Jacob M. Appel's incredible résumé almost suggests he knows all about the worlds of the diverse figures who appear in his award-winning fiction - without their bizarre, eccentric and peculiar behavior, of course. Appel's latest story collection, Einstein's Beach House, shows just how wide and deep he can go in exploring different kinds of characters -men and women, young and older - all acting out the overall theme that some situations in life prompt some people to make absurdity the norm. Appel's characters easily go from semi-rational to downright loony. The irony is that though the more rational characters yield to odd behaviors in their loved ones, because they want to please them, to sustain if not enhance their relationships, they wind up buying in to the ridiculous, only to find that at the end, funny-cuckoo has become sad-pathetic, and they are left with ambivalence, if not isolation and aloneness. In the title story, "Einstein's Beach House," a knock-out tale of narrative ingenuity that yokes opposite and discordant qualities, the father who starts a con that Einstein summered in the bungalow his family has owned for decades, come to believe in the details he made up.
The brilliance of Appels' conceptions is not only that he taps into so many weird psyches in story after different story (there are eight tales here), but that he signals content by style. It's a dry, matter-of-fact style, full of expressions of oddball free associations. In just one sentence Appel can pull off a sequence of non-sequiturs, disjointed comments or observations, that sometimes contain sly hints of criticism about a society that promotes or tolerates fads and fantasies. In "La Tristesse Des Des Hérissons [hedgehogs]" the narrator goes to visit a "veterinary psychiatrist" who had been featured on the cover of New York Magazine, whose office "was located only blocks from the nursing home where Adeline's mother sat expressionless at the end of a musty corridor, periodically calling out lessons that she had memorized at Miss Porter's, where she'd once shared a swimming locker with the future Jacqueline Kennedy." In "Limerence" [look it up] the narrator speaks of her parents as liberal Republicans of the Rockefeller variety "who went to synagogue twice each year to worship a benign, munificent God who cared passionately about SAT scores." Or, from "The Rod of Asclepius" --"My aunt is away for the weekend with her new boyfriend, a veterinarian, who will soon become my Uncle Conrad, and will later become my former Uncle Conrad, and will eventually move to Florida and open a theme park featuring exotic animals."
Appel is a master of dazzling metaphors, witty, literary allusions, and just-right sentence rhythms. Beginnings are priceless: "We'd been living together for eight months when we adopted the hedgehog" (from "La Tristesse); or from "Strings" -- "Rabbi Cynthia Felder was newly married, and in her pulpit only six months, when a former lover [once "the most gifted musician ever to vend hot dogs at Yankee Stadium"] asked to borrow the sanctuary" (he wants to put on a concert for 400 cellos). Situations are immediately wacky or strange: In the opening story, two girls sneak into the basement of a sex offender while the father of one of the girls tries to befriend him, to the dismay of his neighbors. In another story, a young woman kidnaps her ex-husband's turtle and presses her lover, a failed ventriloquist, to assist in his upkeep. In the last story, "Paracosmos," the mother of a girl who had an imaginary friend falls in love with the imaginary friend's imaginary father and then suspects her own husband of having an affair with the imaginary mother. Depression hovers at the edge of all the tales, but the affectionate lunacy tends to keep things light.
Who crafts such a clever literary cornucopia? At 42, Dr. Jacob M. Appel has already acquired seven masters degrees from Ivy League universities in several disciplines: English and American literature, history, creative writing, bioethics, playwriting - not to mention a medical degree (Columbia), a law degree (Harvard) and a position as practicing psychiatrist at Mount Sinai . He is also working on a Ph.D. at Columbia on the history of American [psychiatric] medicine. It's likely there's more. How Appel finds time to write such entertaining and moving fiction (previously published in noted literary journals) is a mystery, but as Keats might say, why unweave a rainbow?
Leave a comment