Daniel Wallace made a splash almost 20 years ago with “Big Fish,” which introduced one of modern Southern literature’s most unforgettable, and sometimes exasperating, father figures.
The title refers to the enigmatic Edward Bloom, a Homeric hero (at least in his own tall tales) and damaged dad searching for meaning during his life's final chapter. "Extraordinary Adventures," Wallace's latest, features another exasperated son struggling to connect with a dying parent and revisits many of the debut novel's questions about identity and personal veracity. Its hesitant protagonist Edsel Bronfman could be Bloom's antithesis, less a big fish and more a timid tadpole stuck in a mud puddle.
“He was a man who was overlooked by everyone, maybe because he had been standing in one place for such a very long time.”
Like Ford Motor Company’s notorious marketing flop in the early 1960s, Bronfman’s gawky body seems poorly constructed — never mind that the name “Edsel” means “nobility.” The shy 34-year-old shipping clerk mostly keeps to himself at King’s Manor, a crummy Birmingham, Alabama, apartment complex wedged between a freeway and a dog pound.
Fate intervenes via a telemarketing call. Bronfman beams to learn that he’s “won” a weekend getaway to tour time-share condos in Destin, Florida. However, the incredible offer will be void if he can’t lock down a plus-one for the trip. Which might be difficult: It’s been three years since Bronfman’s last date and nearly two decades since his first and only hookup with a high-school crush.
Though he keeps a tight grip on the novel’s overtones of magical realism, Wallace tests the limits of credibility when we learn that Bronfman isn’t sure if he ever lost his virginity. The character is already a walking anachronism. “Like a vegetarian living on a pig farm, Bronfman felt misplaced in the twenty-first century.” He doesn’t trust the digital world, “where people actually advertised themselves like automobiles or sofas.”
Still, what single, white-collar city-dweller these days has neither a smartphone nor home computer?
On his mother’s 70th birthday, Bronfman brings her a pair of battery-powered heated socks and a bottle of scotch. He finds mud-covered Muriel in the backyard “investigating the cycle of life,” she says, digging up a beloved family pet killed by a car 25 years ago.
Though she claims to be on death’s doorway, the vivacious Muriel injects needed life into the novel, which helps counterbalance the protagonist’s diffidence. It turns out that bashful Bronfman resulted from an encounter with a stranger named Roy (another word rooted in royalty). Muriel played the role of accidental mom ironically, as if pretending to be something else altogether. Bronfman recalls how “she looked exactly like the kind of single mother who would sleep with your husband.”
Their stressed relationship becomes more complicated when Muriel is diagnosed with dementia, forcing Bronfman to hire a sitter to keep her from wondering off.
The triangle of his meager life (work, home, mother) soon morphs into a lopsided polygon. Eager to score a date to Destin, he strikes up an awkward courtship with his building’s receptionist, Shelia, who passes workdays by mentally assigning animals to workers in the lobby. Bronfman, she decides, is a giraffe, the largest ruminant.
When his apartment is robbed, Bronfman flirts up Serena, the tomboyish police officer assigned to the case, as well as Coco, a suspected burglar. Bronfman steers clear of the complex’s shady element after a chance encounter with a pistol-packing midget in his neighbor’s bathroom.
Clues to Bronfman’s arrested development are revealed via flashbacks. In Muriel’s house, Bronfman ponders how the flowers and logs in the gas fireplace are fake but convincingly real. “The fire itself flickered identically to the fire of 30 years ago, through the same prefabricated knotholes, as if there were some realities that could be repeated over and over without modification forever. In some ways, Bronfman had modeled his life on that fire.”
We’re told that Bronfman has “some sort of condition that wouldn’t allow him to say anything that might improve his position in the world.”
The novel provides scattered clues to the character’s dysfunction, mostly Freudian implications that boozy Muriel must be to blame.
Meanwhile, Shelia’s quirks suggest she may have mental issues even deeper than his. As their budding relationship develops, Wallace takes pleasure in toying with the tropes of romantic comedy. A flirty moment reminiscent of “La La Land” finds the misfit couple surveying Birmingham from a secluded hilltop. Bronfman daydreams about revisiting the spot in 50 years, both of them “old and a little crazy,” and taking a geriatric lover’s leap together.
Like “Big Fish,” “Extraordinary Adventures” weighs the benefits of truth-telling in close relationships and the less desirable effects of American mythmaking. As much as we love to root for underdogs, the late-bloomer Bronfman inspires more eye rolls than empathy as he fumbles to evolve.
An inversion of Thurber’s Walter Mitty, Bronfman dreams up exotic alternative lives for people he meets. He pictures shiftless Tommy as an outdoorsman who could survive being left in a jungle. Butch beat-cop Serena becomes a different person when he imagines her wearing a blouse and skirt.
Yet Bronfman finds it harder to conjure different versions of himself, at least initially. A vision of the beach trip does inspire him to join a local YMCA and make other profound changes to kick-start his stalled life. “It’s what he was looking for every day of his life, in a larger sense of the word, and what he suspected everyone was looking for: definition, the answer to who you are.”
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FICTION
‘Extraordinary Adventures’
By Daniel Wallace
St. Martin’s
$26, 336 pages
