When Christmas Dies

"Mr. Ives' Christmas"

By Oscar Hijuelos

HarperCollins

248 pp.; $23

How does a parent endure the senseless slaying of an only son by a street thug? One with faith in a transcendent God could endure it, you might surmise, and especially a Christian who professes to bow to the eternal purposes of that God. But the brute truth is this: the death of a child, and especially the sudden, violent death of one's own child, can cause faith to crumple.

A parent is hardly able to view such a death as the child's early entry into heaven—indeed, those who do this too easily lead others to suspect the ladder in their heads doesn't quite reach upstairs. The parent might try, by some prestidigitation of transfer, to translate the death into the symbology of Christ, whose supreme sacrifice is the basis of Christianity, and end up appalled. Only the senselessness of the act remains, and God, the former focus of faith, is now the recipient of an all-encompassing anger, worse than any directed at the person who pulled the trigger.

How could God permit this to happen, the believer thinks, and falls into a bitterness more profound than the atheist's resigned despair at mere senselessness. The outworking of the dimensions of such a death, in its effect on believers and unbelievers alike, is the central business of Oscar Hijuelos's new novel, "Mr. Ives' Christmas."

Ives, who has worked most of his life in the art department of a Manhattan advertising agency, is growing elderly when we meet him, but he still ruminates on the death of his son, Robert, who was killed in 1967, near Christmas —shot outside a neighborhood church after choir practice. Ives's anger is apparent as he recalls yet again the circumstances of his son's death: "God had timed things so that his murderer, his face scowling, came walking down the street just as his son and a friend were standing around talking. Pop, pop, pop, three shots in the belly because his son had simply turned his head to watch his murderer's exaggerated and comic gait as he went by. A fourteen-year-old kid, who'd reeled around asking, 'What chew looking at?,' his pistol popping before Robert could reply."

Ives's "stubborn inability to stop mourning," even decades later, tempts his wife to leave him. "Again and again she told him, 'You have to put it behind you, my love,' but as the years passed, nearly thirty of them, with their thousands of days and hundreds of thousands of hours, he still could not get a certain image out of his head: his righteous and good son, stretched out on the sidewalk, eyes glazed and looking upward, suddenly aware and saddened that his physical life was ending, that image coming to Ives again and again."

Ives is the true center of this novel, as few central characters are; every word of it is filtered through him. He was deposited outside a foundling home, an orphan, and later adopted by a gentle Catholic widower from Brooklyn (adoption rules were different then) who ran a printing firm located on Chambers Street—a mellow man emotionally and financially sound enough to adopt several children:

Mr. Ives Senior was able to give his third son clothes and books, two brothers and a sister, a little money, and a room in his large, somewhat rundown brownstone, three stories high, on Carroll Street. And a name: Edward. And encouragement when, in one of the miracles of life, young Ives, at the age of seven or so, had started to draw, spending his leisure hours not out on the street playing with the local ruffians, who'd slide down coal chutes and throw bottles off rooftops at passing trucks, but resting on his belly in their front parlor floor, copying out drawings from newspapers and the illustrated books that found their way into the house. His father had liked such books very much, notably those from England with engravings by the likes of John Tenniel or those artists who illustrated the works of Charles Dickens, whose line drawings enchanted the young Ives. . . . He also taught his son how to pray, when to kneel and stand and bow his head and close his eyes during the consecration of the Host; taught him to take in the beautiful goodness that he was desperate to believe existed; to tremble before the "enormity of it all."

Something of the center of the novel is present in this passage, especially in its tone of simplicity and wonder—a wonder that travels, at times, into the precincts of the fabulistic. The prose pours on at this stately pace, too dreamy and measured for a novel, you might think at first. Then you begin to understand you are living at Ives's pace, and the novel's structure of chapterettes—many only a page or two long—begins to make sense. Each tiny chapter is given a title in full caps, and deserves one, you come to feel, when you understand that these are the cardinal thoughts Ives has mulled over for 30 years. Each section then begins to accumulate increasing emotional weight.

Ives thinks, a common man courting poetry and cliches; we follow his thoughts. Hijuelos's goal is to represent Ives as no more and no less than he is, rather than reverting to additives or "action" scenes to make him interesting. This rigor of focus is Hijuelos's strength, and he has been wise, in the best artistic sense, never to waver from his first conception. It is a modest conception, perhaps, but so refreshing—modesty in contemporary fiction! And it is a pleasure of the highest aesthetic level to discover that conception fulfilled nearly perfectly.

