MORE BREAD OR I'LL APPEAR

By Emer Martin

Houghton Mifflin Co.

271 pp., $23

A super-modern odyssey spanning continents and styles, Emer Martin's More Bread or I'll Appear is surprisingly entangled with the traditional theme of family. Beginning in Martin's native Ireland, the story traces one sister's search for her family's eldest and most beloved sister. The absent sister, Aisling, reigns as a ghost-like presence throughout the book, seducing the rest of the characters with her unfetteredness even as she binds them together. Although the story ranges from the seedy underworld of Tokyo to the hot sands of Cuba, these bonds of family are the center of Martins vivid, exciting novel. As the family unites and separates in the search for Aisling, ties of love money, and deeper genetics link its disparate members.

It falls to Keelin to pursue Aisling who has been only a series of postcards from exotic places since she left home. The novel begins as a generational saga in Ireland, delineating a long and suitably gothic history. In this generation, as in many Irish families, all of the siblings except for Keelin leave Ireland completely. Finally leaving her boring Dublin lifestyle, Keelin stumbles into the elegant web of family and lovers that emerges in Aisling's wake. As Keelin follows her sister's path she finds herself intertwined not only with Aisling's exotic, erotic lifestyle but with her other family members in strange ways. Each attempting to carve out their own path, none of them can free themselves of the others, so the story also moves through Patrick's haunted wanderings and the life of their uncle Oscar whose cardboard clerical collar and designer suits speak of a long history. More Bread or I'll Appear becomes a traditional generational declension that spans the globe and some very untraditional characters.

Seemingly independent of each other, reuniting only for Christmas, these entirely estranged people are linked by their common past and by genetic inescapability symbolized by their individual manifestations of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Martin deftly uses OCD (By no means a glaring theme within the book) to represent the complex, unavoidable and often tragic ties that bind families. Except for dutifully doing what she is told, Keelin seems to be unaffected by the disorder. Her brother Patrick, however, develops from a boy so fixated by his own sinfulness that the priest complains about his overly frequent confessions into a latex glove-wearing paranoid trapped in his own neurosis. Like Keelin, the fourth sister Orla seems to have escaped OCD, though she does pass it to her son who is almost completely undone by it. The characters are aware of their compulsions even as they execute them, and, like Keelin as she lives out Aisling's life after her, are doomed to act out roles they have no control over. Martin's characters are fully and enticingly written, emerging from the text like the heroes of an epic poem. Culminating in Aisling herself, who even in childhood seems to be a giantess, the figures spring hyper-real from this surreal journey narrative.

A wild romp through dangerous and exciting places, the text subtly takes on the feeling of each different country. When Keelin wanders through the Tokyo night life the descriptions take on a hard, bright, almost neon like quality. As she sweats through sickness in Central America a fuzzy magic-realism pervades. New York and Las Vegas become the barren, American suburban talk-show circuit. Like the text, Keelin is subtly changed by each new location, making a journey that began as a quest for someone else her own. Even as she moves towards real independence, though, Keelin is snared by the complexities and false promises of the family bond. It seems that even a family as symbolically linked as her own, in the end is only a handful of people randomly fastened together.

Emer Martin's second book is a mesmerizing mosaic of places, characters and feeling. Reading almost as a guide book to the modern scattered human soul, More Bread or I'll Appear is both beautiful and terrible. Though she has been compared to Henry Miller and Irvine Welsh, to me Emer Martin sings completely unique modern saga.