What's in a Name

...Darling, they’re fi ne names...

...No, but you picked names out of tragedies...

...Meanwhile, Tom’s once and future love, Audrey Limpkin, is forced to dress as a man to support her family— “disguised for the benefi t of those who fear change,” as she puts it in a letter to Tom...

...The almost supernatural pull of the Bedlam name, however, is the alwayspresent undercurrent in Tom Bedlam that becomes more pronounced as Tom’s frantic effort to oppose the Bedlam infl uence in his progeny only seems to further empower it...

...Even Tom’s pious mother, who refuses to embody the disquiet of her married name, develops a brain tumor that causes her to unwittingly abandon her turn-the-cheek blessings for less affectionate retorts...

...Arthur becomes so tough he decides to go fight the war his father despises...

...Tom names the boy to honor poor Arthur Pigeon and then immediately begins to fret that the designation might cause his son to be as socially awkward and vulnerable as his longdead namesake...

...Our Augusts may fumble iambic pentameter...

...Todderman,” she memorably greets her cruel boss one morning, “may the devil brand your backside with the face of your wife...

...In London my practice will be waiting for me: fat, old people ravaged by wealth, good living, infi delity, sloth, vanity and self-importance,” a classmate observes with improbable pride...

...The antiwar Chapel takes on the angry aura of an Alec Baldwin robbed by history of a Huffi ngtonPost login, his tongue rife with pithy takedowns of warmongers: “If patriotism could be removed as easily as tonsils, I’d work night and day, believe me...

...And when confronting Arthur’s murderer who has grown up to be Britain’s minister of war—well, yes, of course he has— “How many more men will die while you maneuver your political career...

...It’s not as though I named them Cain and Abel...

...Then there are the ho-hum condemnations of British militarism in the Boer War and World War I, clearly designed for modern resonance...

...Life, in other words, is, indeed, bedlam...

...Proving the maxim in a nonetoosubtle manner, Tom’s only true friend at school—Arthur Pigeon, a bird-named boy who walks very differently— is shortly thereafter heinously murdered by the popular scion of a well-connected, affl uent family...

...Simultaneously, the daughter who pursued acting much to Tom’s chagrin ends up in an absurdly popular “war protest revue...

...Like the poetry professor who wonders how the beefcake teenage quarterback in front of him could possibly be his offspring, Chapel is bewildered as his children morph into Bedlams...

...Ah, Mr...

...Our Charitys are not necessarily charitable...

...Perhaps it was the triumph-challenged surname...

...Young Arthur responds by adorning the soldiers with makeshift dresses...

...He certainly did...

...So when Tom fi nds Arthur playing with clothespin dolls, he burns them and forces the boy to play with toy soldiers...

...The chicken that walks differently from its neighbors is pecked...

...Chapel says...

...Couldn’t you have picked comedies...

...Or did circumstance, bad luck, and random malevolence simply rear its single, synergetic hydra head...

...We can dismiss such a contention as mysticism or a negative self-fulfi lling prophecy...

...I didn’t want to be molded...

...Surely society will not come crashing down because a woman adds sums as well as a man,” our superstar accountant-with-a-secret posits earnestly...

...Please tell me what mistake I made in your upbringing...

...The contradictions are intertwined with unintended consequences until Tom looks at the massive whole and realizes that, perhaps, his decision to “live with a backward eye, intent on repairing his past” ensured the very bedlam/Bedlam he sought to escape...

...We are all molded, darling, whether we like it or not...

...T-shirt and a “Savin’ It” bracelet...

...Malvolio...

...The minute you were born he set you on a course by giving you a name and walking out the door...

...One daughter takes to the Bible like her grandmother, another to the theater like her grandfather,” Tom laments...

...Once his schooling is over, Tom, believing the name Bedlam “probably wouldn’t inspire confi dence in a patient,” changes his name to Chapel, runs off to Africa with the daughter of his mentor (against the man’s wishes), sets up a medical practice, begins a family, and, for a time, experiences blissful peace...

...Bertram...

...We want these lads to have a destiny, don’t we...

...Unfortunately for the well-meaning Laments, the lives of their sons end as tragically as their literary forerunners...

...After all, Julia Lament may believe a child’s name “is his portal to the world,” but we cannot name our daughters Chastity and then assume they will proudly walk high school hallways wearing an “Abstinence Rocks...

...The fi rst time Tom meets his absentee, ne’er-do-well actorfather the man eats all the household porridge and pilfers his mother’s meager savings—from between the pages of her Bible, no less...

...And while playground mockery may be a certainty, even a Cornelius can receive a “D” in chemistry without any peripheral parental prodding and guidance...

...Thus, when Hagen chooses to title his fast-paced, life-spanning sophomore novel Tom Bedlam after a character who attempts (unsuccessfully) to evade the implications of his name by becoming Tom Chapel, and, further, introduces us to an infant called the Orfl ing (“part orphan, part changeling”) who refuses to age when his family forgets his name, it behooves readers to take note...

...Tom sends him to a prep school to toughen him up...

...When Emily succumbs to her illness, Tom appears destined to inherit the same chaotic life, and not much else, until a hitherto unknown, and well-off, grandfather suddenly appears offering to pluck Tom out of the factory and drop him into a private school...

...Howard looked incredulous...

...Shawn Macomber is currently at work on a book about global class warfare...

...On Tom’s fi rst day, a kindly professor advises: “The factory and the farm are similar my friend...

...And I shall soon resemble one of them...

...Then again, would you choose a doctor named Tom Bedlam as your primary care physician...

...It was in the newspapers every day...

...Here young Bedlam stokes the fi res at a porcelain factory a few feet away from his God-fearing mother, the mistreated and underappreciated fi gurine carver Emily Bedlam...

...When it becomes clear that the school authorities have no intention of conducting a good faith investigation of Tom’s foul-play claims, the young man reluctantly strikes a semi-Faustian bargain with the murderer’s father: his silence in exchange for medical school tuition...

...There is no more shocking case for Tom, however, than his son Arthur...

...Darling, the names in the tragedies have elegance, gumption, history...

...it was good versus evil and us versus them,” Hagen narrates...

...Before her convenient death— necessary for the reunion with the reformed cross-dressing love of his youth—Tom’s wife muses openly whether he shouldn’t have married her sister: “She would have molded you into a pillar of society,” Mrs...

...Steeped in Dickensian imagery, Tom Bedlam opens in Victorian London amongst the standard-issue tenement death traps and factories...

...Bottom...

...It was a seduction, a distraction, an entertainment and an addiction...

...My father never molded me...

...Settling into the well-worn ruts of other period novelists, Hagen colors his narrative with celebrations of social struggles gone by, and so only the boy from the tenement rises above the privileged order and immoral vacuity of the aristocracy-in-training...

...BY SHAWN MACOMBER Tom Bedlam A Novel by George Hagen Random House, 464 pp., $25.95 In a telling scene from George Hagen’s debut novel, The Laments (2004), Howard and Julia Lament argue over Howard’s Shakespeareinspired decision to christen the couple’s newborn twins Julius and Marcus...

...Thanks to our leaders, we are all savages again...

...Nevertheless, in fi ction, names frequently do matter in much the way the Laments hoped/feared...