The primary narrator of Ismet Prcic’s “Unspeakable Home” shares with the author a name (here shortened to Izzy), a place of birth (Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina), a youthful trauma (the Bosnian war), a debilitating disease (alcoholism) and an eventual escape route (immigration to late-90s America). Still, Prcic, a writer of formally adventurous fictions — his debut novel, “Shards,” manipulated both convention and chronology — would likely bristle at the label of autofiction. His new novel is too kinetic to merit inclusion in that trendy cohort. Part existential cry, part urinal graffito, part anguished confession, “Unspeakable Home” is a survival strategy, a transfiguring of personal memory to obscure the terrible cost of exile.
In one of several unlikely choices, the novel is framed by a series of letters to the comedian Bill Burr. Izzy, recently divorced, watches Burr’s comedy special on repeat while drying out in Salem, Ore. The experience binds him to the comic, enabling the slightly deranged disclosures of a one-sided correspondence. He riffs, curses, jokes, shares drink recipes, and divulges secrets and shames. He tells Burr of his recent struggles — marital, financial, creative — and describes the book he is currently writing (presumably the one we’re now reading): “Every narrator is a version of me, every chunk a snapshot of a particular brokenness. And in that brokenness I can go anywhere for meaning, anywhere for feeling, healing.”
Izzy’s narrators (several are also named Izzy, though a few are unnamed or bear new names) act as avatars of his immigrant experience, ever engaged in the war “between two sides of one mind, the native side (B) and the tourist side (A).” In patchwork, semi-autonomous chapters, they take us from the Balkans — “that gorgeous, ungovernable, godforsaken peninsula always in turmoil, always on the fringes of civilizations, always a broken-up borderland” — to the suburban superficiality of Southern California. These narrators differ in age and circumstance, though they remain bound by a sense of cosmic homelessness. Shared pain makes them legible, coherent. The old life — that of trips to the Adriatic, country cousins, wartime depravity, sloganeering Chetniks, turbo-folk music and mohawks — has been severed. Sent forth by well-meaning parents, they submit, unwilling, to the spiritual cauterization of America.
Prcic’s prose is spiky, prolix, jocular, a little careering, as if slightly out of control. If there are a few too many juvenile jokes and a certain unhinged hilarity — the letters to Burr sometimes read like manic episodes — the novel also has grit, a kind of hardscrabble authenticity.
Its most successful material is the stuff of childhood and early adolescence, especially the scenes with the paint-huffing Tuzla punk group “TZ PUNX,” of which one of the Izzys is a member. Full of wretched bravado and donning leather jackets and Doc Martens, they rebel against conscription and the empty nationalism of the country’s ostensible adults. They spend the war in states of intoxication, partying with moonshine, glue, pills or wine pilfered from the family cellar, performing an energetic nihilism that feels like a desperate bid for life.
Another alt-Izzy narrator — a teenager named Musa Music — is sent from Bosnia to live with his uncle, the Lexus-driving, cowboy-attired Buck (formerly Bahrija), in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Musa has plans to attend college and hopes it’ll lead him to a job after graduating, though his uncle sees this as a relic of communist thinking: “That system doesn’t exist in the States,” he says. Rather, he advises his nephew to change his name to Moe — “You don’t want, first thing, to be correcting a future employer’s pronunciation. You have to assimilate” — and suggests he take his flimsy art portfolio to DreamWorks or Disney. When Musa takes a job at a stationery store instead, his uncle suggests he return to Bosnia. “I told your father I’d help with the ticket,” he says.
Buck’s ironclad command — “You have to assimilate” — echoes through the novel like the proclamation of a dark and inscrutable god. “I was hungry to belong,” Izzy says, even as that hunger destroys him. The multiplicity of personas suggests an aspirational shape-shifting, as the Izzys chase American amplitude in all its alien dimension. The result is a sort of playacting, a compulsive fashioning of one false self after another.
How the narrators release the pent-up frustrations of this fractured life lend the novel its pathos and cracked humor. A middle-aged Izzy enacts impotent violence in his son’s first-person-shooter video game; another, working at an art house theater, sends secret messages on the marquee. Nearly all of them drink to excess, courting oblivion.
But freedom — to write, to speak, to be — remains elusive. “I am to break myself in, like a horse, to be happy,” Izzy says. “I have to break my own spirit, my soul, for the goal of happiness. I have to trick my eyes, to trick my brain, so that my body would be pleased? This is a way to live?” For those seeking a home, however unspeakable, what other choice is there?
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