Review: 'Defenestrate,' by Renée Branum

Marta, the narrator of Renee Branum's debut novel, "Defenestrate," grows up in the American Midwest alongside her twin brother, Nick, but it is their ancestral city of Prague that figures centrally, both in the work and in Marta's memory.

In Prague, according to family tales, the twins' great-great-grandfather "was said to give a gentle push to the back of a … stonemason … in a high church steeple"; consequentially, "our family has held on to this death and never been forgiven."

Shoves, falls, warnings, breaks and superstitions are heavily layered throughout the opening pages of Branum's work, yet the tension and foreboding are tempered by the richness of the characterization. The twins are irreverent travelers; they are great fans of Buster Keaton; their father obsessively details the miniature world he builds for his model trains; their mother prays.

Branum returns again and again to the same themes and images — falling, Prague, Buster Keaton; Nick in a hospital bed after a fall; Marta drinking too much at a bar. Once Branum establishes the importance of these, they begin to seem inevitable each time they surface in the novel's string of vignettes.

There is an element of predictability — the notion of falling, for instance, is sure to return — but the suspense continues to build. The quiet suspense works so well that the moments of violence and outrage — such as Nick's worst confrontation with his mother, which is also the scene of his father's death — are somewhat jarring.

Branum adds more pressure each time she returns to the same scenes and questions, so that details slowly emerge, including a history of mental illness in the twins' family. Marta fears that Nick's fall was a suicide attempt; meanwhile, she doesn't understand that he is worried for her.

Mortality is present on these pages, and the characters grapple with it in various ways. "[O]n some level, aestheticizing death is our only real recourse against it," Marta thinks — not necessarily her assertion, but an observation she makes as she watches others contemplate their fears. Branum confronts existential questions with bold, clean prose that swings between gravity and deflection. "Stories are meant to persist," Marta says; and so they do.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review, the Ploughshares blog and elsewhere. She held a 2014-2016 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Defenestrate
By: Renée Branum.
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 226 pages, $26.
Virtual event: In conversation with Charles Baxter, 7 p.m. Feb. 3. Hosted by Magers & Quinn. https://bit.ly/3eZpXN0