And Then

by Donald Breckenridge

Breckenridge takes readers on a hypnotically broken journey, chronicling his fathers slow and deliberate death, interweaving the stories of others: a young woman's hopeful arrival in New York City, a young man's voyeuristic summer spent housesitting for his professor, and a soldier who never made it out of Vietnam. What they all have in common is a deep preoccupation with the way lives resonate and connect, an emotionally honest love story about how we relate to others and ourselves. The work of a mature writer, And Then will be treasured by readers who look to literature to find solace and meaning in trying times.

Genres: Fiction

104 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 2017

About the author

Donald Breckenridge has written five novels including And Then (Black Sparrow Press), edited two fiction anthologies, and introduced the NYRB Classics edition of Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanuel Bove. He was the fiction editor of the Brooklyn Rail for nineteen years, and co-founded and co-edited InTranslation. He lives in Brooklyn with his spouse, Johannah Rodgers.

Reviews

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Nothing, in fact, actually dies: everything goes on existing, always. No power on earth can obliterate that which has once had being. Every act, every word, every form, every thought, falls into the universal ocean of things, and produces a circle on its surface that goes on enlarging beyond the furthest bounds of eternity.”

Suzanne runs off to New York and there meets Brian, a photographer. Brian suggests she moves in with his friend and Suzanne becomes Paula’s roommate.
“After wiping her mouth with a soggy napkin she finally responded to his sidelong glances by asking him what he was reading. ‘The story traces the paths of the people affected by, or somehow related to the death of the author's lover,’ Brian passed her the book, ‘it's like stepping through a series of continuously unfolding mirrors.’”

Years later, Tom was apartment-sitting for Professor Paula Avloniti and spots, by the phone, a photograph of a young woman on the beach.
“Tom was on the landing unlocking the door to Paula's apartment when the wooden steps creaked as if someone was walking up the stairs. He turned around and immediately recognized the blonde from the photographs. She was dressed in a long black coat and carrying a black umbrella in her right hand. He didn't have time to step out of the way or even be afraid. A cold breeze carried her energy and when that entered his chest it coursed through every cell. It was a vibrantly white sensation that caused the hair on the back of his head to stand on end. Tom never forgot the feeling or tired of telling the story- she just walked right through him.”

Three narratives; Suzanne’s, Tom’s, and
the author’s account of his father’s illness and eventually death; are told non-sequentially and intertwined with each other. Details in one story are echoed in another and used to clarify and magnify the themes and emotions. Ghosts from the past, remnants of memories, and physical items evoke a deep melancholy, a regret of choices made and love lost.
“I shared every significant experience with my father. Each passion, success, failure, ambition and frustration passed through his townhouse. Every episode, which comprised my late teens, twenties and thirties, decades of poverty I embraced while editing and writing, was sounded out at his table. Low paying jobs and failed relationships carried me back here, as my obsessions gradually became manuscripts, which were eventually published. The less I fretted over his health the closer we became.”

In the introduction to And Then, Douglas Glover writes , “His settings are Carverish, bleak and constrained; his characters are the stubborn, alienated authors of their own melancholy fates; they persist in a panoply of failed habits and attitudes, gestures of a wounded self they refuse to give up because it is theirs, a refusal that is by turns defiant, sordid, heroic, grotesque, and tragic.”

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this one. in this death-confronting, exquisitely detailed heartbreaker, Breckenridge replays and cross-cuts hauntings and fathers. it's pointillist, collage, or a jump cut complex, but it's got a surprisingly easy, unpretentious surface. among its triumphs: an uncommon and excellent portrait of the artist as son.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alert to love, fear, dream, grief, and sadness, how they entangle and unravel us, Donald Breckenridge’s And Then weaves at least three different narratives, memoir, literary drama, and ghost story among its organizing threads. Breckenridge employs a pared-down prose, its quiet tonality bolstered by dialogue embedded sans tags, etc., within exposition, description, etc., said embeddings infusing the narrative with a throbbing and often poignant immediacy. With its graceful portrayal of complex and often troubled intimacies, its depiction of memories and other spectral disturbances, its inventorying of possessions and the containers that hold them, And Then might also be called The People, Places, and Things They Left Behind.

[Valentina · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collage of stories, woven together, full of grief, troubled minds, and specks of happiness. It's a hard book to read since it reads likes a train of thought, no real structure or anything so I highly recommend reading it in one sitting. Overall, I appreciate the style and story, but it didn't do anything magical for me.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and sad tale and a little difficult to read since the dialogue was broken with thoughts or scattered descriptions.

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 5 out of 5]

The formidable critic and poet Donald Breckenridge has here produced a peerless example of the novel roman, harkening back to the avant-garde efforts of such famous forbears as Alain Robbe-Grillet and other lights of the French experimental writing scene of yore. Breckenridge, who is the fiction editor of the Brooklyn Rail, has crafted a cunningly elliptical tale of a man in love with the past, a time's wormhole species of meditation on lives lived in the margin and then erased. Haunting, oblique, poetic, with an inimitable style.

[Dan]

Not an easy read, especially if one picks it up and puts it down intermittently over several weeks. I suspect I will enjoy it far more if I read it again straight through so will reserve a rating until then.