2 out of 4 stars
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David Podlipny's The Roots of the Antenna is a portrayal of quiet courage in the face of the limitations imposed by physical affliction and loneliness. Ming is a young Asian man living in a two bedroom apartment with his father, mother, sister, cousin and demented grandmother. He works the night shift as a janitor at a nearby shopping mall, and so exists out of sync with his day shift family with whom he interacts only in passing, encounters which the author succinctly describes: "...arid exchange, conflicting stares, and a sudden parting."
A torn Achilles tendon has ended Ming's career as a young soccer athlete with a promising future. At story's opening he is also dealing with troublesome symptoms connected with a general unnamed malaise. Ming's knees pop and crack and ache like an old man's. He has trouble sleeping, is often exhausted, and, worst of all, is assailed night and day by a severe itch that leaves his skin covered with scaly patches.
Ming finds his only solace in solitary basketball played on the inner court yard of his bleak, towering apartment complex. It's there that we have a sense of this quiet young man's calm use of simple exercise to forestall his mysterious physical decline and to parlay his distress into some kind of meaningful daily existence.
Ming lives his nights at the shopping mall. We meet there his eccentric co- worker, Rudolph, an emaciated amateur body builder who is convinced that he has achieved "definition" and that "... all I need now is the bulk." The doctors have declared Rudolph's wife terminally ill. Rudolph refuses to name the illness or credit the doctors' opinions for fear of missing opportunities for a cure by imposing meaningless labels. He becomes Ming's adviser, ranting against modern medicine, junk food, and the hosts of microbial invaders that threaten the human organism. Perhaps Rudolph's alternate folk prescriptions for what ails Ming are darkly comic: topical garlic, head shaving and poultices of lemon juice, ginger and honey that Ming applies at home to wear like some kind of absurd sticky toupee', but this reader was not laughing. Ming's suffering is too authentic.
Readers looking for a fast paced action and plot driven narrative might dismiss Podlipny's effort here as a mere 'slice of life' character portrait devoid of the major tensions and final resolutions that they would seek in other novels. I would answer that this story does in a quieter way have a rising action, a "high point" if not a climax, and a gentle if not precipitous falling action that arrives at the mitigation of Ming's discomfiture with a simple if only partial way to cope.
Other readers who look for carefully crafted language in addition to effective structure will be harder to answer. This novel is problematic for its logical and syntactical anomalies. Too often the language mars content with absurdities: as when Ming looks up from the deep well formed of the walls surrounding the courtyard at "an angular circle of sky." Or: "Rudolph squinted ponderingly." Or: "...paused to clear his throat succinctly." Sometimes the language is so skewed as to be strangely appealing: "Rudolph was only delirious from inhaling the particles of his radioactive fairy tale." Is this poetic twisting or pure ineptness? Either way, it is memorable.
Though the style was often careless and unprofessional, in sore need of the meticulous editing that might have freed it from its many distracting malapropisms, I found this story compelling enough that it will stick in my memory for a long time. I had the sense that, though a fiction with a created main character, the novel was based on real experience. Ming's symptoms were so specific and convincing as to be beyond mere invention. There is something authentic here worthy of any reader's attention and empathy.
Though I see this novel as very worthwhile, given its flaws, I can only rate it 2 out of 4.
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The Roots of the Antenna
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