| EARLY ON IN "The Last Flight of Poxl West," Daniel Torday's expertly crafted first novel, an irksome grad student with dandruff asks the title character if we have "reached a point of saturation with all the first-person accounts" of World War II. It's 1986, and Poxl (né Leopold Weisberg) has just published an acclaimed and best-selling memoir, "Skylock," about his time as a Jewish bomber pilot in the British Royal Air Force. He replies that he hasn't even given the question any thought - he "simply sat down and reported the heroism" of others. It's a canny pre-emptive autocritique from Torday, who casts any skeptic of his chosen subject matter as a snidely unhygienic killjoy. ("'You haven't,' the kid said. 'Huh.'") The meta-nonfiction gets complicated, particularly if you're reviewing "Poxl West," even more so if it's for this very publication. In the opening pages, we are treated to an excerpt from The New York Times Book Review's take on "Skylock," to the effect that, while it "is not a perfect book . . . and its second half is stronger than its first," it is nonetheless "truly unique, a history we need, and there's something undeniable about the quality of its details, the precision of its observation. Having finished it, I don't think I've been so moved by a book in recent memory." Huh, as my other stand-in might say. Since "Skylock" itself constitutes the bulk of "Poxl West" - the rest concerns retrospective first-person interludes from Poxl's nominal nephew (Poxl is a family friend; they're not actually related), Eli, as a 15-year-old outside Boston in thrall to his newly famous uncle's aerial and literary heroism - Torday has attempted to write his own enthusiastic Times book review by proxy, although I'm skeptical the copy editors would have let "truly unique" pass unchallenged. (In fact, for a war novel, "Poxl West" devotes a lot of attention to the minutiae of book reviewing. Having read my copy while flying coach from New York to Los Angeles with my seatmate manspread far into my airspace, I can attest that it is, indeed, as romantic a vocation as that of a combat pilot.) To start with the overfamiliarity of World War II: If specificity is the path to differentiation, then Torday has deftly gunned down that enemy grad student. The novel is impeccably researched, with, yes, precisely observed details as Poxl and his memoir hurtle from his hometown in Czechoslovakia, where his father runs a leather factory and his stifled mother roams outside their marriage; to Rotterdam, where he falls in love with Françoise, a Dutch prostitute/nightclub singer; and most lengthily to London, where he becomes engaged to a British nurse, Glynnis, and joins the war effort, first as a mobile canteen driver and rescuer in the Blitz, later as a pilot; and points beyond. Meanwhile, Hitler tightens his grip on Europe and characters close to Poxl die or are left behind. There doesn't seem to be a germane subject for which the author hasn't done his homework, from the leather trade to the cockpit controls of military aircraft to the kabbalah (Torday won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction for his novella, "The Sensualist"). And all of this is rendered in Torday's unobtrusively lyrical prose, superb Rothian sentences that glide over the page as smoothly as a Spitfire across a cloudless sky. Poxl on an adolescent pastoral outing with his crush: "An early-evening moon stood sentinel over us, lucid in the receding sky. The banks of the Elbe were suddenly new to me, the fields of some distant planet we'd been transported to. Flies lifted out of the low grass in ululating swarms as if shaken off the earth's floor by the vibrating strength of my desire. A low waft of fragrant pollen rose in the night air." This isn't just painterly imagery tethered to teenage hormones; Torday metes out consonance and alliteration - lucid/receding, sky/banks, flies/lifted/if/off/floor/ waft/fragrant - with the care of a poet. Those gorgeous sentences may glide a little too smoothly, or at least swiftly; the novel flies through Poxl's adventures at the speed of sound. Françoise, his lodestar for the second half of the book, is present for only a 30-page stretch. His early life with his parents in Czechoslovakia is given a scant 16 pages. The air combat section spans just 24. Quantity is not quality, but the critical sequences are so brief that Poxl's descriptions of his feelings tend to express more than evoke, even as Torday conveys them with characteristic sensitivity and elegance. "Knowing my mother had met her end," Poxl writes upon learning his parents have been sent to a concentration camp, "was like imagining every star in the sky blotted out by some small boy with a pin whose touch extinguishes each light." The war stories, too, come off as somewhat episodic and hurried. The sex scenes that supposedly scandalized Poxl's readers are tame, for 2015 or 1986. A few characters - namely Poxl's sweet nurse and an anti-Semitic navigator in his squadron - are, if not out of war-movie central casting, then out of the waiting room next door. If "Skylock" were published independently as a real memoir, I'm not sure it would be "a history we need." In one of the interludes that frame Poxl's story, Eli mentions a school report he has written on the memoir and transcribes his teacher's praise: "Impressive research, impressive topic, impressive writing, impressive, impressive, impressive.... Meticulous work: A-." This novel, too, at times reads like a meticulous paper calculated to win over a teacher. It's exceedingly well behaved, omitting anything that might upset delicate constitutions. The messiness of war can't quite get its full due with sentences and scenes this tidily manicured. When we switch to the looser modern world of Eli's Hebrew school, where students make bawdy jokes and the hip young rabbi calls his charges "dude," it's a relief from the black-andwhite palette of "Skylock." One gets the sense that Torday has shoehorned a naturally rawer, more kinetic sensibility into the stiff, polished combat boots of historical war fiction. Who can blame him? Our culture tends not to classify small-scoped comic novels as the stories "we need" - that category is reserved for somber sagas of national strife. YET A TWIST arrives near the end of "Poxl West" that fruitfully complicates and rewards its polyphonic structure. As Poxl says of Françoise's routine with her singing partner, "There was something to the act of harmonizing itself that smacked of precision: two voices doing two different things, diverging so they might come together as one, greater than either alone." Torday's self-discipline on the turn of events is admirable, and it raises a number of compelling questions on subjects I can't list here for fear of giving it away. But if "The Last Flight of Poxl West," like "Skylock," is not a perfect book, it is still an utterly accomplished novel that fulfills many of its mission objectives. After Poxl is reviewed in The Times, Eli rejoices, "Now my uncle Poxl was a writer." Daniel Torday is a writer, one with real talent and heart. He need not require such validation from the establishment to confirm his impressiveness. A World War II memoir of a Jewish R.A.F. bomber is this novel's book-within-a-book. TEDDY WAYNE writes the Future Tense column for Sunday Styles. His next novel, about a Harvard freshman who becomes dangerously involved with a classmate, will be published in 2016. |
