The Sound of Things to Come (review)

Woven throughout are fragments of a shared postmodern culture that brackets Dostoyevsky and Kate Chopin, Eliot and Mia Couto, Hollywood and Nollywood, Europop and hip-hop, email and Twitter, elliptical quotes, as from Tóibín's The Story of the Night and Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon, and bits of songs that sign both angst and "a new dawn" like Michael Bublé's cover of "Feeling Good" and Colbie Caillat's "The Little Things" Together they convey alienation and the thirst for connection and meaning. Some, "trained not to see," adopt a willed blindness, a "fence in the head" that perpetuates cultural, religious, and ethnic stereotypes. [...]when a young girl dies, having left home to create the music that "fills her" and heals another "wanderer," her parents cling to their belief that she is "not one of us" And two fathers come to understand that their refusal to transcend "inexhaustible boundaries" alienated their sons. The inherent structures of psychiatry, philosophy, and art (especially literature, music, and photography) nurture memory and develop a vision that can detect "patterns in a patternless life" and engage with "the unknown parameters of existence" Pursuing clues in "the narrative of the subconscious," these characters learn to locate the spark (the novel's first edition was entitled Farad-electrical charge) that "moves a man to go ashore."