Our Frail Blood by Peter Nathaniel Malae, is a brilliant, heroically Catholic novel. Dense, Proustian in its savor of the quality of time and its lost chances. Emphatically West Coast in its culture, in a way that convinces us that there really is a distinct West Coast culture. And it exemplifies what that culture might consist of.
It’s also an indictment of early 20th century America. A bill of charges against an egoism untempered by obligations to family or tradition. Selfishness, even selfhood, gone wild. Clownish.
Peter Nathaniel Malae loves to write as much as he loves to tell a story. They’re not the same talents. Good writers are more common than good storytellers. You can be trained to write well. You can’t be trained to be a bard if you’re not meant to be one. Malae’s prose is dense with consequence but trust me, the novel doesn’t falter.
The arrangement of Our Frail Blood’s chapters takes a powerful triad form. Each chapter leads off with the name of a character, a descriptive title and a full calendar date. I just noticed that all the character names are also three-part, like our author’s name.
The names recur in chapter headings. Contemporary dates are followed by earlier dates as if time was a tidal pool, flowing in and out. The epilogue is actually the earliest date in the story. There are thirty chapters in five parts plus a prologue and epilogue. Readers should be grateful for these benchmarks which help us to keep our bearings in a complex narrative. There’s also an indispensable family tree at the back of the book.
Our Frail Blood is a chronicle of the Italian-American Felice family, their five offspring and what they do to their mother, Maria. The elderly Maria Serafina (Capone) Felice has been placed in a below-par hospice by her children. There she doggedly survives with occasional visits from her sons and daughter. As Maria remains alive, the number of her deceased roommates approach a dozen. At one point, her expiring husband is put in the bed next to hers, separated only by a curtain, and she is not told.
It’s her children, with power of attorney, who have decided to terminally shelve their mother. Richmond is the son with the most formidable intellect. As an adolescent, the family offered him a pilgrimage to Rome because he was considering the priesthood. Although he took the inspirational trip, he ended up as a poetry loving investment banker instead.
Richmond decided his mother was not mentally competent and near her end by fiat. Although he’s quite wealthy, he’s not willing to improve his mother’s living conditions. He’s already paid a million in medical treatment for his gay son who died from AIDS. You sense that he has more wealth to spare but he won’t spend it on his mother’s care, only on his luxury residences. Perhaps he might have to give up one of his houses to secure his mother a nurturing environment in her final years. He won’t do that and convinces himself instead that she is mentally unaware and dying.
His confrontational brother Anthony is an extreme righ-winger. Anthony believes in being a “real American”. When Anthony and his wife adopted a Korean baby, they took away the child’s Korean name and gave him an Anglo name. When the child grows up, he rebels and takes his birth name back.
I liked this line about Anthony: “He couldn’t turn on the television without his masculinity getting assaulted by gay men obsessed with interior decoration.” Anthony is the kind of guy who feels threatened by difference. The diversity of contemporary American society appalls him.
No one knows how much money Anthony has. He’s outraged at how his mother is being treated but he won’t help her unless Richmond and the rest of the family also chip in. Since they won’t, Anthony is off the hook on the financial burden of helping his mother. Collectively, the Felices have several million dollars. But none of that money is available to help Mom. Each Felice child is obsessed with pursuing their own agenda.
I’ll let you meet the other Felice siblings for yourself. And I’ll let you encounter the bloodied skeletons in their family home Victorian closet. They’re a nightmare family that can scream conversations at each other when they get together. Their only point of coincidence is when their mutual self-interests align, as they have in the case of neglecting their mother’s care.
The moral compass in this story is granddaughter Muron Leonora Teinetoa and her son, Prince. Muron is separated from her Polynesian husband and is raising her beautiful son with the support of her mother. Muron, with a great child-saving instinct, shields Prince from the Felices like a she-wolf protecting its last cub from marauders.
I am the enemy of Muron Leonora Teinetoa. I didn’t intend to be. But by what I am doing now, reviewing this book on a blog, I am undermining Muron. Muron is paid to read. She’s a book reviewer on a West Coast paper. People like me, who get away with posting presumably substandard book reviews online, are undermining Muron’s job. Apparently, only Michiko Kakutani is safe from us book bloggers.
Being a book reviewer is the perfect job for the bulimic Muron since she has no desire to deal with people. It’s wonderfully subtle to see how the introverted Muron confronts the characters in her life by applying the analytical skills that she has honed in her careful disquisition of books. Imagine conversing with someone who applies the high standards of a professional book review to their conversation with you. Maybe it would be like talking to Kakutani.
I want to get back to the one-word sentence that I used in the second paragraph above: Clownish. The Felice sister, Mary Anna, actually becomes a professional clown in the closing chapters. In one her her rare visits to her ailing mother, she places a portrait of herself in her clown costume above her mother’s bed. Even though her mother may be dying, it’s still all about Mary Anna. The Felice’s rarely empathize with anyone but themselves.
As a book reviewer who happens to be gay, I felt I was being trashed by the character of Mary Anna, who comes off as the queen dragon lady of every lesbian stereotype that you can think of. Especially the canard that lesbians are women who hate men, defining people by their alleged hatred rather than by what they love.
And in a minor plot twist, Mary Anna is seen to be undermining a family by taking a lover, as if gay people don’t also have families of their own. I understand the writer’s scheme of presenting the Felice children as selfish, with each having their own personal style of being selfish. But I have to wonder about the writer’s didactic judgements. Perhaps writers shouldn’t judge their characters. But in that case, there’s no point to this novel. So let the writer judge, and as a reader, I am judging back.
