ON THIS DAY

Poet Bellows edges into literary fiction with a first novel about two young adults trying to grow up.

Narrator Warren, 18, and his sister Joan, 20, have been orphaned by cancer and suicide. Early on, they and Auntie E visit the graveyard where their parents are buried. “A bald saint looks up into the trees with extended arms and upturned hands; as we pass by, his expression seems to change from beseeching to bawling.” The story heads in that direction too. Our sibs spend a lot of time thinking about the past: “We’ve had contests to see who could remember what, when. We’ve recreated entire holiday gatherings, down to people’s outfits and food.” Appropriately, much of the story occurs in flashbacks of Dad disintegrating at the hospital, or Mom getting sloshed on the porch. Present time includes Warren and Joan doing things like watching trick-or-treaters enjoy the childhood that was denied them and a subplot about a somewhat evil man named Richard who wants to sell off the family nursery, reducing an entire episode in their lives to a dollar amount. Bellows’s overly simplistic prose, perhaps intended to accurately render the adolescent narrator, comes off more as a limitation than a characterization. Narrative style ranges from dreamy reminiscence to apparent journal entries to Ping-Pongy exchanges between Warren and Joan, who still haven’t matured and might not. Thoughts are often simplistic as well (“I saw it was not my father; it was a replica lying in his bed”), the writing sometimes descends to a level more appropriate to magazine writing, and the only question the book seems to ask is whether Joan and Warren and Auntie E will be able to craft some form of nontraditional family in the aftermath of cruel nature. Still, a nice mood pervades the flashbacks, even if the present suffers for it—which may be the point.

A tale not yet complete.