The Train of Small Mercies by David Rowell

Published by Putnam on October 13, 2011

It's tricky to write a novel that weaves together the separate stories of an ensemble cast. Done well, the different viewpoints cohere into a meaningful whole. (I thought Colum McCann did it masterfully in Let the Great World Spin, using a tightrope walk as the focal point to intertwine stories of disparate lives.) Done poorly, the technique makes a novel read like a collection of unrelated stories. The Train of Small Mercies falls somewhere in the middle.

Robert Kennedy's funeral train is the novel's binding thread. On his first day as a porter, Lionel Chase is assigned to the train as it departs from New York. Maeve McDerdon has traveled to Washington to interview for a position as the Kennedys' nanny, an interview that is cancelled after Bobby's assassination. Delores King in Pennsylvania doesn't want her husband to know that she's taking their daughter to see the train but suffers a misfortune that threatens to expose her plan.

In New Jersey, young Michael Colvert (having returned home after his noncustodial father took him for an unauthorized visit) and his friends reenact the Kennedy assassination in their back yard. Edwin Rupp, his wife, and another Delaware couple plan to watch the train pass, but Edwin is more interested in his new above-ground pool (and in his friend's wife). The train will pass the home of Jamie West, a young man who returned from Vietnam with a missing leg, on the day he's being interviewed by a local reporter.

For many Americans, Bobby Kennedy represented hope in a time of turmoil. An unpopular war, urban unrest, and changing views of race and gender contributed to a shared anxiety that was heightened by the assassination of Martin Luther King. David Rowell conveys a sense of a nation in crisis at the moment of Kennedy's death, yet his characters (realistically enough) are distracted by their own problems. Unfortunately, their stories are too often half-formed, amounting to vignettes of life on the East Coast, interesting but lacking significance.

The narrative jumps maddeningly from character to character. Perhaps David Rowell believes readers have such limited attention spans that they can only handle a few paragraphs of character development before they itch to move on to someone else. The technique gives the story a fragmented quality that made it impossible to feel as if I truly understood any of the characters. None of their stories are resolved -- at least two are left hanging in the midst of a personal calamity -- making it even more difficult to form an appreciation of their connection to a larger story. While Rowell's characters are not without depth, the fragmented nature of the storytelling undermines the novel's themes.

The Train of Small Mercies is at its best when it explores marriage and relationships in the 1960s. Delores yearns for independence but lacks the courage to tell her politically conservative husband that she plans to watch the funeral train. Maeve has achieved an uncertain independence by leaving her family in Boston (the city in which they made a home after leaving Ireland) but, despite enjoying the power of flirtation, feels isolated in Washington, having befriended only the hotel concierge.

Other characters exist as sketches more than fully formed characters. Through his conversations with his father and other porters, Lionel serves as a reminder of the importance of Bobby Kennedy to black Americans, but he has little life of his own. Jamie is a stand-in for the soldiers who returned from Vietnam with maimed bodies and broken spirits, but he has no significant role in the story beyond his iconic status. We know almost nothing of Michael beyond the pain that resulted from his parents' broken marriage. He lies down in the path of the oncoming train in a scene that lacks the drama Rowell must have intended, in part because we know too little about him to understand his motivations. The Rupps and their swimming pool contribute almost nothing to the story.

Rowell writes deft prose. He clearly had the germ of a strong novel in mind. Unfortunately, the germ didn't grow into a more complex organism. Enough of the story works to merit a recommendation, but this isn't a novel I can recommend with enthusiasm.

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