Two Novels by Brandon Hobson

How do you lose a child to gun violence and expect to return to a normal way of life? This was the question I struggled with the most. My son was a victim. The officer who shot him--now retired--lived in our town, and there were many sleepless nights when I wanted to drive to his house and kill him myself. I wanted to hit him as hard as I could, so that he could feel pain. Yes, yes, I have always known grief is difficult and that forgiveness takes many years. I still haven't learned to completely forgive. I could only put it in the will of the Great Spirit.

I have reread Brandon Hobson's excellent novel, The Removed, so that I might teach it in the spring. I think--or hope--that it will hit the sweet spot for students: a book that is challenging in ideas, sometimes in prose, but mostly is made up of a kind of plain but sophisticated everyday language. It resonates, too, with topics that are on the mind of students today, like police violence, which it places in the context of the larger history of Indian Removal and dispossession. The story centers on the Echota family, whose son Ray-Ray was shot a decade prior by a cop. They take in a young foster boy, Wyatt, whose eerie similarity to Ray-Ray seems to reverse father Ernest's creeping Alzheimer's. Another son, Edgar, is lost in a fantastical "Darkening Land" of addiction and suicide, and where a sinister friend threatens to turn him into the bounty for an Indian-hunting game. What will students make, I wonder, of the book's mixture of realism and fantasy, and its refusal to cohere into something logical and explainable?

One thing I had a greater appreciation of this time around is the way that Hobson weaves the various timelines and narratives together. There are four third person narrators--mother Maria, sister Sonja, Edgar, and the legendary Cherokee rebel Tsala--and the story of each is punctured with visions and epiphanies in which the others seem to break through. This complicates, for example, the story of Wyatt, whom we are otherwise willing to believe is only strangely similar to the dead Ray-Ray. But when Wyatt's stories prove to have a kind of oracular insight, it becomes clear that we must take seriously the belief that Wyatt is Ray-Ray resurrected. I can already hear the students now--Well, is he?--but the answer, of course, is that he is and he isn't, that Hobson gives us a kind of Schrodinger's cat whose waveform threatens to collapse if you look too closely. This matters because the novel wants to give us models of resurrection and return that are larger than the realm of the materially possible. What "the removed" search for is not a literal return to Cherokee homelands--not in this book anyway--but some other kind of restitution or redemption that is not one-for-one. The last image of the book, with the family gathered for a memorial bonfire, watching a mysterious figure approach, underlines this nicely: is it Edgar? Wyatt? Tsala? Or somehow Ray-Ray himself? Yes, Hobson suggests, yes, yes, and yes.

The instances when Milton would wake in the middle of the night feeling like he was suffering in a bed of putrefaction, his dreams digested and visible as the glow of the school in flames, he could smell the sour gunpowder and dead bodies lying in pools of blood, their foreheads marked with the number of the beast while the rest of the students cried out in a panic, yet all he could hear were the voices of the dead buried in the land all around, rising out of their graves and asking him for an account of his decision to shoot and kill, and for the remainder of the night his sleep was restless and uneasy, full of their shrieking voices and hollow moans, because he worried about bearing the weight of all that guilt. In his notebook for English class, Milton had written down the following quote from Shakespeare: "Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind."

Hobson's new novel, The Devil is a Southpaw, opens with a note that the author has received a manuscript in the mail from a former classmate, or cellmate, having both been institutionalized in a juvenile detention facility long ago. The manuscript, which makes up the bulk of the book itself--very 19th century--is a novel with the same name by Milton Muleborn, and it draws on those experiences at the facility, which it describes as a kind of phantasmagoria of demons, witches, and sinister captors. Much of the novel focuses on Matthew Echota (the same last name as the characters of The Removed), a fellow student-inmate who, we're told, is the most intelligent and talented of them all, a gift for which he is sometimes praised by the prison guards, and sometimes isolated and brutally tortured. We intuit quickly that the author, Milton, is and has always been deeply jealous of Matthew, who it seems not only has a kind of artistic genius that Milton lacks or feels himself to lack, but who also had been dating his ex-girlfriend. Milton's jealousy and enmity toward Matthew is of the kind that only very similar people can share--both are sensitive, artistic, writerly souls trapped inside the harshness of the juvenile detention center--to the extent that part of me wondered if the two wouldn't prove to be the same person in the end.

Milton's detention center is a strange and frightening place, where a mysterious woman paints skulls at night and a freakish Dr. Strangelove type rules with an iron fist. Its cruelty verges on the fantastical, and the swamp that surrounds it seems to be filled with creatures and spirits. Parts of it, of course, are recognizable, drawn no doubt from the same experiences supporting troubled youth that inform The Removed and Where the Dead Sit Talking: the rancid food and forced isolation, the stultifying effects of institutionalization of childhood creativity. But in Milton's telling, these aspects become heightened into pure dreamland horror: the novel moves toward a shared escape, in which Matthew and Milton move through a literal underworld where they encounter, among other things, the spirit of Salvador Dali to guide them.

To me, the most interesting thing about The Devil is a Southpaw is the prose. I wonder how people will take Milton's Grand Guignol-isms, his general wordiness and clumsiness. To me, I thought this was all very recognizable. Though Milton is supposed to have written this novel as an adult, I recognized in it something I see often: the language of a talented and creative teenager who has limited control over his style and vocabulary. It's not supposed to be "bad," per se, but the language here is meant, perhaps, to show the fine degree of difference that separates the genius and talent of Matthew--who, as we learn, grows up to be an acclaimed but trouble painter--and the mere creativity of someone like Milton.

I can tell you that reading the prose of teenagers reorders your brain, and after a while you must take a break from it to regain clarity; I felt the same thing while reading The Devil is a Southpaw. It's a bold move, to write a book in prose that is ostensibly flawed in the same ways as its narrator. To me, the voice works as a reflection of Milton. What it means in the end for the novel as a whole is another matter--though Hobson make some gestures at other voices--a second half written by Milton in a more sober, reflective mode, and an interview with the adult Echota--but I walked away thinking that it all remained too claustrophobic in the end. There's really no getting around or outside of it--and maybe that's the point.