'The Way Through Doors' by Jesse Ball
BOOK REVIEW
A challenging web of stories-within-stories leaves a reader fulfilled.
Jesse Ball's "The Way Through Doors" is a lovely, unpretentious little thing -- about as promising and sweet as a second novel can be. It's an odd book, but so was Ball's first one, the experimental detective novel "Samedi the Deafness." He appears dedicated to writing odd books.
"The Way Through Doors" concerns Selah Morse, a young pamphleteer, who bows to the needs of adulthood and asks his uncle for a job. He ends up in the Seventh Ministry, a mysterious New York City department whose authority is "both unlimited and non-existent."
It's a strange and inexplicable place, not unlike the novel itself. Selah's business suits, supplied by the ministry, are like those made for the Albanian secret police. At one point, Rita, the ministry's message girl, serves him a cup of slightly poisoned tea. "I had decided to . . . give you the antidote every day so that you would be forced to obey me," she says. Then she changes her mind.
But does this really happen, or is it just a story Selah tells? Selah, after all, is an unreliable narrator. He's telling stories to help a mysterious girl, Mora Klein, who's lost her memory in a taxi cab accident. If Mora falls asleep, it could cause her irreparable harm. As Selah talks, he searches for clues to her identity.
Conventional novels require a bit of tidiness in their emotional arcs. Raskolnikov kneels at the crossroads; Scout Finch realizes that sometimes mere decency can be heroic. At the same time, forcing consciousness into neat little boxes is like squishing live fish through a garlic press. Here's where experimental fiction comes in: by finding ways to depict what it actually feels like to be alive, human and confused.
Yet talking about experimental fiction is difficult, partly because it's the nature of such work to make frames of reference go kablooey. But also, much of it is so self-indulgent that even referring to it can feel embarrassing -- like commenting on tragically bad behavior at a dinner party. Too often, I feel that experimental novelists are shirking their artistic duty. I never feel this way about Ball.
Selah tells stories nestled inside stories. He'll start one, then a character in that story will start another, and so on. It's like Hamlet's mousetrap reimagined as a Russian nesting doll, only without the Dane's sullen anger. When Selah and Mora start turning up in the stories-within-stories, it makes a kind of deeply satisfying emotional sense. And there's an odd wisp of deliberate kindness throughout the book, like the smell of roses.
