Novel deftly weaves time, memory, American story

“We all fall down.”

This figuratively literal and literally figurative sentence begins Keith Donohue’s intriguing, inventive novel “Centuries of June.” Of course, this observation’s ancient and perennial value, the subject of gazillions of novels, is in the next step — the getting up.

Donohue’s exploration of the fall, and the rise, of one anonymous contemporary guy, is sly, surprising and entertaining. “Centuries of June” offers a reader both post-and premodern treats: It’s a meta-fictional conceit also resonating with one of humanity’s oldest impulses, the drive to make order out of chaos via narrative and story.

When this kind of thing works, it can really rock for a reader. Donohue in an interview said he began this book wanting to write about American myths and “came across the painting “The Virgin” by Gustav Klimt — which depicts a group of naked women resting in a clot beneath these wild and colorful quilts. I began thinking about what their stories might be and how those tales might be interwoven with this speculation on time, memory, and the American story.” The result was a circle (or quilt) of stories, built around a first-person male narrator who wakes up naked on his bathroom floor at 4:52 a. m. on a warm night, bleeding profusely: “I have a hole in the back of my head and cannot move.”

He initially can’t remember anything aside from knowing that he had gotten up to “relieve his bladder, and something struck [him] down.” As he gradually begins parsing things out, puzzling over what he can remember and coming to a full understanding of his situation, he hears a delicate cough and notices, sitting on the edge of the tub, a familiar-looking old man in a terrycloth robe, a man “like something by Giacometti,” all severe angles and skin tight on bone. When the man coughs, small yellow pinfeathers escape from his mouth.

With the aid of this avatar, who might be his father, or the mighty writer Samuel Beckett, or someone else, the narrator tries to piece together what’s happened to him. He and the old man converse, although the old man is a conundrum, a combination therapist, trickster and antagonist. The old man says, “Excuse me sonny, but I have a powerful thirst. Do you have anything else besides this swill from the sink?” The narrator replies, “I may have a beer in the fridge. Or a bottle of whiskey somewhere,” to which the old man replies, tellingly, “Smashing. On your way back, you may want to put on some clothes.”

The narrator exits the lighted bathroom for the dark house, “quiet as a grave,” and hears a sigh. Tracking the sound to his bedroom, he opens the door: upon eight naked women in his bed, “at once and altogether, a floating cloud, flower and flesh,” a jumble of limbs and other parts, sweetly asleep. And he has no idea who they are or why they’re there.

He returns to the bathroom, whiskey in hand. The old man prompts and cajoles and teases pieces of the previous day out of the narrator’s memory. Then, the old man:

focused on a spot just above my right shoulder, and at the same second, the light behind me changed ever so slightly and the room cooled by exactly one degree. A presence had entered the bathroom, and my sixth sense tingled. As I swiveled my neck to see what lurked over my shoulder, the old man sprang to his feet and positioned himself between me and my attacker. “Put down that club,” he ordered, and the raised arm lowered the weapon in a slow and resigned arc. He stepped aside and revealed one of the girls from the bed.

This turns out to be S’ee, a Tlingit woman with a story to tell about the bear she married, who she believes to be — the narrator. What follows are six additional visitors, who each come to the bathroom with, apparently, murder on her mind, from harpoon, witchcraft, frying pan, pickax, pitched baseball, and, finally, a “gat.”

Each woman’s violent intent is blunted by the miraculously observant old man, who helps the narrator avoid further damage, and helps the women calm down and tell their stories; with each representing an iconic episode of American history, and a good woman wronged by love and fate.

Eventually there are nine people in the bathroom, and a baby, and magic and impossible things happen as the women spin tales and bond with each other, and with the old man, but not with the narrator, still a target and bewildered apparent participant in each of their lives, according to them.

The eighth woman, who never leaves the bedroom, is the final piece of the narrative puzzle, one to be enjoyed both for its solution and for the beautifully serpentine but purposeful path we take to arrive there.

Donohue calls his book “a mash-up” and it is, echoing everything from the Marx Brothers to Dickens, Native American folk tales, Lewis Carroll, noir detective fiction, Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Mikhail Bulgakov, Haruki Murakami, the Ramayana, and other sources.

Not that this matters — the product here is uniquely Donohue, and the craft seamless in the spinning of an absorbing skein of yarns in a marvelous display of voice weaving together to form a single tapestry: a “parti-colored utterance” (to quote Annie Dillard) unfolding about love, mortality, men and women, memory, family, and the fundamental force of storytelling.

When the seventh sister has finished and the only thing left is for the narrator to face the last woman, now in the bedroom crying, we fully re-enter the narrator’s present, no longer 4:52 a. m. This, it turns out, is a profound and poignant resolution to the night’s wonderings, but also a beginning, as the story ends: “Here we go again. Another chance at life.”

The world of this book indeed offers centuries of June, a timeless summer in which to marvel at our species.

Ed Taylor is a writing teacher and freelance Buffalo critic.