Home Alone

One of the sillier bits of advice propagated by fiction-writing programs around the country is to write about what you know. Perhaps that accounts for the proliferation of novels about twentysomethings living bohemian existences in New York or Los Angeles. Not that such books aren’t fun, but if the dictum were obeyed, the scope of stories would be seriously circumscribed. Brady Udall, who teaches writing and is a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, doesn’t cleave to what he knows in his marvelous first novel, though he does use his own background as a foundation. Udall grew up in Arizona (he is the grandnephew of Mo Udall, the Arizona congressman and longtime figure in Washington politics), and much of the story takes place on an Indian reservation in his native state. He is also a Mormon, and one of the central episodes of the book involves a Mormon family.

But the central character is pure, delightful fiction: Edgar Mint, a half-white, half-Apache boy born in the late 1960s. His mother was a drunk and his father disappeared before he was born. “If I could tell you only one thing about my life,” says Edgar as the book begins, “it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.” Over the course of the next several hundred pages, Udall unfolds the mystery of Edgar’s life, from his survival at a rundown hospital, to his tortuous days at a Native American school on the reservation, to his near-adoption by a family in Utah and, finally, to the surprising redemption that awaits him as a teenager.

Edgar is an odd boy. Barely verbal, unable to write by hand because of slight brain damage after the accident, he is given a typewriter after he emerges from his coma, and he types every day. Presumably, the novel is meant to be excerpts of the running commentary that Edgar has typed about his life, sometimes writing in the first person, sometimes in the third. And what a life it is. Months spent in a dilapidated hospital surrounded by three other patients in various states of decrepitude, one of whom, Art, having lost his wife and children in a drunken car accident, becomes Edgar’s lifelong friend. Years spent at a boarding school that makes a Dickensian orphanage seem bucolic. More years in a “Leave It to Beaver” Mormon home, which are marred by the bizarre marriage of the dysfunctional couple who house him along with a menagerie of animals meant to compensate for the death of their young son. And an entire childhood haunted by the doctor who saved his life, who makes it his mission to protect Edgar and, in the process, becomes a malevolent presence in the young man’s life.

Many of the stories, stripped of the narrative quirkiness that Udall infuses, are dark and depressing. The school, nicknamed Fort Apache, which was in fact what it was in the 19th century, is a microcosm of a destroyed people who now inflict harm and degradation on one another. Edgar and his closest friend, Cecil, are used as pawns by the older delinquents and suffer beatings and sadistic abuse that they bear with stoic silence. Edgar is beaten nearly to death and, in his depression, tries to kill himself by jumping into a ravine, but recent rains had swollen the current. Edgar survives: “The river had stolen both my shoes, one of my socks, and one of the two pairs of pants I owned. Thankfully, Edgar still had his underwear.” Through the ordeal of these school years, Edgar maintains a philosophical remove, but he is damaged nonetheless. The full extent of that damage doesn’t reveal itself until the final pages of the book. Only then, when he realizes that he is safe at last, does he let down the wall that has kept his pain at bay. “I began to choke up and I didn’t know if I was going to vomit or suffocate... but it was something else coming up, a wind gathering in the hollows of me and pushing into my chest and throat....There were so many things I had never cried for. But I cried for them now.”

There are a few off-notes. Barry, the doctor who shadows Edgar, never seems dangerous, yet Edgar responds to him with a deep, defensive fear that has tragic consequences for them both. Yet, Udall doesn’t fully tease out the motivations, either of Barry or of Edgar in relation to him. And at times, Edgar’s life is so unremittingly bleak that his survival feels less like a miracle than like a curse. These are minor issues, however. “The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint” is an adept mix of humor and pathos. Udall’s prose strikes a perfect balance, sometimes minimalist, sometimes lush. The novel revolves around an odd central character who, if written by a writer of less talent, would have strained credulity but with Udall as a muse is achingly human. Edgar Mint is nobody’s Everyman, but he is the hope and the pain of a child looking for, and eventually finding, a home. *