulaic: fast start, expositional sprint, meaty pause for reflection, and a bullet ending. The characters are perhaps the gems of the collection \u2013 they pulse with life and longing, pain and cleverness, and carry complicated family histories and relations, where every dysfunction revealed (and there are many) suggests ten others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the opener, \u201cHue and Cry,\u201d the disgust with which the main character Lizzie ultimately views her diseased father is foreshadowed by our frank, catch-all introduction to him:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne night, the thirty-year-old-agnostic middle-school principal summoned his daughters to hot cocoa at the kitchen table and announced: \u2018I fear I have taught you girls too much grammar and not enough forgiveness.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lizzie\u2019s father\u2019s dying aim, personality, will, is summed up in this sentence, and while the rest of the story builds upon and substantiates these details, it is hard to swallow the initial introduction. The punch of characterization, concentrated and up-front, recurs throughout the pieces \u2013 along with insertion of the reader into a very particular place in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat year Lizzie\u2019s kid sister kept a list of things that were funny when they happened to other people\u2026\u201d the collection begins \u2013 what year? Who is Lizzie and why are we talking about her kid sister and what she thought of other people?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are all the details, Appel says, as he hands us a shot of the specifics, and here \u2013 chase it down with the rest of the story. We are both distanced by the act and forced and pushed and willed to immerse ourselves in it, to understand the specifics hidden in the rest of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If \u201cHue and Cry\u201d begins the sketch of human brokenness, telling the story of a young girl exploring her sexuality under the watch of an emasculated father and neighboring sex offender, \u201cLa Tristesse Des Herissons\u201d outlines and eventually colors in everything in bold black Sharpie \u2013 with Josh and Adeline as a couple stuck in a limbo between childhood and adulthood. Adeline\u2019s father committed suicide when she was a child, and she falls for Josh (literally) over a dessert cart at the bistro he co-owns for a living with former law school classmates. The deterioration of their relationship moves in tandem with the progression of the story \u2013 Adeline at one point threatens to jump off of their sixth story balcony, out of jealousy toward a college-age waitress at Josh\u2019s bistro \u2013 until what love is left to keep them together can only be tied back to their faded images of their happy beginnings and anxiety of the unknown. Their new family member, Orion the hedgehog, becomes a conduit for their emotions. The proxy for communication bends and stretches between the couple until Josh cracks and ends up on the sixth-floor balcony himself, his hand bloodied and holding on to the hedgehog \u201cfor dear life.\u201d By then it is unclear whose life he\u2019s referring to \u2013 or if any of the three lives at stake are separable any longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cStrings\u201d Cynthia the rabbi struggles to rationalize the anxiety and emotion that comes when her past and former flame Jacques reappears in her life, because of the potential for both the greatness and calamity \u2013 unpredictability \u2013 that he represents, and the threat he presents in her stable life and marriage to the calm, supportive Jed. Jesse in \u201cLimerence\u201d spends much of his boyhood infatuated with the rebellious Lina Limpetti, whose metal anklet and sexual prowess at thirteen hold an attraction he cannot shake even in adulthood. In \u201cSharing the Hostage\u201d a history of baby-snatching family members is swapped with a joint custody arrangement over a tortoise named Fred. Again and again we see characters experiencing the pivotal histories that will shape them, reflecting on their childhood as their adult selves, or struggling to cope with the suicidal psyches, family values, leftover pets and other miscellaneous items borne from past experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stories are weaved together with threads like humans channeling their inner struggles through things outside themselves, troubled relationships, and disruptions within the home. But there are moments where the narrative voice feels disconnected. When Lizzie explores the sex offender\u2019s house, she observes with surprise that there is \u201c[n]othing pornographic, nothing more risqu\u00e9 than the work of D.H. Lawrence.\u201d The observation makes sense thematically, with the threads of homosexual attraction, questions of morality, and forgiveness in the face of weakness and death \u2013 but would any other child know Lawrence in this valence, or at all?