Book Review: Florence Knapp’s “The Names”
It’s a compelling novel that fills one with an actual physical sense of dread, from the first words on the first page, and yet also offers glimpses of whimsy, beauty, and love. Florence Knapp’s debut novel, “The Names,” achieves this balance, highlighting the warmth and wonder of human existence, while weaving a tale of tragedies, ordinary and extraordinary, that befall its characters.
Knapp employs an inventive structure in unspooling her domestic drama over three and a half decades, with added remembrances that predate the saga that begins in 1987. The story is told in three threads, with chapters identified by the three different names—Bear, Julian, and Gordon—that Cora, an Irish mother living in England, may have chosen to give her baby boy.
The “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics, or the idea of a so-called “multiverse,” in which all potentialities unfold across infinite planes, are usually a mark of science fiction; here though, the vibe is a spare, objective realism that simply sets out different possibilities, stories that might have unfolded according to one pivotal decision Cora makes of what to name her second child.
One source of this book’s power is Knapp’s adept use of surprise and suspense. Emotional abuse, coercion, assault of a domestic partner, murder—these things ripple outward in the novel, roiling for generations. Such is the havoc of domestic violence, even when perpetrators often take extreme steps to try to keep the impact of their abuse quiet. Knapp renders this reality in searing brushstrokes large and small.
It’s rare these days that I devour a book and then immediately start to read it again, but with this one, I found myself wanting to take in the triptych a second time, by flipping through pages to read each thread in sequence. I longed to follow the delicately woven mysteries and absorb the characters’ joy and pain without the off-kilter feeling of unease that I had on the first read, to better study Knapp’s craft as a writer.
As Bear (a name chosen by the woman’s daughter, Maia, with the hope that her younger brother might someday grow up to be “all soft and cuddly and kind” but also “brave and strong”), the young man makes an impassioned speech to his girlfriend, Lily, after she’s almost been killed by a terrorist in Paris, telling her why he loves her. He says, “I love that when you send me letters you sign off with your first and last name and I’ve never known why you do that, but I haven’t asked in case it makes you stop. I love that you add lemon to everything you cook. I love that in winter you keep those weird heated handwarmers in your handbag to give to homeless people. I love that I can pick you out in a crowd, not just by your hair or your face, but by the way you move.”
These stirring, quotidian observations express a capacity for love that is worlds away from what Bear has learned, through stories filled in his own home when he was born, when Maia bestowed upon him the talisman of his name. Knapp’s novel drives home the horrors that some humans inflict upon those they claim to love, but also suggests that every moment is a fork—a place to choose to demonstrate with names, words and actions what love and care really mean.
“The Names”
Florence Knapp
Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 336 pages
