Defenestrate by Renée Branum

Published by ‎ Bloomsbury Publishing on January 25, 2022

A family superstition underlies Marta’s obsession with falling. She thinks about people who have fallen from great heights and survived. She thinks about Buster Keaton, the undisputed master of falling. She ponders statistics about falls. She might see falling as a metaphor for her own life.

Marta and Nick are twins. Marta’s mother tells Marta that she has always had trouble being close to anyone other than Nick but cautions Marta that she cannot always be her brother’s keeper. Marta and Nick have much in common, including depression and possibly a suicidal ideation. Their mother is steeped in religion, the kind of religion that forces her to disown Nick when he comes out as gay. Their nonconfrontational father devoted most of his time to constructing a village for his model trains. Marta always wondered how that hobby was meant to keep them safe, but Marta is a bit obsessed with safety.

The family superstition — they avoid calling it a curse — began with Jiří, who in 1895 pushed a stonemason out a window in a cathedral tower that was under renovation in Prague. The stonemason may have seduced Jiří’s daughter, although the truth of the story might be quite different. Since Jiří defenestrated the stonemason, family members have fallen from railings or ladders or roofs, as if they cannot resist falling, their “bodies magnetized to the pavement.” Perhaps the family is being held accountable for the stonemason’s death, or perhaps the family curse has more to do with mental illness.

Marta and Nick visit Prague, a city that is famous for throwing men from windows, as if returning to the scene of their ancestor’s crime will help them “make sense of the shape our lives had taken.” Inevitably, Nick falls from a balcony in Prague, saved by the branches of a tree but nevertheless hospitalized. Whether his fall was accidental is ambiguous, although it gives Marta a chance to discuss a famous photograph with a man she meets in a bar. The photo, later made into art by Andy Warhol, is of a woman who landed on a car after jumping to her death from the Empire State Building. As conversations of seduction go, Marta’s needs some work.

The plot concerns Marta’s journey toward health and forgiveness. She drinks too much. She behaves carelessly. She blames (with a certain amount of good cause) her mother for poor parenting. After Nick promises her that he will try to be careful so that he doesn’t fall again, she comes to realize that trying to be careful might be the only promise she can make to anyone, including herself. Careful with herself, careful with her family, careful with her relationships.

The elegant voice that narrates Defenestrate is well suited to the story. The voice is calm and quiet, never reaching toward melodrama, always keeping the story grounded in Marta’s introspective melancholy. Sometimes Renée Branum reaches for descriptions that fail to resonate, but her prose is usually an appealing blend of the evocative and the precise. The falling metaphor is a bit overused; the examples of fall survivalists become redundant. The tales of Buster Keaton are interesting but ultimately add little of substance to the narrative. Small flaws aside, Branum’s confident and controlled narrative offers an intriguing view of a family learning to manage, and perhaps overcome, a perpetual state of self-inflicted crisis.

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