Cesare Pavese would have called this “the usual coincidence”: on July 11, 1995, Serb forces slaughtered more than 8,000 unarmed Muslim boys and men and piled their bodies in mass graves dug into the fields of northern Bosnia. This morning, 25 years later, I completed my notes for reviewing Brad Fox’s first novel To Remain Nameless which conjures the lives of two Americans – Tess and Laura – who became best friends while serving as NGO aid workers during the Balkan war in the 1990’s. And now, perhaps 25 years later, Laura has married Barish, “a son-of-immigrants Turk born in the US” and is about to deliver their first child in a Manhattan hospital. Tess, who still works overseas, has arrived to attend the birth.
When events and lives coincide, we look for the third thing that converts coincidence to fateful significance. Fox has built his novel to enhance this expectation. His briskly narrated chapters alternate between maternity ward and foreign locales, present and past. The view is omniscient, but most loyal to Tess whose memories animate the itinerant chapters. She is weighing everything – her dispiriting childhood, her dedication to the often ineffectual and even corrupt humanitarian enterprise, her attachments to men, her childlessness.
Although Fox puts us in position to assess the value of these connected elements, To Remain Nameless is dedicated to the density of reality and the agitated movements of Tess’ mind. David Mamet once insisted that every line in a playscript must move the story ahead in some way. Fox’s pared-down prose, taut pacing, candid tone, global street-sense, and an attuned ear for speech combine to create the aura of progression – each sentence adds or extends something vital. But one soon understands that the world of this rewarding novel is like the one we actually sense even while demanding closure – a sublime frustration.
Nevertheless, To Remain Nameless enacts the onset of renewed or emerging thought – and certainly, of renewed life. Laura Valerio (an unsubtle derivation from the Latin valere –– “to be strong”) comes to the hospital with contractions but full dilation is hours away. While Laura groans, “Tess listened to the vacancies in her own chest, wondering what sounds she would make if her uterine walls were contracting … She lay a hand on Laura’s sacrum as the nurse had done, and at the same time tried to feel within herself the pace where this was happening. Womb. It made her wince.” Two paragraphs later, Tess’ reflections swerve back to the world of constant global turmoil: “To serve others, Tess thought. To live for others. To despise them, to have been disappointed, and still to work for them. To disbelieve in progress, in benefit, to think that everything backfires. So why do anything?”
Tess does and has done much. Sarajevo, Istanbul, Cairo, Kampala – the reader is swept to sharply evoked episodes about her work challenges, friendships with nationals, lovers. She works in the refugee camps in Macedonia, assessing conditions and filing reports that, she suspects, will “disappear into oblivion.” At one point, she meets up with Laura to serve in Turkey – and in one of my favorite moments, the two of them disabuse the benign but feckless intentions of two male Swedish philanthropists. Then, four years after Bush and Cheney ruin Iraq, Tess is in Cairo. Tess feels as if a “contagion” is driving her from one place to the next, seeking “this certainty that despite everything she was whole.” And then, back to Laura’s birthing room – and her belief that Laura “had always been whole unto herself.”
Tess and Laura realize that the image of “the benevolent American” no longer has any currency in the world. Fox knows this from 15 years of first-hand witness – as an aid worker and itinerant journalist, he experienced the aftermath of the Bosnian war, was present during the refugee crisis on 1999, and has worked in Damascus, Beirut and Istanbul. The propulsive feel of his prose captures the constant disquietude of that world – and there are countless passages through the novel that illuminate the existential insights of someone who has been there. In the passage below, Tess’ Serbian friend Karatina sums up the compromises of the Bosnian war:
“All those years, Katarina said, you knew you were okay because at least you weren’t that guy, you weren’t Arkan or Mladić or any of the petty criminals that went down to shell Sarajevo or go on raids in Kosovo. So then you didn’t have to worry about yourself, what you did or who you were. If you were in Belgrade you stayed out of the way, away from the cops and criminals, holed up with small circles of friends in little bars and empty shopping centers, in the little tugboat on the Sava, anywhere where you were likely to be left alone. And then it was just day by day. Bad affairs, hilarious drunken and drugged-out nights, dissolving into the pit of the past, half-remembered, minor scandals between friends, one day after another. Everyone degraded, banging their heads against the wall like children, but somehow good, at least not like them. Now that was over, the dictator was locked up, and you were left to realize that you’d aged ten years, hadn’t studied, hadn’t learned anything useful, just survived, and that was enough to break your heart.”
Fox not only accepts the risk of monotony in the pendulum-like swing between present and past, he relishes it. He draws one in shrewdly – but how will he accommodate the driven turbulence of Tess’ mind without generating even more tumult and messiness? Discovering this artful dodge is the ultimate pleasure of To Remain Nameless.
We don’t know Tess’ last name – and we await the naming of the baby. All signs from the attending obstetrician point to a successful delivery. Tess massages Laura, goes down to the avenue to find something to eat. She has a brother, Max, who has sought a monastic life: “What could a person learn in that inward space? Tess suspected it was a falsehood, an attempt to conceive of oneself as the sole source of consciousness, but Max found it meaningful.” But To Remain Nameless, itself such an “inward space,” comprises an utterly unique truth-telling.
[Published by Rescue Press on May 1, 2020, 244 pages, $18.00 paperback]