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“Ether”
by Ben Ehrenreich; City Lights Books (164 pages, $13.95
paper)
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In Ben
Ehrenreich’s second novel, “Ether,” a compact work
of biblical noir, several small creatures meet harsh
ends, sometimes eulogized by dismissive laughter,
sometimes clumsily mourned. A mouse is stomped on, its
clotting blood striating the pavement. Hit by a car, a
pigeon lands in a flurry of feathers on the road. A deaf
and mute woman rescues a hummingbird whose heart is
still whirring, but soon death steals it away too. When
it comes to the body count of woodland cuties,
“Ether” is like “Bambi” directed by Quentin
Tarantino.
Southern
California writer Ehrenreich, who recently won a
National Magazine Award for “The End,” his Los
Angeles magazine feature detailing the procedural
odyssey from deathbed to six feet under or a pile of
ashes, calls these deaths “the ordinary apocalypses
that join to make a day,” along with fires and floods,
the struggles to eat and mate. No higher power seems
particularly sympathetic, yet alone responsible or even
watching. But we can’t be sure. Has the creator become
bored by what he sees, abandoning us like a TV show
that’s failed to capture his attention but continues
to chatter on in an empty room?
“Ether”
can’t really answer the question, but it sends out
fine fictional emissaries to explore the matterand
artfully roam the concocted landscape, the most
enigmatic of which is a man known only as the stranger.
Dressed in a stained white suit and jazzy lace-up shoes
like a Dust Bowl-era entertainer hit with hard times,
he’s a fallen god in search of his power, testing out
what he has left in encounters with desperate outcasts:
a lady barfly who nervously flirts with him; an odorous
bagman with a mystic connection to his stuff; four
violence-prone boys. The characters are familiar from
hard-boiled fiction, but Ehrenreich delights in fleshing
out their known contours, playfully exposing the strings
on his puppets instead of trying to hide them.
Eager to
“get back on top,” the stranger says like a pining
junkie, he visits a down-and-out Gabriel to retrieve a
package wrapped in oil-stained brown paper and bound
with twine. Another visit to the other archangel, a
law-school student and suburbanite named Michael,
doesn’t go as well. It’s hard to ever feel too sorry
for the stranger, though.
With his
quick cruelty and patronization, the stranger is nobody
to root for — but it’s notable that if only because
he exists in human form, he can’t help but stir up
flickers of empathy. In “Ether,” God is one of us:
fickle, self-obsessed, senselessly malicious.
The other
character that the stranger is often beseeching in
“Ether” is the author himself, an insomniac who
ponders the veracity of his creations in pensive
sections written in the first person. The author and the
stranger have a relationship that’s family in some
ways and impersonal in others. Sparing barely more
feeling for his spawn than the stranger shows for the
pitiful people he meets, the author tries to instruct
when the stranger only wants answers. Sound familiar,
believer?
As anyone
who’s spent a little time with the Bible knows, the
revelations are actually few and far between but flip
the book open and chances are somebody’s walking
somewhere, most likely in the desert. (Hey, not
everything can be the rock ‘em, sock ‘em highs of
Genesis.) “Ether” borrows that ambulating pace,
which can sap energy from the narrative sometimes, even
when suffused with apocalyptic urgency.
But it
gives you time to drink in Ehrenreich’s sculpted
sentences, sturdy things built of simple but beautiful
materials. Like furniture made by the Shakers — making
something well was “an act of prayer” for the
Protestant aesthetes — Ehrenreich revels in the
journeyman’s work of his craft, offering language for
the weary and the dispossessed, the rich or the poor.
Have a seat; stay awhile.
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