THE WORLD’S ROOM

Newcomer London offers a rich, nimble instance of the coming-of-age story, in which his narrator straightens himself up into life from the lurid psychological skein of his family.

Teddy Hofmann opens by confessing that he has been known as Erich—at least since his older brother, an original bearer of the name, committed suicide in 1969. The history of this oddity begins in New Jersey, where the Hofmann family (Teddy, Erich, sister Deborah, mother Lorna, father Willy) breaks apart. Lorna, a compelling, erratic character whose sense of entrapment is eloquently sketched, gathers her children together, and drives south, for Mexico. When Columbia professor Willy at last ceases supporting his wife’s apparent lark, Lorna and the kids travel north to Los Angeles, where they settle in Venice. Then, however,Teddy’s family begins to shudder under the pressures of California in the ’60s, a flighty mother, an idiosyncratically intelligent brother, and a sister bitter about her neglectful father. Erich, Lorna’s clear favorite, begins an epic poem/ballad about his life, which Teddy covets as a clue to her affection. Later, Erich is diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., where he commits suicide. After his death, his grieving mother begins calling Teddy by her first son’s name—with the result that Teddy himself spends the ’70s and ’80s a man divided in himself, and unable to find his own center. A disastrous love affair, and the death of his mother, heighten his crisis of personality, while the rupture of his sister’s childless marriage reunites the children briefly, before Teddy heads south again, to Mexico, in an attempt to clarify his own history. At the close, Willy suffers a stroke that will finally kill him, and Teddy is given the chance to view his family through his father’s hidden eyes.

With graceful nuance and subtlety, London’s tale is a melancholy success, a cleanly written, emotionally credible debut that tamps its pathos with a firm, generous clarity, and so eliminates the hazy lilt of sentimentality.