The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Two Fields That Face and Mirror Each Other by Martin NakellSteve Tomasula
Martin Nakell. Two Fields That Face and Mirror Each Other. Green Integer, 2001. 287 pp. Paper: $16.95.
The phrase novel of ideas doesn’t exactly apply to Martin Nakell’s thoughtful Two Fields That Face and Mirror Each Other because of the nineteenth-century baggage evoked by the term. And yet some similar description, say conceptual art in the shape of a book, surely applies. Though there is a plot (sort of a family saga in which Grey leaves his lover Gloriana back in New York to visit a family farm in Michigan and attend the funeral of George, a friend’s son, who kidnapped and killed his stepbrother before committing suicide), the plot is the least of it. Indeed, the novel is strongest when it functions less like Stendhal’s mirror traveling down the road of life and more like textual art on the subject of identity: a weave of meditative sections in which, for example, Grey sitting on a porch in Michigan and watching the repetitive work of a farmer preparing a crop is counterpointed with Gloriana’s observation of the emotional cycles that a “tribe” of stock traders goes through trying to predict wheat prices-just one manifestation of the many fields that face and mirror each other. As the characters struggle with a plethora of dichotomies, e.g. how family values in Michigan can translate into the legal defense of a man known guilty of murder in New York, the novel looks deeper into these mirrors facing mirrors until we are considering the nature of narrative itself. And this may be the most convincing aspect of the novel: a demonstration that just when you think it’s all been done in the novel, a novel of ideas can still reflect its own rich traditions even as it mirrors them in ways that are meaningful to our contemporary cultural field, where neither people nor institutions can be explained by naive looking. [Steve Tomasula]