by D.W. White
January 24, 2022
D.W. White is a graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University's BookEnds Fellowship. Currently seeking representation for his first novel, he serves as Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, where he also contributes reviews and critical essays. His writing further appears in or is forthcoming from Fatal Flaw, Twelve Winters Journal, Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, The Rupture, On The Seawall, and elsewhere. A Chicago ex-pat, he has lived in Long Beach, California for seven years, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block. He can be found on Twitter @dwhitethewriter.
Defenestrate by Renée Branum; Bloomsbury Publishing; 240 pages; $26
The human gravitation towards narrative is a well-documented, well-researched, and inherently understood feature of our species. A tendency to find pattern, to make meaning, to craft plot in everything we do leads to both Homo sapiens’ wonderful storytelling abilities and most damaging vulnerabilities. If the triumphs of language, art, and history stem from our cohesive grouping of events, the gambler’s fallacy stands as insidious example of our ruinous pattern-seeking tendencies. It is fundamental to our collective existence and individual lives to tell stories, whether piecing together family legend or recounting the day’s shopping trip. This primacy of narrative in the human condition, naturally a base component of every novel, is nonetheless explored with unusual depth and foregrounding in Renée Branum’s temporal-structurally distinctive debut, Defenestrate.
The book follows a set of twin siblings, Marta and Nick, who essentially live their entire lives together. Somewhere in their mid-to-late twenties over the course of the plot, they are haunted by a familial ‘falling curse’, one that has tracked the extended family across generations, continents, and oceans, emanating from a fateful incident at a Prague construction site late in the nineteenth century. A certain ancestor’s murderous shove of a stonemason with eyes on his daughter haunts Marta and Nick’s family up to the present day, manifested in strange deaths and a fixation on the base workings of gravity. This, along with the twins’ interest in the silent-film star Buster Keaton that can rightly be termed obsessive, are the two reliable drumbeats scoring Defenestrate’s storyline, narrated in a conventional first-person by Marta.
This relatively straight ahead schema is complicated by Branum’s structure, the most notable — and, it may be contented, controversial — aspect of her debut. The book is broken into short vignettes, some less than a page, a rare few more than three, which move between dual plots, in the first of which Marta and Nick live in Prague for an approximate year after college, to get away from immediate family complications and towards ancient family defenestrations. There was a fight, we learn, between Nick and their mother, prompting the twins to seek out their roots. The second plot line, set in tight temporal relation to the telling, follows Nick’s recovery in the hospital from his own, seemingly inevitable, fall from a window and Marta’s negotiation through a triangulation of familial-emotional pressures: her concern for a grievously injured brother, her attempts at making peace between Nick and their mother, and her own struggles with happiness and her purpose in life. It is a compelling, fertile fictive landscape, and one well-suited for Branum’s strengths as a writer. Indeed, the book is at its best — and author her most comfortable — when Marta’s emotional transparency is woven together with her artificer’s descriptive, metaphor-laden prose:
I know what I now know: that my mother’s telling is itself a fall and we are surviving it. The hearing of history is a descent we must weather and manage—my mother already having fallen through it long ago and landed at the foot of the stairs…After the plunge, there is silence. Nothing at all. But I know the silence isn’t permanent, isn’t irreversible. At any moment I can speak, can say what my bother said in his letter: Thank you for setting the record straight. Yes. That is what I’ll say. But not yet. They are still waiting for me down below. I am not through falling, you see. I have not yet landed.
Although one perhaps wishes for more of them, moments such as this one, when Marta is free to play her family history off her narrative’s raison d’être, constitute the strongest and, it seems, most open and honest, portions of the book.
Branum sensibly employs both past tense and that rising darling of the fictive world, the present, to smoothly signpost each vignette’s temporal location. The fictive present — mainly Nick’s rehabilitation and the family’s attempts at reunification — is written in present while the past — essentially Prague and everything else in their lives — comes in the past. The reader never wonders when or where a given section is, and in this way Defenstrate represents perhaps the present tense’s best and most logical usage. By obviating any need for awkward narrative guidance, Branum frees Marta from much of the expository duties usually laid at the feet of first person narrators, allowing her own voice and story to come through.
