In his debut novel, PROVIDENCE, David Grosz wields words like artists’ tools—soft brushes here, razor-sharp chisels there. He builds ideas and thematic motifs, pulls at them, re-examines them, rewinds them, and, in the end, reshapes them entirely. The reader follows this introspective, vaguely unsettling story as if playing backgammon with a superior player, just as the narrator is asked to do throughout the novel: unclear about the rules, motives, or endgame of his partner.

PROVIDENCE tells the story of two couples who met in college and meet again later under circumstances whose telling and retelling become integral to the story. Their families develop a close friendship until around the time the narrator, Gabriel, approaches teenhood. An event involving both families’ kids, including Gabriel’s sister, Becca, breaks the friendship permanently. Despite his relatively small role in something he does not fully understand, Gabriel plants its unhappy consequences firmly onto his own shoulders, allowing his guilt to color his actions, personality, and life for the many years leading up to the time he narrates this tale.

Decades after the event, Gabriel unexpectedly runs into Catherine, the mother of the other family. She encourages a new friendship, teasing him into games of backgammon, museum visits, and strolls around New York’s neighborhoods. The story soon encompasses Becca, who had been a difficult and unpredictable child and is now a celebrated, wealthy, and still difficult and unpredictable artist. She often maintains a cool—even cruel—relationship with others, including her own brother. The storyline, which toggles between the present and the past, focuses on Gabriel’s attempts to understand the people now involved in his life. What, he asks his readers, are they after? In the constantly shifting undercurrents of his and their perspectives, where does the truth lie?

Grosz shapes language impeccably. He dispatches exposition with flourish, describing for example the “scuffed, gassy Datsun” belonging to his “otherwise neatly tucked and coiffed, upper middle-class family.” He describes complex gradations of friendship, intimate while still platonic; warm one moment, uncertain the next. He takes his reader on richly painted tours of cities throughout the globe, especially New York, and into the rarified lives of the educated wealthy. He carves in particularly acute detail the pretentions, genius, superficiality, and cruelty of the world of artists and collectors.

The novel returns repeatedly to the idea that fortunes rise and fall in inevitable ways: “That weekend in the Catskills seemed to mark a crossing from the time of good fortune to one of bad fortune, from the gift of friendship to the loss of friendship,” Gabriel notes 150 pages in. Later, he observes that “the cycle of fortune and misfortune, of comfort and anxiety, of companionship and solitude, turns for us all.” Another often-repeated motif is the sense of feeling lost: literally, in the woods or the city streets; emotionally, in the hardened permafrost of the narrator’s unaddressed sorrow; figuratively, in the story and its multilayered, often contradictory meanings.

Occasionally, the thoughtful pace of the wheel of fortune slows and becomes overly introspective, and interest lags. Despite a twist near the novel’s end and a beautiful closing mise en scène, the reader might find that the discoveries eventually unraveled do not quite warrant their long buildup—particularly given the extensive ruminations over the story’s past.

Still, the overall journey is well worth the ride. Grosz shows an uncanny ability to extricate emotions and ambivalences that would seem to defy language, a phenomenon he himself notes as the narrator approaches the close of his tale: “To feel close to someone is not necessarily to know them at all.”

Author David Grosz beautifully crafts language, characters, and storytelling in this haunting novel about friendship, loss, and the changing nature of the wheel of fortune in PROVIDENCE.

~Anne Welsbacher for IndieReader