Memory has its place in Elliot Perlman’s ‘Street Sweeper’
Sometimes you have to invest long term to earn dividends. In Elliot Perlman's new novel The Street Sweeper, the investment is about 150 pages of detailed, highly introspective, occasionally ponderous character development. You persevere because of the author's track record and because you see enough glimmers of greatness in those slow-reading pages.
And, then, a quarter into the book, characters blossom into beings you care about and engaging plot lines suddenly emerge.
The Australian author of the award-winning novels Three Dollars and Seven Types of Ambiguity, Perlman centers his third novel on two main characters. Lamont Williams is a good-hearted African-American ex-con in his 30s, struggling to restart his life in the Bronx by trying to keep his menial job as a hospital janitor while searching for the 8-year-old daughter he hasn't seen in six years. Adam Zignelik, raised in Australia, is a Jewish professor of history at Columbia University in New York whose fear of failure is sabotaging his career and relationship with the woman he loves.
A host of other fully realized characters play important roles that intersect throughout the novel. Michelle, Lamont's intelligent and beautiful cousin, happens to be married to Adam's boss, Charles McCray, the first African-American dean of Columbia's History Department. Charles is the son of William McCray, legendary black lawyer in the American Civil Rights movement, and close friend of the late liberal Jewish Civil Rights lawyer Jake Zignelik, Adam's negligent father. And so on.
Meanwhile, two compelling story lines propel the novel's late-blooming plot. Lamont befriends the elderly Henryk Mandelbrot, a dying Jewish patient at the hospital who survived the Holocaust and has an important story to tell. And, seemingly unrelated, though not, Adam snaps out of his teetering life to uncover a historian's treasure of overlooked interviews with death camp survivors conducted in Europe immediately after World War II. Apparently the first oral history of the Holocaust, the materials were lost in the dusty basement of a small college library in Chicago, and hold the promise of saving Adam's career and personal life.
As characters interact and fates intertwine, Perlman tells an engaging multi-generational saga witnessing personal histories that heroically endure and survive brutal and horrific racism to become what we know as the history of the Holocaust and the American Civil Rights movement. At his best, Perlman accomplishes this literary feat by evoking remarkable depth and meaning in otherwise commonplace events and characters.
And, like history, this sprawling novel's breadth of characters, details upon details, dizzying introspection and eventual loose ends require patience. But, long after those thick early pages, what is most memorable about this richly woven tale is the lessons about the importance of memory and remembering, and the novel's underlying compassion and sense of humanity.