The difficulties come, however, in other aspects of authorial decision making — in attempting to fully realize the thread lines of Marta and Nicks’ consumption with their family, falling, and Keaton, Branum overwrites by half, with important (and too-scarce) scenes of real connection or confrontation between the characters broken up for yet another biographical or historical aside. This, in turn, is an outgrowth of Defenstrate’s most challenging aspect: that structure. While the approach has been used successfully in other recent works — including R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries and Kate Zambreno’s Drifts — it is a bit of mismatch for a narrative so concentrated in two or three specific geo-temporal locations. The reader works hard to locate narrative propulsion or character arcs in so hectic a plot pattern, while Branum’s considerable distributive abilities do not need the help of spotlighting each scene or memory. Her success in welding each vignette, especially those more far afield, to the central story and characters will largely vary based upon the individual reader’s sensibilities, but it seems fair to note that a bit more time spent with our protagonist herself at the expense of some of the deeper plunges down the Buster Keaton bibliographic rabbit hole might have been warranted.
A second element sure to be divisive in readerly opinion is that of composition. The book rarely changes speeds, rarely alters in tone, mood, or style, as Marta both tells her histories and navigates her present. For some this will be a benefit — Branum’s best skills are her physical description and dexterity with emotional range. This monochromatic ethos results both in an omnipresent greyscale, but also in an undeniable poignancy. As the present day narrative progresses, Marta’s mental health challenges and alcohol use emerge into the foreground and provide considerable pathos. However, like much else here, this development feels somehow slipped in by the back way, as we only gradually learn that this is a central and important source of fictive tension. And while some readers will respond to the serious and unflinching handling of major emotional themes, others may have difficulty engaging from scene to scene in episodes that feel largely the same in their heavy gravitas and clipped structure.
The characters, too, are at a somber remove, as Marta largely deigns to allow the reader into her own world or that of her brother’s save those few recurring fixtures. Her fleeting yet heartfelt relationship with Morena, an Italian woman living like them in Prague, for example, is an intriguing storyline that never seems quite of interest to either narrator or novelist. Their relationship with their mother, complicated we come to see by a striking and acute scene, is not quite explored as much as it might be — surely less than a typical novel would do. And while innovation and straying from convention are always to be welcomed and encouraged, one wonders what would have been the result if Branum had given a little less pride of place to her structure and believed a bit more in her character’s ability to stand alone without incessant resuscitation. Midway through the book a not-unreasonable conclusion to reach is that Defenstrate’s central players are more collection of character traits than characters, its storyline more plot points than plot. Ultimately, then, while her techniques mirror Marta and Nick’s isolation-in-tandem from both society and family, thereby scoring a number of metafictional and theoretical points, it places something of an artificial ceiling on the heights to which this vertically-obsessed debut can reach.
All the above is not to say, however, that Defenstrate is an unsuccessful book, or an unenjoyable read. Branum’s deep conceptual understanding of her work’s foundation, on terms of both craft and theory, is clear. The parallels drawn between the family’s curse, the nature of falling, and each character’s — especially that of Marta — struggles in remaining upright in life are clever and subtle. Effective allegories and illusions abound, adding depth and creativity. On a more discursive level, too, there is much to commend: the descriptions are reliably strong, Marta’s voice well-made and engaging, and the book moves swiftly and assuredly through its scenes and has moments of true descriptive greatness. The cityscape of Prague, a locale unfortunately rarely explored in Western fiction, is arresting and compelling, even if at times a bit bleak when seen through Marta’s spiraling worldview. In the end Defenstrate is a novel that will, perhaps more than most, leave a divided readership in its wake, but inarguably stands as an inventive, well-crafted, and enticing debut.
©2022 West Trade Review
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A Place in Time: Story and Structure in Renée Branum’s Defenestrate
FICTION REVIEW
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