The mad career of David Keenan’s Boyhood has much of our moment’s wild energy in its structure and style. Arranged in a series of short fictions that break and reform across hundreds of sections, the novel has no central character as such, propelled instead by an anarchic energy whose literary style approaches the quality of a troubled dream.
To Keenan, boyhood is a condition of time and place governed by the surreal physics of a literary imagination that sees ghosts, demons and angels where others see character and setting. Glasgow is the portal to this otherworld, which extends through Derry to Mexico City in a vaudeville and ghastly chorus.
None of which sounds very much like a book about youth. The idea seems rather that the stage of awareness we associate with that independence of mind that exists before adulthood is of a kind with an openness, an emotion, and a carelessness, in all its dark freedom, that shapes the world in its unpredictable dimensions.
These conditions flash before the reader in quickly gathering chapters that are magnetic and disorienting. Keenan’s writing keeps the whole unlikely engine moving, with the intensity of the drugged horses he describes racing through the streets of the Glasgow night. That grey city presides over the novel like some dead god, its subjects lighting what remains with their sharp speech and mad ideas.
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That manic determination is the book’s signature mode, whether it explores the Second World War or the Day of the Dead. Narrative here has purchase only as vignette, and in this the novel shows its debt to the pseudonyms and fugitives of the earlier 20th century, to St-John Perse, Frida Kahlo, and Walter Benjamin.
Reading the novel feels like Keenan has paused time, held up his subjects, and observed them waking and asleep. The effect is something like taking William Blake on a bender, the regrets of the morning after signature of a century of missteps.
Together these make a strangely new and compulsive pattern, which Keenan leads the reader through with sly skill, even if sometimes the dance falters. And if some parts of this thought machine work better than others, that is only to say that some special books enter the world still unfolding, and Boyhood is one of their company.
