The Existential Expat

Had I read “Necessary Errors” a few months ago, I doubt I would have enjoyed it. The first novel by Caleb Crain ’89 joins the ever-populated genre of “young American traveling to a strange foreign country to have his first international experience.” In this case, said young American is Jacob—a gay aspiring writer—and the country in question a Czechoslovakia newly rid of communism. He is excited to witness the aftermath of a revolution, hoping even to find a gay revolution in its wake; instead, he suffers estrangement and disillusionment, as a perpetual outsider in both his nationality and sexual orientation.

It is in this respect that one can most appreciate Crain’s novel. Unlike most other writers would do, he does not glorify Prague—indeed, it is easy to forget during the course of the novel that the city is, in reality, stunningly beautiful. He focuses instead on the queer loneliness of being away from home and at a linguistic and cultural disadvantage, and on the bizarre sensation of living through a long-term detour. Having just spent two months in Paris, I found Crain’s portrayal far more realistic than that of any other such novel—I recognized its accuracy in a way I could not have without having experienced it myself. In this regard alone, it is worthy of merit: it precisely and movingly hits on truth.

Simultaneously, its structure is profoundly flawed, especially lacking in an effective dramatic arc. It was at times difficult to read through empty conversation after empty conversation without the satisfaction of plot or character progression. Most distinctly, Crain’s pacing is so disorganized it seems almost unplanned. The first third of the novel focuses largely on Jacob’s romance with Luboš, a Czech man he meets at the city’s lone gay bar not described as “rough” in his travel guide. Jacob ultimately learns that many of the gay men in Prague have turned to prostitution, his lover among them. The relationship ends, and the novel loses all the momentum it had gained: it essentially starts anew. The following section of the book is written artfully and elegantly as Jacob contemplates returning home and examines his American coins, “admir[ing] the burnt sienna patina of one of the pennies, which in the candlelight was iridescent with violet and green where people’s touch had salted it.” But now, bereft of any forward motion, the story cannot be sustained by such description and falls into unnecessary platitude. “It was easy to stay abroad,” Crain writes. “Jacob’s workload as a teacher was light, and in the hangover-Communist economy, it was no hardship to live on the salary.” The reader already knows this information, and Jacob’s long-winded, systematic thinking through his situation comes across as juvenile. As the victim of his pacing, Crain seems not to have a choice: such vapid lines are the sole way to keep his novel moving when he has obliterated its tension 150 pages in.

The novel’s problematic rhythm manifests itself, too, on a more microscopic level: it exists as chunks of pure dialogue followed by chunks of pure introspection and description (much of it as banal as Jacob’s economic contemplations) that give one whiplash when they transition from one focus to the other. The components of these hairpin turns are not always bad, however, as Crain is quite a skilled writer of dialogue. What his characters say often feels slightly unrealistic, but amusingly. The character Melinda, a friend of Jacob, is particularly prone to this: she tells Jacob, “’You handle your liquor so well…you have the makings of a great alcoholic.” Crain has also mastered juggling bilingual dialogue. He sets off English with normal quotation marks, and Czech with dashes, as one would do in various European languages. This is remarkably successful: it renders the transition between languages legible and clear, and it allows the reader to easily follow Jacob’s increased fluency in Czech. Crain also lends the novel flavor by reflecting the patterns of Czech speech in its English representation—for example, he utilizes the word “thus” frequently to reflect the semantics of Czech. Linguistic difference is a powerful tool for expression in Crain’s hands, as when Jacob observes that “in Czech, missing had to be said in the third-person singular, like raining, and so Luboš didn’t seem to reveal as much by the confession as he would have in English.”

It is in these regards, those of linguistic and cultural difference, of the sensation of being an expatriate and an other, that Crain is able to craft a novel that, ultimately, does rise above its multifarious problems. The immaturity of Crain’s structure does not fatally compromise the powerful and atypical depiction of Jacob’s situation. He shows Jacob to be sometimes awkward and alone, even among friends. “He had only himself for company,” Crain writes. “Sometimes he had the feeling, which one may have if one lives alone, that time had paused for him, though perhaps in this apartment only, as if, canoeing along Time, he had turned into a still inlet.”

And so perhaps “Necessary Errors” is not the novel most would want to read. Its unrepentant defeat of the romanticism of the European adventure is at times brutal. But, as someone who has just recently experienced the perplexing loneliness and estrangement Crain depicts, I felt almost vindicated by the novel’s adherence to honest portrayal. Without such consistent realism, Crain could not have ended his novel as he did, with Jacob realizing, unexpectedly, the ties he has formed to Czechoslovakia. As he sits on the bus from Prague, overwrought with emotion, he thinks: “Now, […] now, now I know what it feels like to go into exile.”

—Staff writer Grace E. Huckins can be reached at grace.huckins@thecrimson.com.