It’s fitting that Ivan Vladislavić’s new novel, The Distance, features dueling narrators. That’s most obviously because boxers, particularly Muhammad Ali, are central to the story. Joe, like Vladislavić himself a South African novelist of Croatian descent, is revisiting childhood scrapbooks in which he tracked the height of Ali’s career, mainly from 1971’s “Fight of the Century” against Joe Frazier to their “Thrilla in Manila” rematch in 1975. But boxing is just one example of the kinds of opposing forces that Vladislavić explores with wit and sensitivity in this book: fact versus fiction, boyhood versus adulthood, masculinity versus machismo, apartheid versus freedom, and, most potently, brother versus brother.
Joe and his older brother, Branko, aren’t adversarial, exactly, but their memories and alternating narrations pit them as opposites. Joe is outwardly reserved and intellectual but also canny; Branko is more pugnacious and streetwise, and put off by his brother’s intelligence. “Joe always gets away with murder,” Branko recalls. But Joe looks for ways to reconcile the uneasy relationship they had growing up in the Transvaal province outside Pretoria. “Living with Branko had made me tough,” he writes. “He had absorbed the family creed of standing up for yourself more completely than I.” That creed is embodied broadly in family lore about family members who came to South Africa from Dalmatia, and more specifically in their father, who dismisses Ali as “Gaseous Cassius” and a “loudmouth” — lines that, given the time and place, have an especially racist pitch. Ali represents the kind of culture Joe’s family is fighting against.
And yet, because Ali is a fighter too, he has a role in the notions of masculinity that Joe and Branko adopt as kids. They have a sister, but she’s so marginalized from the narrative she barely qualifies as a sibling at all for the purposes of the story. And many of the memories the two share concern teenage proving grounds of manliness. The two attend wrestling matches together, and Joe recalls being struck by a bullying classmate as a sort of rite of passage: “The punch, or rather taking the punch without complaint, was a kind of deposit, an expression of good will,” he writes. Joe equates physicality with maturity; when he wrestles a stronger classmate to a decent draw, it earns him a certain admiration that’s “flattering and disconcerting.”
In this context, Ali isn’t exactly a role model for Joe — he doesn’t dream of being a fighter. But through the sportswriting that Joe meticulously scrutinizes, Ali becomes a potent example of how to invent a persona, and the consequences of that invention. Ali’s braggadocio sets off critics, from his father on down, who dismiss his language, attitude, and very name — Joe senses the contempt in those who continue to call him Cassius Clay long after he became Ali. As if to give Ali’s character a physical shape, a presence, Joe turned Ali’s pronouncements into concrete poetry on the cover of a scrapbook. And he takes note of the linguistic choices that sportswriters make when writing about him. Reading one report on “The Fight of the Century,” he notices that a writer uses the surnames Clay and Ali interchangeably, and “the effect of this ‘elegant variation’ is dazzling: as the fight unfolds, one of the boxers magically doubles into two persons, Clay and Ali, while the other, Frazier, is stuck with being himself.” Through Ali, he finds at once the way that words make a person — or persons. It clears a path for him to become a writer.
And because Ali has become part of his origin story as a writer, the grown-up novelist is trying to turn it into a book, with Branko’s help. Branko resists, and they argue the matter:
“I’m no good at making things up, I say. That’s your department.”
“That’s the whole point. Making things up won’t do any good. I need to remember things as they actually were.”
In the same way that using “Clay” and “Ali” in the same sentence complicates a narrative, Joe and Branko together muddy the waters of what things “actually were.” Branko’s resistance, his questioning of his own memories and of the point of Joe’s book, provides the tension the book requires. It’s a kind of retort to the assurances of autofiction and memoir, in which we can comfortably accept a complex story as cohesive because one narrator is telling it. Vladislavić denies his story such easy access. In Ali, Joe sees somebody through which he can invent his own personality, but Branko sees something closer to playacting, no different than his obsession with detective heroes like the Saint or photocomic star Mark Condor, or his brief attempt to try on an American accent. “My brother’s need to be someone else never goes away,” he writes. “He becomes a writer. You can see the catastrophe coming down the pike.”
And then Vladislavić does something even more disruptive. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, Vladislavić shifts the story in a way most autofictionists and memoirists avoid: he delivers a plot twist, a genuinely surprising one that challenges the stability of his narrative and underscores the distance between the brothers. To share it here would be a genuine spoiler. Suffice it to say that the effort to produce a book on Ali becomes messier still, as does our understanding of Joe and Branko’s relationship.
Branko despairs over the role he might play in the book Joe is trying to assemble. “What a laughable double bill we will make: his nickel-and-dime biography of Ali and my five cents’ worth of memoir.” But his joke suggests that they’re on even ground — their sibling rivalry can be dialectical, not just adversarial. Each brother has their own persona. Ali might have had a role in shaping them, but only enough to provoke them to make their own inventions. As Branko puts it in a text to the book’s editor, “Btw the book is not actually about Ali.”
[Published by Archipelago Books on September 15, 2020, 304 pages, $20 softcover]