A Review of Mark Sarvas’ “Memento Park”
The Father Effect
As a book blogger, sometimes you take chances on seemingly unknown authors and their works with the hopes that you might be blown away. Well, I took a chance on Mark Sarvas’ Memento Park and I’m elated that I did. This compact yet dense novel is about memory, religion, family, relationships, betrayal, art and so much more — but is immensely readable and relatable. Focusing on a modern-day C-list Hollywood actor named Matthew Santos (note that he shares the same initials as the author, so you can draw your own conclusions), Memento Park sees him acquire a valuable painting from a Jewish artist who committed suicide during World War II in Hungary. The painting’s worth a cool couple of millions of dollars, and Santos has acquired it because it apparently belonged to his family before being spirited away by anti-Semitic sympathizers prior to the family’s arrival in America. Oh, and the painting would have belonged to his father, but he doesn’t want it. So sets forth a mystery as to what Santos doesn’t know about his dad — a man he’s been at odds with for several years — and all the hidden things he harbours.
The novel is told almost entirely in flashback as Santos riffles through his memories while waiting for the painting to hit the auction block, or, more accurately, the night before it is about to be sold. Through this process, the character comes to understand the secrets that others withhold from us — or secrets that might be a product of our own imagining. The story offers a bit of a love triangle, as Santos is living with a model named Tracy, but also has designs on the lawyer handling getting the painting back into his hands, Rachel. However, the core of the novel is the binds of family — how sons and fathers bond or don’t bond over shared interests.
Religion plays a part in the narrative as well. Santos becomes more aware of his own Judaism after visiting Rachel’s father, who is a devout Jewish person. Part of the work is about the generation gap between the aged, who practice their faith, and the middle-aged, who don’t simply because of the trauma inflicted on Jewish peoples (namely, their parents) during the Holocaust. This aspect of the novel is wholly satisfying, because Santos seems to be almost Catholic in his religion, so for a non-Jewish reader such as I, reading Memento Park was a little like getting a window into a hardly seen world. And while the novel is about Judaism and what it means to be Jewish, there’s none of the stern-handedness that comes from reading a work of, say, Saul Bellow. As Santos is interested in pop culture as much as he’s interested in his heritage, the novel forms a border between the old and the new that is mesmerizing.
The father-son dynamic of the story is intriguing for me personally, as the relationship with my own father has been tenuous at best. Here, Sarvas speaks truths about the fact that fathers may do peculiar things that aggravate their sons, but such fathers love their offspring nonetheless — even much to the chagrin of such sons. As such, the novel is also between the most aggravating trait of any father-son dynamic — the keeping of secrets. There’s a lot we don’t know about Santos’ father, but that’s not a failing of the book. It’s just in keeping with the fact that there are certain things that fathers don’t want to burden their sons with — unhappy times, perhaps. Sarvas deftly paints a picture (easy to do in a book about art, I suppose) of the reasons why we don’t know all the things that, as sons, we feel privileged to know. In a truism, it seems that you only really find out what a member of your family is really like after he or she has passed on — as is the case with this book.
Even though, at first blush, I didn’t think that Memento Park would be a novel for me (I thought it might be too high-brow for my tastes), I am effusive in my praise for this book. The characters are surely flawed, but they’re interesting and not completely unlikable. There are flints of dry humour sketched into the dialogue, even as Santos is usually at wit’s end in dealing with others — he can be a bit of a misanthrope, but you’ll end up admiring him all the same. There’s also enough pop (as in pop culture) in these pages to keep more modern, younger readers glued to the pages. There’s a real richness, a playful back and forth, between various polarities (emotional versus intellectual art, for instance) that is riveting. To that end, Memento Park is a book about many, many things, but keeps the balls in the air without things coming crashing down. Is it a perfect book? Perhaps not, though I can wrack my mind all I want and cannot think of a singular negative thing to say about it. The novel is so deep on so many levels that to attack it for any failings might seem churlish.
Memento Park ties up most of its loose ends, and anything left dangling is an acknowledgement that life for these characters will go on after the final printed page is turned. In the end, this is a powerful meditation on the power of love, family bonds and romantic relationships. It’s about finding yourself either in how you relate to others or through God and religion. It poses all the right questions of this modern age, while keeping a foot rooted to the past. All in all, Memento Park is a novel that will leave you breathless, and, once you get the ability to breath back, you’ll want to reach for the phone to talk to your own father and learn more about him. Every good book should make you want to do something like this. This is one of them.
Mark Sarvas’ Memento Park was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 13, 2018.
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