FICTION IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 6 8 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A M Y H U N G E R F O R D Cold Fiction Imagine that Philip Roth’s Coleman Silk had su√ered the fate of Keith, the protagonist of Caryl Phillips’s new novel, In the Falling Snow. Keith’s fate is not so di√erent from Coleman’s: rather than su√ering the false accusations of racism and erotic cradle-robbing cooked up for Coleman in The Human Stain, Phillips’s man is subjected to the o≈ce-wide exposure of all ill-advised romance with a colleague. The woman, thrown over, e-mails their entire erotic correspondence to everyone at work. It is a Rothian set-up, and Roth would probably, as Phillips does with Keith, have the man lose his job, with all the personal repercussions that such an injustice entails. And Roth’s man would be raging on the page, giving us those operatic rants that neither satisfy nor fix but propel memory to the surface of narrative: we would get Roth as an angry Proust. I n t h e Fa l l i n g S n o w , by Caryl Phillips (Knopf, 320 pp. $25.95) T h e G i n C l o s e t , by Leslie Jamison (Free Press, 288 pp. $25.00) 1 6 9 R But Keith, or perhaps Phillips, is an equable man. At least, the tone of the narrator, who sees the world from Keith’s perspective, is even – a few pages in, one might say the tone is even to a fault. Soon, though, the relentless neutrality turns from baΔing to impressive . It raises the questions at the heart of this novel, or rather, questions that squat where a heart ought to be. Where is Keith’s feeling? Where is his anger? Does no one raise his voice in here? How cold is England? Cold isn’t what we expect Keith to be. He is a good man. The son of a Jamaican father who emigrated to England as a young man, Keith survived the loss of his mother and then of the woman who replaced her in his life – his father’s white girlfriend, Brenda. His father, who has su√ered bouts of mental illness and involuntary commitment, wants the boy with him when he is well enough to have him. The father’s pride overrides Keith’s attachment to Brenda; it does not matter to the father that Keith hardly knows him when, near Keith’s twelfth birthday, he is released from the mental institution and shows up to claim Keith from Brenda. Surviving this emotional rending and the racist bullying of local boys, finally earning his entrance into university, Keith finds himself fitted to work for the cause of racial equality in Britain. He falls in love with a like-minded white woman, and the two make a life, have a son, Laurie, and grope their way through her family’s disapproval , his father’s erratic presence, and the newer iterations of racial tension Laurie must face. Keith enters higher management in an o≈ce that provides social services and multicultural awareness initiatives. For reasons we do not fully understand, Keith loses his way emotionally at some point; he has a one-night stand at an o≈ce retreat, and, seeing him as a decent man, if a flawed one, we feel for him. Hearing his confession, Keith’s wife, however, decides to leave him, as if she had been waiting for just this cue. Hers is a decisive act that hints at strong feeling but finally reads like something else. What we know of her is that she, too, is decent – annoyed, tired, worried about their son, but decent. How she worked up the passion to leave Keith remains obscure. This strange absence of passion in Keith and in those around him is related to the ambitious narrative decision Phillips makes in this novel. He is committed to the present, and I mean that 1 7 0 H U N G E R F O R D...