Reviewed by Todd Adams
Ian Maloney
tells the story of a boy Jonah growing up with a driven, complex father in South
Brooklyn Exterminating. The novel starts with the father awakening his
seven-year-old son at three in the morning. They are headed out to spray a
place for bugs in Brooklyn, and the exterminating business serves many purposes
in this book. It provides most of the setting and much of the plot. It is also how
the father instills the values—a code to live by—of honesty, hard work, and
pride in a job well done in his son. Still, it is also a source of much-needed
comic relief, for this is not a simple, idyllic story in which father and son
live a charmed life together. The father smokes two packs of cigarettes a day
and drinks too much. When the eighty-hour work weeks become too much for him to
endure, he also takes too many pills. As a result, he has an epic, violent
episode and ends up in a sanitorium for six months. How the father gradually
wins back his son’s trust is one of the most affecting scenes in a book filled
with such scenes.
Maloney avoids
sentimentality by respecting Hemingway’s admonition that the greater the
emotion, the less said. We see and hear the world through Jonah’s eyes and ears
because of the first-person narration. We know what he feels and thinks
moment-by-moment, but there are no lengthy ruminations on the meaning of life.
There is no angst-filled soul-searching. After the violent episode, the two
main characters don’t have a tearful reconciliation. They work together on
fixing a boat with a hole in it instead, and this metaphoric activity takes the
place of words between the father and the son. How to heal breaches is a vital
part of the code the father is teaching the son to live by, too.
Some of these values may not be for everyone. The father owns a gun
and is loathe to give it up even after his outburst. His son has to take the
weapon away and hide it. The father never gives up cigarette smoking, but
neither of his children smokes. He despises political correctness as an affront
to the English language, but the most memorable example is his insistence on
using the word “exterminate” instead of “pest control.” More problematic, he
indulges in anti-immigrant rhetoric. However, his generous actions toward
individuals who have moved to the United States from foreign countries
undercuts it. Perhaps most troubling, he has a traditional view of marriage and
the role of women. His wife is to be loved and respected—and stay home to raise
the kids. Even near the end of his life, he still considers this decision the
best one of his life, and his son does not disagree.
However, he is determined not to raise his children as he was
raised. They don’t live in constant fear and pain as he did when growing up as
the son of an alcoholic and abusive father. He abuses alcohol and drugs, but
he—or their mother—keeps them from succumbing to the same evil. Most
importantly, he gives both his daughter and his son the freedom and emotional
support to be who they want to be, unlike himself, and they choose to be
artists. His is not a dogmatic love full of unchanging rules and strictures but
an open, growing one that imbues the novel with surprising warmth and depth.
Hemingway’s aphorism serves Maloney well as he navigates these
dangerous shoals of emotion, but perhaps less so when it comes to Jonah’s
decision to become a writer and write a memoir about his relationship with his
father. That decision is obviously tied to his father’s love of literature and
frustrated desire to teach it. They share books with each other. They even
recite poetry to each other, and the novel ends with the son’s first draft of a
lengthy description of his father. This ending has an emotional effect, but it
may also leave the reader wondering what Jonah has learned from writing the
book, if anything.
All quibbles aside, however, this is an impressive debut novel
about a complicated father-son relationship that ends in love and mutual
respect instead of the more familiar disaster. Told with verve and style, it is
full of compassion, pity and comedy as the reader learns about a rarely
described, often ignored profession. I look forward to reading Ian Maloney’s
next novel.
- Todd Adams is retired lawyer who writes a blog about everything he did wrong writing his first novel and how he hopes to avoid doing in his second one.
Copyright©2024 by Todd Adams. All Rights Reserved.