A writer's use of language generally follows one of two schools. The first tries to keep it as simple as possible, so it doesn't obtrude into the story and its action. The second attempts to manufacture striking language at every turn, in a desire to represent an original "voice." The problem with the first school is its tendency to forget that language forms the story, in all its obtrusive and quixotic and multitudinous forms. Its presence is, in an unexplored sense, otherworldly, because it is neither the story nor its characters but their medium. A chiseled precision, with turns of eloquence or shifts in speed to suit the word to the action, seems to be the goal of writers in this tradition, from Tolstoy and Maupassant to Hemingway and Carver.

(This school should be further distinguished from those who write the plain flat prose that seems to emulate the one-dimensional images of TV, a style first perfected perhaps by Harold Robbins and often preferred by those who presently write "Christian" novels.)

The problem with the school of dazzle is the pounce or prance of personality in every sentence, as if each phrase could somehow be unforgettably vivid because of the sheer originality of the practitioner. Here language becomes the medium of personality, the author's, and at its lowest ebb this school functions like those booths that turn out strips of photos of the paying subject. Mannerism that dates in a decade is the school's scourge. Few in its fold overcome the temptations of self-regard. But when they are avoided and the cadences of the storyteller take over, such writing not only justifies its experimentation but extends the dimensions of language, as in Twain, say, or Eudora Welty or Harper Lee or perhaps more aptly—anyway in the best of his work—Faulkner.

Over and above all this, few readers realize that no writer chooses a school, but helplessly does the best he or she is able to do with whatever gifts are given, within the demands each story or book dictates.

Which is a way of attempting to define what Hijuelos has achieved. Mr. Ives' Christmas travels mostly at the edges of these schools, attempting a poetic reproduction of the movement of Ives's thought—utterly undramatic, you think for the first few pages, and impossible to pull off. But by the time you make that assessment, you have already entered Ives's world.

Hijuelos's brushing against cliche and his archaic turns of phrase and diction—"Even in his youth, he had a pensive nature"—are, I believe, purposeful. He hopes by this to pinpoint Ives's era (he was born in 1924), his more sedate and formal, gentler generation. Hijuelos also intends to convey something of the Spanish identity Ives takes on. Not knowing any of the details of his birth, Ives has come to believe one of his birth parents was Hispanic. He forms friendships, first with the Cubans and Puerto Ricans who work in his adoptive father's printing plant, and then with the Hispanics on Claremont Avenue, near Columbia University, where Ives and his wife move after their second child, a daughter, is born. It galls him all the more, then, that his son's murderer was a Puerto Rican.

When Ives first encounters his eventual wife, Annie, an Irish Catholic from Long Island, she is turning into an avant-garde bohemian, in the idiom of the day. They meet at the Art Students League; Ives, in his introspective shyness, is attracted to her—a nonspinsterish schoolteacher with a streak of sexual adventurism. When a model fails to show up for a drawing class that Annie and Ives and a priest from Fordham and several others are taking at the League (the priest disguised in street clothes), Annie undresses and mounts the pedestal.

One evening the class and another model go out to celebrate Christmas and get a little loaded from flasks on the way, and then witness a reality of city life: "they heard a tremendous commotion of shattering materials, glass and wood and metal, high above them, a large window on the twentieth floor bursting free of the corner building." Looking up, "Ives calmly noticed what, at first glance, seemed like a falling comforter, a heavy coat, a laundry bag weighted down with clothes, all wavery and turning in circles." Soon enough there's a noise "as if somebody had hit the snowy pavement with a baseball bat. Not twenty feet in front of them, the young woman bluntly landed, her bones breaking, blood spreading out from her head and out the tips of her fingers, her hands curling up and opening in spasms, her chest, its rib cage . . ." I can't go on.

