{"id":525,"date":"2016-10-07T19:12:43","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T23:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sewerlid.com\/?p=525"},"modified":"2016-10-08T00:22:14","modified_gmt":"2016-10-08T04:22:14","slug":"review-of-einsteins-beach-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/2016\/10\/07\/review-of-einsteins-beach-house\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cAn ordinary kind of wonderful\u201d \u2014 A Review of Jacob M. Appel\u2019s Einstein\u2019s Beach House <\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"appel-jacob-einsteins-beach-house-cover\"<\/a>
\n\u201cThat year Lizzie\u2019s kid sister kept a list of things that were funny when they happened to other people: tarring and feathering, Peeping Toms, mad cow disease.\u201d Like the list that opens Einstein\u2019s Beach House<\/em>, the synopses of the eight stories that make up Jacob M. Appel<\/a>\u2019s collection are humorous from a distance \u2014 a couple adopts a depressed hedgehog; a former ventriloquist helps his girlfriend kidnap a tortoise from her ex-husband\u2019s house; a woman has an affair with the father of her daughter\u2019s imaginary friend \u2014 but become more insidious up close. In the title story, for instance, after a tourist guidebook incorrectly lists his family home as the former beach house of Albert Einstein, Bryce Scragg cleans it up a bit, decorates with a blackboard of equations and a fetal pig in a jar, and begins offering tours of the cottage \u2014 for a twenty-five dollar fee \u2014 much to the chagrin of his wife and the amusement of his daughters (the eldest of whom narrates the story). When a tourist inquires as to how they came to own the cottage \u2014 which Natalie, the narrator, informs the reader has been in her family for four generations \u2014 her father says that he bought it from Einstein\u2019s niece. The goofiness of Bryce\u2019s get-rich-quick scheme soon takes a chilling turn, however, when an older woman knocks on their door claiming to be Einstein\u2019s niece and sole heir, forcing the family to vacate their home and to question the things they thought they knew about their lives and their place in the world.<\/p>\n

These tales of domestic oddities demonstrate an instinct for withholding rather than the sensationalization so common in contemporary works vying for the attentions of distracted readers. It is always clear how Appel\u2019s pieces could be taken farther. Einstein\u2019s \u201cniece\u201d could continue to haunt the family, as opposed to being regulated to the status of a peculiar, never-again-spoken-of event. Or, in \u201cHue and Cry,\u201d which follows thirteen-year-old Lizzie and her best friend\/crush Julia as they spy on a sex offender who recently moved into the neighbourhood, the perversity, in another writer\u2019s hands, would likely be made explicit. Instead, Appel allows his stories to play out with subtlety. As such, this collection may come across as understated to some readers. The prose isn\u2019t particularly poetic or colourful, and it lacks the urgent uniqueness that some readers, like myself, look for in a novel or story collection. The use of clich\u00e9d phrases throughout the collection \u2014 \u201cI regretted the words as soon as they left my tongue\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m not sure what finally drove me to the edge,\u201d for example \u2014 is also off-putting, as it takes the reader out of the story. Further, there is a lack of variation, though it is difficult to pin-point. The narrative point-of-view does change from piece to piece \u2014 sometimes first person, sometimes third; sometimes male, sometimes female; young, old \u2014 but the contexts of the perspectives do not vary widely. Certainly some pieces are more absurd than others (or their characters are more open to experiencing absurdity), but there is a persistent domestic quality that the stories and their characters cannot seem to escape. It is not quite a suburban environment, simply a restrained one. The third story, \u201cStrings,\u201d which follows a rabbi whose ex-boyfriend requests to borrow her pulpit for a concert of 400 cellos, concludes with the sentence \u201cshe wrapped her arms around his chest … secure in the knowledge that life\u2019s greatest triumphs and calamities were safely behind her.\u201d This closed-off ending, all wrapped up with a bow, so to speak, leaves the reader without any curiosity as to how the characters\u2019 lives might continue beyond the story.<\/p>\n

The majority of the pieces focus on familial units and the concept of home. This thematic consistency creates cohesion within the collection, but I also found myself hoping for at least one story with more of a sideways approach. What is interesting is that some of the characters are aware of this domesticality. The narrator of \u201cThe Shared Hostage\u201d tries to nudge the \u2018hostage\u2019 towards a life of freedom while still acknowledging his own inability to reach complete freedom and honesty with his girlfriend. Leslie in \u201cParacosmos\u201d may or may not be imagining that she is in an adulterous relationship, not so much breaking the monotony of her stay-at-home-mom existence as living out the possibilities of unreality extant within a domestic sphere. Appel doesn\u2019t appear to aim for bigness, for a summary of all of human nature, which is simultaneously the collection\u2019s strength and weakness. The collection misses an expansive quality, the moment when a story opens up and reveals something, not necessarily something life changing, but something that changes the reader if only for a moment; tints their metaphorical vision. Particularly in the first three pieces (\u201cHue and Cry,\u201d \u201cLa Tristesse Des H\u00e9rissons,\u201d and \u201cStrings\u201d), the restraint of the language creates a feeling of confinement and stasis. At the same time, there are many other contemporary works that attempt to achieve expansive moments, but only succeed in trying too hard. Appel never does this; his stories never try too hard to be what they are not. In \u201cThe Rod of Asclepius,\u201d \u201cParacosmos,\u201d and the title story especially there is never a sense of falsification. There are no blockbuster shocks or surprises or convoluted plots, yet the stories still manage to resist predictability. Some may say, \u201cno risk, no reward.\u201d But patience and withholding can bring their own reward. Appel mixes his instinct to withhold with the everyday absurdity of life to create generally successful stories of forgiveness and the ongoing tensions of the passage of time, of knowing and not knowing and of wanting to know but ultimately being unable to know.<\/p>\n

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Appel, Jacob M. Einstein\u2019s Beach House: Stories<\/em>. Pressgang, 2014. 179 pages.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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ERIN DELLA MATTIA<\/strong> is a writer, researcher, and almost-graduate of Ryerson University\u2019s Literatures of Modernity MA program. Her work has appeared on Rookie Mag<\/a><\/em> and The Word on the Street Blog<\/a><\/em>, among other places, and her creative essay “Zine Culture and the Embodied Community of Rookie Mag<\/a>” was published as part of Ryerson’s Stories in Play Initiative<\/em> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThat year Lizzie\u2019s kid sister kept a list of things that were funny when they happened to other people: tarring and feathering, Peeping Toms, mad cow disease.\u201d Like the list that opens Einstein\u2019s Beach House, the synopses of the eight… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":620,"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions\/620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sewerlid.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}