Twelve-year-olds can be pretty remarkable creatures. Something about the in-betweeness of their age fosters an understanding of the world that is more felt than explicitly known. Sensitive twelve-year-olds possess the uncanny sensory intuition of children, along with a sharpening comprehension of the relationships between themselves and others. The result is that they may sense what is brewing under the lacquered surfaces of personal relationships, although they do not yet have the life experience to understand what, exactly, is really going on.

Marcel Möring’s The Dream Room is a novella about the experience of David, one such twelve-year-old. In just over 100 pages, Möring manages to effortlessly evoke a portrait of the inner life of an entire family as seen through his eyes.

The novella is narrated by David. It is his voice that recalls the history of his parents’ life, together and separate, just as their marriage is in the process of dissolving. David works alongside them during a rainy summer when the family’s only means of income is creating model planes.

The author sparely, yet delicately, unfolds the history of David’s family. His father was a fighter pilot in World War II for the English, escaping his native Netherlands by stealing a small plane and simply flying to England. He later met David’s mother when recuperating from a career-ending plane crash as a crop duster pilot. She was the nurse who accidentally fell in love with him. This history, surreal as it seems, manages to captivate the reader by the poignancy with which it is drawn.

During his thirteenth summer, David experiences the growing rift between his parents not by watching them together, but by spending time with each parent alone, observing the loneliness and the growing estrangement of the two people connected only by him.

Möring’s prose style is understated; the reader continually discovers the almost imperceptible threads that tie the characters to their own histories and to each other. As David recalls his father’s past, it becomes clear that this past is intimately connected to David’s own present and future.

In an evocative passage, David recalls when his father became a crop duster pilot:

“Different people will give different periods in their lives as a clear point in time, the moment when life itself suddenly seems simple and obvious, and when things and events seem to fit together with such ease that one will wonder how on earth life could have been so obvious, what the secret was. There probably is no secret, it’s the kind of memory, a memory that plays up more strongly than all the rest, a recollection tinged with melancholy and regret that makes one yearn for those days of freedom...that later become the rythym of life itself, grown-up life.”

The reader never loses sight of the fact that it is David telling his parents’ story, and that his life, too, is in the process of rapidly unfolding and changing. It is David who quietly seeks answers for his own future, and the effect of his family’s dissolution on his own development becomes clear.

The novella is divided into four chapters, with the last taking place years later when David is a grown man in a romantic relationship of his own. The real acheivement of Möring’s writing is realized in this final chapter. In a few short pages, Möring describes with every nuance how experiences and recollections in the narrative of twelve-year-old David add up to make adult David, showing how relationships, to self and others, evolve.

books

The Dream Room

By Marcel Möring

William Morrow

113 pp., $22.95