Your Secrets Sleep with Me

Coach House $14.95, 213 pages

An electric current of upset drives Your Secrets Sleep with Me like a gale behind dominos. Things fall over; things fall apart. As the book opens, a wave of refugees enters Toronto from Canada's unstable southern neighbor, where the president has put the country on red alert.

Sixteen-year-old Kaliope Vally got out a couple days earlier, "before the streets started crawling with military, doors got busted down and people dragged away." At age eight, little Rani Vishnu sports a number of gray hairs—each a result of tear gas, getting trampled by police or otherwise witnessing state violence. When her mother Anu's University of Michigan colleagues are rounded up and detained, they get out, too. And while they play word games in the bumper-to-bumper traffic to pass the time, John Racco, father of Michael and Ruth, launches what the evening news quickly dubs "the Backhoe Massacre." Soon after, Toronto's CN tower takes a spectacular tumble. But the effect is more Wizard of Oz than WTC—and not just because of the tornado that tipped it.

I've never been to Toronto. My sense is that O'Donnell's portrayal of the city is no different from his rendering of the greater world: reality with a touch of funhouse mirror, minus the fun. His Toronto is "pubescent, a little nervous; masking shyness with a performance of aloofness; snooty but universally so and born only of an unawareness of just how beautiful it is."

O'Donnell's Toronto is also quietly treacherous. Somewhere downtown there's a sewer rumored to have eaten a child. Rocking the city is the case of the parents who kept their children in glass jars with air holes in the lids. "There's also shit floating in the lake; kids pushing through loose screens to tumble out of high-rise apartments; the leader of the police union enjoying the post-operative benefits of a pig's penis surgically grafted to his own; and the maintenance crew at the National Hockey Arena, a bunch of guys who fucked little fans for years."

It's a world in which Angela Carter would have felt at home, though here, the fantastical is just another commodity of globalization. Miracles are everyday affairs forced to fight for recognition once the machine of sensationalism has sucked them dry. (The first reference to 13-year-old James Hardcastle is from 16-year-old Ruth, who dismisses him, scornfully, as "that little piece of shit who had walked on water.")

None of the principal characters is a day over 16. But unlike J.S. Foer's Oskar Schell, these kids might at times be self-absorbed, even precious, but they're pocked to hell with recognizable human flaws, and their pain is all too familiar. The kids aren't just the focus; they're the only ones with soundness of mind. The suits and little league coaches are murderers and child molesters. Michael's father is in jail for the Backhoe Massacre, and when his mom isn't suicidal, she's neurotic with a 21st-century intensity. Rani's mother Anu is anodyne but ineffectual, while Kaliope's famed aunt Amina, a respected activist powerhouse, is disappeared by the government. James and his sweetheart, little Xiang Pao, live in a group home, no parents in sight. Together, on their own, these kids try to make sense of the world around them. Queer love unfolds as a matter of course. But flesh gets seared; hearts get broken; miracles go gut-wrenchingly awry.

A stream of meta-fiction courses through the book. In an interview (see nypress.com), O'Donnell describes his effort to "[create] a narrative presence that could prove to the reader the interconnectedness of everything." Its construction is certainly "experimental"—sometimes as many as 20 pieces fit within a single chapter. One German critic read Your Secrets more as verse than fiction, saying it "emphasizes the poetry of language, situations and interpersonal constellations" over dramatic development, potentially sacrificing some of the work's narrative potential.

I disagree. This tale holds 101 compressed dramas; the resulting tension is as thick and refractive as DC air in August. Though Your Secrets critiques the global spread of America and the sprouting of police states, at its core the book explores the meaning of self, of our relationships with our bodies, the outside world and one another, down to a cellular level. One character "believes that while you can't escape the company of yourself, you can make yourself so big as to be unrecognizable. She believes that your sensation of your self is an actual landscape—a real geography, as real as the streets surrounding you." Your Secrets Sleep with Me is a fantastic, fantastical landscape, compacted into book form, that's slipping under the radar. And it's far too big for that.