Into Thin Air and Back
LORENTZEN, CHRLSTLAN
Into Thin Air and Back The Loss of Leon Meed By Josh Emmons Scribner. 338 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen Naked in his bathtub, Archimedes of Syracuse famously exclaimed,...
...Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen Naked in his bathtub, Archimedes of Syracuse famously exclaimed, "Eureka...
...All this from so much dirt...
...Part II is Leon's 18-page confession about his "loss...
...The section is both kooky and poignant...
...Eve Sieber, a hipster in her early 20s, works at the discount retailer Bonanza 88 and frets over her boyfriend Ryan's heroin addiction as well as his taste for increasingly deviant erotic activities...
...Unlike that movie, though, The Loss of Leon Meed never lapses into the maudlin...
...In 1850, native son Josh Emmons recounts, "a motley group of seasoned and amateur prospectors...
...Later he disrupts Sadie in her shower and she calls the cops, who fail to arrive before he vanishes...
...Sadie and Barry attend a party where Longaberger baskets are sold, so we glimpse some Amway-style commercialism...
...Indeed, as The Loss of Leon Meed grows more melancholy, it also devolves, hilariously, into farce...
...Eve and Joon-sup are now health nuts and running partners...
...He sought isolation in a cabin on the outskirts of town and took to carving life-size effigies of his lost kin in "burl, the large outgrowth of redwoods, oaks and Douglas firs...
...When his friends pointed out, reasonably, that his hobby might be too morbid to be healthy, he cutties...
...Elaine and Steve have married...
...Reported missing in the local Times-Standard (his mother has offered a $10,000 reward), Leon, a widower in his 50s, mysteriously shows up in various locations around Eureka, then vanishes...
...Emmons is dabbling in garden variety magic realism, and it would feel cheap, especially in a book so concerned with the ordinary, if not forthe comic and emotional payoffs...
...He surfaces first in the Pacific, where beachcombing Elaine attempts to rescue him...
...Critics who have lately declared that American literature is passing from an age of irony into an era of sentimentality may be confounded by Emmons' vision of Eureka...
...To set his plot in motion, the author plays a wild card, the eponymous Leon Meed...
...As the novel progresses, moreover, the cultural noise recedes and another element comes to the fore...
...Out for the reward, Shane drags him from a bar and tries to turn him in, but—poof!— Leon is gone...
...Some were almost beautiful...
...It fits neatly into neither category but partakes of the best of each...
...Joon-sup Kim, a dreadlocked Korean immigrant trying to shed his ethnicity, mixes environmental activism with excessive pot smoking...
...Joon-sup brings us to a rally to rescue migratory waterfowl: "Joon-sup had never seen one of these birds in the flesh, which was compelling evidence that something needed to be done to protect them...
...The piece gave him headaches, but he pressed on and finished it...
...Yet for all their oddities—hippieism, Wiccanism, Mormon conversion—Emmons' creations grapple with rather routine problems: romantic, behavioral, professional, or a combination of the three...
...Afterward, he found himself floating in the middle of the sea, in a nightclub, etc...
...Both young authors make their sharpest turns come at moments of romantic and sexual desperation...
...Neglected by her adulterous husband, schoolteacher and mother of two Elaine Perry succumbs to her principal's sexual coercion in order to keep her job...
...After 130 sculptures, a decade's labor, the project culminated in the molding of one last burl slab—his wife and daughter at sea, about to die...
...Martin Nemec, a Times-Standard reporter fresh from journalism school, discovers his confession and tracks down the people mentioned in it, believing he has a hot feature about mental illness on his hands...
...Lillith believes Leon to be imprisoned in the "Astral Plane" by the "Horned Consort" and conducts a ritual to bring him back down to Earth...
...Middle-aged Sadie Jorgenson, an overeating psychiatrist, simply can't get a date...
...The risk in this sort of writing is knowingness that drowns out the characters...
...Ten years earlier, his wife and daughter drowned during a whale-watching expedition, and he became consumed by grief...
...they inhabit, rather than embody, their stereotypes...
...The Loss of Leon Meed recalls Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, as the narrative pans from one character to the next during a recent December...
