The Curfew

Appetite for the paranormal, the allegorical, seems so hardy lately that I worry taste for the fantastic may soon change. In recent weeks, I’ve read Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods and Heidi Julavits’ The Vanishers, both trading in otherworldly medium (also Michelle Latiolais’ subtle, heart-rending, perfectly pitched collection of short stories, Widow, which is magic but firmly rooted in realism). Today, I’ve just finished Jesse Ball’s book, The Curfew. Jonathan Franzen wrote in the New Yorker nearly a year ago to the day that the legacy of the novel, as a genre, is its transformation of how willingly we suspend disbelief. If that’s true, The Curfew seizes upon that legacy to introduce its own language and narrative style.

The Curfew is set in a nameless city beset by post-apocalyptic anxiety. People never feel secure and live their lives with their heads down. The story follows an epitaphorist (one who writes epitaphs for gravestones), William, and his young daughter, Molly. Part I of the book follows William as he works, traveling through the city, writing epigraphs for people who have lost family members or friends, sometimes from individuals themselves planning for the inevitable future. William’s epigraphs read like poems, distilling the sometimes volatile mix of how someone is remembered with the heartache of people left behind. One day, an old friend, Gerard, approaches William with information about his late wife, Louisa, who disappeared and is believed to have been murdered. To discover the information from Gerard, though, William must break the city’s curfew, a decision that few survive. In Part II, Molly is delivered to a neighbor’s apartment so that William can go out. The story is split between Molly’s interactions with the neighbors, Mr and Mrs Gibbons, and William’s visit with Gerard. The Gibbons, it turns out, are puppeteers and they try to distract Molly by engaging her in a puppet show about her life. Part III charts the story to end, told in large part through the puppet show. I can’t tell you about the ending because the writing resists summary. I’ll only say that the narrative line explodes like nothing else I’ve read, left me with breath caught up in my throat.

The Curfew strikes me as a kind of literary chimera – parts poetry, prose. The writing in the book is spare and sometimes, I wondered, if it was too studied in its affect, too foreign. But then I would be overtaken by the story, the love between William and Molly, the language. Jesse Ball is a poet and so much of the language, the use of punctuation and placement of words on the page evokes that genre. For example, Molly is mute and communicates with her father through gestures and games. The typography in the book, the use of dashes and asterisks indicate volume and mood. The device could be precious but the changes in typography produce real changes in the story.

The writing itself has poetic effect. So many of the story's moments evoked moments in my own life as a reader, not as a novel does, permitting entry through single door, but more like poetry, eliding story with memory, sparking an entirely new attitude toward what a novel can be. For example, just as William is about to walk into the night, where he fears apprehension for breaking Curfew, he lingers on the staircase outside his friend's door. He pauses, staring at the the light of his friend's house shine from the outside. Then, he moves to leave. At that moment, he has no choice but to accept the risk of fatal error. Reading the description of that moment reminded me of a time when I was a student, traveling alone in South Africa, leaving acquaintances in Stellenbosch for Capetown miles away, by cab, in the middle of the night. I arrived safely and maybe my fear was overblown. But the feeling of closing the car door behind me and friendly faces disappear by the roadside will forever stay with me. The Curfew is full of moments like these, moments told just so there is room for a reader's own experiences to converge with the action on the page.

At one point in the story, someone asks William how he came to be an epigraphorist. He replies:

I was always good at puzzles, and I have memorized the complete works of five poets which I can recite on command. Four years ago, when I could no longer do the work that I did before, I saw an advertisement in the paper. It read, Position requiring: ingenuity, restraint, quiet manner, odd hours, impeccable judgment, and eloquence. Unworthy candidates unwelcome. I was the only one to apply.

The other man says, “That sort of thing I understand effortlessly. It seems the way things should work.” I love that passage for the way it captures the magical, effortless quality of the book.