Have you ever wondered what would happen if Franz Kafka had written William Goldman’s The Princess Bride? Neither have I but I just thought I’d ask. Nevertheless, if he had decided to write such a novel, it might have looked something like Jessica Anthony’s The Convalescent (McSweeney’s, 2009), an original blend of styles that might be described as “comic expressionism.” To explain requires a spoiler alert, so read no further unless you want to know how the novel ends.
This is the story of Rovar Pfliegman, an orphaned dwarf butcher of Hungarian descent who sells meat from a bus in Virginia. In addition to his stature, Rovar has other challenges: since his parents were killed in a car accident, he has been unable to speak; and he has scrofulous skin that is constantly peeling and flaking. He lives in the bus with a beetle named Mrs. Kipner. Like Rovar, Mrs. Kipner is among the lowliest of his species:
His right eye was bright and healthy, but his left eye hung low, clouded with a white mucous. One of his wings was coated in little white spots, and he kept throwing his head back, in a futile attempt to scratch them.
Rovar’s only other social interaction comes from visits by the authors of books, magazines and cassette tapes that he keeps in his bus. There’s Charles Darwin, Isaac Asimov, Carly Simon, Captain Jerry Aldini (author of The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures), Madame Chafouin (author of Madame Cahfouin’s French Dictionary (Concise Edition)), all supplemented by occasional quotations from Anonymus (author of The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Pagan Hungarians).
Rovar enjoys a weekly outing to the offices of Dr. Monica. Although Dr. Monica is a pediatrician, she sees Rovar in part because he’s small and childlike. She believes there is nothing wrong with Rovar, but keeps seeing him because he is such a pitiable creature. Her receptionist, Mrs. Himmel, isn’t so compassionate, sometimes leering at him in a judgmental way, sometimes forcing him to wait on the picnic table outside. Her hostility mounts when she accuses Rovar of drawing a picture of a penis and showing it to the children in the waiting room. In fact, he has drawn a trombone, but he is, after all, a deeply misunderstood person.
Running in tandem with Rovar’s account is the story of his ancestors. You see, Rovar is the last of his people, the Pfliegmans, the fabled eleventh tribe of the proto-Hungarians. They are the underclass, the downtrodden, the barely human. They have survived by a dogged persistence, a willingness to tolerate the intolerable, and by making themselves useful. So, for example, they have become butchers to the world, a profession which Rovar has inherited. We read an account of the birth of the giant, Szeretlek, which causes a flood when his mother’s water breaks. There’s the desirable but large-thighed leg-wrestling champion, Lili László, who challenges Szeretlek and defeats him. There is the Grand Prince Árpád who falls in love with the lowly Lili and, jealous of Szeretlek, banishes the giant from his kingdom. It is the humble narrative of a humble people, and Rovar is one of them.
The novel is an extended meditation on weakness. Rovar wonders how he could possibly explain to Dr. Monica “[t]hat my body is chained to a legacy of a thousand other crippled bodies that lived and died over the last millennium?” He follows this by citing Darwin: “Throughout nature … one species incessantly takes advantage of, and profits by, the structures of others“. Rovar, and all the Pfliegmans before him, may be necessary in their weakness. This is reinforced by a visit from Isaac Asimov who explains that, oddly enough, the universe could not exist without the weakest of all forces—gravity.
If the novel ended here, it would read like a justification for abuse, but Anthony offers a surprise at the end. Things are beginning to change for Rovar. All his skin has peeled off. A flood has washed away his bus and all his belongings. Police are waiting at the door of Dr. Monica’s clinic. They will take him away as soon as she has given him an X-Ray. As he waits on the table, the transformation begins, a transformation which invites comparison to Franz Kafka.
So what are we to make of The Convalescent? Could it be a humourous tale of the underclass? A social parable? I’m inclined to lean towards the Kafka lineage, especially given the novel’s hat-tip to the Austro-Hungarian empire and its fascination with entomology. Reaching the height of his literary powers during the First World War, Kafka found the world disintegrating around him, and the Romanticism into which he was born seemed nonsensical. Austere, humorous, absurd, existential. Perhaps his was the only kind of expression which made sense in a changing and violent world. While Jessica Anthony doesn’t inhabit such a world (unless Maine has changed since I last visited), nevertheless, it is arguable that America is engaged in a disintegrating public discourse which has acquired a tinge of paranoia and psychosis that bears analogy to Europe a century ago, and to which writing like Anthony’s may be the only sane response.
* * * * (out of 5)
Buy The Convalescent from McSweeney’s store or listen to Jessica Anthony reading from it.
If you like the tall-tale storytelling style, especially in the historical sections of the novel, then you might, just might, also like Sean Stanley’s fabulist allegory, Etcetera And Otherwise which I have briefly reviewed here.