TALES OUT OF SCHOOL

By Benjamin Taylor
Turtle Point Press (1995)

There is a reason why good first novels are rare. Writing a novel is tough, something like hooking bait on long strings attached to each of your fingers, and then trailing them all the way across a well-stocked, reed-stoked fish pond. Think of the pond as the novel's atmosphere, the bait as its characters, and the strings as its various plotlines. It takes practice to get it right. Unless the novelist is careful, somewhere on the way across that murky pond, a lot of important stuff can be lost.

In the case of "Tales Out Of School," it's the plot that doesn't make it to the far shore. In an attempt to create a dense weave of multiple story lines, Benjamin Taylor ends up merely pulling first on one string and then another while the rest sink to the bottom, taking the entire book with them.

"Tales" would be an ambitious project for a novelist of any level of experience. Taylor has picked turn-of-the-century Galveston Island, Texas, as his setting and the members of an immigrant Jewish beer-brewing family as his subjects. First-son Aharon Mehmel marries Lucy Pumphrey, a Catholic New Orleans heiress, forcing the loss of both her Catholicism and her inheritance. After the birth of their only son, Aharon contracts the early century equivalent of AIDS (pre-penicillin syphilis), and his wife must learn to both forgive and re-love him in the course of a now non-sexual marriage. As penance, Lucy forces Aharon to tap into the family fortune for the construction of one of Galveston's great palaces, against the will of his parents. And then, finally, Aharon perishes in a hurricane while attempting to protect the brewery, driving his father to a grief that turns quickly into madness.

Although readers might think I've ruined the novel by telling the entire plot and giving away the ending, I haven't. All of this takes place in the novel's first 38 pages. Taylor continues to pile it on: the homosexual experimentations of Aharon's teenage son, Lucy's attempts to revert to Catholicism, the arrival of a mysterious mute, puppet-making, Russian immigrant mystic, two bicycle mechanics trying to recreate the Wright Brothers' flight, the secret lives of Galveston Island's two lesbian lovers, the spiritual angst of the Mehmel family rabbi...all interspersed with flashbacks to the Old Country, obscure religious musings, and reprints of German songs and ancient Latin texts. Umberto Eco would have a ball with all of this, and would have taken us all on a good ride. But Eco's books are all strong of plot and Taylor's is not. These unrelated asides, interesting as they might be on their own, only serve to weigh "Tales" down and drag it to a halt.

In excerpt there seems no problem with the quality of Taylor's writing itself, which is thick and lush:

"Rabbi: literally, My Master. And there were days when Gernsbacher felt masterly. With the early sunshine in his eyes he would say: 'This morning am I God's good right arm.' But for such a spell of days, as if by an iron law, there came amputation from Him. It was the dreamlike feeling of not being able to flee. There was the wide quietness that was all in all; there was only that. The world was beautiful, yes, but no longer gestured beyond itself. It was just the world; it was no longer Creation: it was uncreated; it was nature. Such thoughts led always to the wisdom of Jacob's wife: Curse God and die. Tucked into Scripture, there it had lurked down all the centuries. Way not to be Jewish anymore. Curse God and die."

In a longer, more time-graceful book one would call this elegant and engrossing. But in a novel as short as "Tales" (283 of those itty-bitty pages publishers are getting more and more fond of producing), the writing seems ponderous, a man trying to talk with a mouth full of too many words, and sometimes gets in the way.

At the end of these "new writes" reviews, one is supposed to give an opinion of this writer's future. I won't make a prediction, but if Taylor writes a second book, I'd give it a look. "Tales Out Of School" was a grand reach, a little too grand for Taylor's present skills. He has a lot to say. There is some indication that he will find better ways to say it.