Detour charts the struggle of a film-crazed young man to shape his identity; it is also about his resistance to doing so at every turn. Owning an identity can mean being straitjacketed, condemned to a living death; language becomes both an escape from the straitjacket and its evilest genius.

Detour is also a story of first love, as it concerns the intense, transient sexual relationship between the young man, who is very reluctant about to enter medical school in the Midwest, and a rootless former heroin addict named Anne.

The hero of Detour experiences movies the way Don Quixote responds to the romances of chilvary—as being infinitely more real than anything else in the world. Hence the connections relentlessly made between his own often Bresson, Welles, Fellini, Ophüls, Sternberg, Sirk, Karlson and Godard. Camera movements, cuts, dissolves, tension between sound and image—these torment, fascinate, liberate and exalt, because they seem to lie just beyond the vampire clutch of words, thoughts, analysis.

It is within such contexts that one begins to understand the “detours”—social, psychological, familial, erotic, existential—that frustrate and enrich the protagonist’s quest for love, for connectedness, for the satisfactions of a calling. As well as the artistic detours that are crucial to depicting his complex, lacerated, maturation.

It is by means of a technique that has truly absorbed the formal lessons of the novel and through an extraordinary command of language—and of the many different languages inside language: colloquial, technical, abstract—that Brodsky makes this account of the growth of the self so unnervingly new and unpredictable. In sentence after sentence, he manages to discharge the shock of the unknown, the unspeakable, the never before said.

Detour is a vastly expanded version of the novel that received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Citation of the PEN American Center in 1979.

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This startling novel (originally published in 1991) is the concentrated peak of Brodsky’s dynamic and unique vision. With a shifting group of characters—Mazel Tov Jones, Neddie and Eddie, Vladimir and Mr. and Mrs. Stein, Brodsky explores the thought process of a protagonist who is accused of a murder but is never sure of his crime or his accusers. Brodsky’s character becomes a model for all humans trying to find a self-identity, reduced to the simple yet tragic dilemma of trying to communicate with fellow men. Stripped of excess plot and locale, this novel expands on the visions of Beckett and Kafka, but with a uniquely American voice.

Circuits will surprise and engage the serious reader at a level that few contemporary writers attempt to reach. Brodsky lives up to Ezra Pound’s famous challenge—Make it new—and pushes fiction and the novel to new limits with spirit and vigor.

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(Blue Rider Press, pp 302, $27.00)

A great undiscovered jewel, and from what I infer, a book that deserves to get into every single book club in the nation, and beyond. My enthusiasm is perhaps excessive. There comes a time when a book appears and has valuable lessons to teach us. We learn something we never suspected existed. People in their 60s’ have a life as well, and they go through ups and downs like the rest of us, and still have to learn lessons along the way. They can even display resilience and an appetite for life. It is pleasant surprise that a publisher would release a book that actually concerns our aging nation, where so much emphasis rests on the land of twenty-something Lena-Dunham wannabes teaching the world with great self-assurance life lessons and proper etiquette. Which begs the question: what is more interesting, someone who fumbles through life while brandishing a narcissistic flag and seems to have all the answers? Or someone who has worked hard to build a life, only to lose everything overnight and who has to pick herself up to start again—at age sixty?

This is exactly what happens to Meredith Maran who had a perfect life, meaning living with a sense of safety that no one could ask for more, with a good marriage (to the woman of her dream), a beautiful Victorian house, a good writing career, and an active social life. And then Life comes knowing at her door, like it tends to when things are going too well, and it takes everything away, and more. The best friend dies; her father is diagnosed with Alzheimer; she loses her job, and the house, along with the marriage. Welcome to “The New Old Me.” This is where we meet Meredith, dead broke about to move to La La Land, CA, where she struggles to rebuild her life and self, with all the scrawny feathers that come attached to them, fanned by heartache, loneliness, and self-doubt. The energy of the prose however shows us that beyond the circumstances lies a strong-willed and witty woman, and sure enough slowly Meredith crawls out of her trenches, and she does so with humor. For those in search of summer inspiration, this is your book. Look no further. (It was my wife’s favorite read so far this year.)

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