Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller
Find it in a WorldCat library
Compare prices at major online bookstores
|
|
Review by Charles Flowers
At the close of this novel's stunning first chapter, the experienced, sensible reader might well crow, "Well, Leithauser, you've blown it this time. Eerie lyricism beneath the northern lights, slapstick comedy, the sad waste of a youth's accidental death, brilliant wordplay and two compelling voices -- one like a rasp in the inner ear, the other gloriously bombastic. It's all downhill from here, bub. You've shot your wad."
The experienced, sensible reader would be dead wrong.
The Friends of Freeland continues to race along with breathtaking invention for the next 59 chapters, as each twist of plot or recollection of the past or peculiar character or seeming diversion zings out of left field and heads beautifully home. In creating Freeland, a north Atlantic island nation that could be mistaken in a light drizzle for Iceland, the dexterous poet and novelist Brad Leithauser has wicked fun with his background materials. Discovered by Erik the Other, the frozen, dark, gloomy, impoverished land of boiled fish and bootleg liquor cherishes an alarmingly credible sense of self-importance: after all, the rest of the globe is, in a sense, below it.
But it would be a mistake to endorse the publisher's effort to sell The Friends of Freeland as political spoof. In fact, the only flat passages of this exuberant, freewheeling novel are two televised debates in the Freeland presidential election.
Leithauser's ambitions fly much higher than the merely satirical. In the familiar distinction between the active and the contemplative lives, he sends up and celebrates a universe of differences between his first-person narrator Eggert, a ratlike writer, and Hannibal, the bombastic, charismatic, bibulous politician who has been Freeland's president for two decades. Eggert, despite failed love affairs and a taste for cowardly revenge, winds up with two wonderfully intelligent, loving children. Do they mean more to him than his 49 books of Freelandic literature? The answer is the driving force of this, his fiftieth book. Hannibal, ravaged physically and politically, has had and continues to have much the rosier sex life, but his real triumph is his prodigal love of country. Even as compensation for certain personal losses and failings, it is viable and grand.
How has an epic sprung from the lives of two mere Freelanders? It certainly helps that Leithauser creates a country complete with its own folk tales, famous battles, invasions, international enemies, economic problems and complex, brooding geography. Or that he can toss in a chapter about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that could be the most memorable piece ever written about movie musicals, or portray a hilariously obsessed linguist with postdoctoral detail, or take eczemic Eggert through a mournful, itchy love affair in the humidity of Washington, DC.
In short, this is a novel of scarcely legal abundance, a work of such bawdy glee and deep feeling that we laugh aloud and also crave the best for Eggert, Hannibal, and all they touch. It is typical of Leithauser's superfluity of skill that the apparent death of a very minor character will freeze any reader's veins ice cold. In other words, as in the most memorable of novels at the very beginning of the form, every incident has its weight of feeling in The Friends of Freeland, and every sentence is alive with rediscoveries of language.
Charles Flowers, who lives in Purdys, NY, received the NY Press Association's Best Column Award for his art and drama criticism.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.