The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Tortoise, by James Lewelling
reviewed by A. D. Jameson

An unnamed narrator flies home, stopping overnight in a hotel, en route to visit his dying father who claims to want to tell him something. While this could be the premise of a conventionally realist road novel, most of Tortoise consists of a meandering interior monologue, delivered in an increasingly repetitive—indeed, faintly autistic—tone. (When the father finally describes his son as “half-awake, wandering around in the dark— . . . probably a bit retarded,” we’d readily agree if the dad didn’t seem a nut himself.) It remains unclear, ultimately, whether the narration’s strained, inarticulate nature is due to the narrator’s own unreliability, or whether he’s a typical product of the setting, an alien landscape located in the Southwestern U.S., a place where sense cannot be guaranteed, the previous generation lacking both authority and advice (even when it claims otherwise). Whatever the case, the narrator numbly accepts his place as a man-child somehow married with two daughters, his family and native country as strange to him as the unidentified Middle Eastern country where he now lives. Further perplexing is the status of a (supposedly stolen) Dictaphone he carries in his breast pocket: at three critical points it interrupts the narrative by running out of tape, neatly dividing the novel into sections (plane, motel, home) and muddying whether events are “live” or prerecorded (and to what degree that distinction matters). The action takes a few bizarre turns in a final fourth section, shaggily rendering most of these questions moot; until then, Tortoise’s pleasure lies in Lewelling’s disturbingly skillful depiction of our country’s current malaise.