The Open Door

THE OPEN DOOR a novel by Floyd Skloot Floyd Skloot's new family study The Open Door -- his third novel of the decade -- has the tragic vitality of an old dark hunk of a bed and boxsprings abandoned in a city street. It spans two generations of distracted, thoughtless, often deliberately hurtful loving, yet towards the end devotes its most touching moments to the partial repairs that can be achieved by the victims of such homes. And while child abuse always claims the story's heart, it sets this agony within the culturally vibrant, frequently funny backdrop of mid-century Brooklyn. The parents in question are Myron and Faye Adler, and indeed, they're spirit-addlers, plus the adders in childhood's Eden. The couple has been slap-pasted together by societal pressures, but they remain so wrong for each other they invite comparison to some of the glaring mismatches found in Dickens. Myron, a Brooklyn poultry man, at least has known a taste of love, before his own father brought his heavy hand down on Myron's passion for a shiksa. Faye lacks even heart enough to know what she's missing. Her high talk about the arts is all empty gas, laughing gas for readers -- except that we're kept as much on edge as the two tormented sons, Richard and Danny. These boys must navigate their home like mine-sweepers, eyes and ears pitched for the first signals of adult explosions lurking everywhere. This violence limns all the neighborhoods of '50s New York, the well-swept stoops and cavernous movie houses drenched, in lesser novels, with nostalgic syrup. Skloot, on the other hand, though he's never above a fond joke at Brooklyn's expense, knows the borough too well to serve it up oversweetened; his cameos include not only Pee Wee Reese but also the Mad Bomber. Ultimately, every child wakes to maturity, and even damaged boys like these grow up to face the inner punches and kicks of awareness -- of knowing they might still, in spite of everything, discover love. In the book's closing attempts at that discovery, Skloot never loses his wised-up, tamped-down clarity. When one of the boys cleanses some part of the family spirit by saying Kaddish for his father, the greatest moment of transcendence occurs in the front seat of a rabbi's big late-'50s sedan, in a blizzard. And the ultimate vision of family repair, of redemption takes place -- awash in sunny, sweaty promise -- in pay-to-play batting cage. review by John Domini