Whatever the New York detail, Hijuelos is precise. A boy tries to peddle roses at the scene. The sobering death, a forerunner of Robert's, draws Annie to Ives. They take up with one another, and although her father and uncles and brothers, all city cops from Glen Cove, despise Ives—an artist (meaning bum) of dubious nationality—the two of them marry. Annie's gradual dedication to Ives as his wife is one of the wonders of the novel; she frees him to imagine himself an artist at the center of an advertising firm. Though her love is a gift to Ives, unexpectedly exuberant, Hijuelos never abandons himself merely to detailing this but keeps his focus on Ives's meditative, spiritual outlook, with results that are often astonishing:

"Somehow she had become enamored of him. She loved his body, did unheard-of-things with him, the mystery of her love expressed in entangled, twisted positions. Having read all the plain-covered marriage manuals and Greenwich Village books like the Kamasutra, Annie ground the bottom of her body into his uplifted maleness and made him feel that he was sinning. And then Ives, forgetting guilt, behaved like the most wanted and desirable man in the world, giving his all and losing himself in the little paradise of his orgasm—the release of such lust producing, like a settling mist, a new shroud of guilt, for Ives remembered the metal crucifix with its dark patina he kept on the wall just above the bed, and the anguished face of Christ."

More than any contemporary, Hijuelos has dramatized the realities of spiritual life in the chaos of America. He is particularly adept at conveying a sense of Roman Catholic spirituality, which is often entangled in the grit of the everyday, as in this recounting of Ives's regular visits to a local church, Saint Andrews:

"He'd walk in with his portfolio in hand, dip his fingers in the font of holy water, make the Sign of the Cross, genuflect before entering the nave, and then dally over the table on which there were dozens of prayer candles, their little flames dozing, as it were, in their blood-red glass cups. He'd put a few coins in the slotted box marked FOR POOR SOULS, and make a wish that his adoptive father would find all the happiness and glory he'd wanted in the hereafter. . . . He emptied coins from the pockets of his coat and lit candles for all the others like himself, who, for one reason or another, had ended up in orphanages and foundling homes—he was always certain that so many of the bums, hoods, and prostitutes he saw on the street started out that way. He stared at the fluttering tongues of light, moved the thin burning taper from one candle wick to the other, before blowing it out. In a slightly hypnotic state, he would kneel down in a front pew observing the statuary, the crucifixes, and the triptychs above the altar. A scene of Christ turning water into wine in Judea; Christ ascending into heaven from his tomb near Jerusalem; a star rising in the east over the Syrian desert—these scenes of times and place, so far away in the real world, seemed, in the context of a church, immediate and accessible. In some moments, Ives would close his eyes and imagine those distant places, and in a flash he would feel certain presences. And he would think that was all the travel he'd ever need."

We learn that Ives sometimes "thought of God as the father on the throne in heaven, the ever-powerful deity, a great Hercules stretching across the sky, as Michelangelo had depicted him on the Sistine Chapel ceiling . . . or alternately like one of William Blake's wizened spirits, with a long flowing beard and fiery eyes." And then this passage immediately follows:

"Once, when his son was only five or six and they were sitting on a beach by Lake Sebago, watching the water, Robert had asked him what God looked like. It was that time of day when the changing light and wind had made the water choppy and mysterious, when the silt had risen like clouds of dark milk from the lake bed to just below the surface. In those moments, when Ives told Robert, "God is a spirit," he imagined him as a vaporous goodness inside people's being."

For all his imaginings, Ives's answer to his son is correct, and the image of the lake filled with milky silt suggests not only God's presence as Spirit, but his suffusing omnipresence—or immanence, as theologians call it.

In a chapterette entitled simply, "ON MADISON AND FORTY-FIRST STREET," Ives after work buys a chocolate bar in the lobby, then steps into the street where "the sky was a clean wintry blue—the blue of a deeply processed magazine ad, the blue of poster art for seaside vacations in Hawaii and Havana, a blue that, reminiscent of water, seemed dense and inviting, a blue of light diffused through crystal." In the cold, steam is rising from manhole covers, and as Ives savors his chocolate, the receptionist from the firm where he works appears at his side and, in an unusual but not enticing gesture, asks Ives if he wants to take a walk; he declines and she goes on.

Then something else unusual happened: walking down the street toward the impossibly crowded avenue, and standing shoulder to shoulder amid a throng of shoppers on the corner, Ives . . . blinked his eyes and, in a moment of pure clarity that he would always remember, began to feel euphoric, all the world's goodness, as it were, spinning around him.

At the same time, he began to feel certain physical sensations: the sidewalk under him lifting ever so slightly, and the avenue, dense with holiday traffic, fluttering like an immense carpet, and growing wider and stretching onward as if it would continue to do so forever, an ever-expanding river of life. And the skyscrapers that lined Madison Avenue—beginning with the Young & Rubicam building just across the street, with its streams of employees rushing in and out of its revolving doors—began to waver, the buildings bowing as if to recognize Ives, bending as if the physical world were a grand joke. And in those moments he could feel the very life in the concrete below him, the ground humming—pipes and tangles of cables and wires beneath him, endless ticking, moving, animated objects. Why, it was as if he could hear molecules grinding, light shifting here and there, the vibrancy of things and spirit everywhere.

