The Baltimore Boys by Joel Dicker is a novel in which The Sorrows of Young Werther meets Sidney Sheldon, a sentence I’ve been looking forward to writing ever since I read this book, way back in May. A story of family rivalry, young love, exceptional achievement, loyalty, idealism and tragedy it’s a sort of male coming-of-age saga set in Baltimore, Florida, New Jersey and New York. It reminded me of the big, chunky novels I used to hoover up as a teenager, all angst and money and fame, but it has a bit more literary panache. Not a great deal more, but definitely a bit. I enjoyed it very much and am typing this feeling guilty, as I really should have reviewed it a lot sooner.
If you’ve seen it around you’ll know it’s a real doorstep of a novel, clocking in at 450 pages plus in hardback. It took me a little over three weeks due to my grumpy dry eyes and this was so depressing at the time that I put the book in my to-review pile and didn’t manage to get around to writing about it all summer. I read Joel Dicker’s first novel, The Truth About the Harry Quebec Affair (which was a monster hit) in about three days a few years back, and this is, I think, a better book. It’s a lot less reliant on showy tricks and devices and uses its preoccupations in a more coherent way. Intriguingly, though, it focuses on the same male narrator – bestselling author Marcus Goldman – and digs deeper into his family history, gradually revealing the details of a tragedy in his youth that rocked his extended family.
So, when the story begins, we’re the present day in Florida, with Goldman coming to his second home in Florida suffering from writers’ block. Imagine his surprise when he finds that living nearby is his first love, Alexandra Neville, who is now an international pop superstar. Seeing Alexandra again awakens painful memories in Goldman concerning a tragedy (that will be much trailered, have patience) and we return with him to the past and his late childhood. Marcus’s youth was defined by a rivalrous split in his family between his father and his uncle. The Baltimore Goldmans, headed up by the patriarch Saul Goldman, a rich and successful lawyer, live a life of big houses, fancy vacations and preferential treatment by Marcus’s grandparents. His own Montclair-based family seems humiliatingly ordinary by comparison and at any opportunity Marcus jumps ship to spend time with the high achievers. He longs to be a part of their gilded tribe and to leave his own, lowlier, background behind.
But all is not as perfect with the Baltimore Goldmans as it may first appear. Marcus’s cousin, Hillel is an annoying smartie-pants, a perilous combination of precocious intellect and weedy body, who is constantly bullied at school. His parents despair of finding him an education that he’ll survive, until that is, Woody joins the family. Woody is a young offender who’s received help and guidance from Uncle Saul, and who can’t really find a place to live contentedly either. He and Hillel become firm friends, and Woody uses his superior muscle power to protect him in the playground. This dynamic changes everything, and Uncle Saul and his family pretty much adopt Woody from then on. Marcus loves them both, and visits whenever he can, subsuming himself into their friendship and, with his usual self-conscious awareness of moments when life and art coincide, naming them The Goldman Gang.
Woody’s going to be a sports star, Hillel some kind of genius and Marcus doesn’t know yet what he’ll do but it’s going to be impressive, he’s determined about that. So what ruins this perfect state of affairs? A girl, of course. Alexandra moves in next door to Hillel and Woody and all three fall for her. Cue angst, betrayal and disaster.
The novel takes a long time and drives you round the houses a lot, through numerous time zones, until the denouement is finally reached. But I really like Dicker’s writing style, which is easy and unpretentious, heart-felt without being sentimental. I get very impatient with stories that take a long time to go anywhere, it’s a critical weakness of mine, but I was never impatient with this. He is an author who’s good at creating a world, and what works especially well in this novel is the way that Marcus’s perspective – agog all the time at his amazing relatives and obsessed with achievement – becomes in some ways what this novel is about. Youthful idealisation is the key to the story and the reason why Marcus is the last person to understand what’s happening around him.
There’s something about this novel that gives it an odd throwback feel to me, though the books it reminds me of almost all used to be written by women (Sidney Sheldon being the exception that sprang to mind). I saw a very interesting article by Siri Hustvedt the other day in which she suggests that Knausgaard writes like a woman. Is this the new 21st century literary transgender? Men writing in ways that used to be considered female?
Advertisements
