Reading 2024: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha

 On the opening page of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (a baseball reference), we meet Sam Waxworth, a "young man from the provinces" newly arrived in New York. In the book's first line he asks this question:

"What makes a life - self or circumstance?"

Perhaps in part the novel is an attempt to answer the question.

Sam is a data-cruncher who has been invited to write for an established New York magazine. The year is 2009 and Sam feels he has "an opportunity at greatness" "in a place worthy of his ambitions". He believes in aggregation - "the combination of observations" (these, please note, are purely data observations) - and he wants "to test his ideas against the world".

We watch as he uses data to find himself a flat, and presumably we are supposed to be amused that Sam thinks himself brilliant for finding somewhere available and affordable that everyone else has mysteriously overlooked. The fact that the building houses a poultry warehouse, crammed with smelly caged birds might be what has put off others less addicted to data, but Sam seems oblivious.

Strolling the city, Waxworth notices a charismatic street preacher who is forecasting the world's end on 1 November. Waxworth, who has "spent a good deal of his life thinking about forecasting" makes the preacher the focus of his first piece.

Menwhile Eddie, a young veteran recently returned from Afghanistan, son of a formerly prominent, now cancelled, columnist, also encounters the preacher, saves him when he is attacked, and moves in to his apartment to take care of him. 

Eddie's father, Frank Doyle, is to be the focus of a long Waxworth piece. Sam plans a hatchet job but over the course of a baseball game in Doyle's company finds that he likes him and ends up being caught up in the charm of Doyle family life.

Frank Doyle is quite unlike Sam, all emotion, no precision. "Not everything that happens can be saved in a database", he tells Sam. In the area of baseball, his great passion, he believes that some elements that affect a game cannot be defined in words.

Sam has a wife who is not joining him in New York immediately. The effect Frank Doyle's daughter Margo has on Sam when he meets her may be one of those things in wider life that cannot be put into statistical terms, let alone words. 

Margo has adored her father until very recently when the behaviours that got him cancelled also led to her own disillusion with him. "Her father had taught her that engaging seriously with ideas was one of life's great pleasures". Until the moment of disillusion "she has spent so much of her life wanting to impress her father that, now she no longer cares, she doesn't know what to do."

Margo and Sam fall into a habit of wandering the city talking about poetry and looking at paintings. Margo tries to explain that poems aren't riddles, that Sam can't treat them as puzzles from which to extract a solution. 

Meanwhile Margo's mother has come unstuck because of the financial crisis, which is tricky given that Frank is no longer on anyone's pay roll. Frank's fall from grace it becomes clear was precipitated by alcoholism, and as a result he is unaware of any problems outside of his pretty immediate orbit. His son Eddie becomes ever more enmeshed with his preacher friend, and his best friend from school, a gay scholarship boy who has made a enormous fortune at a hedge fund, decides to help Mrs Doyle, a decision that leads in the end to his downfall and hers. 

Sam's wife meanwhile arrives in New York and quickly realises that something is going on between Margo and Sam, (although in a way not much is as Sam, as Margo observes, is not so much in control of his passions as actually almost devoid of them). 

Everyone hurtles forward on their own trajectories toward a brilliantly plotted finale and, despite the raw ingredients that I've set out possibly sounding not wildly interesting, over 500 pages flash by enormously enjoyably and in a manner that conjures a particular time and place with great vividness.

This is not a novel that plays with form. It is that far more entertaining and infinitely trickier thing - an old-fashioned story set in a richly imagined world with a sprawl of characters, a novel that captures the mood and atmosphere of a particular moment while creating a tangle of endearing characters and plot lines. I was not bored once. The mother and the school friend were, to my mind, weak points in the structure - that is, I was not persuaded that the author saw them as characters of interest rather than pawns to be shifted about to assist plot and add the right amount of diversity - but overall this is a hugely entertaining book with a lovely elegiac ending. Few people can or do write this way any more. I am glad that Beha does.