Cleaver

The title character of Tim Parks’s novel Cleaver, a sardonic and sybaritic British TV journalist, decides at the peak of his career to disappear to a cabin off the grid, high in a German-speaking corner of the Italian Alps. Scorched by a roman à clef published by his son, Harold Cleaver just wants to try to “shut his big mouth”—to grasp the simplest concrete reality without indulging his instinct to make a documentary or act like he’s on camera.

Unsurprisingly, Cleaver, lodged in a moldy hut that belonged to a freshly deceased Nazi, does not quite master the contemplative mode. That’s all the better for Cleaver, which coolly tracks his multitasking mind as it shuttles between the severe new existence he’s comically unprepared for, and the bloated old one, which yielded its own share of personal disasters. These are cataloged in his son’s tell-all, which Cleaver constantly replays and rebuts in his head, a virtual novel-within-the-novel.

This babbling brook of consciousness is enlivened by the tug-of-war between Cleaver’s entrenched patterns of thought and his quick-witted curiosity. His urbanite’s vague notions of nature and self-sufficiency collide with actual nature and dependence on his backwoods neighbors, on whom Cleaver also projects his own tortured relationships. (He understands just enough German to conjure wild surmises, theories he shares with a doll and a troll figurine.) The obsessive patterns of thought slowly home in on his own elemental family tragedy, but Parks—a Booker Prize finalist and himself a Briton living in Italy—resists easy epiphany. Instead, this miniature clash of civilizations dramatizes, in mock-heroic glory, the frighteningly unpredictable task of living in the present, while having a past.

—Jonathan Taylor