Introduction

A dazzling story of fathers, sons, and brothers - bound by love, divided by history

The Auberons are a lovably neurotic, infernally intelligent family who love and hate each other-and themselves-- in equal measure. Driven both by grief at his young mother's death and war with his distant, abusive immigrant father, patriarch Isidore almost attains the life of his dreams: he works his way through Harvard and then medical school; he marries a beautiful and even-keeled girl; in his father-in-law, he finds the father he always wanted; and he becomes a father himself. He has talent, but he also has rage, and happiness is not meant to be his for very long. Isidore's sons, Leo and Mack, haunted by the mythic, epic proportions of their father's heroics and the tragic events that marked their early lives, have alternately relied upon and disappointed one another since the day Mack was born. For Leo, who is angry at the world but angrier at himself, the burden of the past shapes his future: sexual awakening, first love, and restless attempts live up to his father's ideals. Just when Leo reaches a crossroads between potential self-destruction and new freedom, Mack invites him on a road trip from Los Angeles to Cleveland. As the brothers make their way east, and towards understanding, their battles and reconciliations illuminate the power of family to both destroy and empower-and the price and rewards of independence. Part family saga, part coming-of-age story, In the Land of the Living is a kinetic, fresh, bawdy yet earnest shot to the heart of a novel about coping with death, and figuring out how and why to live.

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Excerpt

At three, Leo was of an average weight and height, and of the usual tender flesh, but his mother thought that something inside him was different from other children she knew. He’d spoken a bit early, true enough, but it wasn’t his aptitudes that struck her as unusual. She didn’t care that much for aptitudes anyway. His heart was heavier, she thought. His face sometimes had a kind of medieval stillness and sobriety to it — like a face, say, looking out on the centuries from a unicorn tapestry that’s itself unchanged and unchangeable. Any mention of his father would elicit the stillness, and so could many other unpredictable things. He seemed depressed. She sent him to a preschool that was run by psychoanalysts.

The child could not understand guilt, or grief, or defense mechanisms, or much of anything, really, besides life and death, and presence and absence, but he did understand and welcome one principle upheld for him by certain grown-ups: that he could call for help. The school seemed to be an island in a sea of helplessness and aloneness. He trusted the women there to answer him if he cried out. Elsewhere, among strangers, he could feel himself struggling and then actually drowning in a great, dangerous sea without anyone noticing or caring. He could feel a coldness about him like Atlantic water in December, all purple with the gelid blood of winter.

Very early, he developed radical, monastic convictions: he was a hero afloat in a storm sea strafed with winter winds. He was a poet at the mercy of the gods, looking in on the far revolving core of the universe. He had a destiny before him ruinous or triumphant, and everyone he knew belonged to this destiny, not least his younger brother, who he thought had been spared the tragic burden. It only remained to be seen whether Leo had within him ruin or glory.

As he passed into that period of life known to psychoanalysts as latency, his sense of destiny receded behind the normal affairs of childhood, but it would reassert itself at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways.

By the summer of 1982, when all the bad things could no longer be clearly remembered, Mack followed his older brother, Leo, everywhere and in everything — and as far as Leo was concerned, that was as it should have been. If Leo took a pretzel from the ebony bowl at Grandma’s house on a Friday night and bit the sides off the pretzel, so that it looked like a little man, and then had the little man leap into his mouth to a death by mastication, then Mack did that too. If Leo and their cousin Todd slid down the polished floorboards in Grandma’s front hall in their socks, then Mack did too. If Leo covered his door to their shared bathroom with Wacky Packages and Star Wars stickers, then so did his younger brother. If Leo trained himself to write in all caps like they did in comic books, then Mack trained himself to write in all caps so he could write like Leo.

And if at 5 a.m. Leo sat down in front of The P.T.L. Club to watch Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker crying about their sins, Mack watched it too. The P.T.L. Club was better than The 700 Club even though neither show made much sense. And even The 700

Club was better than no TV, especially on a day when there was Sabbath school, which they grudgingly attended every week at Park Synagogue near Taylor Road. At the Sabbath school they’d been told they were Jews, and they figured it was just as well,

since the Bakkers made them feel that Christians were perhaps a bit weird.

It was understood that whatever the show, Leo would occupy the more favorable couch position — that is, the end farther from the TV — and Mack would sit at the other end, where you had to crane your neck to see P.T.L. at a fifteen-degree angle and were

so close up to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker that you could see the red, blue, and yellow pixels of their tears wiggling on the inside of the curved glass. Leo had once or twice tried sitting there himself, and from Mack’s side, you could even reach out and brush the invisible, hairlike lines of static that stood up off the glass.

Did Leo call his dad Dad in the summer of 1982 or was he still calling him Philip? Such changes became mysteries. Dad or Philip, Philip or Dad — but not Daddy. That summer Philip flew them and their mother to Disneyland in California, where Philip

took Leo on his first roller coaster: Space Mountain. Leo didn’t get a bloody nose as he had that other time with Philip, in the bumper cars, when his legs were too short and he’d left off his seat belt to reach the pedals.

He didn’t get mad at Philip when he got the bloody nose. Or when Philip dropped him into a pile of leaves and the hard frozen ground punched him in the lungs. When he crawled to his feet out of the warm, decaying, flattened underleaves, he tried not to let Philip see that he couldn’t breathe, and that he’d gotten the seat of his pants wet. He didn’t even pull the leaf out that was stuck inside the waist of his pants, so as not to embarrass his new father. Leo would not be mad, but he would also not let Philip throw him into any more leaves.

The past was not supposed to matter anymore, but it did. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

In the Land of the Living Alienation between father and son plays a big role in the novel. How is Isidore’s alienation from his father, Ezer, similar to and different from Leo’s alienation from his father, Isidore? In what ways are the fathers immune to change, while the sons are able to embrace it?

The part I chapter titles mimic those in medieval romances. Do you think Leo romanticizes and idealizes his father? Why?

In what ways does Isidore’s life story undermine the romantic idealism expressed in the chapter titles?

Why does the lady with the cane upset Isidore?

In the Land of the Living is in some ways an immigrant story. How does the Auberon family history either support or contradict the notion of the American dream?

What does the road trip across the country say about the American dream?

Is the author’s view cynical, sincere, or a combination of the two?

Why do you think the brothers Leo and Mack become alienated from one another? Do siblings sometimes become surrogates for parents? How do you think that sort of dynamic has affected Leo and Mack?

What enables the brothers to reconcile during the course of their road trip across the U.S.? Do the brothers change as people in the course of their road trip? Are there examples that suggest that they have learned to see reality more clearly?

To what extent do their “issues” remain firmly in place? The book presumes a strong relationship between early childhood experience and adult life. Do you notice events in the adult lives of Leo and Mack that recapitulate the events of their early lives in any way?

Leo is a character that is saddled with guilt and shame. How might his father’s death play into those guilt feelings? Why do people experience “survivor guilt” when someone they love dies?

A great deal of the events of the novel are completely outside the control of the main characters. How do they come to terms with those forces that are bigger than they are? Is anything under their control? What? Do they learn to master anything that was previously outside their control?

What do you make of the Ovid quote in the beginning?

In what way is Leo like a phoenix born from his father’s ashes?

Weblinks

»	Author Austin Ratner's web site
»	Playlist for In the Land of the Living from Largehearted Boy
»	Publisher's Web Site
»	NYT profile of Austin Ratner

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