THE WASHINGTON POST • BOOK WORLD • SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010


4 FICTION REVIEW BY DONNA RIFKIND The sweep and span of war T


he cover of Julie Orringer’s first novel shows a photograph of the Chain Bridge, one of Bu- dapest’s most-loved land- marks. The picture was taken


as World War II was drawing to a close, just after retreating German troops had bombed the Hungarian capital’s bridges to delay the advancing Soviet offensive. In Orringer’s cover photo, the Chain Bridge is a shattered remnant: Only emptiness is suspended between the pil- lars flanking the Danube. What we see, in that stunned moment, is an invisible bridge. Long before the bombing of Budapest


occurs at the end of this novel, Orringer uses the symbolism of invisible bridges in many inventive ways, re-engineering traditional dimensions of time and space, calibrating the immensity of world-war deaths against the specifics of one family’s life, and building emotional connections between parents and chil- dren, husbands and wives, the preserved and the oblit- erated. And gradually, over time, she shows how supple those connections are and how instantly they can be broken. “The Invisible Bridge” is an


intricately layered historical novel that needs plenty of room to be effective, and at 600 pages it shouldn’t be a paragraph shorter. Even so, its first half demands some patience. Orringer has delib- erately backloaded most of the book’s urgency into its later wartime sections, but its initial 300 pages, which roll out with a stately and sometimes prosaic accessi- bility, are an indispensable foundation for this account of the very particular way in which Hungary’s Jew- ish population was decimated by the Holocaust. The novel begins in 1937 in a golden haze of promise, as 22-year-old Andras Lévi, the son of a lumberyard owner from a village in Hungary’s eastern flat- lands, departs for Paris to study at the École Spéciale d’Architecture, where he has won a scholarship. Andras is glad to leave behind the quota restrictions that prevent Jewish students from enrolling in Hungary’s universities, though while en route to France he can’t ignore the menacing signs (“Jews Not Wanted”) and Nazi flags in the small-town German train stations. Paris, for Andras, is a giddy circuit of academic lectures, spirited political ar- guments in Latin Quarter cafés, all-night design projects and a job at the Sarah- Bernhardt Theatre, which is mounting a new Brecht play. “I have a desperate gar- ret; it’s everything I hoped for,” he writes happily to his older brother, who has re- mained in Hungary but is hoping to at- tend medical school in Italy.


Soon enough, romance enters


Andras’s Paris idyll in the form of Klara Morgenstern, a gray-eyed ballet teacher


nearly a decade his senior who brings along a sullen teenage daughter and a past full of secrets. But the window to Andras’s bright future fractures into shards after his student visa is revoked and he’s forced to return to Budapest. When war breaks out in September 1939, he’s immediately conscripted into the Hungarian labor service. His exalted vi- sions of art and architecture are erased by the shock of hard labor, and he’s trans- formed from a young man with the luxu- ry of choices to “a speck of human dust, lost on the eastern edge of Europe.” At this point we begin to visualize the


THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE


By Julie Orringer Knopf


602 pp. $26.95


connection between the book’s first half, where Orringer so assiduously humaniz- es Andras, and the second, where she just as painstakingly chronicles his forced de- humanization, along with the dispersal of his family and the dismantling of an entire world. Yet in a landscape gone dark, here and there we perceive an in- visible bridge: an improbable reunion; an impossible rescue; a tale of survival that hinges on a bread crust, a drop of melted snow and a poorly covered mass grave. We have seen images like these many times before, in the literature of eyewitness- es such as Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész, and increas- ingly in the fiction of young- er writers, who are roughly the age of those eyewitness- es’ grandchildren (Orringer is 37). In what way is “The Invisible Bridge” different, and why is it important? With the writers of Or-


ringer’s generation who choose the Holocaust as a subject, we’re watching an inevitable transition from a


literature that can remember to a litera- ture that can only imagine. Does the winking magic realism of Jonathan Sa- fran Foer’s “Everything is Illuminated” call more attention to the author than to his subject? Does the Hollywood-style feel-goodery of David Benioff’s “City of Thieves” put too smooth a polish on mass suffering and death? Orringer avoids these pitfalls and


many more by making brilliant use of a deliberately old-fashioned realism to de- fine individual fates engulfed by history’s deadly onrush. She maintains a fine bal- ance between the novel’s intimate mo- ments — whose emotional acuity will be familiar to admirers of her 2003 story collection, “How to Breathe Underwater” — and its panoramic set-pieces. Even those monumental scenes manage to dis- play a tactful humility: This is a story, they keep reminding us, and it’s not bringing anybody back. With its moving acknowledgment of the gap between what’s been lost and what can be imag- ined, this remarkably accomplished first novel is itself, in the continuing stream of Holocaust literature, an invisible bridge. bookworld@washpost.com


Donna Rifkind is a writer in Los Angeles. FICTION REVIEW BY ELINOR LIPMAN


A middle manager finds salvation in bottled water


T


he hero of James P. Othmer’s second novel, “Holy Water,” is — luckily for us — living a mid- dle-management life that has added up only to “the consci-


entious fulfillment of limited expecta- tions.” At 32, Henry Tuhoe has a résumé that traces his lateral moves and promo- tions from Oral Care to Non-headache- related Pain Relief to Laxatives to Sil- icon-based Sprays and Coatings and fi- nally to vice president of the Underarm Division.


