Lives Made of Myths

...Despite his finally living in the City, the civic-minded metropolis of his dreams, he is still not where he wants to be...

...Gabe takes advantage of the neighborhood's unlocked doors and breaks into homes simply to try them on for size: "Looking at myself in other people's mirrors, the world was my diorama: Early Gabriel I with PinkPony Hairbrush on Dragonfly Drive...

...Although the instruction is well taken—if a little unnecessary—Gabe’s triumph can only be as moving as his struggle was effectively portrayed...

...the black-andgold birds were her thoughts whirling in the air around her...

...There is a whiff of “or does he...

...contributor, "Salon" Creation myths are themselves born—sometimes of necessity, sometimes of comfort or convenience...

...I could see that I was getting taller in other people's mirrors, house after house...

...A "small, dreamy, very nervous, boy" with a "sad brown bear of a father," Gabe's guiding creation myth is traced to the time directly preceding papa bear's departure from the family home in the fictional town of Bishop, Massachusetts...

...The sky did fall...

...The voice is selfself-aware, a post-self-conscious examination of an all too examined existence...

...Once upon a time, the big money guys who made the city believed they were gods, and they built their enormous banks here, a stone’s throw from where their ships came in, in the style of Greek temples, or what they thought Greek temples were...

...Gabe himself is our only conduit to Gabedom, but he makes a quizzically remote companion...

...Early Gabriel II on Locust Lane...

...More than anything in the world, I wanted that to happen to me...

...She was so beautiful...

...It is during this middle section that D’Erasmo’s engaging prose and fine, descriptive luster falter under the burden of Gabe’s inscrutable slouch toward selfhood...

...this is why I do what I do...

...Her eyes were closed...

...THE CENTRAL and largest part of the novel follows Gabe’s adult life in New York City...

...They called it "the City": "Once the City was built, it often stayed up, winding into the dining room and bordering the kitchen, for months...

...The middle-aged narrator of Stacey D'Erasmo's third novel presents the first of his own series of creation myths in response to the query, "When did I first stumble into the wrong grove...

...The increasingly enigmatic Caroline leads her brother into a bog and up a tree, where she fashions herself into a human birdfeeder: "They seemed to arrive so suddenly that I might have said they emerged from her hair, that the end of her black hair had turned into small black birds with yellow wings, but of course that isn't true...

...the glimmers of magical realism preceding it pool into a sort of white rabbit hole through which our hero slips...

...Gabe’s office is on Wall Street, where he draws perverse pleasure from passing as a bean counter: “I worked in ruins...

...Our City was American, civic-minded happily functional...

...the answer is a challenge to the reader's discernment...

...That's the kind of kid I was...

...He urges the reader to pause and contemplate the unsuspected depths and heights that make up an ordinary person like him, your subway seatmate on any given day...

...Looming largest is the memory of crafting a wrapping paper and cardboard tube Xanadu under the Christmas tree with his older sister Caroline...

...are tatted, sometimes less than comfortably, onto the mythical swaths enrobing his account of an otherwise profoundly earthbound life...

...The twin towers are down, and D’Erasmo effortlessly conjures a Rome sent staggering but not yet fallen...

...Gabe’s illness wanes and then intensifies during his time with the bizarre group in the Mexican desert, culminating in a pseudosacrificial death and psychosexual epiphany that will test the mettle of even D’Erasmo’s believers...

...Gabe wants life to happen to him, and while his refusal to participate in the process may be a common enough affliction in the modern male, it can make for tough going in a male protagonist/narrator...

...When she said it, I really thought it was true...

...Before Gabe leaves for college in Arizona, a pivotal encounter occurs...

...Stoking that era for its remaining flickers of idyll, Gabe follows his opening query with a portrait of unimpeachable childhood security: Nestled in his home, his mother reads Ovid's Metamorphoses to him in bed while his father fiddles in the garage...

