The New York Times-20080127-Middle-Age Man- -Review-

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Middle-Age Man; [Review]

Full Text (938  words)[Author Affiliation] Ken Kalfus's most recent novel is A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.

ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL MANNER OF THINGS SHALL BE WELL

By Tod Wodicka.

266 pp. Pantheon Books. $21.95.

Any of us may be susceptible to an occasional feeling of alienation from our times. Cursed with an awareness of the centuries past and the eons ahead, we know how arbitrary a prison the moment we inhabit really is. Couldn't we imagine ourselves as entirely different people, shaped by the exigencies of another era? Couldn't the thought obsess us?

The thought certainly obsesses Burt Hecker, the narrator of Tod Wodicka's first novel, All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, a title whose length and repetitiveness don't bode well for its contents. Burt, a medieval re-enactor whose fanatic refusal to live in the historical present has brought pain to the people around him, goes through life in a dirty tunic and a mead-induced stupor. He refuses to learn to drive, calling automobiles, somewhat witlessly, time machines. Now well into his 60s, he avoids all that is OOP -- that is, Out of Period. His principal comfort is his amateur society, the Confraternity of Times Lost Regained, which sponsors medieval fairs, jousts and banquets.

Although Wodicka offers a cursory summary of Burt's childhood in a religious orphanage, asking why Burt believes he was born in the wrong time is as unproductive as inquiring why a transgendered individual believes he was born in the wrong sex. Burt, who when in period calls himself Eckbert Attquiet, says, I simply felt as if I were a remnant from something long since passed, and only ever half there in a modern world that I did my very best to ignore.

Burt's troubled family seems to be similarly, if not as severely, afflicted by history. His late wife ran a Victorian inn in upstate New York; his son grew up mimicking his father's medievality and, shunning his contemporaries, devoted himself to early music; his mother-in-law is an ethnic Lemko from the Carpathians, intent on recreating the way of life her people lived before their slaughter and forced deportations in the 1940s. Even Burt's daughter has sporadically adopted someone else's time period. She was, as a young woman, a committed Trekkie; now she's an assistant to a geologist, living by a calendar whose pages cover billions of years. All these temporal dislocations have sundered the family spatially. It's the late 1990s and Burt's daughter has moved to California, his son and mother-in-law to Eastern Europe, the locus of history being compulsively re-enacted on a wide scale.

The point -- that pretending is simpler than being -- is easy to comprehend, but when the principle is played out in a man's life the results are complicated and tragic. As his wife succumbed to cancer, Burt's failure to rise above his fantasies deepened his estrangement from his children, his friends and his time. In the bitter aftermath of her death, Burt leads a workshop of medieval chanters to a hillside in Germany, where seven of them spend three days locked in a tent attempting to replicate the girlhood experience of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century anchoress and composer of visionary religious music. They hope, perhaps, to taste of her ecstasy. In the shadow of a Benedictine abbey, Burt himself tastes an exhaustive variety of Rhine wines. Abandoning the chanters, he goes off to the Czech Republic, looking to reconnect with his son, who has joined an electronic jazz group, the Sound Defenestration Collective, which is about as easy-listening as it sounds.

Sensitive to his failings as a father, Burt reflects that the family institution, like the individual, is a product of chance and other transient forces: Families are historical things. You have to believe in them for them to be real. They have precedent, they repeat themselves, they have a million points of view and they never stay the same, even after they happen. If you can prove they happened at all. But they're always happening and you'll never understand them: you can dress up, re-enact, but you'll never get to the heart of them, of how they are when they are what they are.

Although Wodicka turns up a provocative thought here and there, this musing, typical of Burt's grief-laden vaporousness, serves also to illustrate the artless, wordy and underarticulated writing that makes All Shall Be Well such a Black Death of a chore to read. Wodicka has chosen a narrative voice too depressive and portentous to manifest his ingenuity. For all Burt's colorful eccentricity, he's a vague protagonist whose motives, actions and responses are only intermittently clear. In the basement of a Prague nightclub, after his son's band noisily covers Hildegard's Columba aspexit -- Sequentia de Sancto Maximino, Burt is overwhelmed by emotion, but we're unsure exactly which emotions are doing the overwhelming. Nor does Wodicka manage to explain why the Middle Ages, with their brutality, ignorance and poverty, were so much fun, as opposed, let's say, to the Dark Ages.

The title is almost certainly the longest for a recent novel. It's taken from the writings of Julian of Norwich, a medieval hermit entrusted with visions of her own. T. S. Eliot appropriated the line for his poem Little Gidding, but he had the good sense to abbreviate it. In his mad pursuit of the past, Burt Hecker doesn't abbreviate anything. He makes no concession to the age, and therein lies his ruin. Tod Wodicka shows a similar disinclination to abbreviate or concede.

[Illustration]DRAWING (DRAWING BY CHRISTIAN NORTHEAST)