A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. The grimness is persistent, but Marra relays it with unusual care and empathy for a first-timer.Ī somber, sensitive portrait of how lives fray and bind again in chaotic circumstances.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. But he’s a careful, intelligent stylist who makes the most of his omniscient perspective one of his favorite tricks is to project minor characters’ fates into the future by revealing their deaths, he exposes how shabbily war treats everybody and gives the living an additional dose of pathos.

Marra has carefully threaded his characters to work an everybody-is-connected theme, and some of those connections ultimately feel contrived. The most affecting and harrowing subplot involves Sonja’s sister Natasha, who is missing as the story begins we quickly learn the various indignities she suffered in the years before, forced into prostitution and addicted to heroin but later recovered enough to help deliver babies alongside her sister. Akhmed is quickly put to work learning to saw off shrapnel-flayed legs, and as the novel shifts back and forth in time, each of their stories deepens. At the core of the story is Sonja, a longtime doctor with a flinty, seen-it-all demeanor who, as the story starts in 2004, has taken in an unlikely pair: Akhmed, a barely competent but well-intentioned doctor who is protecting Havaa, whose father has been abducted. The characters Marra brings to this landscape, though, are thankfully lacking in pieties about the indomitability of the human spirit. Marra’s vision of Chechnya in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union is inevitably mordant: religious and separatist battles have left the roadways studded with land mines, the buildings pockmarked with bullets and many residents disappeared and tortured.

A decade of war in Chechnya informs this multivalent, heartfelt debut, filled with broken families, lost limbs and valiant efforts to find scraps of hope and dignity.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra