‘The Hundred Year Flood,’ A Search for Self in Prague

By chance, Tee falls in with a famous Czech painter and revolutionary named Pavel Picasso, Picasso’s beautiful-but-melancholy wife and muse, Katka, and their thuggish friend, Rockefeller; a love triangle and other disasters follow, and the last one sends Tee back stateside to a head trauma recovery unit in a Boston hospital, where we find him at the book’s opening.

Structured by association and flashback rather than chronology, the novel often reads like a series of tenuously connected set pieces: Tee’s uncle flies his plane into the ground just a few days after 9/11; Pavel remembers his father, also a painter, being dragged away by state police; Tee sees a ghost, or possibly doesn’t. Random acts of violence seem motivated chiefly by the demands of the plot and are never otherwise explained. If at times this narrative porousness resonates with Salesses’ embrace of blank space over connective tissue, it also can be hard to distinguish from a failure of craft.

This minimalism extends to the sentence level, where Salesses tests the boundaries of metaphor with sparse, juxtapositional phrasing. When it works, the payoff can be lovely. For example, as the water rises outside the apartment where Katka and Tee consummate their affair, Katka hides a leg injury from him. The simple sentence “Her leg beat like a second heart” conveys an achingly physical throb, as well as the disturbing sense that Katka may cherish her secret pain almost as much as her secret love. Other metaphors, however, come off as distracting, even aggressive: “Katka woke with her leg in her mouth” suggests either a contortionist or a cannibal.

It’s hard not to wish that Salesses had found more direct means for Tee to confront the riddle of his origins.

In fact, Katka is a cipher, a woman whose identity Tee willfully and casually obliterates in the interest of finding his own. Katka submits for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, other than the fact that she is a professional muse obsessed with the children’s book, The Giving Tree. Later, Tee finds himself thinking guiltily that Katka gave him everything, “her apples, her branches, her trunk — in only a few short months.” Was the tree happy? We’ll never know.