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It is peculiarly disarming to open a book titled GENESIS and find a number "6" instead of the expected "1" above the first lines of the first chapter. Either Jim Crace has begun his eighth novel with Chapter 6 or he has titled the first section simply "6." In a sense, both possibilities are correct: Each chapter details the events surrounding the conception of each of the main character's six children, beginning with the last, then beginning again with one, proceeding chronologically to five, and ending with six again.
So GENESIS begins, appropriately, with a revelation: Felix Dern's second wife, Mouetta, is pregnant. She shares the news during a movie and must wait until the credits roll for his reaction. Felix is an actor and demands silence during films as "professional courtesy." In the meantime, Crace gives us the circumstances of conception. Felix and Mouetta live in an unnamed Eastern European city --- possibly Vienna or Prague --- that is in the midst of decades of political turmoil. On their second anniversary, they are detained by military police within the city and unable to return to their home. So they pull their car into a secluded park and, with mixed motives and emotions, have sex in the car.
Felix --- or Lix, as is his suggestive nickname --- has sired five previous children. In fact, "Every woman he dares to sleep with bears his child." So from 6 Crace takes us to 1: Lix's first child and his first sexual experience, with a stranger he has spied through binoculars. The next chapter documents his month-long affair with Freda (Mouetta's cousin, incidentally) during their student-revolutionary days. Their son, George, is conceived after a botched kidnapping of an American businessman.
He produces Children 3 and 4 with his first wife, Alicja, a plump Polish activist. The elder, Lech, is created on a balcony overlooking their flooded city, which everyone has evacuated except them. They conceive the younger, Karol, on the eve of their divorce, after they have grown distant and cold.
Lix's fifth child is with Anita Julius, an actress who plays his lover in a romantic comedy called The Devotee. Their tryst, carried out onstage in an empty theatre, is quick and passionless, the same night he meets his second wife, Mouetta.
In the past Crace has proved himself a master of this type of schematic structure and chronological manipulation. His best novel, BEING DEAD, a classic of forensic fiction, began with a couple's murder and from there moved simultaneously forwards and backwards in time, detailing their marriage and courtship while documenting the rot and decay of their undiscovered bodies. In GENESIS, however, the structure becomes quickly tiresome, a bit fussy and more than occasionally constricting.
Crace designs each of his chapters similarly: each story is foreplay leading up to the copulation that produces Lix's child. Crace proves fatally patient, too willing to caress the reader with his supple language for pages and pages before hurrying through the act in a mere paragraph or two, leaving readers unsatisfied. Just like sexual teases, textual teases must be carried through.
Furthermore, Crace's typically graceful prose is too ordered here, too controlled and too calculated to approximate a lover's touch and depict at all adequately the abandon of passion, the trajectory of lust, the glorious messiness of sex. His sentences should contain the literary equivalents of crumpled clothes strewn across the floor, bunched sheets at the foot of the bed, furniture toppled. But Crace despises such clutter in his writing and keeps everything neat, tidy, unsullied.
Finally, despite some intriguing --- and largely unexplored --- insights into the differences between men and women, GENESIS is simply too enumerative to be erotic or even emotional. Crace counts off these moments of conception, but he only hints at the massive waves of desire that drive Lix into these women's arms.
--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
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