It’s difficult to portray genius in narrative. I think of J.M. Coetzee’s 1994 novel, The Master of Petersburg, which seeks to evoke the inner life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky but only succeeds in tracing an austere semi-portrait without any of the heat, the outright weirdness, of its subject’s work. Or Raymond Carver’s final short story, “Errand,” which excels precisely because, in imagining the death of Anton Chekhov, it eschews the Russian’s writing in favor of his physical diminishment and death. Perhaps the most vivid instance of this bifurcation may be found in Seymour Glass, the eccentric sage at the center of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family saga, who kills himself at the end of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Only once, in the novella Hapworth 16, 1924, does Salinger write from Seymour’s perspective, and the result is the author’s most unconvincing effort. It is as if, by allowing Seymour to finally speak for himself, Salinger has stripped him of whatever inchoate, inexplicable magic he might possess.
I couldn’t help but think about Seymour as I read Gabriel Tallent’s Crux, a novel that features not one but two geniuses among its characters. The first is Tamma Callahan, gay and disaffected, a teenage outcast living in a small town in the Mojave Desert with a family that doesn’t understand her and just one friend, a fellow high school senior named Dan Redburn. The second is Dan’s mother, Alexandra, who as a young woman wrote a pair of iconic novels, only to retreat in the aftermath to a small, shuttered bedroom where she remains hidden from the world. For Tamma and Dan, the only activity that has any meaning is rock climbing—not just as sport but as a way of life. It’s not the danger that compels them so much as the commitment. “If you wanted to live,” Dan reflects, “you had to take the risk.”
Tallent is the author of one previous novel, My Absolute Darling (2017), which was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. There, he wrote about another young woman in trouble: 14-year-old Turtle Alveston, toughing it out with a difficult and domineering father in the woods of the Mendocino coast. The books share a gift for understanding the complexity of their youthful characters, in ways both organic and real. Often this emerges from the language—not only what it tells us but also what it obscures. Tamma and Dan have known each other since infancy; their mothers were once best friends. After an initial bouldering foray ends with a nasty fall, Dan teases Tamma about her concern for him. “Are you having feelings right now?” he asks. “No!” she hollers back. “Oh man,” he persists, “I think you’re having hella feelings.”
“Fuck you I’m not,” she says.
The circumstance is one each of us can recognize in its push and pull between adult self-awareness and adolescent reticence. How do we reconcile these apparently opposing postures? All we can do is hold them in uneasy tension, as per Keats’s negative capability. “They sat in the dark together. Tamma underneath the boulder. One close to the other,” Tallent writes in the scene’s subtly rendered final moments as the friends reveal their true selves wordlessly. It’s a beautiful image, heartfelt and authentic, and it establishes the characters—and the bond they share—as the anchors, each to the other, that their lives otherwise lack.
In part, this connection has to do with their families, which are unhappy in their own ways. For Dan, this means the silence that has descended on his house in the aftermath of his mother’s withdrawal—not just from writing but from everything. Alexandra is unhappy, not least about motherhood, which, as she explains to her son, was never on her agenda. “Your dad was off building strip malls,” she declares in one especially charged interaction, “and I was stuck here, raising a child I didn’t want to raise, when all I wanted was to be writing.” There’s more to it, of course, and they both know it; Alexandra has a weakened heart and a transplanted valve, taken from a pig, that has begun to fail. And yet, the deflection finds its mark in her son’s heart, which is wounded by her bitterness. Tamma, meanwhile, has been similarly wounded, not only by her mother but also by the older sister who once said she wished her dead. “No one ever talked about it again,” Tallent writes, “and everyone acted like it was done. Tamma thought about it every day.”
To Crux’s credit, Tallent pushes back against these dynamics and the expectations they engender; a medical emergency brings Tamma much closer to her sister, while another flips the script on Dan and Alexandra’s relationship. At the same time, this is where the novel begins to reveal its seams. In the first place, the scaffolding feels overstated, with certain situations doubled in ways that seem too imposed. The health crises, for instance: For all the ways that they parallel each other, neither generates the necessary friction, the fear and longing such entanglements provoke.
“Hospital beds and carts left against the wall,” Dan remembers of his mother’s first medical intervention. “The distinctive smell. The tile, the lights, the room ahead of them.” But what is that distinctive smell? The language leaves us wanting. In that, it recalls Dan’s casual uttering of the word “hella,” which is a bit of Northern California slang (Tallent grew up in Mendocino) that an untraveled 17-year-old born and raised deep in the Mojave would seem unlikely to use.
Then there’s the issue of genius, which Tallent asserts throughout the novel without ever quite drawing us inside. Smartly, he resists sharing Alexandra’s writing. Her passion, however—the idiosyncrasies of vision or sensibility—remains largely undeveloped as well. When it comes to Tamma and the art of climbing, the writing relies too much on technique, on the toeholds and “exposure,” rather than on the experience, the soul. Only at the very end of Crux does Tallent begin to get there, as Tamma, considering her future, “already had the hot, good, boulder-solving feeling coming over her, she was already trying to find the footholds, already looking for the line, and as she looked, it started to fall into place.”
Already looking for the line. Yes, this is what an artist does, whether on the page or when climbing. What’s required is a certain necessary surrender, an acknowledgment of all one does not know. Don’t get me wrong: Crux is a fine novel. Its characters are dimensionalized, its narrative solidly framed. Yet too often it left me wanting more, to stand on the precipice “between the deeply felt danger of committing and the real danger of hesitation” to which its characters aspire.•