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, the narrator in \u201cSharing the Hostage\u201d is a former ventriloquist with baby-snatching relatives and a long history of dating \u2013 interesting, but lacking development; the narration and character are off pace. His new girlfriend Maddie reads as a flatter, happier version of Adeline \u2013 though just as committed to her pet (this time a tortoise). Appel\u2019s bullet of an ending approach is less impactful here, partly because the stakes are not as high for the new and weakly developed couple, partly because it ends on the all-too-simple notion that people have to deal with one another until someone gives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dysfunction is the vehicle Appel uses to draw out the consequences of our failure to face reality \u2013 our unwillingness to compromise. In the story that shares the collection\u2019s name, a resourceful father, Bryce, decides to capitalize on an error in the American Automobile Association\u2019s guidebook that marks his beach house as once the great Albert Einstein\u2019s, only to find his ownership questioned and ultimately overturned under Einstein\u2019s name. The displacement of his family from their home draws out his stubborn idealism and places it in direct opposition to his wife\u2019s practicality, and ultimately crushes his creative spirit, a painful erasure of a childhood home for both him and his daughters. One imagination is traded for another \u2013 first, Bryce pretends his beach house was once Einstein\u2019s, and years after displacement, that his beach house never existed at all. The collection ends with \u201cParacosmos,\u201d in which a couple (Leslie and Hugh) struggle over their daughter Evie\u2019s imaginary friend, Lauren, until Hugh ultimately bans her from the household. While Evie moves on and reintegrates with her real-life friends, Leslie finds herself embroiled in a surreal affair with Lauren\u2019s father \u2013 a reversion to her own tendency toward imaginary friend-hood and a result of her unconscious, unfulfilled wants as an adult. Truth is defined in the eye of the beholder in both stories, just as the fuel of each story is the individual perceptions and interactions between different perceptions. While Bryce experiences the painful reality of losing his home, Leslie leaves hers on the basis of an imaginary lover, and the question remains whether either have learned to deal with reality any better in the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By far the collection\u2019s strongest piece, \u201cThe Rod of Asclepius<\/a>,\u201d seamlessly encompasses dysfunction, the impact of childhood and one\u2019s past, and the blurred lines between imagination and reality. Here Appel\u2019s storytelling is at its best, with the narrator Lauren telling the story of her and her father\u2019s experiences after her mother passes from \u201ca ruptured uterus\u201d through \u201cpulses\u201d of memory that build to a jarring conclusion. Lauren discovers as we discover, there is no unnatural rush of characterization, no observation that seems out of place. Lauren\u2019s reality is, she ultimately finds, fiction, her father as false as he is charming, as vulnerable as he is dangerous.  \u201cI doubt so many falsehoods have been concealed with so much truth,\u201d she observes \u2013 a prescient understanding of the complex nature of truth, of reality, and of pretend that all of Appel\u2019s characters, young or old, explore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Appel\u2019s characters are endlessly relatable first because of their complex histories \u2013 the specificity of each character\u2019s life, his or her family, pivotal past experiences, paint them as colorful, chipped, and real. Second, and perhaps most importantly, because the characters struggle to process the reality around them. We meet a suicidal girlfriend who adopts a hedgehog, a leeching ex-boyfriend with half an organized adult life and orchestral ambitions, an architect father who sneaks into hospitals for vengeance – yet in the same stories, respectively, we meet a young couple with very real commitment issues who are struggling with depression, we experience the fear of having a stable life being upturned by exciting but dangerously unpredictable forces, and we see the ways we try and fail to cope with loss. Through characters that throb with life, Appel hits at the human struggle to process and deal with the reality that is around them, and particularly the reality that is growing up. The tales and characters are specific and strange enough to read as fiction \u2013 and real and relatable enough to resonate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read an excerpt from Einstein’s Beach House<\/em>, “The Rod of Asclepius<\/a>“, reprinted with permission on 87 Bedford<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a9 Copyright 2016 Hillary Le<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hillary Le is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley where she studied Business, English, and Creative Writing. She has contributed to a variety of campus publications and blogs and continues to work on her prose outside of her 8 to 5 in San Francisco Bay Area. A hand-bound copy of her self-published novella, \u201cHome: A Notebook,\u201d can be found in the UC Berkeley Library collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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