Review: ‘The Last Flight of Poxl West’ by Daniel Torday
In summary, the plot of
Daniel Torday’s evocative first novel, “The Last Flight of Poxl West,” may
sound a little schematic. A 15-year-old boy named Eli worships his uncle Poxl,
who writes a well-received memoir about his heroic exploits as a bomber pilot
during World War II. But in the
wake of the book’s success, Eli discovers that Poxl is not exactly who he has
pretended to be.
Mr. Torday recounts this
story in alternating sections — excerpts from Poxl’s memoir that make him out
to be the sort of dashing figure played by David Niven or Robert Taylor in the
movies; and framing chapters narrated by a grown-up Eli, looking back on his
boyhood and his discovery of the truth about Poxl’s life.
What keeps this story
from devolving into sentimental or predictable melodrama is Mr. Torday’s
instinctive understanding of Eli, his ability to convey both Eli’s childhood
craving for a hero and role model, and his grown-up apprehension of the
complexities of truth. Poxl remains a more elusive character. No doubt he is
meant to be, as it’s hard to separate the man from the mythmaking that
eventually leads to his downfall (a fall that seems apparent to the reader
nearly from the novel’s start, though it comes as a terrible shock to young
Eli).
In some respects, Poxl’s
penchant for exaggeration may remind readers of the embellished storytelling
that recently landed the NBC anchor Brian Williams in so much trouble. And “The
Last Flight” often does seem informed by earlier controversies like James
Frey’s admission that he’d made up details of his life in his so-called
“memoir,” “A Million Little Pieces.”
In fact, “The Last
Flight” provides both a touching, old-fashioned drama about war and love (along
the lines, say, of the Robert Taylor-Vivien Leigh movie “Waterloo Bridge”) and a more modern
framing tale that makes us rethink the impulses behind storytelling, and the
toll that self-dramatization can take not only on practitioners but also on
those who believe and cherish their fictions.
Poxl, we learn, is not
Eli’s relative by blood, but rather an old family friend who fills the void
left by the death of Eli’s grandfather and who comes to play the role of mentor
in all things cultural (art, literature, music, theater). His stories of his
World War II heroics with the Royal Air Force — reminiscent of some of the tall
tales told by Geoffrey Wolff’s con-man father in “The Duke of Deception” —
entrance Eli, who looks up to him as a Jewish war hero, who succeeded in
wreaking vengeance on the Nazis who had killed his family back home in
Czechoslovakia.
When Poxl’s book is
published, Eli studies it carefully — this object containing the stories his
uncle had once shared with him over ice cream sundaes. The photograph on the
back cover shows Poxl standing with his arms crossed, in front of a large tree:
“It was the kind of photograph,” Eli recalls, “you’d find on the back of a
Stephen King or a John Irving novel at that time — in the days when a writer
could become as famous as an actor or an athlete and ascend to the most visible
ranks of American public life, could hope to meet Norman Mailer at a party, be
reviewed in the Village Voice Literary Supplement. A kind of literary fame
that’s hard even to fathom, let alone remember, now.”
Mr. Torday — the
director of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, an editor at The Kenyon
Review and the author of a novella, “The Sensualist” — injects Poxl’s account
of his life with a keen sense of verisimilitude. He has a painterly eye for
detail: a townhouse, painted canary yellow, made of “chisel-cut rectangular
stones,” “the Catherine wheels raised by each blockbuster bomb as it landed,” a
bomb-damaged sandwich shop in London bravely sporting a sign “More Open Than
Usual.” And this gift, combined with his sure sense of time and place, makes
the worlds that Poxl traverses in Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and England
jump into focus. He also has Poxl recount his star-crossed romances — one with
a prostitute named Françoise, the other with a nurse named Glynnis — with a
depth of feeling that underscores the pain of loss he suffered during the war
and his own tendency to abandon those who care for him.
It’s Mr. Torday’s
ability to shift gears between sweeping historical vistas and more intimate
family dramas, and between old-school theatrics and more contemporary
meditations on the nature of storytelling that announces his emergence as a
writer deserving of attention.
THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST
By Daniel Torday
291 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $25.99.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário