If you are a reader intoxicated by the strange, a reader for whom conceits matter more than characters and song, then Lydia Netzer’s “How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky” is the sort of book that may well live up to its billing as a funny valentine. If, on the other hand, you read in search of stories that ultimately transcend ideas, then this second novel by the best-selling author of “Shine Shine Shine” may furrow your brow.
Netzer’s plot is full of beguiling possibilities. Two young women, best friends, conspire to give birth to a boy and a girl on the same day. The children will be raised to fall in love, separated in early youth, encouraged back together, and live, at last, as soul mates.
The boy, George, will grow up to be a cosmologist at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. The girl, Irene, will become obsessed with black holes. George believes in fairies, gods and goddesses. Irene, obsessed with suicide, believes in very little but her own consuming work. He is tall and handsome, an irrepressible but never satisfied ladies’ man, a dashing hero in search of completion. She is small and angular, a “virgin from the neck down,” who has been living for a few years with a brutish and excessively cartoonish gamer named Belion. She has eschewed drinking, drugs and what she frequently refers to as “penis sex” in pursuit of perfect self control.
George’s mother is alive and frantic, an astrologer-turned-businesswoman who lives intermittently with her tree-climbing artist husband. Irene’s mother, a once-and-always-calculating astrologer and committed alcoholic living not far from the Toledo Institute, is now dead. Indeed, “How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky” opens with Bernice’s death — a drunken fall down stairs that occurs precisely at the same time that Irene has seen the lavender mist of a black hole in her machine.
Irene doesn’t like her mother, not anymore. She has avoided her for years; Bernice’s drinking disgusts her. Her reaction to the death swings from tears to clinical, cold-hearted relief to immediately picking up the phone and calling the Toledo Institute, where she always wanted to work but felt she couldn’t until her mother got out of her life’s way. It’s hard to get a purchase on Irene. It’s hard to feel for her. She’s not what one might call outer-directed. “I don’t miss you at all, Irene thought to her mother. Whenever I start to think I’m missing you, I remind myself that it is nonsense.”
Meanwhile, back at the institute, a cadre of science-seeking students is listening to George lecture about the gods that obsess him. George’s head hurts. He’s having visions. His lecture veers from its promised scientific track and sounds, in part, like this:
“Where did (the gods) go?” George pressed on. “Are they sitting somewhere in a retirement home for aging deities? Sipping tea and asking for their sons, who they know are coming to visit them today? Asking every day until the nurses must dress someone up as a son and make the fake son visit all the rooms? And the gods don’t even notice the difference? Because they are in their dotage?”
Not long after, seeking a little misguided love from an institute colleague who was raised as a mute, George tries on these seduction lines:
“I came up to see you,” said George.
Kate Oakenshield nodded emphatically.
“That’s a great flute. Great song. Would you like to read some of my new article? I wrote it for the Dark Star Review. I mean, I’m writing it. This is a draft, do you want to read it?”
Soon enough, woozy George and ambitious Irene meet, and the instantaneous sparks fly. Through it all, the friendship between the mothers is revealed as well as their soul-mate brewing plan and the mean twists that send the plan off track. The mothers are particularly foul-mouthed and scheming, even as young children. Their dialogue, like nearly all of the dialogue in Toledo, is a blunt force. Here they are, for example, as fifth graders:
“I love the swing!” said Sally.
“Me too,” said Bernice.
“I’m never giving it up!” Sally trumpeted.
“Okay,” said Bernice, although she was privately afraid of heights.
“I don’t give a f— what anyone says,” said Sally.
What is love? That is the question Netzer has posited. What is the difference between the divine and the earthbound? What power do we humans have over the emotions that stir within? These are excellent questions. They are glorious sparks. They promise something novelistically big. But for this reader, more nuance would have helped enormously. Somehow Toledo feels stuck between harshly lit poles. I yearned for more lavender mist.
Beth Kephart reviews frequently for Printers Row. @BethKephart
“How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky”
By Lydia Netzer, St. Martin’s, 339 pages, $25.99
