We Can Report Them
 Cover of the 1st edition | |
| Author | Michael Brodsky |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Laurie Dolphin Design |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Postmodern literature |
| Publisher | Four Walls Eight Windows |
Publication date | 1999 |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 340 |
| ISBN | 978-1568581446 |
We Can Report Them is Michael Brodsky's sixth novel. The novel intertwines death and creation, centering on the making of a commercial glorifying a serial killer's last days. Bert, the commercial's director, must also deal with two terminally ill patients, first his stepfather Albert, then his mother-in-law Joyce.
Several reviews noted that We Can Report Them has a more straightforward narrative than Brodsky's previous ***. Nevertheless, the novel is filled with mathematical allusions (Cantor and transfinite cardinals, topology, infinite series, Turing machines) and to kabbalah (tzimtzum, ein sof, sefirot).
Significance of the title
The success of Albert's "unanticipated tonsillectomy" was so staggering that "We could report it", as one of the doctors says parenthetically, notwithstanding the fact that the patient died shortly afterwards.[1]
After thinking about the pending detailed test results Joyce's doctors are soon going to tell him, Bert summarizes what they will say as: "In other words, ... we can report her."[2]
Plot summary
The novel begins (with deceptively straightforward text) by introducing Bert and Belle, "a truly happy pair", a married couple living in a suburb near Manhattan. Bert works for the Turing Advertising Agency, directing commercials. His stepfather, Albert, has been in a hospital, on his deathbed, for several years.
The action begins with Bert picking up Belle's mother, Joyce, and Joyce's current husband, Leonard at the airport. We learn also Joyce's previous husbands include Fred, now Joyce's lawyer, and her unnamed third husband, Belle's father. (We later learn that her fourth husband was named Murray.)
Bert then makes a pickup of B. Austin Samuels, his boss at the 60th Street Heliport. A new client was loco about Bert's previous commercial, "The Reflection Principle". But the bad news is Bert did not make the Floyd Flowers best-dressed list.
Bert visits his father in the hospital, talking with Doctors Pratt and Grass. They deliver speeches on the meaning of symptoms, illness, and death. They are critical of Albert, who keeps permuting his symptoms.
Bert returns to a work conference, attended by Samuels and one of his dedicated lieutenants, GreenHurstWood (usually referred to as GHW[3]). They explain to Bert how his career is pretty much doomed by failing to make Flowers' list. Samuels recommends Bert trying loving his stepfather. Bert returns to the hospital, only to learn that Albert has died of an "unanticipated tonsillectomy."
After a short memorial service and funeral, Bert meets in a downtown converted warehouse with Samuels and the commercial's principal actors: Priscilla, who plays the victim's wife, Gift, who plays Pudd, the serial killer, and Ralph, who plays the victim. Bert explains what the meaning of acting is, partly in terms of anecdotes about his "old pal, Marty Heidigger (sic)".
Reception
Brodsky has his immense gifts under control, and real madness is allowed to shine forth
— Edmund Carlevale, The Boston Book Review, 11/1999
While the stylistic excesses force the reader into a peculiarly tenacious reading zone, We Can Report Them is finally agreeable as it is a novel that resonates.
— Alan Tinkler, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 2000, Vol. 20, Issue 2
[E]ven when the story is intelligible... it doesn't much matter, except as a sounding board for various abstract concepts.
— Kristin Eliasberg, New York Times,10/10/1999
Brodsky belongs to the avant-garde school of novelists who dispense with plot in favor of the referential possibilities of language. ... Critical opinion is divided on Brodsky's 10 previous works of fiction, and the writer has alternately been read as a brilliant prose stylist and an off-putting obscurantist. Though the comic density of his language here yields some stunning verbal pyrotechnics, it just as frequently thickens into unintelligibility.
— ?, Publishers Weekly, 9/1999
Some critics praise Brodsky, but this reviewer agrees with Charles Salzberg: "Language...is supposed to communicate, not alienate; enlighten, not confuse."[4]
— Jim Dwyer, Cal State Chico, Library Journal, 1999
References
- ^ p 33
- ^ p 128
- ^ GHW happen to be the lead initials of former US president G. H. W. Bush)
- ^ Charles Salzberg, New York Times, review of Southernmost and other stories, 3/9/1997