As It Falls

Breckenridge (You Are Here) draws on personal history and Sophocles’s Oedipus cycle in his stimulating latest. What begins as a series of disjointed narrative chunks gradually coheres into a mostly unified narrative involving an unnamed author working on something—perhaps this novel—in his Brooklyn apartment at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic; a bisexual actor named Michael who is having an affair with his married costar, Kate, in an early-1980s Oedipus production; and an unnamed 19-year-old woman and an older married man who are also having an affair in 1967 Ohio. The author, who was adopted, imagines this couple to have been his biological parents. The 1967 scenes are the strongest; Breckenridge demonstrates great sensitivity in his depiction of the young woman, who leaves her intolerant conservative family to give birth to the author in California. The father, meanwhile, is a former jazz musician turned insurance adjuster caught between his freewheeling womanizing tendencies and his obligations to his family. Things get a little diffuse in the final act, though, as Michael and Kate slip into abstraction and Oedipus’s daughter Antigone emerges for some reason in present-day New York City. From this fog, though, Breckenridge stages an affecting moment of parent-child reconciliation. This is worth digging into. (Mar.)