EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE GRACE

See offers a novel about a mentally ill man seeking inner peace while raising a young daughter.

Los Angeles veterinary technician Benjamin Bradford feels as if he’s living a double life. On the one hand, he does his job well and manages to successfully take care of his child, Sophia; on the other, he’s persistently struggling with the stress of mental illness—“this place inside, where I hear the voices and do battle with all my selves.” Bradford shares his thoughts with Cassandra,the therapist he’s been seeing for nine years, whom he describes as having “a kind of serene and celestial otherness to her.” In his sessions, he worries about his ability to raise a daughter in a healthy environment when he constantly feels like he could lose control; indeed, he berates himself for every time he’s raised his voice to Sophia despite his therapist’s advice that he cut himself some slack. This is difficult for Bradford to do, as mental illness runs in his family, afflicting both his mother and his grandmother, and his father disappeared from his life when he was very young, giving him tense, ambivalent feelings about fatherhood: “A father,” he reflects at one point, “is a ghost, someone who walks out on you, and leaves a hole in your heart.” When Bradford receives an invitation to the wedding of his best friend, Keith Ramsey, and his former love, Anna Robertson,he’s engulfed by memories of their shared college days in the 1990s. Pleasant recollections lead to traumatic ones, which add further depth to this heavily retrospective novel.

See carefully and skillfully balances the present and past in his narrative, although the prolonged flashbacks inevitably slow the present-day storyline’s momentum. As tensions mount between father and daughter, and as Sophia rebels against Bradford’s moodiness and caution, readers are treated to dramatic scenes with powerful exchanges: “Just because you have no friends and no life, doesn’t mean you can force me to stay home and watch you be miserable,” Sophia says at one point. “Why can’t you just let me live my life?” But as well-written as these scenes are, they have to perform double duty; they not only need to move readers emotionally, but also extract them from long stretches of 1990s-set narrative, which get lost in excessive period trivia. It’s tough to balance a delicate portrayal of a father-daughter dynamic amid seemingly endless references to the Beastie Boys, Roxy Music, Nirvana, mixtapes, and boom boxes, although See generally manages to succeed, nonetheless. That said, readers will find that even two-thirds of the way into the book, very little has happened to present-day Bradford, who’s still at the same job, still talking to the same therapist, still having occasional flare-ups with his daughter, and still pining after the lost Anna. Although the author is an unfailingly energetic guide, some readers will likely wish that the narrative had a bit more get-up-and-go.

An emotionally powerful but structurally awkward novel about a troubled man’s quest for redemption.