A Trip to Brooklyn for a Stunning Literary Debut

The premise of Maynard and Jennica, the debut novel by Brooklynite Rudolph Delson, appears to be a kind of test of whether the reader can stand the presence of the book’s eponymous male protagonist Maynard Gogarty. Maynard is a strange, unique chap—and he is a self-styled chap, owing most of his bizarre personality, we learn, to a childhood fetish for bowler caps. It’s also possible Maynard may have received some of his eclecticism from Delson, who claims to have once supported himself for a year in Germany by selling subscriptions to his “occasionally salacious” personal correspondence.

Maynard has never really owned a backpack, since they come in the wrong colors. He declares that there is no way for him to be happy, and that “fun”—with its implied notion of a period of contentment—is a bad word. More desirable are phrases like “skedaddled”, “by the by”, and French expressions—“mon Dieu”; “par exemple, moi”—that are usually the provenance of rich aunts. As Jennica Green, his girlfriend through most of the novel, points out, no one really likes him—but Maynard appears to be proud of this. Most people, he says in his defense, are simply just less “dignified” than he is.

Yet a woman named Jennica manages to fall for him nevertheless, though it is through rather roundabout circumstances, and it is the intrigue and serendipity of their relationship that drives the novel along. Much in the vein of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Maynard and Jennica is told through the fractured narratives of a small ecosystem’s worth of viewpoints. Thus, besides all relevant family members of Maynard and Jennica—including some deceased ones—a macaw, “certain cicadas,” some frogs, and a broken emergency brake on the subway each get their own mini-chapter to express themselves. Delson proves himself a master at playing these competing voices off one another and keeps the reader transfixed by making full use of the foreshadowing possibilities inherent in this setup.

With a few digressions, the action takes place entirely in New York, and the text would fit nicely into a syllabus for a class on the sociology of twenty-somethings living in the 212 area code. Jennica, for instance, is renting the same room she lived in as a 21-year-old intern for the investment bank for which she currently works. She is “how many issues behind in her New Yorkers?” but never fails to read “The Talk of the Town” on the grass in Central Park. Delson also attempts to deconstruct the mind-set of a guy encountering a hot girl (Jennica) on the subway, a situation acutely familiar to any guy who has ever ridden the R or W train:

“You step onto the subway... and there she is! This creature with angelic blood, and a cup of iced coffee...her halo quivering every time that the subway rattles. And you must decide what to do. Do you say something, or do you say nothing? Dignity would seem—dilemmatically, to require both and yet to permit neither.”

This is fairly accurate, although we never in fact learn what constitutes a non-clunky subway pickup line, as Maynard instead attempts, and fails, to impress Jennica, by attempting to fix the aforementioned broken emergency brake.

Though the book might ostensibly be categorized as a post-Sept. 11 piece, another strength of the novel is that Delson avoids making any kind of sweeping, grandiloquent statement on what “we as a nation”—or more temptingly, the lives of New York twentysomethings—may have “lost”, and instead simply chronicles the different viewpoints of his stable of characters.

Or does he? Maynard’s utterly depraved reaction to the attacks—he suggests at one point that the colors of the flags that so many Americans choose to display in the following weeks might be improved by having horses urinate on them—leaves the reader asking whether he represents some kind of metaphor for a decadent, condescending era that needs to be put down. If we didn’t find Maynard totally insufferable already, this moment seals the deal—and so it is for Jennica, who must reevaluate everything she’d thought of him. It is unclear until the very end of the novel where Delson himself stands with regard to his own grotesque creation, but it is the desire to find out that ultimately sustains the reader’s interest more than any other aspect of what is besides, at least stylistically, a superbly written work.