The Body of Jonah Boyd
By David Leavitt, Bloomsbury, 2004

Warning sirens should go off whenever one encounters a novel that uses Freudian psychology as a primary theme. The field of psychology, as I understand it, has largely discarded the Freudian approach, and it’s bad enough that literary and art historical criticism insist on keeping the outmoded theories alive. But when old Sigmund makes an appearance in a mainstream novel, it’s time to put up one’s guard. Fortunately, Freudian theory gets lost in David Leavitt’s The Body of Jonah Boyd; beyond a few stabs at fetishization and a couple of Oedipal/Electra situations, there’s not much that holds together in terms of a coherent Freudian theme. Unfortunately, there’s not much else that holds together in this little mess of a novel, either.

The novel’s storyline revolves around a Thanksgiving dinner in 1969 at the home of Dr. Ernest Wright, a professor of psychology at a small but prestigious liberal arts college in California. Attending the dinner are Dr. Wright and his family - his prickly wife, Nancy; his flighty daughter, Daphne; and his obnoxious son and budding writer, Ben - as well as a pair of Wright’s graduate students. Also invited is Wright’s secretary, Judith “Denny” Denham, with whom Wright is having an affair and with whom Nancy Wright plays four-handed piano every Saturday. The special guests of the day are Nancy’s old friend, Anne, and her new husband, Jonah Boyd, a celebrated author who is nearly finished with the manuscript for his new book. Before the holiday is over, Boyd’s manuscript is lost, and three decades worth of painstaking exposition begins.

Although wrapped in the trappings of a family saga, Leavitt’s novel is really about one character - Ben Wright - and his confrontation with the ideas of creativity and authorship. Everything else, including the entire Wright family and even Jonah Boyd and his novel, feels cobbled together; the entire framework of the novel rumbles like an unwieldy machine designed only to provide an explanation for a single, unremarkable notion. One unlikely coincidence follows another, one unbelievable relationship after another takes an inexplicable turn, and almost all of the characters drift in and out of the plot, contributing very little. When Ben Wright expresses his opinion that coincidences in literature are acceptable if they move the plot along toward a destination which it would reach anyway, one is not moved to accept the comment as a clever, self-referential bit of metafiction; rather, one gets the impression that Leavitt is self-conscious (and perhaps a little guilty) about the massive contrivance he is attempting to foist upon his readers.

The novel’s narrator, Denny Denham, is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the rickety structure of the book. She is almost completely peripheral to the plot, and she exists, until the novel’s incredible conclusion, merely as an observer. Her links to the Wright family - her job as Ernest’s secretary, her affair with him, her pseudo relationship with Nancy - are, without exception, insignificant, undeveloped and unnecessary and only serve as a rationale for her presence in the household. She might as well have been a random homeless person that Nancy Wright invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Again, Leavitt hints at remorse over attempting such clumsy trickery; Ben says to Denny, late in the book, “You were never really involved in any of it, were you? You were just - I don’t know - there. On the sidelines.”

Denny is not the only character who is only just “there.” Ernest Wright, the ostensible patriarch and driving force behind the family, is nothing but an apparition. He pops in occasionally to make a regal comment and drop a little Freudian reference or two, but he never really means anything. Jonah Boyd, too, is irrelevant, except as far as he’s required to have written a book and to have somehow delivered a manuscript into the plot.

The novel’s conclusion is the final straw, as it were. I’ll not reveal the yoga-like twists that Leavitt utilizes to sum up the story, just in case any potential readers are still susceptible to surprise by the time they reach the final pages. Suffice it to say that the ultimate contortion is not unlike the inept resolution of Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary, and the gimmick works as unspectacularly here as it does in Palahniuk’s novel. It is fitting that Leavitt should borrow techniques from Palahniuk, because Leavitt, too, has written a novel that is, one assumes, meant to be a sly commentary on the moral ambiguity lurking beneath the facade of American societal normalcy. But both Leavitt and Palahniuk have written novels populated with characters that are alien and awkward (even, one might argue, deviant), and one gets the sense that neither author would recognize normalcy if it whacked him on the posterior.

Copyright 2004 Ad Media Inc.