Book Review: ‘Unspeakable Home,’ by Ismet Prcic

UNSPEAKABLE HOME, by Ismet Prcic

The primary narrator of Ismet Prcic’s “Unspeakable Home” shares with the author a name (here shortened to Izzy), a place of birth (Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina), a youthful trauma (the Bosnian war), a debilitating disease (alcoholism) and an eventual escape route (immigration to late-90s America). Still, Prcic, a writer of formally adventurous fictions — his debut novel, “Shards,” manipulated both convention and chronology — would likely bristle at the label of autofiction. His new novel is too kinetic to merit inclusion in that trendy cohort. Part existential cry, part urinal graffito, part anguished confession, “Unspeakable Home” is a survival strategy, a transfiguring of personal memory to obscure the terrible cost of exile.

In one of several unlikely choices, the novel is framed by a series of letters to the comedian Bill Burr. Izzy, recently divorced, watches Burr’s comedy special on repeat while drying out in Salem, Ore. The experience binds him to the comic, enabling the slightly deranged disclosures of a one-sided correspondence. He riffs, curses, jokes, shares drink recipes, and divulges secrets and shames. He tells Burr of his recent struggles — marital, financial, creative — and describes the book he is currently writing (presumably the one we’re now reading): “Every narrator is a version of me, every chunk a snapshot of a particular brokenness. And in that brokenness I can go anywhere for meaning, anywhere for feeling, healing.”

Izzy’s narrators (several are also named Izzy, though a few are unnamed or bear new names) act as avatars of his immigrant experience, ever engaged in the war “between two sides of one mind, the native side (B) and the tourist side (A).” In patchwork, semi-autonomous chapters, they take us from the Balkans — “that gorgeous, ungovernable, godforsaken peninsula always in turmoil, always on the fringes of civilizations, always a broken-up borderland” — to the suburban superficiality of Southern California. These narrators differ in age and circumstance, though they remain bound by a sense of cosmic homelessness. Shared pain makes them legible, coherent. The old life — that of trips to the Adriatic, country cousins, wartime depravity, sloganeering Chetniks, turbo-folk music and mohawks — has been severed. Sent forth by well-meaning parents, they submit, unwilling, to the spiritual cauterization of America.