With the closing of “Armpits” — one of


the few places where the author’s clev- erness calls attention to itself — corpo- rate “rightsizing” coincides with the break-up of Henry’s unhappy marriage to the unreasonable Rachel, who has forced him into a vasectomy. Or has she? This medical and marital mystery is where Henry first wins our sympathy and re- cruits us for his adventures. Not that he has a choice, but will his transfer be, as his boss characterizes it, “a chance to start over, an op- portunity to lose his inherent wussiness”? As with the author’s ac- claimed first novel, “The Fu- turist,” “Holy Water” manag- es to be at the same time cyn- ical and soul-searching, a difficult juggling act better served in some chapters than others. Henry must decide: Lose his job or be corporately exiled to the fictional third world Kingdom of Galado on the India-China border? There he will open a call center for Happy Mountain Springs bottled water, a sainted brand. Henry doesn’t find out until he arrives that the citizens of the “unhinged mon- archy” of Galado have no drinking water, that plastic bottles are outlawed, and that all the country’s streams are toxic. But his corporate ennui turns into a per- sonal humanitarian mission — Clean water for all! — fueled by love and eyes finally opened to the world outside him- self. Alas, danger threatens and en- croaches. “You have to know all the wrong people to get anything done in this country,” he quickly learns. His new home has a prince who is cra- zy to just the right megalomaniacal and comic degree. As a graduate of North- eastern, he speaks excellent English. Wearing Lycra workout tights while his iPod plays “High School Musical,” he tells Henry, “I have decided to bypass governments and political diplomacy in favor of corporate diplomacy.”As illitera- cy, starvation and illness flourish, the prince dreams of office towers, banks, hotels, brand-name luxury boutiques and a 28-theater cineplex. His citizens, he asserts, despite demonstrations and uprisings to the contrary, do not want a democracy.


Though a layer of guy humor rests none too lightly on the first few chap- ters, we would miss larger-than-life Mer- edith, Henry’s administrative assistant by day and an online nudist by night (her site, by subscription only: EEEEVA EEEENORMOUS and her 46EEEE Twins). Henry’s secret voyeurism and re- spect for her multifold talents add a re- warding touchstone to the plot. No one- note porn star, the highly intelligent Meredith devours the National Review, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Back at headquarters, via e- mail, strictly business, she helps Henry in his mission to supply fresh water to the parched and needy citizens of Gala- do.


HOLY WATER By James P. Othmer Doubleday


292 pp. $26.95


The call center, despite daily training sessions, is never quite up and running: No employees speak Eng- lish, and Henry is mightily distracted by the political realities of Galado, by his conscience and by Maya, a native and his second in command. “You don’t want to be here, do you?” she asks Hen- ry on his first day. He replies sarcastically: “In a tiny vil- lage in the middle of no- where teaching workers from a drought-plagued re- gion how to talk about crys- tal-clear water that comes in a container that, inciden- tally, is forbidden here?” In “The Futurist” Othmer demonstrated a terrific eye for the absurd, for deflating


the big, the pompous, the entitled. Sly sentence by sly sentence, “Holy Water” similarly does not have a wasted word. Once he gets Henry out of Manhattan and into Galado, the author walks a per- fect line between satire and compassion. Less satisfying are the ambitious plot turns, in which Henry’s altruism goes a little action-adventure. There is a lane switch in the last few chapters, not just into darker comedy but into a more sol- emnly muckraking tone. Momentum doesn’t offer an easy glide to the finish. As Maya tells Henry, “You use your hu- mor and your cynicism to protect what is essentially smothered idealism.” The same could be said for the hand that spins this often brilliant, always caustic corporate satire. Is the marketplace asking authors to


James-Bond-up their plots? Might some readers wish Henry had stayed in subur- ban New York, commuting to Manhat- tan, Cheever meets Vonnegut, having faith in the domestic over global ambi- tions? We look forward to that down- size. Othmer is a smart, elegant, witty writer who could do small beautifully. bookworld@washpost.com


Elinor Lipman’s ninth novel, “The Family Man,” is now in paperback.


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