...The gods had chosen her, they had changed her, they were changing her before my eyes...

...Gabe discovers he has a life-threatening illness and, rather than succumb to a radical course of treatment, he runs off to Mexico, ostensibly to find his itinerant father...

...The Prologue and closing chapter suggest the novel’s last and most consequential creation myth is that Gabe has returned from the underworld transformed...

...Early Gabriel III on Cicada Court...

...this is where it all went wrong for me...

...Along with this comes the fringe benefit of letting men blow him in the bus station bathroom...

...Brewster, Florida, is described as a kickstandofatown—certainly not a place to stand on your own— and it is here that 11 - year-old Gabe begins, as the adults say, "acting out...

...By the time a heat-seeking plot curve is launched our way, it suggests too much, too late...

...Her arms were their branches...

...Narrative boons in life and in art, they are buoys we locate in our wake, retrocharting our course: This is when we fell in love...

...Initially this is a sensitive, pre-teen version of rebellion...

...too often the insistent mythical imagery seems to stand in for intricate character or structural development...

...My mother seemed not to notice anything out of the ordinary about it, as if everyone had one in the living room: Turkish families would have minarets in theirs, Japanese families would make theirs with footbridges...

...His obsession with the Brooklyn house is elaborately drawn and yet not well understood...

...editor, "From the Notebook...

...The question, posed by narrator Gabriel Collins, is rhetorical and recurring...

...His earliest remembered identity is that of an angel: "Gabriel, my mother used to say...

...When the financial strain of his father's abandonment causes Gabe's mother to take a motel management position in Florida and move her children south, the Bishop home—and the multitudes it contained—ascend to mythic status in the child's mind...

...to this last segment of the novel...

...At college he re-creates himself as a punk-bohemian artist, pals up with a whimsical, tragical painter named Sarah, and compulsively collects “interesting junk” for “elaborate pop-up apocalyptic landscape” dioramas...

...Coping a little more materially, he starts selling drugs, hoarding his returns with the vague intention of reappropriating the Bishop house and climbing the umbilical cord of the Eastern Seaboard to burrow back into it...

...D’Erasmo takes her metaphors of longing and transformation as far as they will go and then some, relying heavily on a particularly avian subset of Ovidian imagery to add dimension and spiritual animation to a character whose default mode is a backward-keening inertia...

...Although Gabe is not strictly unreliable, he reveals deficits of character and candor we are meant to pocket and retrieve along the way...

...Gabe would rather spy on Brewster than live in it, he decides—a kind of existential coping mechanism that will follow him well into adulthood...

...It is the opening line of The Sky Below, an Ovidinspired metaphysically inclined take on the elusive nature of identity...

...Gabe’s amorphous sexuality and the squishy interplay posited between orgasm and rebirth (“At night, I lay in my bed, stroking, and became other things, making my way around my own personal zodiac...

...My angel...

...At age 37, he is an obituary writer at a once venerable, now flailing lower Manhattan paper...

...Indifferent to his loaded, devoted boyfriend Janos, Gabe moonlights as a ghostwriter for a wilted pulp romance queen and obsesses over purchasing the home of a black family in a rapidly gentrifying section of Brooklyn...

...I took on a glow...

...Caroline and I stepped gingerly around it, not tumbling any of its buildings or houses...

...this is how I finally became who I am...

...She had become something else...

...She was elsewhere...

...Particularly with the addition of post-9/11 New York, one begins to long for less bald thematic ambition and glittery set-piece work and more old-fashioned narrative propulsion...

...her hair was their nest...

...He also discovers girls—or, more accurately, girls discover him, and throw his idea of himself into relief: "I couldn't have been all the things she said I was, but I suspected that maybe I was a few of them...

...I only wish I knew him better...

...Describing his experience of 9/11 to Malcolm X, a woman he meets on the postapocalyptic commune where he ends up, Gabe says, “Secretly, I think the world did end that day...