The World of Tomorrow
By Brendan Mathews, Little, Brown, 560 pages, $28
Brendan Mathews’s first novel, The World of Tomorrow, is admirably fearless, daring to tread territory staked by no less than E.L. Doctorow’s finest work, the 1985 novel-cum-memoir World’s Fair. Mathews’s is a long book, full of back story and digression, which is no knock on it per se; for what is a good novel — or a good life — but a long series of digressions?
Unfortunately, Mathews’s work also demonstrates another truism about a novel, which is that writing one is like setting off into a trackless wood. The slightest misreading of your compass can leave you lost in the trees, many miles from where you wanted to go.
With commendable ambition, Mathews attempts to combine a serious story with a great lark. The World of Tomorrow starts with Francis Dempsey, a redheaded rogue of an Irishman faking his way across the Atlantic in first class as a Scottish lord. It is the summer of 1939, and Francis has recently escaped from a Dublin prison — where he was serving hard time for selling French postcards and pornographic books like Ulysses — after he was allowed, under guard, to attend the funeral for his enigmatic schoolteacher father. There, he and his younger brother, Michael (enduring his own incarceration of sorts in a Catholic seminary), are abruptly sprung by a mob of their dad’s old IRA pals, whom they never knew existed.
A wild ride ensues across the Irish countryside, to a safe house that turns out to be not so safe. Francis accidentally detonates the explosives inside, leaving him with a small fortune in stolen funds, an addled and deafened Michael and several inconvenient bodies to put as far behind them as possible. Francis — now “Angus” — decides to light out for the States under what he calls “the First-Class Plan,” audaciously travelling in as posh a manner as possible. He appropriates the title of a highland lord from “Macbeth” and explains that he is taking the muddled Michael — now “Malcolm” — to see if a specialist in New York can do anything about his brother’s awful fox-hunting accident.
So far, so good. But everything bogs down once the brothers reach Amerikay.
Francis’ ostensible goal is finding their older brother Martin, now a jazzman living with his family in the Bronx. They are able to reach him, all right, but for various reasons Francis continues with the First-Class Plan, setting himself and Michael up in a vast suite in the Plaza Hotel. Francis/Angus is still pitching woo to a naive, comely heiress he flirted with aboard ship, but whom he may now really love, because she is so magnificent a violinist that her playing moves him to tears (beauty and wealth apparently not being what they once were in the old romance department).
Then Tommy Cronin, a hard man from the IRA, is sent by a mobster chieftain named Gavigan. Francis lets blab about his heiress connection — including his promise to her family that he will introduce them to his “cousin”, the queen of England, when they visit “The World of Tomorrow,” the world’s fair recently opened in Queens. Gavigan decides this is an excellent opportunity to have Francis go all Gavrilo Princip on their Britannic majesties and shoot the king dead. He threatens to execute every Dempsey extant if Francis refuses, and has Cronin put him through a crash course on regicide.
Francis grimly sets about this task while his brothers remain conveniently oblivious. Martin, hired to provide the music for his sister-in-law’s wedding on the same day as the royal visit, is hoping to turn the gig into a new start for his lagging career. Michael, still fuzzy, wanders about Manhattan under the aegis of the Jewish-Czech photographer Lilly Bloch and the shade of William Butler Yeats (yes, you read that correctly).
It would be nice to say that hilarity ensues, but it doesn’t. The main problem is the assassination scheme. It’s not the counterfactual plot to kill a historical character that is hard to swallow; Frederick Forsyth demonstrated a long time ago, in his thriller The Day of the Jackal, just how well that could be done. It’s the idea that any of the principals in this assassination plot, including Gavigan himself, would really imagine they could succeed.
As a result, the scheme becomes a needless distraction from more pressing concerns of plot, period and character. The real IRA was close to moribund at this point in history, overshadowed by the horror already beginning to sweep over Europe. That nemesis is at least represented by Lilly Bloch, tormented by whether or not she should go back to her lover in occupied Prague. But Lilly drops out of the narrative for long stretches, as we follow Francis’ shadow of a gunman. If Mathews is trying to show that humans are caught up in their own preoccupations even in the face of the most dire events, fine — after all, the Trump era proves it every day — but the point is muted by his own meanderings as he careens from the picaresque to the thriller.
For far too long, Mathews follows loose plot ends and eccentric minor characters — a psychic, a doctor contractually obligated never to leave his apartment — while sidelining the likes of Lilly and Cronin, the best-drawn characters in the book. And this side of Shakespeare, a ghost is almost never a good idea.
For that matter, Mathews generally seems more interested in the amenities of the Plaza than in the world’s fair of his title. I yield to no man in my love of room service, but it takes more than 300 pages even to make it to Queens, by which time the shenanigans of the Dempsey boys have begun to run thin. Even then, the World of Tomorrow — a singular moment in American history — is snarkily dismissed as promising a future “where every citizen had a home in the clouds and a car on the road. Food grew in abundance under glass-domed orchards, or came flash-frozen, or Wonder-baked, or in strips of bacon fanned like playing cards.”
Yes, how foolish the people of the past were, to not know what we know now!
Mathews, whose short fiction has graced many publications and The Best American Short Stories, has talent in buckets. He gives us “gloopy eggs and gristly rashers” for breakfast, and “the sugared fumes rising from the censer” in church. Texts where “each leaf crackled when turned, as if the books had been waterlogged and poorly dried”; and “the syrupy tang of motor oil, the whiskey of petrol” in a garage. Martin’s wife feels “the old routines waiting for her, like a shawl that hung by the door.” Vienna under the Nazis is “buffed to a gleaming carapace of red and black, like painted lips over savage teeth,” while jars in a Chinatown shop feature “shaggy tree bark, tendriled mushrooms, a root that resembled a withered hand.” A Manhattan “skyline had been etched with a chisel and thrown into relief by this shimmering blue blackdrop,” and “buildings were bandoliered by fire escapes that sagged into the street.” He treats us to such wonderful Irish terms as “banjaxed,” “fat-fisted culchies” and “jackeens,” and tells us that “every heart has more than its share of reasons to stop beating.”
Too often, though, he seems to lose interest in his own narrative, slouching into how Martin wants “the golden, Hollywood-bright destiny that all Americans seemed to believe was their due,” while Francis feels his adventures “all sounded like something out of a true-crime novel.” We get such anachronistic analogies as “the vocal equivalent of the ring girl parading across the canvas,” or how Lilly’s mother “could negotiate a sale the way Talleyrand hashed out a treaty.” A musician who “could play like Gabriel himself” craves “the angel’s kiss that elevated Duke and Basie to the jazzman’s Olympus” and ruminates on “one of those gift-of-gab Irishmen who could argue a leprechaun out of his pot of gold.”
Mathews is capable of much better than this. In fact, he is capable of a great deal, and we can only hope it’s not long before he plunges into the woods again.
–New York Times News Service
Kevin Baker is a novelist and historian.
