From Joshua Ferris: A Father’s Legacy of Divorce, Unreliably Told


We first meet Charlie Barnes when he realizes he has “the great kahuna of cancers: the pancreas.” Bad news? It makes his day. He gets on the phone and starts calling anyone who underestimated him, hoping to make them all regret it. It says “like priority mail” gets you that fast. It kills you so fast that you go to the grave like a cannonball. “Besides being attacked and killed, that’s probably the worst way anyone can die.”

Then comes an inappropriate statement that Charlie is not sick. But that doesn’t stop her from feeling hurt, what appears to be her chronic condition. “Even if he had pancreatic cancer, they wouldn’t let him live!” Joshua Ferris writes his fifth and most dazzling book, “A Call to Charlie Barnes,” which should appeal even to those who can never warm to the other four. Ferris’ talent has been evident since her first novel. “Then We’re Over” It was published in 2007, but here it took a huge step forward by twisting the semi-autobiographical material so snake-like that even the author’s note is deceptive.

Crossing line is Charlie’s biography. However, it is not presented in a linear or reliable way, and the book’s perspective on it changes in jaw-dropping ways. The story is meta-narrated by Charlie’s son, Jake Barnes, a novelist who, for reasons unfolding over time, turns it into a hall of mirrors. This is a softer novel than Ferris’ others, but that doesn’t stop it from being deadly funny from start to finish. He can’t help being cheerful and this material can’t help being tough either.

“De facto insane since about 1960” Charlie was first introduced to us in 2008. He was 68 years old by then and had won five marriages, various children, at least 40 jobs, countless failures, and different personalities to adapt to each new situation. We won’t be able to solve any of this easily because the writers – Ferris and his alter ego Jake – don’t want us to do it. Instead, the book deftly zig-zags through time, gradually expanding and changing every phase of Charlie’s life in ways that keep him perpetually amazing. So an important character stays hidden until the last pages just because Jake doesn’t like that person. “The son is lying too,” the character says angrily, for the benefit of readers who missed the Hemingway reference that winked at Jake’s name.

Ferris loves names. Here’s a Letrois Ledeux, and Charlie’s first wives are chronologically Sue Starter, Barbara LeFurst (because he married a second Barbara), and Charley Proffit, who dumped Charlie when he found out he couldn’t find a job. During the Charley phase of his life, Charlie really did good in the world by being part of what Ferris called the Poor Old Farm and caring about social services. Then he got into finance and started robbing people, which suits him better.

“Call to Charlie Barnes” is split into two major parts, one for Farce and the other for Fiction. Farce more than lives up to his name and gasps at Charlie’s cynicism. Fiction sees an imaginary goodness in him, adding balance to Ferris’ embrace of chronic darkness.

This darkness may have held one of Ferris’ previous novels, a Booker Prize finalist. “Rising Again at an Appropriate Hour” prevented him from reaching the audience he deserved. Even if “A Calling For Charlie Barnes” is Ferris’ most daring experiment, it’s far better suited to making connections. There are real people and real scars buried here somewhere. (Ferris said that Charlie Barnes imitated his father, who passed away in 2014.) Despite everything he knows, there is a curvy-eyed son who tries to honor his father. Stepmother and stepsister issues sound real. The change of characters over time—from hippie to financier, for example—is not imaginary, and neither is the 2008 financial crash that devastated Charlie and angered his clients. Or when a very important personal event is timed to Election Day in 2016.

Even when somber, Ferris’ prose is tense and magnificent. He says of a velvety drama, “swinging like a dream on a princess’s pincushion,” describing not only the physical space but also the mood in which young Charlie fell in love. The monstrous great-aunt whose child-rearing devastated Charlie is said to be “a huge woman – 300 pounds, she even allows a boutonniere”.

This is from the self-explanatory introduction to the book: “Oh, what a glorious morning! Maybe. The weather in the basement was unknown. The computer required waking up. When he awoke from sleep, he made little gnawing noises and said steady hello. Old office chair. The cold basement is damp. Steady Boy had a desk calendar from 1991, a rapier-style letter opener encrusted with precious stones, a seedy Rolodex, and a rug at his feet. But the carpet made moving in a wheelchair hellish.” (The nickname “Steady Boy” is to Charlie what a Tiny is to a fat man.)

The epigraph for this book is a solemn excerpt from “The Glass Castle,” in which Jeannette Walls lovingly thanks her family. Consider Ferris’s book the antithesis of that, and rate him for showing sharp elbows before his story even begins. And for starting its final episode with a self-referential “Then we came to the end.” Also, encourage him to find just the right way to blend memory with satire, do it with refreshing originality, and not turn heads from the first to the last page of this novel. Acting and love don’t mix easily. But Ferris found a way to do it and got to the top of his game.



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