Again And Again, by Jonathan Evison

A masterpiece of misdirection about a man with a giant imagination.

The protagonist in Again And Again has a multitude of identities. He is a Visigoth street urchin, a Marine, a janitor, a centenarian, and a famous author’s cat. How many lives does a cat have? Quite a few, according to Jonathan Evison, as well as too many. Evison’s beautifully crafted character development in this novel is anchored by alternating versions of Eugene Miles, who tells the story about an extraordinarily long life that leads him to a crisis of despair, when he longs to “escape the hamster wheel of transmigration and proceed to where the cold, dark rivers flowed.” The reader then waits until the end to discover whether Eugene gets wet.

Eugene’s story is told with first person narration over more than one thousand years. This is a departure from Evison’s prior novel, Small World. Walter Bergen’s story plays out through third person narration by several related characters over a mere 170 years. Evison’s novels, no matter what point of view their narrators employ, are all about character development. Only one principal character exists in Again and Again, and his experiences move through time, as if the novel was a combination of several portraits in period costumes. These are painted with brilliant brush strokes made out of Eugene’s accounts of his earlier identities. The reader sees, through Eugene’s eyes, a dungeon room in Seville, a gas station in Victorville, a tiny studio in the Boyle’s Heights section of Los Angeles, a flat in Chelsea, and finally in an apartment at the Desert Greens eldercare facility. At each place resides a different antagonist who adds a new dimension to Eugene’s character, whether as a love interest, like Gaya or Gladys, a jailer, like Assad al-Attar or Wayne, a master, like William or Oscar, an erstwhile friend, Stowell, or finally a confidant, Angel. After telling the stories, Eugene sees that a pattern has emerged over his lifetimes, one of “ineffectualness” and “abject failure.” He has not connected “to the larger world by any meaningful measure because nobody, not one person, had ever claimed me without relinquishing me soon after.” And thus, with the end of his current lifetime looming, he feels that during his lives he was “forever an orphan.”

Again and Again is a masterpiece of misdirection. As with all his novels, Evison’s protagonist digs a hole. In this novel, the reader is never sure how deep the hole is. Or whether there is much of a hole at all. Is Eugene telling the truth? He says at one point, “I’ve been less than completely transparent about my past.” Writing this story in first person narration was a brilliant choice by Evison. Eugene gives new meaning to the concept of the unreliable narrator. And how deep do his untruths go? Are they lies only about incidents within one of his lives? Or were there no earlier lives at all? Those questions make the novel’s message compelling. The reader must decide whether Eugene’s hole is bottomless or whether it is the making of a garden bed in which flowers will soon grow.