Rock, Paper, Scissors

Starred review from May 11, 2015
After his estranged father’s death, Thomas must cope with the lingering secrets and mysterious circumstances surrounding his imprisonment and passing. In this fascinating and erudite exploration of family life, Aidt (Baboon) manages to capture a slice of life, told mostly from diligent-but-dreaming Thomas’s point of view. In the days after his former-mobster father turns up dead, Thomas discovers something strange inside his father’s toaster. While Thomas is busy running his stationery shop with his partner, Maloney, his family debates the state of contemporary literature at dinner parties, memorizes poetry, and generally meditates on the melancholy nature of the human condition. During a lengthy, reflective excursion to his aunt’s house, Thomas concocts a scheme to help out his wayward niece and expand his business at the same time. And what Thomas discovers inside the toaster turns out to be less important than the potential he finds within himself for repeating his father’s legacy. Laced with sex, marital problems, family drama, and money woes, Aidt’s supremely cultivated novel is concerned with the struggle to connect with those we truly love and the consequences of remaining distant. Aidt writes with verve, passion, and a sharp edge, animating a smart set of characters who must fight for truth and happiness.

June 1, 2015
From Danish-language poet and short-story author Aidt (Baboon, 2014) comes her first novel, a domestic drama that merges the mundane and the grotesque. A father dies, and his two children are left to settle his affairs. They are Thomas and Jenny, and they sling insults at the dead old man, a criminal and drunk who was never around much. ("In our family the men don't take very good care of their children," Jenny jokes. "It's a tradition.") But Thomas discovers something among his father's possessions: an unnerving amount of cash stowed away in a toaster oven. At first, he doesn't know what to do with it; as the manager of a paper and office supply shop, he's a somewhat repressed and timid man-which means, of course, that readers of Aidt's short stories will know he's primed for an explosion. The novel focuses on Thomas' interpersonal relationships-with his wife, his niece, his business partner, etc.-all of which are fraught and simmering, and Aidt does a great job showing his incremental movements into frenzy, especially in details like his cigarette intake, which steadily mounts. But Aidt slips when handling her bigger emotional moments. Sometimes these slips are minor, as in one scene of rage that becomes unnecessarily silly when a character yells, "shitassfucking." In other cases, the slips turn to spills, and Aidt has a difficult time getting back up-especially after a rape scene midway through that seems unconvincingly abrupt and out of character. Aidt has a sense for the rhythms of everyday life, but too often, she tries to shock readers. There's great literature to be made about the balance between the mundane and the violent, but Aidt never stitches these two tones together. An awkward mix of realism and soap opera that, despite intriguing characters, never quite coheres.

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