Nowhere Man
By Aleksandar Hemon
Nan A. Talese/Double-day, 242 pages, $23.95
In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” poet Wallace Stevens created a phantasmagoria of shifting conceptual perspectives, but also a core stillness, a landscape in which, “The only moving thing/Was the eye of the blackbird.”
Now Aleksandar Hemon, a young writer who has immigrated to Chicago from the former Yugoslavia, and who may or may not know the work of Stevens, gives us “Nowhere Man,” a novel that might only half-jokingly be called “Seven Ways of Looking at Jozef Pronek,” an intriguing array of differently angled perspectives, only without any comparable center. Given the sense I have of Hemon’s worldview, I would say this is very likely the point.
Hemon introduced Pronek in “Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls,” one of the stories in his striking collection “The Question of Bruno” (2000). There Pronek was a young man recently immigrated from Sarajevo, living in Chicago and looking to make a life for himself. Already he had the feather markings of an authorial alter ego, being approximately Hemon’s age and sharing swatches of his biographical–or at least historical–past. There is no point here in trying to detail commonalities and diverences, but neither can a reader ignore a quality of immersed intimacy, an idiosyncratic specificity about the details of experience that does not feel invented.
“Nowhere Man” unfolds in seven sections, each assigned a locale and a time period (they are not consecutive) and each making use of a different narrative point-of-view. The novel opens in Chicago in 1994, recounting the efforts of a first-person narrator, another East European immigrant, to find a job teaching foreign students. While touring prospective classrooms, he spots a hauntingly familiar face: “I suddenly recognized the smile: the raising of the left side of the upper lip; the exposing of teeth, which had evenly wide, spitting-conducive gaps between them, the toy-dog nodding.” It is Pronek, his childhood friend.
The next section, “Yesterday,” tagged as taking place in Sarajevo from 1967 to 1992, offers a third-person account of Pronek’s life from birth through adolescence and young manhood, lingering particularly on his early love affairs and his years as a would-be songwriter-musician, and ending with his departure from Sarajevo. The succeeding sections capture other facets, one narrating experiences during a year of cultural exchange in Kiev, Ukraine, another giving an account of Pronek’s employment as assistant to a private investigator and how he sets about serving a warrant on one of his compatriots.
The final section, “Nowhere Man,” is marked “Kiev, September 1900-Shanghai, August 2000,” and it breaks with any loosely established pattern by recounting the fabulous and largely unverifiable story of Evgenij Pick, a Russian-born military man turned all-purpose operative who ends up living in Shanghai, where he changes his occupations and affiliations as often as other people change shirts. The only obvious thing linking Pick’s saga with the rest of the novel is the coincidental fact that the first-person narrator of the opening section travels to Shanghai with his wife in 2000 and ends up staying in the room that Pick once occupied. But of course there must be more.
This is a good deal of summary–I apologize–but with a novel so strangely conceived, some such description is inevitable. The question is, To what end does Hemon orchestrate things thus? I would say it is to drive home a particular view of history, one that tracks an individual through the necessarily detached perspective of multiple observers, even as it shows us history less in the usual sense of cause, more as an archive of effects.
Hemon delivers a crazed, kaleidoscopic rendering of the waning years of Soviet rule, along with jagged–often distanced–snapshots of the Serbian-Croatian conflict. One short section is Pronek’s translation of a letter from his old musician friend, Mirza, who details the horrors of life in Sarajevo in the mid-1990s. Otherwise, we mainly get those events obliquely, by way of conversational asides and newspaper headlines Pronek glimpses. The result is a fragmented, almost Cubistic, view of that late-century conflict, but Hemon makes us feel its shadowy presence on every page.
Hemon is a unique stylist, fond of amplifying the offbeat detail and finding the surreal edge in the domestic fact. As the novel opens, for instance, we read of a toilet bowl “agape, with a dissolving piece of toilet paper in it throbbing like a jellyfish,” while the faucet is “sternly counting off droplets.”
The author also delights in delivering important moments of encounter in a deliberately downbeat mode, a poeticized drabness that is uniquely suited to his vision of history as a steady stripping away of illusion. When Pronek, still in Sarajevo, breaks up with his girlfriend Sabina, Hemon writes: “And a sense sneaked upon them, a sense that love was not enough to keep them together–they sat on a bench in the Vilsonovo and watched deflated soccer balls roiling in a Miljacka whirl. They were eighteen, and felt very old.”
Though he is seen in pieces and from various vantages and distances, Pronek is nonetheless a compelling character. In his younger years, when he is a Beatles-besotted teenager still living in Sarajevo, he exudes the universal poignancy of all who are trapped by age and circumstance and forced to nurse their dreams alone. If his romance with Sabina is typical (maybe even archetypal), so is his family situation:
“Once, desperate for recognition and hoping to justify the financing of the electric guitar, Pronek made the cardinal mistake of performing for his parents. He played the complete Eyes song cycle, midway through which Pronek Sr., comfortable in the armchair, started snoring, which at first sounded like supportive humming–a delusion shattered by a loud oink. Mother Pronek’s face assumed an expression of encouraging interest, her hands in her lap grasping each other, as if preventing an uncontrollable applause, her eyes darting sideways.”
Later, in America, we encounter a young man who has had to shed many of his illusions about what life may bring. Working as a canvasser for Greenpeace, he falls in love with his co-worker Rachel, but his feelings on the morning after their first romantic contact can be said to represent his general condition of soul:
“On their way to the museum, she sat in the front seat, and he was convinced that whatever peaks of love they had reached last night, whispering and softly kissing, they tumbled down to the bottom this morning. . . . They went by a pond on which a couple of swans floated with their heads bowed, but Pronek could not tell whether they were plastic or real. The possibility that the world could never respond to his desires tortured him.”
But “Nowhere Man” is something more than just a portrait of one young man’s ever-more-sober coming of age. It is, in its deeper strategy, in its revelation of the personal through impersonal shifts of perspective, an exercise in corrective history, an attempt to counter the novelistic tendency to use history as a backdrop for what might be called the sentimental education of the characters. Through his deliberately shattered presentation of the character of Pronek, Hemon asserts the disruptive, centrifugal momentum of events in our recent geo-political history and refuses to offer the consoling myth of redemption. It could be that what happens just happens, and if it gathers to any larger sense it is only through the imaginative exertions of writers and artists, though even these may, like Hemon, resist the temptations of meaningful closure.
I read that final Shanghai section as a deliberate attempt to break the frame, to remind us, lest we forget, that every life, every story, is embedded in countless surrounding lives and stories, and that history will generate the circumstances that some will experience as fate, others as simply their unchosen lot. Jozef Pronek is, by novel’s end, trying to accept the loss of his home place; his one possibly viable relationship is hanging by a thread. But there is a feeling that he is breaking through, finding the new, necessary ways to invent himself, becoming–how odd this sounds–an American. There may be more to be said about him.