...She wanted them to frustrate the fans who wanted something out of the ordinary...
...Emmons' scheme closely resembles that of director Paul Thomas Anderson in his 1999 film Magnolia...
...Emmons' authorial voice is omniscient, intimate and consistently sympathetic...
...He also constructs set pieces that convey his ideas about "The Way We Live Now...
...Barry Klein, a public radio disk jockey, enables Emmons to probe with a sensitive satire the mind of a homosexual in the process of coming out of the closet...
...The author introduces about a dozen Eurekans at various loose ends, mostly strangers to one another, and assigns himself the task of providing them with hope, or at least a slightly better lot...
...Emmons, however, draws his Eurekans ungrudgingly...
...Leon himself is dead...
...Next he shows up soaking wet at the Derivative concert...
...By Christmas Eve, Shane is lighting houses on fire...
...And orthopedist Steve Baker's wife has left him because he spends too much time building balsa wood models of medieval cities...
...and thinks, "It was the band being perverse and frustrating their fans' expectations [with a song that simulates dolphins' clicking...
...Two reformed boozers, the Mormon Shane Larson and the black Prentiss Johnson, fall off the wagon—the former into fits of assault and spousal abuse, the latter merely into selfsabotage...
...Ditto for these Californians, the majority of whom belong to the generation that grew up during the region's post-1960s cultural hangover...
...Justifiably worried that the truth would sound crazy, all of them are reluctant to talk— except Shane, off the wagon again and back from a sojourn in Provo, Utah...
...The withholding of an explanation comes as a disappointment to the reader, but confusion effectively propels the rest of the novel...
...Restraining orders ensue, our heroes and heroines hesitantly begin sharing their stories about Leon, and are informed that he has left them each a lifesize burl of themselves...
...Some were amusing...
...hoping to locate a new outpost of the Gold Rush" founded Eureka, California...
...Eve sees a show by her favorite group, Derivative (ha...
...The last four words neatly nail the shuddered worldview of a certain breed of disaffected American adolescent...
...We meet four women with man troubles...
...He terrorizes the others to make them talk...
...A misnomer, it turned out: "There was nothing to extract from Eureka but dirt...
...He shifts them around like variables in a mathematical equation, and their troubles are gradually resolved through a gentle intertwining...
...In Eureka, being slightly strange is normal...
...He sees money in the story and wants apiece of the action when Martin sells it to a national tabloid...
...He has a lot in common with Sam Lipsyte, whose recent Home Land mined similar themes in suburban New Jersey...
...Lillith's eyes take in a fast-food kitchen: "It was hot in the cooking area and the milkshake machine behind them ground its way through a hundred pounds of frozen soybean crystals and strawberry extract in a successful cold fusion...
...After almost running Leon over, and then finding him in an endangered tree, Joon-sup seeks therapy and gives up getting high...
...Both orchestrate several emotional Crescendos simultaneously and use the supernatural to connect disparate plotlines...
...Anderson called his Midwesterners "grotesques," but allowed that they "were not all horrible...
...Emmons' wryly funny debut novel trams a panoramic camera on Eureka a century and a half after this letdown "from which the town never recovered...
...Greek for "I have found it"— upon discovering how to tell fool's gold from the real thing...
...His cast allows Emmons many opportunities for situation comedy...
...It doesn't matter to me anymore why this happened," Leon writes...
...Prentiss has sobered up, and Lillith has grown up—but she has kept up the witchcraft, believing her delivery of Leon back to the planet proved its truth...
...Disappointment remains the rule in a landscape that "slipped out of the California Dream...
...Part...
...Emmons lets the mystery of Leon's spontaneous vanishing and appearing hang in the air...
...On the male side, the dilemmas include substance abuse, identity crises and another broken marriage...
...Everything was equally delicious and nauseating...
...In his early 30s, Emmons impresses as a comic writer with a heavy but generous heart...
...For teenage Lillith Fielding, a practitioner of "neopagan" witchcraft who works at McDonald's, a lackluster sexual initiation yields an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion...
...IN Part III, Emmons flashes forward to a December 10 years down the road, and we learn that Leon's vanishing act had some decisive effects...
Vol. 88 • July 2005 • No. 4