Suddenly, to Ives anything seems possible, and "had pyramids appeared over the Chrysler building weeping," it wouldn't have surprised him:

"Then, not knowing whether to shout from ecstasy or fear, he looked up and saw the sun, glowing red and many times its normal size, looming over the avenue, a pink and then flaring yellow corona bursting from it. And then, in all directions the very sky filled with four rushing, swirling winds, each defined by a different-colored powder like strange Asian spices: one was cardinal red, one the color of saffron, another gray like mothwing, the last a brilliant violet, and these came from four directions, spinning like a great pinwheel over Madison Avenue and Forty-first Street. Leaning back, nearly falling, Ives was on the verge of running for his life when, just like that, a great calm returned, the sun receding, the blue sky utterly tranquil. The traffic light clicked on and the light changed."

Here Hijuelos's language echoes biblical cadences. Ives is at first reluctant to mention his experience to anyone, even Annie, but later comes to recognize it as pivotal. For a while he attends spiritist lectures and demonstrations but soon sees through them and returns to his meditations in the church.

Although every word of the novel arrives through Ives's doleful aura, every minor character is brilliant in his or her individuality, an achievement in itself, and when Ives encounters comedy and joy it is as full-bodied as in any free-wheeling contemporary novel—more so, indeed, because it arrives out of the context of Ives's grief.

As the young man who shot Ives's son matures, he pleads for reconciliation, and Ives does what he can, as long as the fellow is in prison. But once the murderer is released, marries, and has a family, Ives has to decide whether he can really forgive him or not. This ultimate scene, and two more equally central, must be passed over, so the reader can come on them fresh as a new day, in the context of Ives's story.

But I cannot refrain from quoting the final two paragraphs of the last chapterette, "IN CHURCH AGAIN," where the choir starts singing "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and Ives's head tips back:

"There he sat, and as was his habit of old, he began his quiet meditation. Above the altar in that church, was a statue of Christ, set back in a kind of nook, and on either side of Him, representations of the Holy Mother and Saint John the Baptist, with their expressions of divine knowledge. Looking at the altar he remembered another of his childhood thoughts: in the same way that the baby Jesus, the promise of the world, lay resting in His crib, adored by the magi and the shepherds and basking in the warmth of angelic and familial love, so did the man Jesus, down from the Cross and awaiting His final resurrection, lay resting inside the altar, beneath the chrismoned cloth. He laughed, remembering how the slightest breeze from the church's opened doors, rustling the altar's cloth, had made Ives' little heart jump: at any moment, Jesus would be coming out of His resting place and the world would be filled with miracles. He would be dressed in great flowing white robes, a beautiful light filling the church.

"With pained and transcendent eyes, bearded and regal, He would come down the central aisle toward Ives, and placing His wounded hands upon Ives' brow, give His blessing before taking him away, and all others who were good in this world, off into His heaven, with its four mysterious winds, where they would be joined unto Him and all that is good forever and ever, without end."

This is an extraordinary statement of faith for any age, and for ours nearly unbelievable, not only in its forthrightness but also in the courage behind it—sufficient, one hopes, to jolt those who call themselves Christian artists out of their self-protective torpor. Yet, in all its power, as one closes the book, Hijuelos's conclusion raises a lingering question: Would secular critics countenance equal forthrightness from a Protestant? This seems relevant when one considers some of the eliding nimbleness that Updike's work, for instance, has taken, after the forthrightness of Pigeon Feathers and other early books.

Hijuelos received the Pulitzer Prize for an earlier novel, "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," and it remains to be seen whether this novel will move him beyond the pale of serious consideration by the critics who are the arbiters of such awards, and who seem more unforgiving of explicit faith in fiction than many parents who tend to a child's death. I doubt that it matters one iota to Hijuelos, or he would not have ended his novel as he did. But I have not heard of many paeans for his recent book from the curators of literary culture, and I wonder why. "Mr. Ives' Christmas" is not only a book of extraordinary faith but an unimpeachable work of art, the sleeper of the year, one of the high points in the last decade of American fiction.