Picador USA
Reviewed by Steve Himmer

Edie Meidav isn't the first novelist to write in the voice of an unlikeable narrator, but she may be among the boldest. Crawl Space, follow-up to her debut The Far Field, is narrated by Emile Poulquet, a French Nazi collaborator responsible for deporting the Jews of Finier where he served as prefect during World War II. Half a century later, after a string of aliases, disguising surgeries, and false lives, Emile survives one trial intended to hold him accountable for his past and flees Paris to escape a second attempt.

Under yet another assumed name he returns to Finier, intent on delivering his will -- and the cruel burden of its execution -- to Arianne Fauret, the woman he still blames for tormenting him as a child and a young man, and consequently for the positions he found himself in during and after the war. Once there he becomes ensnared in a reunion of war refugees arranged and hosted by Arianne, and among the group discovers Izzy, a Jewish childhood friend he betrayed and deported as prefect. While awaiting a chance to avenge himself, he is adopted by a group of squatting young wastrels intent on disrupting the reunion to settle their own score with Arianne.

Crawl Space weaves with several threads at once, but what makes the complications of plot and character manageable is Emile Poulquet's constant, though obsessively selfish, voice. Meidav allows her despicable narrator to speak his mind, creating a dense curtain of his own delusions, yet she also leave holes in that curtain through which the reader can observe his suffocating narcissism. Elegance, for Emile, is everything: appearances and superficial propriety are tantamount to realities, and an unclean train lavatory is as much an indicator of the cultural decline of France as were

those insidious Israelites who were cosmopolitan, intellectual rootless Jews lacking loyalty to our France, to any land, Jews who'd pretend to be French enough that our France could easily lose its borders. Not to mention all the colonies of depraved sexual Jews, or the occult groups of Jews linked with freemasons and worse. These were known truths when I was coming up, and to say where one learned them is as hard as to say where one learned the letter Q. Can most people remember where they learned the letter Q? I should say not.

To be an anti-Semite is to be French, and the inelegance of Jews -- an unwillingness to maintain proper surfaces -- is to blame for all that befalls them. The novel's own elegance, however, that of its carefully crafted prose, serves not to mask or obscure Emile's story with false appearance, but allows his gilded account to speak for itself however uncomfortably.

As he complains that his life has been seized by a few moments, a few youthful decisions made long ago, and as he blames Arianne for that seizure, Emile reduces the cultural and historical weight of his crimes until they are no less personal and no more significant than the schoolyard taunts of his youth. Even deportation of Jews to concentration camps and near-certain death becomes instead

slights against Izzy -- you see I do not say crimes against humanity, that over-used phrase, I say slights against Izzy, because every slight is personal, every bit of humanity is particular, and to pretend otherwise is to raise the criminal above punishment...

The struggle over history -- who owns it, who speaks on behalf of its victims, and how it can and should be incorporated in present life -- is the crux of Crawl Space. For Emile Poulquet history is both destiny and inconvenience, while for the wastrels with whom he falls in the past is a thing to ignore -- the recent past, at least, because the wastrels build their "tribal" life on an idealized, imaginary notion of pre-modern France with which they imagine themselves connecting.

This ostensible rejection of history creates the only real strain on the novel, because the young vagabonds are seen only through Emile's eyes and as someone bound to the past he is unable to make much sense from their ignorance of it. Most of the attention paid them treats the young as fairly generic, even foolish, and while they don't quite descend to comic relief, many pages pass before their complexities emerge and their slight cartoonishness is remediated by the novel's outcomes. While the limited purview of Emile's view on the world serves well at describing lives more like his own -- Izzy and Arianne, for instance, and others who have shared experiences more familiar to him -- the wastrels seem too far from his imagination to gain much complexity in his telling of them.

The characters are complex, though, as is the novel, and it is the work of the reader to tease out those complexities from within Emile's misunderstandings and misrepresentations. Meidav might have chosen to write from more solid moral and narrative ground. She might have employed a third-party or even third-person perspective. But by eschewing an easier route through a difficult subject, she has instead made Crawl Space all the more challenging, and made that challenge all the more welcome.