Susan Perabo, The Broken Places

The Broken Places, Susan Perabo’s fine first novel, starts with a bang. On the outskirts of Casey, a small central Pennsylvania town, an abandoned farm house mysteriously explodes. Trapped inside is Ian Finch, one of the grungy, black-clad teenagers who’d been hanging out in the basement, smoking and fooling around with M-80s.

The novel’s protagonist is twelve-year-old Paul Tucker, a junior high quarterback, the son of a firefighter, Sonny Tucker, himself the son and heir apparent of Captain Sam, the town’s legendary chief. Young Paul rides his bicycle across town and joins a crowd of onlookers, delighted to be able to watch Sonny in action. Confidently resplendent in his turnout gear, his father is, Paul thinks, the bravest man in town.

Sonny descends into the rubble to rescue the teenager, but while Paul and his mother and hundreds of others look on in horror, the full house collapses. Hour after agonizing hour they wait, until at last, Sonny and Ian emerge alive, Ian’s foot having been amputated with Sonny’s axe as the only way to extricate him.

The media declare Sonny a hero. There’s footage on the nightly news; there’s an interview on Good Morning America with Sonny reciting clichés while the interviewer’s face furrows into something meant to approximate genuine human concern. There’s even a made-for-TV movie. But television, this novel reminds us, even so-called reality television, is not very good at discovering and telling the truth, certainly not the truths a boy like Paul needs.

What really happened down there? Television can deliver spectacle but not the messy, sometimes startling, and painful human truths at the heart of this story. What’s the strange bond formed between Sonny and Ian? What’s wrong with Paul’s father? Why can’t things be the way they used to be?

On the set of the movie based on the incident, witnessing a cheesy reenactment of “the story that everyone wanted to hear,” Paul is appalled by the distortion: The depiction of his parent is “an outright fraud.” At twelve, he discovers what most of us already know: Television flattens, exaggerates, and lies. Bathed in the artificial glare of television lights, everything looks false. 

We need a medium more supple and subtle than Disaster TV, more capable of handling complexity and the inner life—we need fiction. Long after the debris has been swept away and a new parade of victims has been made up and miked for the morning chat shows, there are still destructive fires blazing in the Tucker family, small but potentially lethal explosions, facades collapsing every day. There are tremors that can be felt and recorded only by the more sensitive tools of a skilled novelist like Susan Perabo.

A creative writing professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Perabo is the author of Who I Was Supposed to Be, a highly praised collection of short stories, marketed as being “in the tradition of Lorrie Moore,” an appealing blend of humor and heartache, full of endearingly quirky characters. Perabo’s storytelling here is somewhat more earnest; there’s no flash or dazzle, just the clear, assured prose of a writer who trusts her story and respects her characters. 

The best moments in the book are the quiet ones, some terribly quiet, scenes that will never appear on the nightly news. Paul comes to realize what great fiction writers know: “People were full of surprises.” He discovers his prim mother whaling away in the basement on his drum kit; he finds his father scrubbing a toaster in the middle of the night with a ferocious and slightly unhinged urgency. 

The title of the novel is an allusion to A Farewell to Arms, the relevant passage serving as the book’s epigram: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” It seems perfectly fitting that a quotation from Hemingway should be used in Parabo’s novel, a novel that simply but powerfully explores the nature of manhood, fathers and sons, courage and woundedness.

—The Buffalo News