Twentieth Century Man

by Michael Joyce

Fiction. Native American Studies. Here is what you think. Someone, you think, has dragged Robert's body off the path and deeper in the woods, perhaps burying it in a shallow grave or under leaves, which would mean that he had not killed himself, unless whoever had dragged him off had wanted to put off the discovery of his body for reasons of their own, say out of horror or because they loved him.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cy, a 93 year old man (emeritus professor of linguistics)drives alone from his daughter Deirdre's country house where he now lives to friends Allie & Alex's cabin in Maine after having discovered (imagined, dreamed, remembered?) the dead body of his young research assistant Aileen's boyfriend at the edge of a woods on Deirdre's property. The novel isn't, however, a murder mystery, but rather more a mystery of mind. We suspect early on that Cy isn't an entirely reliable narrator. Even his unreliability is unreliable, however, since we experience it by way of the words & actions of others: his daughter on the phone (once Cy turns his phone on); Jams, the Abenaki-Quebecois caretaker who has been told to look in on & look out for him; Louis, local law enforcement officer & friend of Jams (they were in Iraq together)&, at the end of the novel, Albert, a video artist at Dartmouth who shows Cy a film clip that causes him to question his memory of what he has seen. Often the responses of these others to what Cy does or says imply that something different than what he reports has been going on. But then again, it is Cy, as narrator, who reports what the others say & do, so we are on shaky ground all the way around. Cy drifts in & out of various modes of perceiving reality, until the overall impression is that of "now you see it, now you don't." There are dreams that aren't exactly "dream-dreams" and memories that aren't what we generally think of as memories. Joyce creates an almost hallucinogenic effect. Weaving through Cy's thoughts, dreams,& memories are always scenes from his 25 year marriage to Constance, his much younger wife (he, a professor in his 50s, she, a student in her early 20's)who unexpectedly died at sea about 10 years earlier(she sailed away, she didn't return, her body was never found). In the course of his sojourn, everything Cy is certain of, that he knows, is called into question.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminded me of Joseph O'Connor's "Ghost Light."
You're faced with an unreliable narrator in both, someone who's been marginalized by society by their age and sheer bloody-mindedness of continuing to exist, possibly long after they have.
Joyce forces this shriveled old professor, Cy, with all his warts and naked gooseflesh onto center stage, which is a very uncomfortable place for him to be as he attempts to reconcile just what it was he saw in the woods: was it the dead body of his assistant's lover? Or was he hallucinating, an old man driven mad by his sometimes cruel aide?
Moreso than Ghost Light you -- and the book points out at the second person perspective, which I'm normally not a big fan of, but it works, in this case -- are dropped in the same muddle as the narrator. This makes the book a bit thicker read than Mr. O'Connor's, it's a little tougher to get into, but the effort is well worth it.
The bit players in the drama round out the book. The caretaker of the cabin in which the narrator takes refuge, the local policeman who stops by to check on things and rough it up with the caretaker, Cy's daughter, the sadistic assistant Cy is saddled with for his language work at the university, the dead/not-dead boyfriend, the shade of Cy's departed wife, who sailed off into the sunrise some time ago and continues to haunt his days.
It's a beautiful book about aging, loss, with a slow simmering mystery on the back burner the whole time. It's not quite the fact-paced thriller whodunit, it's more of a thoughtful examination of a life. Worth the read.