FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The MisfortunatesBy Dimitri Verhulst, translated by David Colmar Portobello Books, 200pp, £12.99
SOME FAMILIES are different. The Verhulst clan, though, amounts to an extreme variety of human disaster. Theirs is a household run by a mother who stoically cleans up the vomit, random urine and worse deposited about the house by four grown alcoholic sons. The Verhulst brothers drink on a monumental scale; they are the kind of boozers who win beer-drinking contests and set unmatchable performance records.
This episodic, deceptively skilful, semiautobiographical account of life as a squalid party that stops only with hospitalisation and death takes place somewhere in Belgium. The young narrator, Dimmy, nephew of the brothers and grandson of the matriarch, adopts a carefully neutral tone. He never moans. Nor does he stint on the details – not even when describing the uninhibited toilet practices of men who don’t believe in closing doors.
The communal free-for-all is briefly disrupted when Dimmy’s aunt, the beautiful Rose, returns with her marriage in tatters and her lovely teenage daughter in tow. Sylvie is taken to the pub, where she quietly has a soft drink before asking for beer. When she is eventually dragged home, very drunk, her mother flees with her and more or less leaves the narrative. But no one really notices as the brothers – each with his respective disastrous relationships and children who are sired, then never seen again – content themselves with singing bawdy songs and inciting arguments in pubs.
They all share a devotion to the American singer Roy Orbison. This passion leads to probably the most memorable set piece. A debt collector has confiscated the television, and the brothers panic. Not only is it their life support; it has even greater significance than usual that day, as a Roy Orbison television special, Live at the Coconut Grove, is mere hours away, and none of the neighbours is likely to invite the mob over for fear of a riot.
Such is their love for Orbison that one of the brothers decides to approach a stranger. Having arranged the viewing, he informs his siblings and off they troop to the painfully tidy home of an Iranian couple who are desperate to integrate with Belgian society. Dimmy recalls that his brothers presented the wife with the aspidistra that was formerly displayed on top of their television.
Verhulst, who was born in 1972, writes in Flemish as well as standard Dutch. He is regarded as one of Flemish literature's leading voices; among his several novels is Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill(1999), which has also been translated into English.
The Misfortunatesis unusual on several levels. It's not a typical coming-of-age narrative. The fluency and increasingly morose edginess are brilliantly conveyed by David Colmer, the book's translator. It is as if the tone is constructed on an ascending scale of anger. There is no doubt that the narrator is different from his family, but he does not labour the point. For all the crudeness of the behaviour described – and it is often very coarse – the novel is both measured and subtle. Verhulst never labours a gag or a situation.
Initially it is all about memory. Dimmy re-creates the crazy home in which policemen knocking at the door at night, to return a drunken family member, was a common occurrence. One day an attractive woman, carrying a briefcase, arrives asking for Dimmy’s father. She seems a most unlikely consort; she turns out to be a social worker investigating the narrator’s case. “I’ve come to see what kind of surroundings and conditions you’re raising your son in,” she announces.
A subtle shift takes place, and Dimmy soon moves on to describe the new families who come to settle in the area; people with a deliberate life plan who view the neighbourhood as a holding zone. A boy informs the narrator that his father says Dimmy’s family are of a kind kept “artificially alive by social security”.
Slowly, the early raucous humour of naked bike races and boozing sessions gives way to death and dying and the remorseful recognition that obligation is not the same as emotion. The old grandmother, once the warrior queen in the kitchen, is moved to a home where she sits, gazing vacantly at the narrator. The laughter tapers off and pathos takes over, as does the rage of the grown Dimmy. He thinks about his grandmother, the only person he truly loved, and of her wartime youth. “The most beautiful moments of her life must have taken place on the darkest pages of history, her happiness was overshadowed by the historians’ gloomy black ink, and the progression from lean to fat years passed her by.”
Outrageousness yields to eloquent recognition in a darkly intelligent novel that describes how open scars rarely heal completely and how innocence was not so much lost as never had a chance.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
