Strong storytelling of family’s tale gets tangled in a few loose threads

Families create patterns -- ways of living and loving, of dealing with life’s hardships and perils, of celebrating its joys and richness. These patterns play out from generation to generation, often unconsciously, creating an unspoken script toward which each family member, each player in the drama of life, feels a vague kind of loyalty. Jim Lewis’ third novel, “The King Is Dead,” traces the effect of these patterns, as one family’s crimes and misdemeanors are passed on, unresolved, for the next generation to untangle even as the younger generation remains only dimly aware of its own history.

Spanning two generations and told in two distinct sections, this epic story begins in the late 1950s with Walter Selby, a speechwriter and aide to the governor of Tennessee, who meets and falls silly in love with Nicole Lattimore. Nicole, readers learn, has a bit of a past, including a youthful love affair with an aspiring jazz musician, John Brice. Walter would rather not know this past and constructs a happily-ever-after life for himself with Nicole. Soon they have two children, Frank and Gail, the picture-perfect home, a life to be envied for its completeness and warmth. Walter is awash in contentment.

This satisfaction falls apart when Walter’s skills as a negotiator fail him, and, as a result, an amiable black man kills himself rather than give up his homestead. Distraught, Walter resigns his political post and comes home for solace, only to find his beloved bride in bed with another man. Walter tips over the edge and murders her, then turns himself in and incurs a lengthy prison term. Where does devotion end, the novel asks, and destruction begin?

In part two, readers follow Walter’s son, Frank, now a middle-aged successful actor and a divorced father. Frank and Gail were raised by a kind, upstanding family after their father’s incarceration and have been told only hazy details of their parents’ story. In this section we learn of Frank’s adolescence and young adulthood -- his first young love affair, with the mentally unstable Kimmie, echoing the theme of devotion versus destruction -- and how his remarkable skill as an actor has arisen from his penchant for make-believe. We also learn of his bottomless self-loathing. Having grown disenchanted with his acting ability, he regularly turns down movie parts, until an aged, eccentric doyenne filmmaker convinces him to take on the role of a lifetime. In researching that role, Frank must learn about his family’s past and resolve its conflicts.

If the plotting sounds a bit predictable, it is, and though the writing is often engaging, it fails to serve the narrative arc. When Lewis wants to bring his readers up-to-date on his characters, he presents years of backstory in flat exposition rather than creating compelling scenes, while the central unexpected plot twist -- Walter’s murder of Nicole -- leaps at us from out of the blue. As a character, Walter has been painstakingly constructed with no hints that he’s capable of murder. Instead of sticking around to fill in these needed plot and character details, Lewis takes off regularly on digressive narratives, as if to see where they’ll lead. Nicole’s early love affair with John Brice is given so much detail that readers may find themselves waiting for Brice to reappear in the story. (He doesn’t.) Their liaison illustrates Nicole’s passionate side and (by inference) her potential for infidelity, but the narrative is extended beyond its usefulness. Likewise, Lewis introduces a number of story tangents -- a “coyote” smuggling immigrants from Mexico, for example -- that stall the momentum of the tale.

Readers may quickly forget these flaws, though, when Lewis allows his strong writing to propel the story. Late in the novel, for instance, Frank comes across the brand of perfume his mother used to wear. The scene is sharply drawn and haunting. Frank sniffs his own history in that perfume, suddenly discovering “the smell of a familiar voice, a face bending over him in the dark, half-hidden in shadows and swooning forgetfulness.” Frank inhales again. “This time the sensation was merely a wisp, and he couldn’t be sure that it meant anything at all; the presence was faint and sculling backwards, a shy ghost, drawing away.” We, like Frank, want to recapture what’s lost, and at that moment Lewis has us in the palm of his hand. We have been subtly prepared for this encounter even as Frank fails to anticipate its emotional weight, and the resulting tension is delightful.

When Lewis holds tight to his plot and the family around which it revolves, his storytelling is strong. Alas, the narrative dalliances and flights of fancy he indulges detract from what otherwise would be a satisfying read.