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Books of The Times

In ‘The Changeling,’ the Dark Fears of Parents, Memorably Etched

Credit...James Nieves/The New York Times

THE CHANGELING
By Victor LaValle
431 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $28.

One of the reasons to read Victor LaValle’s novels is the simple sentence-by-sentence pleasure of them — they offer hundreds of baby dopamine hits, tiny baths for the prose snob’s reward system. His imagination is unusually visual. His sensibility is so deadpan that it borders on a kind of derangement. And he has a real flair for the strategically placed f-bomb, which, in my view, is an underrated skill. They detonate when you least expect them, in sentences as otherwise lovely as a tulip.

It’s hard to convey that last talent in a family publication. But not the others. There’s an image in LaValle’s new novel, “The Changeling,” that’s so impressively gruesome that it’s taken up residence in my dreams: Apollo, the protagonist, suddenly wakes up in his kitchen to find that he’s been yoked by a bike lock to a hot water pipe.

I know. Something similar happens to Krazy-8 in the first season of “Breaking Bad.” This is far creepier. Trust me.

The teakettle on Apollo’s stove is rattling and wailing. His 6-month-old boy is shrieking in the room next door, contributing to the whistling din. Apollo tries to get up. It’s a natural reflex with unfortunate consequences.

“When he pulled forward and gasped, the lock resisted, and he slumped backward,” LaValle writes. “As soon as he did, the back of his exposed neck touched the steam pipe like a pork cutlet pressed against a hot skillet.”

A pan-seared neck is the least of his problems. Apollo’s wife then clubs him in the face with a claw hammer. After cracking his cheekbone, she wanders into the baby’s room, serenely balancing the teakettle in the palm of her hand.

Admirers of LaValle inevitably declare him the love child of some unlikely artistic union. He’s Haruki Murakami mixed with Ralph Ellison. (Anthony Doerr came up with that one.) He’s Gabriel García Márquez mixed with Edgar Allan Poe. (Mos Def, whose album “The Ecstatic” was inspired by LaValle’s book of the same name.) He’s Colson Whitehead mixed with H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Pynchon mixed with Shirley Jackson. (These are mash-ups of mash-ups, a kind of critical metaconsensus.)

The point is that readers are always struggling to communicate the odd hybridity of LaValle’s work, which blends social criticism with horror with the supernatural, while remaining steadfastly literary. And it’s true: His novels are tough to classify.

The difficulty with hybrids, though, is that they’re often more awkward than elegant. You see the exact ridge in the sinew where man becomes beast.

“The Changeling” has some of this gracelessness. It starts out as engagingly as any of LaValle’s novels — “Big Machine,” “The Devil in Silver” — and it stays that way for a good while, telling the story of Apollo Kagwa, a used-book dealer and new father who’s struggling against inauspicious odds to succeed in both roles. His fortunes change — we assume for the better — when he goes to an estate sale in the Bronx and discovers a first edition of “To Kill a Mockingbird” with an inscription from Harper Lee to Truman Capote.

Image
Victor LaValleCredit...Teddy Wolff

“Here’s to the Daddy of our dreams,” she wrote.

The message is plump with meaning. Apollo’s father abandoned his family when Apollo was just 4. He’s been having the same recurring nightmare about the vanished man ever since.

But Apollo’s luck, as that bike lock scene might suggest, takes yet another turn shortly thereafter. His wife starts getting mysterious photographs on her phone of both Apollo and their son — who took them? who’s watching them? — and then something terrible happens to his darling boy, and his wife vanishes, and the world becomes eerie and fantastical. New York City turns into a land of the Brothers Grimm — enchanted isles and magic forests, demon giants and glowing witches.

None of these fantastical elements are a problem per se. All LaValle novels come to that sharp bend in the river where things start rippling toward the weird. The problem, in “The Changeling,” is that LaValle sometimes skywrites his main themes so that no one will miss them — he explains his own allegory, essentially, in real time. At one point, a character laments that fairy tales lost their spooky appeal once people began assigning morals to them. Yet that’s often what’s going on here.

“When you have to save the one you love, you will become someone else, something else,” that same character later tells Apollo. “You will transform. The only real magic is the things we’ll do for the ones we love.”

These lines feel unworthy of the author. They made me disconnect from the story entirely. It was as if the line had gone dead.

But I did find my way back. The questions LaValle asks are hairy and urgent: How do we protect our children? Especially in the digital age? For it turns out that Apollo has been taking many, many pictures of his beautiful son — why wouldn’t he? — and uploading them to Facebook, as all modern parents do.

They’re the modern equivalent of Chekhov’s gun. They might sit harmlessly onscreen in Act I. But they’ll be fully weaponized by Act III. “Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter,” one of the story’s villains tells him.

Anxiety over the safety of our children is the black mold that grows on almost every parent’s soul. It is also the stuff of most folk tales, which surely isn’t a coincidence — little boys and girls are lost, tortured, sacrificed. (Modern fairy tales, too. Maurice Sendak’s “Outside Over There” assumes a totemic status in this book.) What LaValle seems to be asking is: How did the parents in those stories actually feel?

How I wish “The Changeling” had been more artful in exploring these questions and ideas. I also could have done without the strained allusions to Donald J. Trump, Fox News and the far right, which seem to have blown in from some neighboring land until they finally reveal their connection.

But Lavalle’s observations about race remain, as ever, both stinging and mordantly funny. (“That was fast,” Apollo, who is black, says when he’s stopped by a cop in a white section of Queens.) And his imagery is a source of immense satisfaction. Stepping into a brown shag-carpeted room “was like being inside a Wookiee’s armpit”; when Apollo zonks on the laundry room couch, he “nuzzled into it like a tick”; a monster is “as tall as the sail of a sloop.”

If monsters are your subject, writing like an angel helps.

Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @JenSeniorNY

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Dark Fears of Parenthood, Memorably Etched. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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